Sociality is as mysterious as nature.  As you read this more than 7 billion people

are busy doing other things.  Do you know them?  Do you know what they are doing?

Do you know what and who they care about; what they live for; what they would die

for; what they would say to you should your lives intersect. With the widespread of

the internet, it is possible to make and sustain friendships across thousands of miles. 

If you drive past small villages in southern Africa, you may hear women singing

together as they carry on the routines of their daily lives.  Carole and I rented a car

in Bali to see what the countryside looked like beyond the typical tourist areas and

staged dance performances.  As we drove down a rural road, we came upon a local

religious processional –  men and women in traditional Balinese costumes, beating

drums, the women carrying pyramidal platters of fruit on their heads.  This processional

was one stylized for tourists, just local folks doing their thing.

      The social world is an incredible diversity of rich mysteries.  That nondescript

petite middle-aged Asian woman passing you on the street might be my fitness

instructor who is able to leap into the air and kick a 6’2” man in the face.  Who

knows?  I watch people on commuter trains, at the mall, in airports. I am at

Baltimore-Washington-International airport.  Three generations of a Hispanic

family are walking past.  Each individual has a separate history.  How do they see

themselves?  How do they present themselves – professional, parental, sophisticated,

down-home, cute, strong, sexy?  Are they going to a funeral or a vacation?  Notice

the scarf, hair style, length of hairdo, jewelry, how they face one another, engage

with one another in conversation, body movements, how they carry themselves,

what sort of bag do they have in hand, how do they walk, stride. What is the logo

on that shirt?  What shoes, skirts, pants do they wear?  What is their religion, politics?

What sort of dwelling do they live in?  What sort of vehicle do they drive?  How did

they get to the airport?  Where do they work?  What do they feel about one another?

      Who are you?  What do your clothes and jewelry say about who you are?  What

does the way you move your hands tell me about you?  Where are you coming from?

What are you carrying in that bag?  Why are you here at this particular time and place?

Where have you just come from? Where are you going?  At one level, you are me and

I am you.  At another level, you are a total mystery to me – a mystery that I will never

solve.  Sometimes I look a child passing by and think, “You may be president some day.”

Or, I utter a silent blessing for their future.  In his letters to his brother, the young

Vincent Van Gogh mentions helping some young boys build a sand castle on the beach.

You never know who it is next to you.

As this sentence is written, I am listening to Puccini’s La Boehme.  I once thought to ingratiatemyself to a member of the music faculty at the university by saying that in the
event of a nuclear war, I wouldn’t escape into a cave with a bible but with music scores.

 He said, “Don’t bother.  People will always create music.” 

People create both simple things we take for granted and complex things we will never use.  Someone conceived the idea of Netflix.  They could have mailed the DVDs in bubble
wrap, padded envelopes, maybe boxes.  Someone had to figure out that little red envelope
that you open on one end without destroying the envelope, and then conveniently use to
mail the DVD back.  Someone else had to figure out the cost efficiencies, which DVDs
to stock in what number, and where to place the distribution points for quick turnaround.
And, someone is focusing on how the availability of movies online will affect a mailorder.

A woman was on TV last night who has written a book about NASA and gave a brief
description of how complex the process was to create a toilet for the space shuttle. 
Normal toilets depends on gravity.  But when you are in zero gravity, stuff doesn’t just
fall down and go plop.  It is just as likely to float up and wander around the room.

Human history is fashioned out of the creative and tenacious striving of all sorts of people
– female and male, all races and nations.  This goodness rises spontaneously amidst the
varied people of a single generation and lasts generation after generation, century after
century, through historical time.  All this goodness, summed up together, testifies to the
workings of a spirit of goodness through individual people at the micro level and history
at the macro, a continuing process of historical transcendence.  These incredible, almost unfathomable, miracles of goodness are evidence of a good spirit in a universe that
otherwise is completely neutral and indifferent.  The question is not “how do you account
for evil,” but how, otherwise can we account for goodness.

The goodness we see, year after year in ourselves, all sorts of people and in all sorts of
circumstances is evidence of something larger; yes, the collective sum of people’s
individual efforts, but also something that inspires those efforts; a much-greater-good a more-than, transcendent good which could be called God, or the Spirit of Goodness.

We enjoy the benefits of the work of previous generations.  My mother was born in January 1911 and graduated from college when she was 18.  Her farm family didn’t have electricity, running water, a telephone.  They traveled by horse and buggy.  In those 100 years we have gone from the family farm to global finance.  Indeed, today’s family farm in many parts of the world is often an exercise in high finance with global connections. 

100 years ago there were very few places in the world where women could vote.  In 1500, black slaves were first brought to Santo Domingo.  It took 350 years to get emancipation and another 100 to the 1960s civil rights movement.  But, people sacrificed, prayed and died to open up greater and greater opportunities for all. 

We owe more to the anonymous inventor of the wheel, the person who figured out how to make fire on demand, the people who crafted intelligible writing and numbers than we owe to our landlord or mortgage company.  But, we cannot pay them back, so our task is to pay laterally to those who share our era, and forward for those yet to come.

Physicians and nurses, beneficiaries of years of decades of medical training from their predecessors, drag us into the first light of day in rooms built by architects, financiers, brick layers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters and painters; filled with equipment manufactured elsewhere; accessed by roads built by governments and road crews; in cars assembled thousands of miles away from metal, chemicals, parts, and plans.  We are cleaned and clothed with fabrics grown and manufactured by workers thousands of miles away whom we will never know.

The doctor speaks words in a language that combines a hundred national dialects, gradually standardized by millions of people's usage over centuries.  An aide writes down data using a numerical system invented by Arabs thousands of years ago.  And, all we've done so far is scream.

Life comes to us as a gift and challenge.  Ninety percent of life happens to and around us, and in that sense comes as good luck, or, if you will, gifts of the spirit.  We contribute the remaining ten percent.  That ten percent is important and a lot of what this book is about.  But, we should acknowledge the gifts of the spirit of life and liveliness, of creativity and work, that precede and accompany us on our way.

Language, the arts, music, markets, businesses, religious institutions, politics, culture are all there the day before we are born.  We don't invent them, though we have the opportunity to enjoy, enlarge and reshape them. Ultimately, no one pulls themselves up by their bootstrap without a huge boost from other people.

We are as awestruck and humbled by the magnificent richness of the gifts of collective sociality as those of nature.  The canyons of Manhattan would be as impressive to a time traveler from the first century, as the Grand Canyon is to us now.  Soaring skyscrapers in Hong Kong are as magnificent as the mountains on which they are perched.  The culture of the people Bali is as inspiring as Balinese beaches; the temples of Angkor Wat, Teotihuacan or Borobudur as exotic to westerners as gorillas and giraffes in Africa.  Literature, poetry, dance, music are gifts that come from the creative energies and hard work of those who have preceded us.

     We read about the death of famous people and the contributions they have made.  But what about the seven billion people who are still alive, each doing what they can to survive, thrive and contribute to our common wellbeing.  Those who have gone before and those who share our moment in time are building a path, cobblestone by cobblestone, on which we and future generations will walk. In order to get through the day, we need food grown, packaged and sold by other people.  We need other people to lay the basics of transportation, the food chain, public entertainment.  We need clothing made by other people.  We need a clean water supply, furnaces that work, electricity, plumbing, public safety – all provided by other people.

Each of us makes our appearance, contributes and/or subtracts from the good of the whole, and then moves on.  We bond with one another, procreate, work, play and influence the shape and quality of the human community in ways both large and small.  Creation and recreation of life; goodness multiplied or divided; meaning large and small.  But, all of it together a mysterious process of history transcending itself, slowly and surely over time.  We are making history, and every person adds or subtracts from the goodness, or evil, that is always in the process of becoming.

We look to teachers, religious leaders, politicians, technicians, business people, health care providers, mechanics, musicians and hundreds of other roles and vocations to provide things we depend on and help us through everyday life.  They build roads, dig mines, grow food, make airplanes, discover medicines, design clothing, pick up the trash, run companies and deliver pizzas for us. No matter how you slice it, we are dependent on other people, both as individuals and collectively.  Individuals may build the roads and dig the mines, but governments and corporations make the policy decisions about whether and where roads will be built and where mines can and cannot be dug, not to mention the funds required to do it.

So, we are political animals in two senses.  We are members of the polis – we necessarily live together and depend on one another, but also are inextricably part of political life narrowly defined – participants and beneficiaries of politics where the cumulative decisions of individuals have a tremendous influence on our life together. 

      It is interesting to scan obituaries to read the small and large things that people whom we don’t know have done to contribute to the polis.  Take the Sunday obituaries in a randomly selected Washington Post.^[i]

M, a retired professor in the old department of family and community development at the University of Maryland.  She had five children, and nine grandchildren.

K, former Wall Street Journal reporter was top spokesman at the Pentagon during the Clinton administration and later became a prominent advocate on behalf of international refugees.  He had three children.

H, a nationally prominent Baptist minister was among the first African American pastors to lead a predominantly white church in Washington, and who helped organize an anti-poverty campaign with Martin Luther King Jr.  He had two children, three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

C, a violin maker who crafted some of the finest instruments of her time, invented new ones, and through science, came as close as anyone ever has to reproducing the venerated sound of the Stradivarius.  She had two children and six grandchildren.

E spent the past 25 years at the National Kidney Foundation as assistant to the president and chief executive.

J, a physicist who specialized in mine warfare and spent most of his career at the Naval Ordinance Laboratory.  He had three children, four grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

Ca, an assistant to several trade organization executives, including close to 20 years at the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors’ National Association.  She had two children and three grandchildren.

 Jo worked for the Court Services & Offenders Supervision Agency, a federal agency that provides supervision to adults on probation and parole.  She struggled with obesity and with the publication of “Ugly” was on the cusp of transforming herself into a promising essayist.

Ke was a roofing estimator.  For the last five years, he had been lead estimator for Northeast Contracting, a residential and commercial roofing company.

 N, a retired director of international affairs for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  In addition to a career of work on weather, he was deeply interested in chrysanthemums.  His manicured garden bloomed with scores of chrysanthemum varieties.  He had two children, three grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

                                                                                                  
      And, 93 other men and women – beloved wife of, husband of, father of, grandfather of, grandmother of, brother of, sister of; teachers, soldiers and a dance band leader; with hundreds of descendents.  We cannot know whether or not all those children and grandchildren contributed to or subtracted from our shared life together.  That’s part of the mystery of our life together.  But let us assume the positive, that among their many contributions, they lived good, decent lives.  That alone is a plus, especially if we begin to imagine the effects that destructive lives can have.  Now multiply these obituaries by 3,000, since approximately 300,000 people die every day.

      How often have you stopped to wonder about who is advocating in behalf of international refugees; who is thinking about mine warfare; who is supervising adults on probation; who is behind long range weather forecasting; who is tending to contractors associations; who is teaching about family and community development; which clergy are crossing racial barriers in congregations; who estimates roofs.   The ten people listed above, and the 93 others listed that day, lived whole lives out of your sight, out of your awareness, and yet each was contributing in her or his own way to the larger society. 

---

[i]  Probably Aug. 16, 2009

Spirit-Gifts of Society: (Mystery, transcendence, goodness, creativity of the other)

We receive life from our parents, children, friends.  They care for us and help

make life meaningful.  We are gifted by the larger society – those who have gone

before and those who are our contemporaries – as well as family and friends. 

The social world is already there when we show up, with all its goodness and evil.

The social world makes possible the gift of human life; and then immediately and

forever continually showers us with the gifts of the human spirit; themselves

manifestations/expressions of a Spirit which continues its work through generations.

     Look around.  Every artifact is a human product – every book, brick and building;

     every chunk of road concrete and blacktop, as well as the lines painted on them,

     the signs and traffic signals that guide.  Think about the architect, the designer,

     the funder, the construction crew, those who made the windows, doors, pipes,

     wires, steel and cut the wood. 

     Paul Harding’s, Pulitzer winning novel, Tinker has a stunning description of

     the complexity of a grandfather clock and the many hands that went into its

     production.  He describes the function of pinions, escape wheels, going train,

     gathering pallet, mallet, spring, arbor, escapement. 

If we call roll through the years, Huygens, Graham, Harrison,

            Tompion, Debaufre, Mdge, LeRoy, Kendall, and, most recently,
            Mr. Arnold, we find a humble and motley, if determined and
            patient, parade of reasonable souls, all bent at their work tables,
            filing brass and calibrating gears and sketching ideas until their
            pencils dissolve into lead dust between their fingers, all to more
            perfectly transform and translate Universal Energy by perfecting
            the beat of the escape wheel.[i]
     We hear a tick tock, notice the pendulum, admire the cabinet.  We don’t stop
     to think about the many creative and technical decisions, the many people who
     produced this amazing human artifact. 

---

[i] Harding, Tinker, Pp. 161-162

In Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, young lovers struggle with their social

differences.  Tony sings:

            The most beautiful sound I ever heard . . .

            Maria – say it loud and there's music playing,
            Say it soft and it's almost like praying

An expression of love is a form of prayer.  The Spirit of Goodness is experienced most

clearly and intensively in human love – the love of parents, children, spouses, committed

pairs; the love of friends for one another.  Love one another as you have (hopefully)

been loved.

      We’re in the midst of a Christmas celebration as I write this.  Children chatter

as they play with new colorful new toys.  Adults lounge, read or noisily play board

games.  The huge pile of red and green wrapping paper is bagged, the boxes and

ribbons saved.  The Christmas tree lights twinkle against the glittering beads

and ornaments.  No popcorn and cranberries were hung this year. It's a warm day

for Christmas in North Carolina.  You can see the Blue Ridge mountains from the

back porch.  The house is filled with the aroma of roasting turkey and baking buns.

A small bowl of pickled beets always sets beside my plate because I once

complimented my mother-in-law on her beets.

The table blessing seems appropriate because we have so much to be thankful

for; regardless of the varied opinions around the table about the god we are praying

to.  We visit relatives.  The aged first-generation bed-ridden brother who would

not see another Christmas.  His sister who goes for walks every day and is excited

about the imminent arrival of her progeny and their offspring.  Jobs lost, jobs gained.

Money earned, money spent.  Church fights and church blessings.  Hugs and “y'all

come again soon.”  Through all, a spirit of goodness, of family connectedness over

generations, of satisfaction at seeing one another whatever differences might occupy

other days.

After spending eight months in Afghanistan, Major J. Mark Jackson made

list of 41 things he had learned at war, including:

·         I am capable of performing acts of brutality but don’t.
·         You don’t feel the effects of battle until the day after.  Then you are swept with
        feelings of anxiety, anger, thankfulness and a profound weariness.  A hollow
        sense of shock descends.  It passes, mostly.
·         The Afghan children are absolutely beautiful, with their hopeful smiles.
·         Nothing is more important than family.  Nothing.

Christopher Lasch said that “family is a haven in a heartless world.”  Nicholas
Kristof writes of his experience with kidney cancer.

            A brush with mortality turns out to be the best way to appreciate

            how blue the sky is, how sensuous grass feels underfoot, how
            melodious kids’ voices are . . . .
              My surgeon, Douglas Scherr, said that . . . after a cancer
            diagnosis. . at least for a time are more focused on what 
            feels more important – like families.^[i]

We shouldn’t need a cancer diagnosis to look to our family and broader social
lives as the locus from which rise the spiritual experience that we typically
project to the sky for the big G god.  In fact, it is in our family relationships
that we learn to love, elementary uses of power and to think of some things
as meaningful while other things are not.  Sociologist W. Lloyd Warne
concluded, based on his study of the Murngin, a hunting and gathering people
of North Australia, that “the family and its collective structures are collectively
represented in their sacred symbol systems.”^[ii] And, not just the Murngin. 
The emotional and symbolic content of American religion is rooted in primary
and secondary socialization. 

Children raised in orphanages that provide limited affection and care, are often

emotionally and intellectually stunted.  The capacity to love other people or divine

beings does not come from the sky, but from our families and they can be the first

and most important locus of our spiritual experiences, whether we recognize it or not.

Jewish philosopher Martin Buber writes:

            The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being.

            The primary word I-It can never be spoken with the whole being.^[iii]                         

---

[i] Nicholas D. Kristof, “A Scare, a Scar, a Silver Lining,” The New York Times Sunday Opinion, 6/6/2010.

[ii] W. Lloyd Warner, The Family of God, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961, p. 29.

[iii] Buber, I And Thou, p. 3.

      In Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other Scott Simon of NPR writes about the two

small girls he and his wife were adopting from China.  We “‘knew that Elise and

Lina were our babies from the moment we received their postage-stamp portraits.

Logically, I know that’s not possible.  But I also know that’s how my heart, mind

and body . . . reacted to their pictures. . . . I would take the photo out of my wallet

in the weeks before we left to get each of our girls, and hold it against my lips to

whisper, ‘We’re coming, baby.’”^[i]   

Living, sustaining and enlarging life have been my gods.  In relatively short bursts,

socio-sexual expression, love and political participation can be our highest ecstasies

and a monastery may not be the best place to experience them.  We are all haunted

by death when we stop to think about it, as we so rarely do.  “Life is an inevitably

fatal disease.  Sooner or later, our own bodies will assassinate us.”^[ii]  But, do we

want to die alone?  Life and relationships to other people are the greatest gifts in

life and death.  Sometimes we ride vitality, love, goodness and death, and

sometimes they ride us.

Even truth in science is predicated on sociality.  An investigator may announce

a discovery based on evidence.  But, it only becomes established truth when its

validity becomes a consensus among “the community of investigators.”  And,

the very capacity to share and discuss the discovery is predicated on commonly

understood language and a shared understanding of what counts as valid evidence.^[iii]

---

[i] Quoted by Michael Gerson, “Miracles from abroad,” The Washington Post, August 27, 2010, A21.

[ii] Gene Weingarten, “Below the Beltway,” The Washington Post Magazine, June 13, 2010, p. 36

[iii] “Science must presuppose ethics because truth is not only a matter of evidence for my consciousness, but more over a matter of intersubjective validity to be testified to by a grounded consensus about the coherence of evidences in the community of investigators.  Hence science must presuppose communicative understanding between persons as co-subjects of agreements about truth; and communicative understanding between persons presupposes certain ethical norms.”  Karl-Otto Apel, The Common Presuppositions of Hermeneutics and Ethics: Types of Rationality Beyond Science and Technology, in John Sallis, ed., Studies in Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979, p. 47 reprinted from Research in Phenomenology 1979, Volume IX.

The Hickory [NC] Daily Record, December 24, 2010:  “We asked: what is your
favorite Christmas memory and why?”

            Kim: my first Christmas with my daughter.

            Jessica: going to the beach with a lot of family.

            Lea: getting together with my family at my aunt’s house on Christmas Eve.

Karen: Getting together with all of my family at my grandmother’s house.

The Spirit of Life, Goodness and Meaning comes to us first and foremost through
family, friends, strangers, communities, even society's outcastes.  Before we are born,
our body rhythms vibrate in counter point to the one who carries us in her body. 
We know warmth, satisfaction in relation to her.  And, as we grow, if we are lucky
enough to “choose the right family,” (actually, quite accidental) many of our most
profoundly meaningful, i.e. spiritual, experiences are those that occur in interaction
with one another.  But, we don’t always recognize these as dominant spiritualties
 in our lives.  Look around and say to yourself, this is where the good stuff happens.
We’re so close to it that we often don’t see the spiritual experiences that happen
on a day to day basis. 

Though nature-based, individual spirituality thrives in quietude, social and political

spirituality is characterized by noise – the sounds of families on feast days; children

in a playground or a pool; the roar of the crowd at a sports event; the excitement of

sharing, singing and political strategizing, of committee meetings and conventions;

the reassurance that others are there working and playing together to achieve family

and public goods; and that you are joined with them, at some level in a common will

and purpose.  Outside Starbucks the other day, jazz blared from the speakers, rush

hour traffic roared just yards away, a car alarm shrieked, an emergency vehicle

screamed by.  The moment was filled with the vitality, the mysterious vibrant chorus

of daily public life. Think about all the people in those cars.  Who are they?  Where

are they going?  What was their day like?  What will their evening be like?  Are they

happy, frustrated, angry? What are they listening to on the radio or cell phone? Would

we like them if we met them personally?  We may not think of noisy moments as

spiritual, but it is here also, that goodness, the realm of the spirit of our social life, can

flourish though we have to learn to think differently about it to appreciate its goodness

and joy.

Sometimes we do need quietude, e.g. as we sit at the bedside of a dying father, mother,

spouse, child, friend; but quietness with, not away from, someone else.  This is a spiritual

moment not because of the silence, but because of our link to the person immobilized in

bed – a social spirituality.

Religious people experience a spiritual presence in liturgy, prayers, sacraments and,

sometimes even the sermon.  But, a congregation also experiences the spirit of life and

liveliness in the social context of worship – family and community gathered to celebrate

the beauty of new life, the promise of a shared future, and the baptismal cries that declare:

HERE I AM!  I LIVE!  I HAVE GAS IN MY STOMACH!  PAY ATTENTION TO ME!

During the children’s sermon, the adults grin at the wiggling and unpredictable
comments of the children.  The sermon may be mercifully short, pointed and
engaging.  But, the spiritual impact comes from the little girl in her bonnet and
bows who blurts out something that throws the pastor off message; from the small
boy whose short pants are six inches from the floor because that's where his knees
are; from the child who runs amok, oblivious to adult decorum; the promise of
new members of the gathred community. 

      The gift of life, exuberant vitality (and their loss) – the vibrant pulsing of life in our
      veins, muscles, nerves; sexual ecstasy (sextasy); the love of family and friends;
      celebrations; suffering and death – are among our most fundamental human
      experiences and thus are our basic spiritual experiences.  Through the nurturance
      of family, kin and friends, we strengthen the larger community.  We are willing
      to sacrifice more for loved ones than strangers.  At the same time, we are more
      likely to put up with troubling behavior from family and friends than strangers.
     Thus, they help us transcend our natural propensity toward seeking personal
     advantages and egocentric satisfactions.  The symbols, rites and theologies of
     religion are constructed out of, are extensions and projections of life’s basic
     experiences, especially our social lives.

   The spiritual intensity of family groups varies widely from our immediate household to the human family where we are, whether we recognize it or not, ultimately bound together as family.  Any social group where similar spiritual connections exist are in some sense an extended family.  As I walked New Orleans Mardi Gras streets with a contingent of young lesbians, we saw another group of women walking down the other side of the street, and one of our group nodded in their direction and said “they’re family.” She didn’t know them personally but they were part of a larger community who shared common ties, a common identity, certain shared experiences and meanings.  The word family comes from Latin where it included whole households – servants, blood relationships as well as marriage.  So, when the word “family” is used here, it is meant to include at a minimum any group of people who love and care for one another; and at a maximum the human family.
   A congregation watches five newborns, cradled by parents and sponsors, gathered around the baptismal font at Luther Place Memorial Church in DC. Two are howling. Pastor John Steinbruck shouts the liturgy over a scream-gasp-scream contrapuntal duet. The congregation chuckles, enchanted by the howls of other people’s kids. There’s also a sense of nostalgia as we recall other baptisms and name-givings. Maybe we even think about God, but it’s the screaming babies that elicit our smiles and are our dominant emotional experience.

Sociality is intrinsic to our existence

History has its true hermits who seek and sustain solitude.  But even people who try to escape social relations are unable to do so. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, escaped to a cabin in the wilderness where he had neither running water nor electricity, trying to become self-sufficient.  He still had to come into town for supplies, and, he sent letters with bombs to other people in order to attract public attention to his concerns.  Though physically alone, he was mentally in dialogue with a larger public.  His sense of meaning was defined by his internal dialogue with other people – the enemies whom he tried to blow up and the publicity it would get.

Christopher McCandless, became known through Into the Wilderness, a book and movie
about his trek into the Alaskan wilderness to find solitude.  He called himself Alexander
Supertramp to describe his itinerant lifestyle.  He died alone in an old abandoned bus.
But, he had not escaped society.  He writes about people he enjoyed along the way.
On the final page of his journal, he wrote “I have had a happy life and thank the Lord.
Goodbye and may God bless all!”  “Good bye” and “God bless all” are spoken to the
faces that had taken up residence over the years in his soul.

Henry David Thoreau, remembered for his solitude at Walden Pond, was busy 
writing a journal for others to read.  He writes about literary classics, i.e. works written
by other people.  It is said that he wanted readers so badly, that initially he self-published
his journals.  So whether other people are there at any particular moment, we are all
continuously in dialogue with our social world – past, present and future.  The very words
that form in our minds come to us as language, the product of the social experience of
those who have preceded us.   And when we address someone else, we assume a
world-context of shared understanding, and, to some extent, living together.^[i]
 

Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes the moment when he goes from days of isolation to a
shared cell as “First Cell, First Love.”  As crazy as it may seem, he says, when you enter
that cell which will you share with a random group of prisoners, you become instant family.
You “fall in love” with them out of your need for human contact. 

---

[i] Nussbaum, p. 256.