belonging

Belonging

by Bob on September 19. 2007

Belonging. Not belongings. Although the words are intertwined in our day and age.

Belonging is not about belongings and material things, though.

Belonging is in the heart and in society and in our souls. I'm not sure about our minds. If we take into account the Cartesian split and duality.

Someone can be a willing outsider, or an unwilling outcast, or just feel like a stranger in this world, even or especially amongst other people.

One can be at a party of one hundred friends and not feel that he belongs there or to anyone.

Not belonging to anyone might seem to mean freedom in oneself. But it's more complicated than that.

H.P. Lovecraft wrote about it in the 1920s, in his short story, "The Outsider".

Albert Camus wrote about it in the 1940s, in "The Stranger". Colin Wilson wrote about it in the 1950s, in the "The Outsider".

One can have all the money in the world and not belong. Alternatively, one could have little or no money and not belong, but, interestingly, this is not usually the case. Poor people have an interesting gift of belonging. They help each other out more than the rich man does his neighbour. The poor share information on how to survive life's horrors and everyday conundrums.

We also can turn to the practice in ancient Greece of the Pharmakos. Originally it was a sacrificial animal to appease the gods. Later it became in usage a name for a person of the polis who was voted out of the polis because he was not welcome or bad for the harmony or some other legalistic reason. Later it was simply a vote of banishment from the polis, rigged with all kind of politics and un-neighbourly overtones. So the pharmakos became in usage the scapegoat. We get our modern English term "ostracise" from the shells or pottery chips used to vote out the pharmakos. We now say, inheriting from the ancient Greeks, but more readily broadening the definition and usage, someone is being "ostracised". Being put out, forced out, banished.

It's parenthetically worth noting the etymological linkage between the Pharmakos and our modern word of "pharmacy". Originally by sacrificing or banishing the pharmakos, the community was supposed to get better and heal. Hence a pharmacy which dispenses pharmaceuticals.

This relationship between the scapegoat and the outsider, or someone who doesn't belong, is a complicated thought stream. People's temperments are very fickle. In good, this week, out of fashion, next week. It's hard to be a victim of such fickle behaviour and choices.

People are in the aggregate always looking for a scapegoat. It seems to be almost essential to quasi-polite-modern society. Someone has to be blamed. No matter who. No wonder lynchings are so very dangerous in a moral sense.

So, if you feel you belong, to the larger "in" group, excellent. If you're on the outside, and want to be, let's say an iconoclast, that's good for you as the rebel.

But if you want to belong and the elusive "they" won't let you belong, that's a tragedy. An all too familiar happenstance these days.

Well, maybe when Adam and Eve were sent out of the Garden of Eden for their anti-deity curiosity, or even later when Cain was banished East of Eden, to the land of Nod, they got a sense of it all. And the Nobel Prize winning author, John Steinbeck, knew, when he wrote his classic book, "East of Eden", all about evil and wandering.

Would that the Golden Rule ruled supremely always. But that's not necessarily man's nature. After all, Gershwin did write a brilliant song called "It Ain't Necessarily So" from his opera, "Porgy and Bess". And, sadly sometimes, it ain't.