Dear Reader. I’m tinkering with the publication schedule. Please let me know if Wednesdays make any difference to you. I’m worried that Substack is becoming over-saturated every Monday. Thoughts? Now on to the show.
“The are two wolves…”
I know you've heard it before. And if you've been on the internet at all, you've definitely seen memes about it too. There are variations, but the gist is simple:
Inside each of us are two wolves. One is aggressive and vicious, the other gentle and peaceful. The moral of the folk-wisdom is that the one you feed is the one that controls your life.
The folktale is usually cited as a Cherokee folktale, but actually isn’t. It apparently has its roots in Christian institutions, which rings true to me. It sound so much like a boiler-plate sermon illustration from a revival preacher.
The tale as told captures the evangelical desire for black and white morality that often gets deified as “Holiness.” I grew up Nazarene, so Holiness is a term I’m very familiar with. It is, as the song says, “our watchword and song.”
The wolf story also works well for contemporary progressive causes as well, which tend to filter the world through simplistic moral compasses as well. In the world where identity politics rules, you can spot your enemy by what movies they geek out about.
What I’m saying is, the story is ubiquitous. It’s one of those aphorisms that we've all heard so many times that we just take it to be true and don't think too much about it.
And to be sure, there is some wisdom there. Yes. If you dwell on negative thoughts, your life's decisions will reflect that. It's a good point.
Unfortunately, like most things we just accept as simple truth, it's also catastrophically inadequate as advice for living in the real world.
There are two ways in which the "Two Wolves" theory fails.
Two Wolves? Is That It?
First, you, me, and all God's children are far more complicated than the set up provided in the allegory. No human being is comprised simply of a nice wolf and a mean wolf. The reality is that each of us are entire ecosystems. In addition to many wolves comprising a spectrum of personality traits, we are all made up of countless predators, prey, landscape, and vegetation. The reductive Two Wolves story is comforting in its simplicity, but it's also dangerous because of it too. The reality is that if human behavior could be boiled down to good guy/bad guy decisions, life would work out as neatly as a CBS procedural far more often than it does.
So on one level, the Two Wolves model is too generic to be useful.
You Need the Big Bad Wolf
But let's just consider the two-wolf model for the sake of simplicity. Let's think of them as a kind of variation on the light side/dark side dialectic of The Force in Star Wars.
There is a kind of usable metaphorical logic built into the paradigm, after all. The capacity for both good and evil. Jekyll and Hyde and all.
Even then, the way the parable is employed is off. The overwhelming application of Two Wolves is to urge people to starve their mean wolf so that the cuddly one can thrive. Again, this is an essential misunderstanding of human beings (and wolves). You literally won't survive in the world without the aggressive, predator wolf. If a person is able to excise that nature from their being, they would be, at best, a baby for all time, surviving off the willingness of others to do their dirty work for them. Sure, perhaps that person can claim some sanctimonious moral high ground, but only by blindly ignoring the privilege of their virtue.
The reality is, the existence of human being is an inescapable tension between the two wolves. While we like to pretend we can live clean, we cannot. Each of us is bound to this fate.
Let me be clear that I am not suggesting living every day like it was Purge Night. Society only exists when the gentle wolf steps in to make sure the rest of the pack is cared for. But sometimes even that requires the aggression and cold-bloodedness of the alpha in us all.
The Problem With Balance
When I try to explain my thoughts on issues like this, people naturally jump to the conclusion that I'm talking about something like "balance." Like Anakin was supposed to bring balance to the Force or something.
I understand that conclusion, but I don't think that balance describes what I'm talking about, really.
Balance suggests that there is a correct position somewhere in the middle of two poles. Like a teeter-totter. That is not what I'm talking about. Life does not actually work like that, and thinking that it does is the essential mistake of those who proudly call themselves "Centrists." The thinking is that some compromised position in the middle between two extremes is the natural, obvious sweet spot. Again, this isn't how life works.
When I talk about "navigating tension," I mean that opposing forces are neither good nor bad, they simply are and one cannot exist in the world and escape that fact.
Rather than thinking of it as an act of balance, I prefer to think of what I'm describing as a guitar string. A guitar string only works BECAUSE of the tension between two poles, two opposing forces. One is not good and the other is not bad. In fact if you try to remove the tension, the guitar string serves no purpose anymore, except perhaps as a cruel murder weapon of some sort.
And the middle note is not always the one you want. Some notes will prove to be better choices than others, but that is for the musician to work out in their own way and time.
This is the problem with the Two Wolves metaphor. It isn't that it couldn't be used productively, it's that we choose to wield it childishly, because we can't handle the terrifying unknown of navigating tension. Which is, as I said, just living in reality, a place where domesticated wolves can't survive without leashes.
That's a very good metaphor. So many aspects of art criticism could be described as holding two opposites in tension. Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder, or is there something objective and certain about our concept of the beautiful? Should art exist merely on its own, as an aesthetic object to be contemplated, or should it derive its value from its ability to communicate? Should an artist develop their own consistent style or should they always be innovating and trying new things? On and on.
I like the metaphor of the guitar string over the balanced teeter-totter. It makes me think about constantly adjusting to get the right note instead of adding/removing weight and then testing. I think that tuning a guitar is more active and responsive. Trying to find balance is a lot of try and test.