Brothers in Arms

Nov 15 2019

I cannot help but admire

nature's frugality,

her minimalist beauty

clever thrift.

Over so many eons

what she has conserved

or wisely re-purposed.

How the same molecule

that releases mother's milk

also floods her with love,

as the nursing mom

holds her babe-in-arms

in her fierce protective gaze.

The same drug

that causes men to bond.

Brothers in arms

heading-off to war,

as, it seems, we have repeatedly done

since time immemorial.

The human brain,

suspended

in the sovereign splendor

of its locked black box,

bathed in a chemical broth

of hormones and transmitters.

Like a touchy twitchy druggie

seeking its fix.

So I wonder about free will.

That despite our conceit of agency

we are mere instruments

of instinct, survival

desire,

marionettes summoned to dance

by puppet-master genes.

As oxytocin, the hormone of love

dictates belonging, attachment

the painful contractions

of our passage from womb to world.

As adrenaline, coursing through our veins

mediates rage

and renders pain oblivious.

Enables the racing heart

the clotting of blood,

the sweat-blinded aim

of scattershot guns.

Freeze, fight, escape

it silently screams;

dehumanizing them

while privileging us.

Nature is frugal; nature conserves. So the same hormones we find in ourselves are also identically found in mice and moths and bottom-feeding fish. We delude ourselves with the conceit of human exceptionalism. But in many fundamental ways, we are hardly exceptional.

A gene does not map one-to-one onto a specific trait. Genes function in combination, so a length of DNA can serve multiple purposes: turned on and off by epigenetic effects; brought into critical proximity to other activated stretches by the tertiary structure – the folding and unfolding – of DNA. This is another example of nature's frugality. And, similarly, how a chemical conserved across species can be conscripted to multiple functions within the same species.

In this regard, oxytocin comes to mind. I am struck by how much of human behaviour is driven by belonging and attachment. And how the same hormone that incites a mother's love also drives the sense of belonging, identity, and reciprocal obligation that enables men to commit war. Because without those deep abiding bonds – the brothers in arms, the camaraderie and fellow feeling – who would fight or risk his life for some abstract cause? And, of course, essential to this psychology is exactly what the final lines say: how necessary it is to demonize and dehumanize the enemy in order to kill; and, conversely, how we somehow delude ourselves into seeing our allies and comrades in only the best light.

There are a couple of recurring tropes here that will be familiar to my readers (and probably strike most of them as tiresome!) There is the questioning of free will. There is a strain of misanthropy. There is the nature of perception: the brain, residing in what amounts to its own virtual-reality world. And there is the levelling down of man: not man, in all his abiding hubris, against nature and subduing her; but man as part of nature, or – even more so – subject to her power and whim.

This was a challenging poem to write. First, because it gets a little technical, and physiology is not exactly conducive to good poetry. And second, because it's another of those philosophical poems, which always risk coming off as plodding, or pretentious, or bloodless. I can only hope it does none of those things.