The Acumen for Survival and Advancement
by G David Schwartz
Posted: March 22, 2006
A series of motifs in literature allows us to
say, as a general principle as well as an experiential possibility,
no one wants to be the younger brother. In folktales, the narrative
perspective is generally either told from the point of view of the
older brother, or else the younger brother is telling the tale of
the younger brother's death. A dead older brother does not represent
that which older brothers typically represent. Therefore, to speak
of a dead older brother, or to speak of the older brother who will
turn out to die in the tale, is to speak of one’s ability
to survive without the qualities attributed to the older brother.
Older brothers represent not simply primogeniture and the rights
and obligations which follow from being first born or eldest survivor,
but also the qualities expected to occur as a result of being eldest
surviving son. The older brother, in all cases where there are two
or more brothers, represents maturity, wisdom, skills and abilities,
and the obligation, and practice of the obligation, to care for
the extended family. The care for the extended family denotes the
will and ability to provide not only for his wife and children,
but his parents and his siblings if they are alive. Hence, the older
brother represents the provision of security for survival and the
means for advancement.
There is rarely, in typical folktales, a single son. Traditionally,
there are three sons. There are rarely daughters, but when daughters
are represented, there are rarely three (but may be seven). A single
daughter is exceptional, but she soon binds with a male who relieves
her of her exceptional status. Even in modern folk-fiction, Wonder
Woman and Bat Girl are exceptional personalities only because they
have not found and settled with the right man. Further, while sons
traditionally struggle between themselves in some manner or another,
the occurrence of more than one daughter typically finds the daughters
getting along, with the exception of stepdaughters. Occasionally
there is a single daughter who need not find the right male because
a brother already protects her. Folklore simply did not know how
to deal in a very real way with daughters.
A single daughter was simply insufficient to allow the (supposed)
qualities of the single son, which also acts as the reason for the
struggle between sons. Therefore, folklore bound daughters into
larger groups of women, implying the hope that in the absence of
one son who definitely could, seven daughters might supply that
which is represented by the eldest son.
The potency of the older brother, however, also represents the
impotence of the younger brothers. If the older brother is mature,
the latter-born are to that extent immature. If the older is wise,
the other is, if not ignorant, not yet wise. The emplacement of
the older brother’s skills, abilities, and practices of obligations
for survival and advancement not only detract from his siblings’
acumen but also render them as not quite that important to the family.
No younger brother would be able to put up with this situation.
No younger brother would be pleased to be disabled in such a manner.
Therefore, younger brothers will be silent in the face of their
older brother’s potency. They will only speak when the older
brother is himself disabled. Thus, younger brothers write the tales
of their older brothers only when they fall into disability, and
they write as if they possess the qualities of the older brother.
If the older brother was disabled in a tale, the younger brother
is the one to have dragged him to safety. Therefore the younger
brother possesses the acumen for survival and advancement. If the
older brother has turned wicked, or had been prodded to wickedness
by Satan or some other force (which might even include the younger
brother), then the younger brother becomes the force for good. Rarely
does the younger brother himself disable the older brother. Yet
the younger brother does always seem to be standing ready to replace
him.
The disabling of the brother in form or content does not matter.
What matters is the occurrence of the literary fact that the older
brother has abandoned, or has had wrested from him, the rights and
obligations to offer survival and advancement.
The older brother, disabled, is as good a dead. Therefore, the
younger brother inherits his status as provider and protector. If
there are three brothers, the second brother is disabled as well,
generally by the same process, so that the younger brother might
inherit the wisdom, skills, and abilities which are implied in primogeniture.
Finally, as is frequently the case in folktales, the older brother
is disposed of through the ultimate disabling event, death, which
is analogous and corollary to the father’s handing of the
birthrights to the youngest son.
One motif in the Bible concerns the father’s direct giving
of the birthright to the younger son. This Director giving may,
of course, occur by duplicitous means, as in the case of Jacob deceiving
Isaac, or David becoming prominent by the intervening choice of
God after stoning Goliath or, as in the case of Cain, by default,
even if the fault of the default was his own. The analogous corollary
in folklore concerns the frequently used motif of three brothers
who venture, one by one, to fulfill some mission or another. The
first brother fails, is disabled, and/or dies. The second brother
fails, is disabled, and/or dies. The youngest brother succeeds and
in some, but not all cases, protects and defends the elder brothers
who, ill, lame, or what have you, are as good as dead.
Outside literature, which is to say in the 3-D world (unless you
have a really good computer), primacy if not primogeniture is given
to the brother who succeeds. In any confederacy, the older brother
is the nation or people who substantiate a claim to protect and
defend. Upon this claim, or assignation of the status of elder brother
with rights and obligations, is the concurrent attribution of acumen
for survival and advancement. The elder brother, or let us call
him the United States of America, is, as long as he acts to assure
or rhetorically convinces a sufficient number of others that he
acts to insure survival and advancement of all, is attributed with,
or thinks itself able to claim, the wisdom, skills, maturity, rights,
and obligations which are the acumen for survival and advancement.
The story of the younger brother who is ever young is simply not
told. He lives in the shadows (protected and defended, and/or plotting
the overthrow of his older brother). He lives as a recipient of
the inclusive activity of the older, wiser, more mature brother.
The story of the younger brother is not told, in short, until the
older brother and all the motifs which composed him and benefits
which enflame him dissolve in his failure or death. Surely this
is the myth of the Jewish-Christian relationship and its corresponding
reality!
Occasionally in literature as well as outside literature (or some
hazy blend between them) we hear of a son who was not the oldest,
who broke the motif, who de-literatures the literature (the way
the world is perceived in literary tropes). David, for example,
was neither the eldest son nor did he murder or otherwise seek to
disable his older brothers. His brothers do, however, simply disappear
from the multiple stories told about David. His brothers have become
irrelevant, literally disabled. Primogeniture does not matter and
there under-ripening wisdom is never an issue. The reason neither
the overburdens of the elder son nor the under-girthing of skills
toward success are relevant is because David, as the anti-motif
stories goes, simply stepped forth to practice the acumen for survival
and advancement by slaying Goliath.
What this means for literature is that whoever practices the acumen
for survival and advancement, the maximal protection and defense
of the most extensive community, is allowed to break literary paradigms.
Such a person, a hero in the truest sense of the word, is permitted,
without benefit of motif or real psychological expectations, to
upset literary/psychological order without causing a corresponding
chaos in either the epistemological systemic of the reader or in
the real world. Outside literature, the primacy is given to the
nation. It is permitted to break rules, make new and different rules,
abandon traditional rules, so long as he/it insures the maximal
engenderment of survival and advancement for the maximum number
of people. There should be no corresponding chaos to the elder brother’s
rights, privileges and obligations.
Of course, no “out there” functions the same as "in
here." No real world event corresponds, nor is analogous to.
literary events in terms of coherency or obedience to rules, motifs
or structure, logic or deduction, history or prophecy. Literature
is a safety zone in the real world of ambiguity and nonsense, violence
and boredom. Literature is a means of attempting to understand the
unread, unreadable world out there. This suggests that the acumen
for survival and advancement is, in the real world, consistently
threatened by debilitating realities, is not protected by literary
structures, soothing motifs, editorial concerns for relative consistency,
the safety of expectations, the ease of presentation, and so on.
Hence, the author, redactor, or editor of a piece of literature
has the time to structure his or her concern for survival and advancement.
The politician, on the other hand, is limited by time (in office)
and thrust into the timely realm of expediency where momentary decisions
-- occasionally long-held, occasionally not -- are tied to voter
approval, expectations and the like as they are derived from rhetorical
assessment, media, scrutiny and personal concern; in other words,
capitulation, mineralization, political compromise, apathy, and
activism if, when, and where it occurs.
The acumen for survival and advancement, however, when adhering
to mineralization and capitulation, is not coherent. When wisdom
is simply wise for a purpose, when skills and abilities are merely
pragmatic and not principled, then maturity is either a rhetorical
devise, which is useful for deceiving the population, intentionally
or unintentionally, or is a temporary event. In either case, "maturity"
is a form of subterfuge and inclusion is not maximized for survival
but is another form of prejudicial choice. If so, the acumen for
survival and advancement become something other than acumen.
It becomes politics as usual. Survival becomes something other
than survival. It becomes the justification for murdering others.
Advancement becomes something other than advancement. It becomes
stratification, revivification, and separation of the possibilities
for insight and action, which could attend to coherent relations.
When the acumen for survival and advancement does not quest maximum
inclusion, it is simply another form of exclusion, limitation, creation
of younger brothers whom the elder brother does not protect and
defend so much as oppress, ridicule, lord over and, eventually,
kill before he gets killed. This, too, is a part of what it means
to be an older brother. Paradigmatically, the elder brother must
prevent his threatening younger brothers from going to the father
and stealing his birthright. Politically, the elder statements must
prevent the younger from going into his coffers and stealing his
goods (or when votes are gold, going to constituents to steal his
votes).
What this assessment means for folktale need not detain us. We
can rest assured that the oral authority or editor throughout the
history of telling or the practice of print will cause everything
to come to the appropriate conclusion. A hero shall arise. The family
will endure. The acumen will continue.
Yet "out there" we do not have the leisure nor the editorial
power to return to an action, to red-line a careless phrase or a
poor description, a sad activity. We should not countenance what
we would not put up with in our literature: a poor character, unresolved
conflicts, lousy reading [of the general will]. Yet even though
we are the character as well as the author of that character, the
locus of conflict and the possibility of resolution of conflict,
we must work out the paradigms and parameters in ourselves as we
discover ourselves in a community. Our community, however, finds
itself ringed by wider parameters and paradigms. I suggest the larger
rings of protection and defense are ones which rely less, recognize
less, the legendary mythology of assessing/protecting paradigms.
The individual is the most myth-leavened part of the ripple. Particular
communities at least have the beneficial capacity of subjecting
mythos to the scrutiny of a community of scholars, diverse viewpoints
to either elicit more insights or more narrowly focus the document
at hand. Therefore, each generation allows itself the possibility,
through its thinkers, to provide the dialogue through which the
community might decide to enact the mythos as community. Alternatively,
the community may choose, by that particular bracketing of the acumen
to make choices, to engage the mythos as eternally true, and therefore
eternally vexing in terms of seeking the larger inclusion.
The largest sphere is the circle of no myths, or better, momentary,
expedient myths. Yet insofar as the largest circle may be the arena
of the "big lie" as opposed to the grand propulsion, the
community carries the capacity of critique or capitulation not only
in the form of scholars and poets, philosophers, theologians, and
authors, but in each individual who has a voice. The individual
has the power and ability to direct the community one way or the
other, to politicize for inclusion or to abnegate the use of skill
and abilities. The individual alone, the very stadium of mythos,
possesses the possibility of acumen for survival and advancement.
But can the individual do what needs to be done alone? Typically,
no. The individual can, however, disciple himself and herself to
scrutinize the need and practice the greed for maximum acts of survival
and advancement. He and she can benefit from the beneficence shown
to others through both critical cogency and deeds done lovingly.
Action teaches others values, virtue, or both. He and she can guide
the community and the community can have an impact on nations.
We look forward to a time not when there will be fewer folktales
and myths but more. We enjoy the lessons they teach through the
challenges they offer, diverse forms of entertainment both stimulating
and possible. Folktales are slow, but long-lasting. We remember
Cinderella long after we have forgotten everything about the Mississippi
Valley Authority. If so, we will learn to recognize and enjoy the
prods which folklore and mythology offer as a means for us to pull
ourselves beyond the entertainment of fantasy and fancy to the entertainment
of bringing about a world which resembles the underpinning of mythos:
a legendary, and therefore possible, world of heroics, coherency,
inclusion, and winning the war against all forms of wickedness by
breaking the paradigms of limitation and bursting the motifs of
this world so that more and more people, men and women, Jew and
Gentile, black person and white person, no longer need the struggles
of brotherhood, nor the assumption of separate rules of daughterhood,
nor certainly the rule of male dominance. Each can better him or
her and their extended brothers and sisters through acts as acumen
for survival and advancement.
To truly learn what survival means in terms of the race we have
too frequently run separately - the human race - would mean to seek
the interstices of survival through an inclusive advancement. In
the end, it is either all of us or none of us. In the end, it is
at least ironic that folklore, which some are eager to dismiss as
primitive and unsubstantial, has long taught that the real clashes
of brutality, between brother and brother, can be lessened through
structured forms which might also amuse us. Such forms are simply
not so severe that they will cause us to go to war. When the severity
is removed from difference, and we might approach that which is
different as one more element in the grand story, then we might
also learn that in things which really matter for survival and advancement,
there are no privileged children. There are no older sons who are
older only because they have younger siblings, wiser because of
an implied stupidity of another, and so on. There are no privileged
children. No son is necessarily better than any daughter nor vice
versa. There are no privileged children. There are no black sheep
in the family, which is most inclusive, most concerned to survive
and advance together. There are no glistening white purities. These
images occur when the stratification of myths occurs. In the real
world of folklore, there are also black jewels and white sheering
heats of hell. In the real world of mythology, there are pockets
of reversal, surprise, the unexpected, which sunder glibness and
static ways of thinking. In the real world of story, everyone is
a child, and none obviously privileged except in the sense that
each is in search of a happy ending.
Nor is the happy ending another reason to close the book or refuse
the tale. In their struggle against wicked beasts that take the
form of humans, the happy ending of most folktales, legends, and
myths do not establish one superior child over the others. Even
the eldest brother has turned out to be nothing but a means of envisioning
the goal. Rather, the happy ending turns out to be the renewal of
relationships or the generation of new relationships. For in the
end, relationships new and renewed are the means of practicing the
acumen for survival which is the inclusivity of advancement.
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