Letter to Anwei Read online

  I think there is an entity, a kind of person, who benefits from our life and from our death, and whose existence explains the phenomenon of suicide, and this brings me (finally) to the idea that I have wanted to convey to you.

  III. Anwei: The Transgenerational Identity

  Now I will describe to you this idea I have been alluding to over the last several pages.

  We are partially made of history, partially made of stuff, and partially made of purpose. Think about where this stuff and purpose comes from. You didn’t make your history, you inherited it, of course. But you didn’t make your own stuff either. Your stuff is designed by genes, which you and I both inherited from our ancestors, who inherited it from their ancestors, and so on. And what about your telos? Your purpose—to reproduce by following “human” strategies for biological success—that is certainly not something you or I came up with! Even your telos is something inherited.

  I have already described to you the importance of leaving an inheritance from your own perspective as an individual. Psychologists usually describe this as “deferred gratification,” and it is widely held to be one of the greatest predictors of success we have. But this principle of leaving and receiving an inheritance doesn’t only apply to the individual; it applies across generations as well. The Greeks had a proverb: a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. Your history, your telos, even your very body and its blueprint, all of these are a legacy you have inherited, just as I inherited mine.

  We are both part of a continuous line of individuals. Just as we can think of our bodies as ships that need maintenance and repair, which remain the same ship despite planks, ropes, masts, and sails being changed—despite even the whole boat gradually being replaced!—in this same way, we are individual planks on a greater ship. You and I are both replacements for old boards, to be replaced by newer, fresher wood once we become old and rotten.

  This is the great idea, the great concept. The great, eternal ship that you and I both are parts of as components, this is the old and important idea for which I could not find a name. When I was first writing this letter to you, I called it the “transgenerational identity,” as it seemed to me the most descriptively accurate label. But this eventually sounded too cumbersome. In looking for an appropriate word for this entity, I decided to borrow from Proto Indo-European (PIE) roots, since the Latin and Greek ones created words just as long as “transgenerational identity.” It is called “Anwei” (pronounced æn-wei[2]) from PIE “ane” and “wei.” “Ane” means “breath” or “wind,” but subsequently took on the meaning “spirit” or “soul.” It is the source of words like “animate” and “animal.” And “wei” simply meant “we” or “us.” So the Anwei is, literally, the “spirit of us.”

  The animating ‘we.’

  The Anwei is the transcendent being that we both come from. It is the source of our inheritance, and the being for whom we leave an inheritance when we build a legacy for our children. I am speaking of “our” now because, as relatives, you and I are different parts of the same Anwei.

  The Hindus believe that Gods would sometimes come to earth in human forms. These humans were “avatars” of the Gods, usually immensely powerful, and possessing some—but not all—of the deity’s qualities. That is what you are. You are an avatar of our Anwei, this aggregation of legacy in history, form, and telos that made us who we are, and makes our investment in our descendants something worthwhile, and not just arbitrary altruism. It is our genes, it is our lineage, it is our history, our culture, our language, our nature, and our collective inheritance.

  It is what compelled me to write this letter to you.

  We cannot live forever like a jellyfish, bristlecone pine, or sea turtle. You and I will both die. But our Anwei can live forever. It is amortal, and through it, you and I can be a part of something that lives forever.

  §

  I understand that this idea of the Anwei may sound a little bit far-fetched to you, maybe even a little superstitious. It is up to you whether you anthropomorphize this concept as I do, or think of it merely as an abstract concept, like one of Plato’s forms. I don’t think anything is lost in either case.

  But if you are like me, you may see three problems with this theory: first, isn’t this very similar to other concepts, like race and ethnicity? Second, you do not feel like this Anwei, and if you do not feel like something, how can it be a part of your identity? Third, what are the boundaries of the Anwei? Doesn’t the haziness around the edges of this concept make it somewhat arbitrary, and perhaps even made up? For simplicity’s sake, I will call these the “race question,” “phenomenology[3] problem,” and the “border problem.”

  The Race Question

  The Anwei is not the same as race or ethnicity, although it is related to these concepts, and is very close to the idea of lineage. A race is a geographically identifiable and genetically distinct population, while an ethnicity is a broader cultural identity, often associated with a particular race. These are descriptive terms for someone looking from the outside in, and it is entirely possible to be of the same race and ethnicity as another, but not to share the same unifying Anwei. The Anwei is narrower than either race or ethnicity, and is closer to a Scottish Clan or an Israeli Tribe than to something as vast and experientially abstract as an entire race. Multiple clans can make up a racial nation (the Scots), and an entire nation may be descended from a single ancestor (the Jews), but in both cases, it does not make sense to think of the entire nation as “one tribe.” Each is broken up: into roughly three hundred in the case of the Scots, and into twelve in the case of the Jews. These smaller clans or tribes are something concrete, closer to the populations of primordial human societies that we evolved to feel comfortable within and connect with[4]. It is in these smaller groups that we can actually connect with others in a meaningful manner.

  Is the Anwei just a clan or a tribe then?

  Not quite. The clan or tribe is a legal or quasi-legal organization, sort of like a nation or a soccer team. The establishment of a recognized “clan” or “tribe” identity is an accomplishment and an aid to the Anwei, but the Anwei exists prior to such an official establishment, and can exist with or without such recognition. It is the groundwork beneath the clan or tribe. The Anwei can die while the “tribe” lives on in name and appearance, but to those who knew it before, it will feel like a hollow and empty association compared to its former self.

  The Phenomenology Problem

  The phenomenology problem—that you do not experience yourself as a part of this Anwei, but as yourself, an individual—can be answered by exploring the nature of consciousness.

  To begin with, look closely at your feeling of self. Try paying attention to this experience of self-ness. Can you find it? Is it located somewhere in your chest? In your head? If you look carefully, you will notice that it cannot be located anywhere. “You” vanish when you try to find the center of your experience, of your self.

  This is because the feeling of what it is like to be you does not have one source, but many. You may intuitively imagine that your feeling of self is located somewhere inside your skull because that is where your eyes are, and your conscious experience of the world is heavily dominated by vision. But if you were to close your eyes and try to navigate in a dark room by touch, the boundaries of the phenomenological “you” would expand from your skull to your hands and feet. If you used a feeling rod as a blind person and grew acclimated enough to using it, you might even feel as though the rod were a part of you, that it was you touching the coffee table or chair leg, rather than the rod.

  What you consciously experience is the result of what you pay attention to, and your attention is highly malleable. You are perfectly capable of paying prolonged and intense attention to high literature while completely neglecting the world of science, and equally capable of the inverse. Your experience of who you are and what you are is highly dependent upon the allocation of y
our attention, and your attention can be divided into infinite variations or concentrations. So while your consciousness may have something to do with your identity, the fact that you are not here and now experiencing yourself as a part of the Anwei is not evidence of its absence, just as an orphan may still be the offspring of their biological parents, despite never knowing them directly.

  I am not trying to tell you that “you” don’t exist because you cannot find your center. In fact, it is exactly that kind of reasoning that prevents people from being able to connect with the Anwei: “we cannot find it, so it does not exist.” You cannot find the center of an ant colony either. Sure, the Queen serves an important role, but there is no reason to believe that the Queen is the “essence” of the colony. Since workers are the scouts and gatherers, we might even imagine that if it was “like” anything to be an ant colony, the experience of the workers might be a closer approximation of the feeling than the experience of the queen, but this is just daydreaming. The fact is that you exist in the way that an ant colony exists. No ant knows what it feels like to be a colony, just as no skin cell or lone neuron knows what it is like to be you. The Anwei can exist, and you can be a part of the Anwei, without feeling as if you were its manifestation.

  All of this is to say that your sense of “self” is remarkably malleable and decentralized. Consciousness is a fascinating and complicated subject, one which I am perhaps underqualified to describe to you in any more detail, but it should be clear to you that your “true self” is not necessarily revealed by how you feel. People sometimes feel depressed, drunk, ecstatic, bored, cheery, or awe-inspired; sometimes, we are asleep and feel nothing at all! None of these feelings—or lack thereof—say very much about what you are, just as the feelings (or lack thereof) of an ant say very little about what it is.

  The Boundary Problem

  That leaves us with the boundary problem: where are the edges of the Anwei? If two people from different lineages have a child, which Anwei is it a part of? If we cannot find these borders, if they are constantly mixing and evolving, does the Anwei even exist?

  This may sound strange after discussing the geographic mystery of consciousness, where a lack of boundaries is not proof of nonexistence, but this is subtly different. With consciousness, there is at least a conceptual boundary; it does not extend beyond our attention. My claim is that the Anwei is not only a concept, but a kind of living being, in the manner of an ant colony. The colony is greater than the ants which make it up, and can survive even if every ant presently within it eventually dies off. But the colony still has boundaries: the insects—even ants—outside of the system comprising the colony are not a part of the colony. The geography outside of the nest itself isn’t considered a part of the colony. Even an individual ant from the colony, by itself, is not the colony.

  All living things have boundaries that differentiate the organism from the outside world. Animals have a skin which makes this division intuitive and obvious, but larger, older, and more complicated organisms, or even concepts, are sometimes more difficult to pin down.

  Consider the case of Pando[5], or “the Trembling Giant.” Pando appears to be thousands of individual Quaking Aspen trees (Populus tremuloides) spread over 100 acres near Fish Lake, Utah, each individually appearing only 20-30 years old, perhaps 50 or 60 in some case. In reality, all of these trees are genetically identical, and share a living root structure that is at least 80,000 years old, and may in fact be a million years old or more[6]. It is what is known as a “clonal colony” organism. Clonal colonies have a genetic source and reproduce by spreading, rather than through sexual reproduction. The Aspen is not the only organism that does this; just to stay within plants, Devil’s Club, Hazelnut, Sumac, and the Creosote bush also sometimes form clonal colonies. What makes Pando and these other cloning organisms interesting is that the boundaries of the living thing in question are ambiguous. Is Pando one organism or tens of thousands? By appearances, it certainly looks like thousands. Only by examining the nature and essence of identity—of what it means for a thing to be itself—can we see that these “individual” trees are in fact one being, however difficult it may be to identify the boundaries of that particular life form.

  Other things can have ambiguous edges, yet we have no difficulty differentiating them from the outside world. Something as simple as a river can have boundaries that fluctuate with the seasons or the weather, looking dramatically different in a winter flood than during a summer drought. I’m reminded of Heraclitus’ quote again: is it the same river? Clearly it is. The variation is a part of its nature.

  But!—you may object—what about a river like the Colorado? Over thousands of years, it has cut away at the rock and worn a new path for itself. It will never look like it did before. Is the Colorado the same river as it was 10,000 years ago?

  Perhaps. Perhaps not. What I do know is that the old river is a part of the history of the present, and that they share a source in the Rocky Mountains and a destination in the Gulf of California. Like a person, the river changes in form as it ages and fulfills its destiny (its predetermined natural course), but no one would say that a boy has transformed into a different person because he has become a man. The Colorado of today is the same river as the Colorado of 10,000 years ago, even if it may have looked dramatically different then. By contrast, the Colorado is not the same river as the Columbia, despite looking somewhat similar in a few places. They have different sources, different forms, and different destinations. They are both rivers, but have completely and wholly different identities.

  Variation is required within evolution, and within every organizational level of human life, but that does not eliminate the possibility of a shared identity. Identity defines the general constraints within which variation is allowed, and sets the standard for which variations actually improve the quality of the thing in question. Having a shared identity doesn’t mean that a group of things lack variety; it means that there are broad patterns of commonality in history, nature, and purpose, which make the variations meaningful.

  In this way, the ambiguities in identifying where a particular Anwei might begin, merge, or end do not disprove the concept. You and I are very different from each other, in our genes and in our background, but we still both come from a common history not shared by the rest of humanity, and we share combinations of traits that are unique to us. Neither of us will have all of the traits that describe this animating ‘we.’ No one does. The Colorado River will never be the river that everyone remembers it as, because the river is always changing, and people’s memories stay the same. But it is the same river, and you and are a part of the same Anwei, even if it is not exactly the same as it was 10,000 years ago.

  IV. Living with Anwei

  Dear grandchild, if the culture you have been born into is anything like mine, then this conception of what we truly are will be profound, maybe even shocking. All through my early years, I was variously taught by much of the culture that I was entirely an individual, unique and unlike anyone else. I was taught that I should develop myself for myself, as an individual. If I did this, then I would be happy and successful. This modern wisdom sounds intuitive, but I believe it actually sets young people out on the wrong foot, and can even make you unhappy and unsuccessful. I hope to show you that those who live in alignment with their Anwei not only live happier, more meaningful, and more successful lives; they actually live longer too. Later on, I will explain how the Anwei can lead you toward becoming a true individual, but that is something to graduate to. I am getting ahead of myself.

  My parents subscribed to National Geographic magazine, and when I was younger, I would browse through them, reading articles as research for school papers, or sometimes just for fun. But one of the articles that stuck out to me the longest when I read it was called “The Secrets of Long Life[7].” The subjects of the article were three different communities: one in Sardinia, Italy, one in Okinawa, Japan, and one in Loma Linda, California. All three of these c
ommunities saw their older members regularly living into their 80’s, 90’s, even into their 100’s, at extraordinary rates.

  Now most explanations for longevity begin with individual health-choices—refraining from smoking, limiting sugar, getting enough exercise, and so on. Some scientists pay attention to the genetic influences that give some people a leg-up in living longer. These things certainly matter, and the author noted that all three of these communities ate relatively healthy diets, stayed active, and benefited from good genetics which predisposed them toward reaching very old age. But these communities are matched by populations nearby with similar genetics, similar diet, and comparable degrees of exercise, whose occupants still do not live as long. The extra ingredient, it seems, is connection with other people, especially family.

  The Sardinians would be up early in the morning, milking cows, slaughtering sheep, raising pigs, or chopping wood—whatever needed to be done around the farm. But for lunch or dinner, they would all sit together for meals with their extended family. They lived in an “honor culture,” where you are considered to be responsible for (and to) your group, not merely yourself. While this responsibility can be demanding, it also gives its members something meaningful to do with their time. I’m sure you can see the connection here with the Anwei.