Peripheral Visions

intoxication, abandoning the protections of good manners, like the solitary drinker for whom alcohol is no longer social. In the same way, when beer is forbidden on college campuses, students are likely to keep bottles of hard liquor in their rooms. Alcohol has different meanings in different settings; surrounded by formality or ritual, tied to connoisseurship or mysticism, it is less toxic to body and to community. Historically, in most parts of the world, observant Jews, who use wine weekly for the ritual of the Sabbath meal, have had few alcohol-related problems.
    Western civilization tends to cut items of behavior out of their matrix and to find ways of concentrating and intensifying substances: wine with food is replaced by the cheap distillation of gin, the chewing of coca leaves is replaced by the use of cocaine and then crack, opium by morphine and then by mainlined heroin. Native Americans traditionally used tobacco with respect, as a divine gift. Disapproval makes some habits more dangerous as they are forced into secrecy and pursued without social controls. Prohibition isolates users and makes illegality tempting and habitual, creating whole classes of bootleggers. Breaking rules is bad for the health of the breaker.
    Courtesy, propriety, standards of order are mechanisms of survival. Theodora Kroeber has described how a tiny remnant of Yahi Indians of the Mt. Shasta area in California, nearly wiped out by Euro-American invaders, went into hiding in the forest and survived, unknown to the whites around them, for years, until the last survivor staggered out, sick and starving, into the unknown white world, where he was sheltered and adopted by anthropologists. Since it was not customary in his tribe for any to pronounce their own names, he is known to us only as Ishi, “man”—or, if you will, Adam, not the first but the “last man left awake.” But clinging to survival on familiar ground even as their numbers became fewer and fewer, Ishi’s people preserved their standards of decency, although many customs had to be adapted to life in hiding. There was a young woman near Ishi’s age whom we believe to have been some kind of second cousin, but because, in his traditional kinship system, even when the community was reduced to half a dozen members, a cousin of that kind was classified as a “sister” and barred by the incest taboo, Ishi never married. There was no one else. The Yahi understood survival to mean survival not as biological organisms but as the carriers of certain patterns of order and meaning, intrinsic to themselves. This is a far cry from the legend of Lot’s daughters, after the end of humanity as far as they knew it in the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, seducing their father in order to preserve the future.
    We have come to lack faith in the resilience and creativity of human order so we lack too the willingness to recognize it where forms differ. Because we do not regard the rudiments of culture as intrinsic to humanness, we keep comatose bodies ticking in hospitals and nursing homes and many argue that the fetus is fully human from conception, before learning and before participation. We tend to believe that the incest taboo has to do with preventing genetic flaws, whereas in fact it is one way human beings everywhere have tried to conserve the trust necessary for social life. With a similar myopic reductionism, I have sometimes heard Iranians argue that the prostrations of Islamic prayer exist to provide rudimentary calisthenics. They may indeed be helpful in keeping joints limber, but the limberness of the spirit is more important. No reductionist interpretation of Jewish dietary laws as a substitute for refrigeration should be allowed to obscure the fact that they order life and preserve community.
    It is perhaps because we have not learned to recognize and respect existing order in unfamiliar forms that we are frightened of social change, unwilling to support and work with the forms that peoples find for themselves. What stands between members of our species and social chaos is not reading the Bible or the works in the Western canon but the habit of patterned relationship, a habit that shows up first in the mutual adjustments of mother and infant adapting to each other’s rhythms. Imperfect and incomplete for many, this mutuality is still sufficiently pervasive to provide most human beings who survive to adulthood with an experience of how separate organisms can