Our old friends Chuck and Roger, who reside on a veldt in South-Central Africa in the Upper Paleolithic, are secure in their occupations and community roles.
Chuck is a member of his tribe’s hunting team. He is a risk-taker, willing to brave the Cat in order to pursue the gazelle; he is an egalitarian, working in cooperative consensus with his team to approach, attack and overcome their prey; and he is creative, always seeking out new ways to improve the process of the hunt and the quality of outcomes.
Roger is one of his tribe’s fire-tenders. For generations on end, human tribes have slept safely through the dark African nights, thanks to the fires humans know how to create and sustain – fires that enrich their meals, keep them warm in the colder months, and (perhaps most importantly) keep the Cat at bay. Those of Roger’s profession keep the fire going till morning. To that end, he is a giver and taker of orders, a member of a disciplined squad that has no patience for mediocre task execution; he is wary, scanning the darkness for tiny glowing orbs; and he sticks with what works, because... well, it works.
Plucked from their time and dropped into our own, Chuck and Roger cease to be tribal brothers and become mutual antagonists, as they absorb the 21st century. Roger is scornful of Chuck: here they are, in a world where meat need not be hunted, killed, toted and dissected; it is wrapped in cellophane and piled high behind cool glass, or served warm and brown by a polite stranger at a comfortable table. Of what use is Chuck in such a world? What good is his indifference to risk, when the acquisition of food does not require courage? The meat clerk and restaurant server cooperate with everyone; Chuck’s availing of their services no longer makes him special; and the system here has no need of his innovation – it is indifferent to his build-a-better-spear impulses.
Chuck is a misfit in this world!
From Chuck’s point of view, however, Roger is the one who’s obsolete: not only is the Cat absent from this place where they find themselves; the Cat is gone everywhere, forever. There is no need to keep it at bay. And nightly tribal bonfires in the middle of those who sleep are not only unnecessary, they are sharply discouraged; the endless caves humans have built for themselves are heated by mysterious fires unseen. And food is cooked on hot metal surfaces and in magical boxes. Who needs a fire-tender or a sentry in a world where dangers are so few?
Chuck and Roger are both misfits, but neither will concede this to the other.
And yet – we are the sons and daughters of Chuck and Roger and their sons and daughters; the genes that made them who they were, that imparted the individual gifts and strengths and differences that empowered their tribe and opened up a place for them in the natural world, still reside within us all.
The Chucks among us drift from the tribe constantly, in search of abstract nothings; they cannot help but wander, convincing themselves that their pursuits have value to a tribe that offers them no meat in exchange; once in a blue moon they return with “The Lord of the Rings” or “Hey Jude” or the iPod, but mostly they have to get day jobs.
And the Rogers breathlessly scan the horizon for peril; on rare occasion they catch the Japanese steaming for Midway, but mostly they find danger in differences, any difference at all that they can point to, in search of an enemy – skin color, holy words, place of birth, or... Chuckness.
The scream of ancient genes is loud and clear, a thousand centuries on from that time when who we were was a perfect fit with where and when; it reverberates with a truth that we never speak, and perhaps can never acknowledge, but which underscores our need for greater humility and our tantalizing untapped tribal promise at the same time, a truth we should turn and face, once and for all:
We are all misfits.
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