The Trouble with Survival

   I am reading a book by Robert Tremmel called Zen and the Practice of Teaching English. While I don't often take to the trendy fad of "Zen and..[fill in the blank]" books, I quite enjoy Tremmel's reflections about how he incorporated Zen and Basho's teachings in particular into his early years as an English teacher. Tremmel describes the importance of reflecting on impermanence, factoring in the mysterious unknowns of teaching life, deep breathing, and honoring the whole life of a teacher--all of which are important points in the holistic education movement. But I also came across a quote that felt particularly relevant to me in work life. Tremmel writes:

"Survival, which most of us do not need to think about most of the time, is the most primitive drive. For all plants and animals it precedes all other concerns; it is the prime directive. Without survival nothing follows. This is as true in the world of the school as it is in the red-in-tooth-and-claw natural world. So it has always seemed ironic to me that the topic of survival does not come up often in textbooks, methods classes, and on-the-record conversations among teachers." (p.41)

Tremmel goes on to describe useful qualities that teachers in training should have in order to 'survive' as teachers, such as the following: ability to think on one's feet (p.47), mindfulness, willingness to take action (p.49), and self-knowledge. His conclusion is that everyone must have the skillful means to succeed in one's profession, which often means anticipating the dangers or trials that others place before teachers: students who deliberately challenge teachers' authority, self-doubt, lack of assertiveness, failure to create opportunities to relate, etc. And Tremmel uses Zen concepts to relate his understanding of survival, citing the example of a zebra fish that narrowly avoids being eaten by leeches by moving unpredictably. Tremmel imputes this tactic to the spontaneity and flexibility afforded by Zen practices.

I find the account that Tremmel makes about survival to be both perhaps true to life and somehow limiting at the same time. One good thing is that Tremmel offers an unsentimental account of what it means to be in a profession of any kind, not just teaching. All professions have both opportunities and threats, for example, and people do need to use wisdom and judgment to stay viable in a social role. In a sense, an advanced degree in teaching, accounting, engineering, etc. is not a guarantee that one's social self will be kept intact in any one of these professions. Under this view, maintaining professional credibility often involves dodging competition coupled with a continual urge toward self-improvement in one's chosen field.


The trouble that I see with survivalism is that it does not quite take into account the interconnections that already exist between beings. Instead, the ethos of survivalism is typically something like 'only the strong will survive'. A modern variation of this principle might be something like, "only the strongest group will survive", so a survivalist will see their body as the basic unit that they must preserve at all costs. There are a few problems that I see with this account of things. The first is the underlying assumption that people survive  only in isolation from other beings (see above zebra fish example). The second assumption is that survival is inherently valuable or precious.

The first problem or issue can be easily refuted, I think, because people rarely live in total isolation. People can usually only survive when they are sharing resources with others: other people, other countries, etc. It makes more sense for me to think that my survival depends on the survival of a whole group or society, instead of taking 'my' survival (the survival of this body) to be of utmost importance.

For the second problem, I think one need only consider; if someone stops being an English teacher due to layoffs, firings etc., what happens to that person? Do they die? Or is it perhaps the case that every moment is a kind of dying, continually in process of being reborn in a new moment? To put it more plainly, English teachers don't lose their existence if, for whatever reason, they don't 'make it' as teachers. Rather than focusing on the skills necessary to maintain one's status as a teacher, it might be equally valuable to have teachers reflect on why they need to "survive" in this profession. Is the need to 'survive as a teacher' so great that one will risk the status of someone else, much less one's own status?

While I agree that the Zen notion of skillful means is relevant in Tremmel's discussion, I question whether survival is always worth it. Sometimes, not surviving in a profession is valuable because it opens the door to other identities, both professional and non-professional. But more importantly, losing a social role can be a training for the bigger  losses, such as loved one's or one's own physical body. Such losses and failures, rather than leading to an automatic course of 'improvement and revisiting' the same situation until one 'gets it right', might instead be invitations to question whether success at any cost is worth the potential harm that a success dream can inflict on both self and others. This is especially so when we attach to one social role as a marker of our existence.

Tremmel, Robert (1999) Zen and the Practice of Teaching English. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook