Of Mice and Cells

After reading a few chapters of John Steinbeck’s 1939 masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath for an online book club, something in the provided supplementary resources irresistibly captured my attention: Steinbeck had an interest in biology!

Sparked by befriending Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist, in 1930, Steinbeck explored this discipline by applying biological knowledge to his observations of culture and human behaviour.

He eventually developed “phalanx theory”, which posits that people in groups can be seen as analogous to cells in a living being. On one hand, we have a cell performing its specific roles, in its specific contexts (e.g. a busy red blood cell carrying oxygen to your eyes so they can move across the page), but of course, we have the whole organism, which has a completely different role (e.g. to study for exams!), existing at a different scale.

This is similar to what we in the Biology business call “emergent properties”: the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts. The cells in our bodies are brilliant, of course, but it is working together that they create a full person, who does things that the cells by themselves couldn’t. Note also that our cells need to be living in our bodies to survive – you draw out blood and unless carefully maintained, your blood cells die.

Bringing this back to Steinbeck’s phalanx theory, imagining humans as cells and a phalanx as an organism has interesting philosophical implications. The potentially harmful effects of a phalanx, a large body that engulfs and dwarfs the individual, are explored by Steinbeck in literature when he writes about banks in The Grapes of Wrath: “If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank—or the Company—needs—wants—insists— must have—as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them.”

In the novel, the bank employees that make up the monstrous bank divert the blame of seizing land from farmers and their families by insisting the bank is larger than them, beyond them. In this case, the phalanx can be a way to shirk responsibility or morality. That the word phalanx has historically negative connotations is not strange to me. It originates from an Ancient Greek military formation where soldiers protected themselves by arranging their shields and spears together better than they could alone, but has been used in recent history in contexts of Fascism (e.g. the Falangistas (Phalangists) party during the Spanish Civil War and Francoist dictatorship).

The imagery of humans as cells and a group as a body can easily lend itself to scapegoating of some individuals as “diseased” and needing to be eliminated for the “health” of the overall group (which is obviously dangerous, bad and wrong). I don’t mean to suggest that a phalanx as a concept is inherently political – rather that, like any longstanding symbol, it is open to being interpreted or appropriated by anyone.

Alongside his observations of the phalanx as something that can enable cruelty, Steinbeck admits it as something essential, positive, and vital. Again, a cell (in multicellular organisms) lives in a community. As individuals, we live alongside others; we need others to thrive. Steinbeck also explores this in Of Mice and Men: “A guy needs somebody— to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. Don’t make no di erence who the guy is, long’s he’s with you. I tell ya, I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.”

Learning that Steinbeck was interested in Biology and reading up on phalanx theory pleased me because it seemed to validate my impression of Biology as a subject with strong philosophical ties. How wonderful it is that multicellularity (something that seems obvious and almost banal at this stage of my studies in Biology) could shape the way someone makes art! It also challenges an often adversarial framing of sciences versus humanities.

However, the juxtapositions within phalanx theory illustrate how comparisons between nature and human society need to be critically evaluated and discussed. A person is not a cell, of course, and the longlasting philosophical conflict between the needs of the individual and those of the collective must continue with more nuance than “the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts”.

Still, I find Steinbeck’s theory to be compelling imagery for the powerful pull that we have towards others and towards community – a pull that is vital and at times terrible