Sans Fig Leaf - 10/5/00

Michelangelo's David, photo by Julie Rampke

"George Washington's Ax"

5 October, 2000

When I was a kid my grandfather once pointed to a weathered old ax hanging on the wall of the tool shed at my great-grandmother's farm and said, "That's the ax that George Washington cut down the cherry tree with."

I was skeptical. I had seen that twinkle in my grandfather's eye before, but he was insistent. Eventually he delivered the punchline: "Well, we have replaced the handle four or five times, and the head at least twice, but otherwise it's the very one."

I was reminded of that conversation this weekend when some neighbors were moving out. Over four and a half years ago Ray and I moved into the place I currently call home. It's a nice-sized two-bedroom unit in a very small apartment complex, two nearly identical buildings with three apartments in each one. Our unit is more like a small house than an apartment--we don't have any neighbors above us, only one small room of one neighbor's apartment is below our place, and the walls don't conduct sound very well through the one wall that adjoins the other neighbor.

When we first moved in there were four guys from the university living in one of the apartments in the other building, across the driveway. All four were friends and had known each other for a while. That summer one of the guys moved out and a new person moved in. The next year two more moved out and a couple more moved in. Then the apartment below them opened up and one of the guys got a buddy share it with him, so he moved downstairs and his former room mates recruited a replacement.

And so things went, with people moving out and in of the two apartments. Some of them I got to know, others were a little less ameniable to introducing themselves when I said "Howdy." A while ago one of the guys in the lower apartment moved his girlfriend in to share his bedroom, while his roommate stayed in the other bedroom until the end of the school year. About a month later all four people living in the upper apartment moved out at once. The two remaining got married to each other. She finished her doctorate a couple months after the wedding, and this weekend they packed up and moved out.

And I got a little sad thinking that I was the only person left in the entire complex who had been here back when we first moved in. I thought about it some more, and realized that, actually, that had been the case for a while. I hadn't quite realized that I was thinking of all those students sharing the two apartments as a single entity. But, like the ax in my grandpa's old joke, they had replaced all the components many times.

This isn't the first time I've thought of a group that way. Back in the late 1970s I hung out with a bunch of guys who were into war gaming and later roleplaying games. We did lots of other things together, but gaming was always a big part of our time together. Around 1990 the group experienced an series of interpersonal problems that felt eerily familiar. We had gone through something like this before. I wasn't feeling much patience with the folks in the group who wanted to discuss possible solutions, because we had gone through it before, more than once.

And while I was trying to explain why I thought we didn't need to change anything because we've gone through this already, I realized that we hadn't. We weren't the same set of people. There was only one person in the group besides myself who had gone through the previous occurence of the problem. And I was the only one who had been there the time before that.

I had fallen into the habit of thinking of this group of friends as a single, continuous entity, with a sort of institutional memory that stretched back to when I first met them. Which wasn't the case.

I know I'm not the only one who does this sort of thing. Just listen to people talking about "our community" in various public forums. It's probably a habit from early on in our species, when the primary groupings were small nomadic bands of related people. Everyone knew everything about everyone else, because they spent all of their time working and living with each other. In a setting such as that, a communal history or instutional memory forms the basic fabric of all your possible relationships.

Our modern society has changed all that. And not just in the last couple of decades, either. For millenia we've been moving away from that way of living. But some modes of thinking are hard wired into our brains, and biological evolution moves much more slowly than social evolution does. We are probably predisposed to thinking of any people who interact with us regularly as sharing a significant portion of our memories and values.

Which may explain why some people get so upset when they realize someone doesn't share their viewpoint or value all of the same things they do. It's not just that it is a threat to them. They literally may be incapable of understanding how the difference can exist.

I'm not sure what the lesson is in all of this. But I'm going to keep thinking about it. Maybe there's something new to be learned for George Washington's Ax.

For those not familiar with the story of George Washington and the cherry tree: An american folk tale holds that, when GeorgeWashington, the first president of the United States, was a young boy he was given a small ax as a present. Eager to test his new toy out, George damaged a cherry tree. Longer versions of the story have it that he tried a few experimental swings at the trunk of an old tree in a corner of the plantation where his parents seldom went. He got a little carried away and before he quite realized what he'd done, the bulk of the tree fell down. Young George did what most children do when in a similar situation, he put his ax away and said nothing about it, hoping that somehow no one would notice what had happened to the tree. After finding the fallen tree, his father called him out and asked if he had cut down the tree. Young George said, "I can not tell a lie. I did it."

This tale is usually told to school children as some sort of lesson in honesty. I supposed, depending on how young one assumes the boy was, that it might take an extraordinary sense of honesty for a kid to admit what he had done in the situation. I've always been a little confused by it, however, as it seemed to me, for as long as I can remember ever hearing this story, that the truly honest thing to do would have been to go immediately to an adult and confess voluntarily. But the story is a couple centuries old now, so who am I to argue with tradition?