WHO CAN GO THERE?

The listservs to which I subscribe are often preoccupied with boundaries, frontiers, borders, and other this-side/that-side or inclusion/exclusion phenomena. I’m going to make a little typology.

First: WHO CAN GO THERE? Into which places are some people are excluded and others allowed to cross? What might the qualifications be?

Doctors (healing)
Soldiers (power)
Scholars (education)
Religious figures (mission)
Old people (experience)
Rich people (resources)
Writers (testifying)
Explorers (discovery)
Emergency responders (firemen, EMT’s, civil officers)
Inspectors (conformity to standards)

Second, can you have power, education, mission, experience and resources without anyone telling you whether you can enter or not? How do you do that?

By paying attention.
Service to others.
Trying it and accumulating experience.
Thinking hard.

What about writing? Oh, that’s something you DO. You don’t have to ask permission to simply write -- the same as painting, sculpture, dancing, singing or cooking. And yet some will try to control, to impose a barrier or boundary.

Third: Some defined edges are natural, like a river or a mountain range or the beach of a sea. But others are socially created, like a school or a nation or an economic class. The latter may use the former as an indicator, the way age combines with skill level to create a school class. Or a national boundary created by an island creates an economic boundary by controlling who can bring desirable materials to it -- either by exporting or importing. This always becomes a political border.

Which immediately creates a class of people who specialize in crossing that boundary: pirates or entrepreneurs with special permission. The best opportunities are when there is a steep gradient between the inside and the outside of the delineation, like the artifacts so common in the SW that are precious to people far away from them. Such a boundary can be abruptly changed by imposing laws, or if the laws were already there, by suddenly beginning to enforce them. A latent law is always an opportunity for someone aware of the boundary it can create, especially if there are people who don’t give the law any moral force, like rum runners during prohibition or the underground railroad when slavery was still practiced in the South of the US.

Writers deal with boundaries all the time: different languages, national allegiances, affiliation with social groups they write about, crossing gradients like those who pretend human behavior is one way by vividly describing human behavior that is another way or by revealing a world that had been unknown or denied. Maybe transgressing a moral line.

A writer might not understand that there is a boundary or, knowing it is there, know how to cross it. This has been true of Native Americans, who can feel the boundary, can feel that it keeps them out, and think it is because of racial prejudices when actually it is because of economic barriers: not knowing how to approach publishing. Not knowing how to get into the “in-group.”

A border can simply be adjacency, that is, one place next to another, with or without a gradient. One is a cliff, one is a talus slope or foothills. Each creates a different ecology, which is a sort of economics. The Blackfeet Reservation is a long slope from mountains to prairie. It turned out that outsiders highly valued the mountains, enough to pay for them and put a boundary around them, creating Glacier National Park. (Which many early native hunters disregarded.) The difference in ways of making a living (game and livestock in the higher country, agriculture on the prairie) also sorted the tribe into high-quantum (old-timey) and low-quantum (progressive) which keyed into economic advantage. (Skewed to small grain ag.) Which became emotional differences. I once remarked on a Saskatchewan panel that livestock people have it hard in winter because of having to feed their animals, but grain people can go to Florida for the winter. The son of a grain farmer (white) came up afterwards and said he would punch me out if I were a man, because I had implied that his father was lazy, less deserving.

In the Seventies I became aware of a circumscribed vocational category, the ministry. Such a group will look different from the inside than it does from the outside. It can be imposed on the unwilling, or it can be meant as a protection for those inside. “Professional” groups have their root in “professing,” in the sense of believing in some faith stance, faithfulness to the goal. They were meant to denote people who had “higher” motives than others, who had committed hard to a “calling” rather than a job. In the case of the religious ministry, most denominations (circumscribed social groups often originating in historical ethnic or educational conditions) defined this calling as subscribing to a specific set of beliefs: dogma. Unitarian Universalists did not -- at least not overtly.

On June 23- 27 in Minneapolis the denomination will stage its General Assembly. Much of the agenda will be about reducing gradients of “prejudice” like those against immigrants or people of color. The ministers of the denomination will meet a few days earlier and their focus will be increasing the skills of their sub-group, steepening the gradient against those in the denomination who resent any sort of privilege or elitism. The UUMA calls the strengthening of their in-group “professional development” and “increasing collegiality” as well as the establishment of “best practices.” The natural development is the sharing of news (gossip) about each other and shielding the group, which sometimes leads the lay people to think something taboo is going on.

From the very first creation of a “priest” class far back in eohistory, there has been a belief that the boundary around this category means special powers and status for those inside. Therefore, there are always iconoclasts who want to break open the group (transparency) and others who wish to be initiated, part of the group. There are some in the group who enjoy the idea of having supernatural powers.

Once at a big denominational “do” of some sort (an installation or minister’s conference) we were in a big church of complex design. (Some people think that cleanliness is next to godliness but UU’s think architecture is next to theology.) I blundered into the men’s bathroom. (My eyesight isn’t too good, and anyway I get preoccupied with ideas instead of practicalities.) Talk about a sanctum sanctorium. This place has become valorized by the media, which likes to portray public restrooms as places where secret things happen. Because they are gender-separated, there is seductive secrecy both ways.

But it was ordinary. The men were laughing and talking, kidding around the same way they did everywhere else. The socially imposed boundary had no particularly high gradient after all. They called out, “Wrong side, Scriver!” I realized my mistake and left, blushing. In fact, years later I left the ministry. I was on the wrong side of the boundary after all. Or maybe the boundary didn’t really matter very much.

There are other boundaries that are more important to me now. What difference does difference make? Which differences really matter? Where are the lines drawn?