Ants and Us

When I was in Africa, I frequently encountered ant hills in excess of 6 feet (1.83 meters) tall. According to Google, ant hills can run as much as 7 feet (2.13 meters) tall. The average Matabele ant (the kind native to Southern Africa is 0.8 inches (20 mm) long.

So a 7 foot ant hill is more than 100 times the height of the average ant that participates in building it.

Unlike humans who build structures intentionally, with a predetermined vision of what they will look like, ants have neither intentionality nor vision. They just build, tunnel, forage, and work, and a side effect of their activity is this structure that ultimately is 100 times the size of the individuals “building” it.

The poet Robert Frost described ants as “departmental” in the poem of that name. He pictured a world where no one ant interrupts what it is about, even for the discovery of a dead member of the hive, but “word goes out in Formic, Death’s come to Jerry McCormic,” and another member of the hive takes over.

“And presently on the scene

Appears a solemn mortician;

And taking formal position,

With feelers calmly atwiddle,

Seizes the dead by the middle,

And heaving him high in air,

Carries him out of there.

No one stands round to stare.

It is nobody else’s affair

It couldn’t be called ungentle

But how thoroughly departmental.”

So much for Jerry’s death, but what was his life like? What is it like to go about one’s daily business (in Jerry’s case, according to Frost he worked in the commissary) with no view to or knowledge of the greater outcomes of one’s labors? To eventually die, having contributed to the building of an edifice a hundred times taller than oneself, and have not a clue that you did that.

I have a degree in what was called Physiological Psychology (now included as a part of Neuroscience), having tried in my dissertation to find the means by which memories are stored in the brain. I went on to a postdoctoral appointment with Dr. Arthur Kling, at the Neuropsychiatric Institute, University of Chicago Medical School, and participated in Kling’s pioneering research on the Amygdala.

Somewhere in the course of my first teaching job at C.W. Post College, Long Island University, I began to question what I was doing. My feeling was that my continuing work on the Limbic System of the brain might contribute one atom to one molecule of one brick in a very tall building that I would not see completed in my lifetime. In short, I was like Jerry, except for my awareness of the possibility I might be building something.

So I began a pivot — taking a job as a Rehabilitation Psychologist in a New York State Psychiatric Hospital, I retrained as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, working first with patients in that hospital, then as Chief Psychologist in a children’s psychiatric hospital, and finally in private practice of individual, group, and family therapy. This proved much more satisfying that brain experiments on various species, but still something was lacking.

By this time, many of the patients and families I was treating were engineers and other professionals who worked at a nearby corporate facility. Industry’s propensity to relocate people in those years led to family and relationship stress that sent a fairly steady stream of them to my office. In the course of my work with them a number of my patients asked if I could use the same approach to “treat” dysfunctional teams at their work, and this led me to the realization that, while people were spending half or more of their waking hours at work, a significant number of those people did not find it a source of fulfillment or enrichment, and basically were putting in their time so that they could go home at the end of the day and retire at the end of their working years. Yet when I spoke to patients who were retired, they didn’t seem any happier or more fulfilled than they had been while they were working.

So I ended up where I have been for the past 40+ years, working to make organizations, and specifically organizational leadership more participative, appreciative, and empowering for the people who work in corporations, and more recently to counter bias and discrimination against women, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, LGBTQIA+ people, older people, disabled people, etc. by awakening those in power (white, heteronormative, men) to the possibility, benefits, and rightness of being allies to and advocates for the historically disempowered.

In every stage of my career I have been one of many working to build an edifice many times my size, the completion of which I am not likely to see in my lifetime. Essential to this work has been breaking down what Frost called “departmental” — the strong human tendency to focus on the task at hand while ignoring the “why.” When I ignore the larger reasons for doing what I do, life becomes dull, monotonous, and loses any sense of meaning. A frequently quoted Jewish text (Pirkei Avot) says “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it (2:21),” and while on the one hand this might seem like a setup for frustration, I believe it is meant to direct my attention not to the task at hand, but to the reason I am doing it — the “work” that I am not obligated to complete, but that will be completed nonetheless.