Human Nature Odyssey: Episode 1. Self-Help Guide for Society

You walk into your local bookstore, the smell of worn and used book pages blend with fresh coffee brewing behind the counter. As you peruse the various selections you stop at the Self-Help section. There are books that offer ways to help you heal your anxiety, your depression, addiction, loneliness, stress, and anger with titles and subtitles that read, 

- Help Me Help You Help Yourself
- 7 Highly Effective Distractions from 13 Bad Habits
- Two Things You Can Do to Forgive Your Mother and How They Will Help You Get Out of Bed on Time 

You don’t quite know what’s wrong with you so you just take this stack of books and fall into an armchair. 

You’re not alone. We’re all on our own quest to live more meaningful, healthy, and fruitful lives. Many of us feel we’re out of balance with ourselves, that something is missing or not quite right. 
To better understand ourselves we might try to understand the greater context in which we live. 
Maybe you start by examining your identity. What group am I a part of? How do I fit into something bigger than me?   

To more fully understand the situation we’re in, we’re going to have to expand our scope in geography and time. Don’t worry, you can stay in that cozy chair and finish the simmering macchiato you just ordered.

But we need to expand our scope because you are living the latest chapter in a 10,000 year story. It’s the story of a complex civilization with ancient roots, bizarre rituals, and strange customs. It wields power that over millennia has grown so enormous it has transformed the world into its own image. 
And then, you were born. Hello. Just thrown into this mess, at a time when even though this civilization’s seemingly at its most powerful, it may not have the power to withstand its own demise.
…and I thought I needed a self help book.
I mean, if there were ever someone who could use a helping hand and a little healing, it’s civilization.
By understanding the history and nature of civilization we can better understand ourselves. And in turn, by better understanding ourselves can we better grasp what is happening on a macro scale. 
This is a sociological examination of the personal, and a psychological examination of the social. 

Welcome to episode 1 of Human Nature Odyssey. I’m Alex Leff. 

Let me tell ya a little more about the podcast overall and then we’ll dive in. 

This is a podcast about mythology, philosophy, and human history with a broad scope. Human beings just like us have existed for hundreds of thousands of years. But then, around 10,000 years ago in several isolated pockets around the world something started to change and it gave rise to something we tend to call “civilization”. What the heck happened? Or we could ask instead, what is happening? Since it hasn’t really stopped - just gotten larger.

Empires come and go but we’ll look at civilization as a continuous phenomenon. After all, the American empire is no more separate from the Roman or even Sumerian empires, than a leaf is separate from the tree. In Human Nature Odyssey we’ll be finding patterns, connecting dots, exploring the roots of our present moment. 

We’ll be asking what is civilization? It’s a loaded term. Who gets to be part of civilization? Is it inevitable? Inherently self destructive? Is it an imaginary game come to life? 

Like Frankenstein’s monster, civilization is a thing humans build but it also seems to have a mind and logic of its own. 

And for a long time I have been completely obsessed with these questions. In fact I can remember the very first time I started asking them and it was the same summer I read a book that has impacted me more than any other book I’ve ever read. (echoey) 

“From now on, I will divide the books I have read into two categories -- the ones I read before Ishmael and those read after.” 

This is a quote, blurb, thing on the front cover of this book we were assigned to read over the summer break before starting 9th grade. Yeah, I didn’t want to read this book. I didn’t wanna think about reading this book. I didn’t even want to think about anything related to school, let alone do anything for it. I had just finished the brutal torture that was middle school and I had two and a half months before going into high school. The summer was my time, finally. 

For just a couple months I didn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn to get on some school bus, or be talked at by a series of adults for eight hours straight with five minute breaks in between to get from class to class. I definitely shouldn’t have to read some book.

So I’m not, actually, I’ve got a better idea. Let’s get out of the house. 

Come on, I’m taking you with me. Just down the stairs. Past the screen door. Out on the sidewalk. Let’s walk.

This is where I grew up, where I first learned about the world and where I spent most of my childhood existence.

Where are we? Yeah, um, how to explain it? It’s an odd sort of land - though maybe not too different from yours.

I could say it’s in the United States but that doesn’t tell you anything, really. The United States is an idea, an imaginary place. 

Where are we in the actual world? Well, this is a land in between what’s called the “endless mountains” of central Pennsylvania to the west, these rolling green hills with farmland-filled valleys, and the pine barrens of New Jersey to the east, these scraggly, sandy, dark forests with iron-rich crimson water. 

In the middle of those places are two rivers, the Schuylkill and the Delaware, both running south, and where they meet is the city of Philadelphia. 

We’re just north of the city here. Eventually when I graduate and leave home and tell people where I grew up they’ll say “oh so you didn’t live in the city.” Yeah, well, it was close. It was 5 blocks away from the city line, where I’d go to China King and CVS. But okay, fine, I wasn’t in the city. 

This is suburbia - a very specific feature of civilization. 

And sure, on the surface it’s just a bunch of two-story brick houses, sidewalks, and stop signs, but to a little kid there can be magic anywhere.

Trees and bushes lined our backyards and connected us to the neighbors on other streets. Adults knew not to cross these invisible lines, but us kids didn’t care. The neighborhood kids would meet up and play imaginary games. The backyards were mythical lands to explore. 

As you grow up in suburbia, you start to learn some neighborhood etiquette and unsaid rules. For starters, you can’t treat your neighborhood like a borderless playground any longer.

You mostly have to stay on the sidewalk and keep off your neighbor’s lawn.

You learn what’s private and off-limits. Which, it turns out, most of the land around you is.

So the kids retreated to their basements, lit by bright screens and played imaginary games built by tech companies.

Sidenote: the adults who complain kids stay inside staring at screens too much are the same adults who built neighborhoods with nowhere for kids to explore. 

So as a kid I’m thinking, what is this strange world I’m in? What kind of land is this? No food grows here, you can’t drink the polluted sewage water, you aren’t allowed to explore it. I’m completely alienated from my surroundings. Alienated from the people around me. It felt like growing up in a pen with narrow corridors to travel back and forth through. 
  
By the summer before high school this all felt really weird to me.

I wanted a land to explore and be a part of.

Alright, we've spent enough time on this street. I’m gonna take you to a special place I found.

(moving audio) Down the street to Pleasant Hill road, which winds slightly up a subtle hill to the left, make a right on Oak Lane, and then you’ll get to the intersection of Oak Lane Road and Ashbourne. This intersection became like a gateway into another world for me. Um, okay, looks like there’s lots of cars here now. We’ve got to let them die down a bit. And, when no one’s looking… check it out. If we scramble through these thickets and bushes... watch out for the thorns. Ok, do you see it? There, that really old house built of stone, covered in vines, tree branches break through dark empty windows. You can barely see it from the street. It’s totally abandoned, which makes it the perfect place to explore. 

Someone once told me this old house was one of the first constructed by William Penn and the Quakers over three hundred years ago when they founded the city of Philadelphia and the state of Pennsylvania. 

William Penn must not have liked the rules where he came from either and needed a new place to explore. The land the Quakers came to was the same one we’re in now, you know, the one in between the endless mountains and pine barrens. This was the land of the Lenape, a people whose land I spent my entire childhood in, but knew very little about. 

Three hundred or so years ago William Penn and the Quakers stopped along the Delaware River and apparently were friendly with the Lenape, at least that’s the story I remember. And Philadelphia, which is latin for “the city of brotherly love”, was founded. When the new settlers wanted to expand west they made a friendly deal with the Lenape that they would expand no further than how far a man could walk in a day. How far could you walk in one day? Basically the deal was, however far that was, that’s where the Quakers would stay and they’d leave the rest of the Lenape land alone. The Lenape, being honorable people, or at least not thinking anyone could get very far in those pantaloons, agreed. The settlers, being less honorable, cleared a path through the woods and got the fastest runner they could find to sprint as far as he could in one day. William Penn’s sons called it Penn’s Woods, or Pennsylvania - those guys liked latin - and there ya go. Hundreds of years passed and now there’s nowhere left for a kid to really explore. 

Except for one place. 

Just wait till you see this. Past the old abandoned house. Through some more thickets and thorns. There it is, like a whole other world. Ashbourne Country Club. 

Don’t worry about the No Trespassing sign, this place is abandoned. 

Once you cross the road, and pass the metal fences lined with tall bushes, you’re hidden, out of sight. You’re free. 

An oasis in a desert of asphalt and concrete. Hills, meadows, trees, no neighbor etiquette, no adults, no one. 

When I first stepped foot in here it was like coming to a mythical land. The empty buildings of the old country club lay like ruins of a lost civilization. 

Just a few years ago this country club was just another part of the suburban sprawl. But now that it was abandoned I got to notice something pretty incredible happened. 

Back in my neighborhood, when the leaves fall, they are rakes and collected, put into trash bags and taken away. But here, in the abandoned Ashbourne Country Club when the leaves fall they blanket the ground. 

In my neighborhood when the grass grows too tall it’s mowed down to stubble. But here, in the abandoned land of Ashbourne, it grows into a chest high grassland.

Outside Ashbourne, if the sidewalk cracks and a weed grows through it, the weed is cut, the crack is filled. But here, that weed grows and splinters the asphalt around it. 

Over the years, I got to watch the golf course turn to milk weed filled meadow, sand traps slowly were hidden by moss and small plants, the private pool turned into a lily pad pond, complete with croaking frogs. Acorns and dirt piled up on the abandoned roofs of the old country club buildings. By the time I left for college there was a small oak tree growing on the roof.

Here, the suburban sound of leaf blowers and power tools competed with the sound of birds and wind. I learned the names of all the trees and which birds liked which trees. 

I’d come here after school and instead of doing my homework I’d lay on the grass and feel like I belonged. 

The land William Penn and his settlers covered up was getting to breathe again.

One evening, out on the golf-course-turned-wild-prairie, I watched the sun set over the budding young forest just as the moon was rising over the ivy-covered fences. A mist spread across the field. A deer and her fawn slowly crept out and munched on the grass under the moonlight. I cried. And not in some beautiful cinematic way, just a sad quiet cry. I cried not just because this felt like my real homeland but because I knew that it wouldn’t last. I understood that, one day, probably soon, Ashbourne was going to be taken back and developed.

Everything undeveloped gets developed. No one has to tell you that. It’s one of those rules that goes without saying. You can see it everywhere. I knew the reasons too and they weren’t unreasonable. You know, the land could be used for more houses for more people to live in, or businesses that could lower the tax rate. All important adult real world stuff. 

I was a kid but I got it, I understood. But part of me still felt they weren’t going to be developing Ashbourne, they were going to destroy it. 

And I was going to lose Ashbourne just as I was getting to know it. I felt like that about the whole world too. Just as I was learning icebergs existed I was also learning they were melting. The oceans were acidifying. The rainforests were disappearing. Well, fuck, I thought. I just got here.

The way the real world was pitched to me by adults was that: eventually you grow up, you stop playing imaginary kid games and you deal with real world problems. But here was the biggest problem of all and it kind of seemed like no one was doing jack shit about it. I felt betrayed. I thought no one else cared. I thought I was alone.

Later I’d find out there were lots of kids feeling a lot of the same way. A friend in college told me to him it felt like “we were all committing mass suicide and you expect me to go home and just do my homework?” 

[read ever faster] But you have to do your homework or else you won’t get into a good college or get a good job. And it wasn’t just about going to college and getting a job. School made it clear the stakes were higher than that. This wasn’t a game. This was serious shit. They wouldn’t quite come out and say it but really there was a desperation to it: do your homework and get a job because if you don’t you might not make enough money to eat. You might not have enough to live. 
 
Why? School taught you all sorts of things but it never quite taught you why. 

But for now it was summer vacation. This was the greatest freedom a kid could find but here I was stuck having to read some stupid book named Ishmael by some guy named Daniel Quinn.

When I read Ishmael that summer when I was 14 I remember not being impressed at first. It was just a boring summer reading assignment. 

But slowly, Ishmael turned out to be like the wild flowers growing through the crack in the asphalt of the abandoned parking lot.

Ishmael spoke to the things that felt so weird to me, gave context to the strange culture I was born into, how things came to be this way. And in the end, how things might be different. 

It wasn’t an ordinary book to give to students. And Mr. Wilman, my 9th grade English teacher, was not an ordinary teacher. 

The ideas raised in that book planted seeds in my mind. It was Mr. Wilman who helped those seeds grow. He discussed it with us in class, addings his own questions and connections. 

Remember when we were talking about ‘understanding the greater context in which we live’ at the beginning? This was the teacher and the book that really first got me started on that. 

The seeds in my mind this book planted have been growing ever since.

Ishmael is a book to wrestle with. To challenge. To question. It was written in the early 1990s and speaks a specific language of its time. It’s a little outdated. It’s written kinda a-historically, not connected to existing schools of thought. But, but, I love this book. 

I’ve got to agree with that quote on the front cover of the book “From now on, I will divide the books I have read into two categories -- the ones I read before Ishmael and those read after.” 

The subtitle of Ishmael is: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit. Together, in this podcast, we’re going to go on that adventure.

And this is how Human Nature Odyssey will begin. 
 
If we’re going to create some kind of self-help guide for society, Ishmael is a good place to start. Over the next series of episodes, we’ll explore Ishmael and its ideas about humanity, civilization, and our place in the world. 

You don’t have to have read Ishmael by any means. This won’t be a book review. These episodes will be inspired by Ishmael but it’s not Ishmael. 

And If you have read Ishmael consider this a companion analysis and commentary. 

Like my high school English teacher, I’ll be sharing Ishmael with you in my own way. I’ll guide us through the book, but a lot of it will be my own thoughts, additions, and challenges to the materials. These are the ideas I want to share with you and maybe you’ll be moved to add your own as well.

Thanks for listening.

In Episode 2 we’re going to begin our Adventure of the Mind and Spirit and dive into Ishmael. 
 
Until next time, I hope you’ll consider the land you grew up in. What were the main landmarks? What is the story of that place? Where could you explore? 

Talk to you soon.

Thank you to Michi, Juno, and Yosi, Dana, Nic, Dad, Joe, and Honan for helping with this episode. 

Our theme music is Celestial Soda Pop by Ray Lynch. You can find a link in our show notes.

And if you’d like to support the Human Nature Odyssey, please subscribe wherever you enjoy your podcasts, leave us a review, and visit humannatureodyssey.com. Also we do have a Patreon where you’ll find additional materials just for you. Each month there’ll be either a bonus audio episode that dives deeper into specific subjects, writings and mini essays, or my recommendations for reading, watching, listening, on these topics with my notes and commentary. Your support makes this endeavor possible. And I’d love to hear what you think. So leave a message on the Patreon and be a part of the conversation.