Purpose-selfless service: Women
Mayhem, misfortunes, disasters and catastrophes, whether man-made or natural, do happen. Not predictably, but often. The destruction they cause verges on the total. The carnage that results is utterly draining - not only of physical energy but, what is worse, of hope. The randomness of death, the senselessness of who was to die and who was to live, of who was to be crippled and who was to be spared leaves the survivors numb, staggering aimlessly or sitting listlessly. For, in a very real sense, there is no point to go on.
If the disaster is local - a car crash, a tornado or a train disaster - outside help first trickles and then floods in. In order to take over the very basic functions of a group of people: first aid, triage, warmth, shelter, food, conversation. Little by little, life returns and the lives of the affected are reconnected to the lives of those around them. It is as if a severed limb is painstakingly and sensitively reattached to the body.
But if the disaster is more than local, if the 'outside helpers' and their 'support systems' themselves are destroyed, then what? What if, as St. Exupéry once wrote, the very fabric of a group, a community or society is not only frayed but cut, snapped, gone? How do societies, in other words, who are really finished find within themselves the strength and the motivation to rebuild? How does the individual - hurt, grieving, hungry and confused - manage to devote a share of themselves, to serve in other words, to recreating that what we recognize as the social fabric?
K, as so often, has no clue. But he is struck by the fact that more often than not it is the woman who do. A book he read a long time ago comes to mind The Hour of the Women. In it the author describes in great detail and with great empathy how it was the women who rebuilt, quite literally, Germany and German society after the Second World War. Admittedly and in honor of the men - if in fact they deserve this honor, something K as an interested and affected party is unable to judge - there were numerically fewer men than women. But even those who were there did not, as a rule, splatter glory over themselves, as a German saying, quite literally translated, has it.
K is - amongst many other things he is not - neither an expert in psychology nor sociology, but he is curious, he does like to make sense and he likes to learn. So he puts on his overcoat, calls the dog and goes for a walk to ponder the implications.
To serve, the dictionary told him just before he left, is to work as a servant, to render obedience to an authority. But that presupposes that there is an authority you can obey. K wonders about the time before authority emerges - and so the dictionary is of no help.
It seems, and K is fully aware that he is getting out on thin ice now, that men need a goal, a plan or a reason before they act. And since total destruction robs them of the reason, any possible action a single and weak person can take is so visibly, emotionally and obviously pointless that they do not even start. Their intellect has reasoned them neatly into complete paralysis.
Women, it seems, have faith. K is pretty sure they also see and smell and feel the obvious pointlessness, but they seem to have faith that maybe, just maybe, what they as single and weak people do may, in the end, amount to something. Apparently, they need no proof beforehand. That this is not really a hard-wired distinction between women and men was made clear to K through interview he heard with A. At the time, in 1989, A who had been chancellor of West Germany during the early 1970s was close to the end of his life. He attended one of the first conferences on sustainable development in Bergen, Norway. The interviewer asked him: "Mr. A, you are a professional politician and you have seen much in your life. Especially, I suppose, you have seen what humans can and what they cannot do. Against that background of life experience, do you really believe all this talk at this conference about how we, humankind, can do anything about sustainability or development, let alone 'sustainable development' ?"
And A, with a candidness rarely seen in politicians responded: "Of course you are correct to be cynical. Mankind, we ourselves in other words, have provided ample reason for the tone in your question. And you know, to be truthful, I have no idea whatsoever whether my, or anybody else's action, makes a damn bit of difference. But you know what, I do not really care. I still behave as if my actions mattered."
That is all anyone, anywhere at any time can hope for, K thought to himself. Then why is it that women seem to live by this truth more often and more readily then men?
K played a little with the dog - or was it the other was around? - before he dared to go in his thoughts to where the ice was even thinner. Perhaps, he wondered - but not aloud for he did not want to disturb the ice with the sound of his words - perhaps it has to do with women giving birth? If ever there was an act of where you had no idea what came of it, it must be pregnancy and giving birth. Of course, you did what you could to provide the best possible chance for the emerging life, but essentially the outcome was undetermined.
Having been a father, K knew peripherally about this - but never having had to live through the experience of pain and danger that childbirth presents, he could only guess that that experience gave women a real taste of the profound meaningfulness of doing something that from a logical, statistical and scientific viewpoint was a pretty shaky proposition. It reminded him about an argument he once had with B: They had quarreled about the likely success of a business she wanted his help for. It had not looked to him, to put it mildly, overwhelmingly positive until B ended the argument by saying: "You know that I really couldn't care less about your statistics of how many businesses fail. My entire life has been about beating the odds, something you obviously do not understand!"
K and the dog kept going, and - since the figurative ice had been holding up so far - went a little further. The world of abundance seems a strange place: extraordinary connectedness and transparency leading to the erosion, perhaps abolition, of authority. A dizzying experience where at times, it seems, even gravity fails. It is as if the order, the authority established by thousands of years of scarcity is being swept away - not by a new authority that we can be a servant of, but by nothing. Men, K surmised, will spend a long time sitting listlessly, passively and helplessly wondering what on earth the point of this new world might possibly be - especially since the old, scarce, one wasn't all that bad, was it? And it provided privileges that cannot be called anything but 'well deserved' for those who inherited them. At the same time, women will get up and build this new world - one figurative brick at a time - and breathe life into it. When they are done, or mostly done, perhaps men will have figured out the point of it all, get off their butts and join the living again.