Biography: Matthew Hallinan
Life as a learning Process
I decided to write a more extended biography because I wanted to present a picture of the learning process that led me to the viewpoint I present on this website. That learning process has been partly intellectual, that is, the result of academic research, but mainly it has been experiential—a product of places I have been, things I have done, and illusions that have been shattered. A biographical sketch, I believe, enables me to bring out the deeper, lived dimension of the growth process.
How I Got to where I am
I was born in San Francisco into a prominent left-wing family. On one level, my family was a textbook example of the “American Dream.” My paternal grandfather was a rebel who fled Ireland with a price on his head, immigrated to San Francisco, and raised his seven children in poverty. My father, a brilliant man, studying after work and leap-frogging over law school, passed the Bar Exam when he was only 19 years old. During the Great Depression, my parents purchased foreclosed apartment buildings in downtown San Francisco, and when WWII came to an end, they were quite wealthy.
My parents, however, were socialists, and my father provided legal defense for the victims of McCarthyism. He became increasingly involved with the small and battered American left, and ran for president in 1952 on the Progressive Party ticket. As the target of the government’s ire, he spent a year and a half in a federal penitentiary on trumped up tax charges. He was a fighter. He built a gym with a boxing ring so my five brothers and I could acquire the skills to defend our unpopular views. We were tough, radical, rich kids. That unlikely combination of characteristics set the pattern for my life. Contradiction would be my lot.
I entered the University of California in 1958, intent on becoming a college professor. I was a serious student; summa cum laude, Phi Betta Kappa in my junior year, and winner of the outstanding undergraduate citation in Anthropology. But in April 1961, my life took on a new direction. That’s when the CIA’s failed invasion of Cuba took place. I decided at that point to commit to the fight against the USA’s efforts to hold back the changes that were sweeping the world. During the 1960s, UC was a hot-bed of radicalism, and it was easy to find a revolutionary group to join. I picked the Communist Party. My last two years at Cal were a swirl of activism—sit-in arrests, 30 days in the SF County jail, community organizing, etc.– a real political education.
However, I still intended to pursue an academic career. After graduating from UC, I received a National Science Foundation scholarship to attend graduate school in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. This is when I began to seriously think about my political experiences in terms of social theory. Increasingly, I was led towards the problem of human nature: what drives humans to make the choices they do? How rational are we? However, I didn’t stay the course at Penn. The nightmare of the war in Vietnam made it impossible to focus on my academic work. In 1967, I dropped out of Penn and moved to New York to become the National Educational Director of the Communist Party.
I had a number of valuable experiences as a leader of the CP. I travelled widely and attended major conferences in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Chile—I even attended the meeting in Belfast where the Communist Parties of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic agreed to unify. However, me and the Communist Party were a bad fit. It wasn’t long before I realized that the CPUSA was hopelessly stuck in the culture of the 1930s, and that it functioned as a kind of cult. Marxism was treated as a sacred doctrine and the General Secretary of the Party was seen as a sort of infallible, Pope-like figure. This was not just the situation in the CPUSA, but the general condition of the Communist movement. While I met many wonderful, devoted, idealistic communists (South African, Israeli, Irish, Iraqi, West Indian and others), it was clear to me that something was fundamentally wrong with the model. I would not like to live in a country run by one of these organizations.
While I still believed in socialism (I believed the communist countries would outgrow their communist stage), I was finished with the CPUSA. I left New York and returned to Berkeley to finish my PhD at UC. I decided to revisit the topic I had been working on at Penn. I Wrote my thesis on the subject of evolution and human nature. That is when I developed many of the core ideas I present in my book “Beyond Biology.”
Those were hard times for me. While working on my doctorate I had a bad accident, was bed ridden for two years, got divorced and became the main care-taker of my daughter. By the time I finished my thesis, I was 40 years old and considered too old to be beginning an academic career. On top of that, in the 1980s, every Anthropology department was reducing its faculty load, and there were no academic positions open in the Bay Area. I decided to make a career change. I had to get a regular job.
I soon discovered that aside from anthropology, I didn’t have any skills I could sell. Renegade communists were not in great demand. I was still too radical to take over my family’s business and become a landlord. Instead, I went to work in the buildings as a painter/handyman. That was an important learning experience. I discovered how working people—particularly white men—are looked at by college educated professionals. They are seen as “losers”–not someone you would want to talk to in a bar. It was no mystery to me why these folks were attracted to Trump’s demagogy about “the forgotten man.”
After 4 years as a handyman (not a very good one), I decided to stop being an idiot. As a result of working in the family buildings, I had firsthand knowledge of their sorry state. Negligent property managers and lack of adequate investment since my mother’s retirement, threatened to turn us into slum lords. I decided to put my revolutionary dreams on hold and take over the business. Becoming a landlord, however, was a bitter pill to swallow. I had been a tenant organizer during my communist days in New York. As a struggling revolutionary living on $90 a week, I had somehow been able to block out how my parents made a living. Now I had to own it.
Running a business was a revelation. I learned about both the costs and rewards of ownership—the 80-hour weeks, the relentless responsibilities, the animating vision, the pride in good results, and the security and comforts that comes with owning revenue-producing assets. I also learned that you don’t have to be hard and greedy to be successful. Your business will run better if your workers and tenants feel they are being treated fairly. To get to that place, however, you have set limits on how much profit you are going to take out of your business—and that will cause problems with your partners and other stakeholders. No escaping the contradictions.
And then–another turning point. In 1989, I decided to travel to the USSR to witness the first free elections in a communist country. Mikhail Gorbachev was intent of creating a socialist democracy. I was thrilled. Socialism was finally being liberated from the stifling grip of the Communist Party. The trip, however, was heartbreaking. The Soviet people didn’t want to reform socialism; they wanted out. After a few days, I realized that I was the only person defending socialism, so I decided to shut up and listen to what they had to say. It became clear to me that there was something wrong with the concept of collective ownership. As one Russian said to me, “when everyone owns it, no one owns it.” They just couldn’t make it work.
When I returned home I sank into a depression. Was capitalism the best that humanity could hope for? I had come to understand that it had certain strengths, but I just couldn’t accept the idea that a society with huge inequalities of wealth and a general indifference to human suffering was the best we could do.
And then another shock: the world awakened to global warming—to the fact that our out-of-control growth process was poisoning our planet. While I had just become disillusioned with the socialist model of collectivism, I found it equally hard to imagine how a competitive, market-driven society would be able to provide the kind of cooperative framework we would need to deal with this new challenge. I had always possessed some kind of idealistic, reassuring worldview, but this new crisis truly shook my sense of well-being. Either the future was incalculably bleak—or there was something missing in my understanding of how the world works. Being by nature an optimistic person, I decided to place my bet on the latter.
At that point, I made up my mind to re-think my tarnished, yet still somewhat operational Marxist world view. I decided to return once again to the topic of my PhD dissertation—evolution and human nature. I needed to go back to the beginning. What are we?
How did something so different emerge out of the animal world? Here we are, at a critical point where we have to work out a new relationship with the natural world, and yet, we don’t really understand how we fit into that world. How can we be both an inseparable part of the natural order and so very different from every other living thing at the same time?
My tradition on the left was always looking for technical and organizational fixes to humanity’s problem. And those are clearly necessary components of any practical solutions. But it has become clear to me that we also need to change the way we think—not just about the world, but about ourselves. Know thyself, the old philosophers counseled. That’s our problem. We are a new and different kind of life-form. Our behavior is too complex to be guided by impulse and instinct; we operate on the basis of belief systems. The problem we face today is that we haven’t yet constructed a belief system that can get us through this current crisis.
That, I have decided, will occupy the final phase of this long journey.