My little loop of identity starts with the sensory body and ends with the cosmos. I used to quote Tillich and Eliade even more then I do now. Xians love to use the cross as a talisman and develop a lot of ideas around it, like Tillich’s idea of the actual “real” world being the horizonal element, and the transcendent upright vertical part being the access to a higher reality. Eliade and Joe Campbell pointed out the ladder that goes into the Hopi Kiva (down) and, as well, Jacob’s ladder with angels on the rungs (up). Very geometric. Very virtual.
Someone said to my friend, “Climb down off your Cross!” But the human skeleton, when arms are extended, IS a cross. None of us can climb down off it. Some skeletons are subject to an internal crucifixion.
One of those philosophical fellows, or maybe me myself, developed a notion about a circle or sphere with oneself at the middle (the axis mundi) and the farthest reaches of what the mind could grasp out there in the star nurseries, the nearest and the farthest, were where the most sacred was. In between was a kind of commons, though complexified with human and geographic differences and responses.
The key to this whole area, what we know in our lives, is ecology. It’s not survival of the fittest, it’s the survival of those who find a little niche where they fit. Enough food, enough protection, enough ease for procreation are basic. But the mind builds castles.
It’s almost impossible to realize that we’ve only been in historical memory for ten thousand years. Over and over we read the analogies about how a string miles long is the world-time and we’re just a little snippet at the end. Much as we rummage around in our genomes and polish up the lenses on our biggest telescopes, there seems to be no end. But time is various and dynamic enough that every few centuries -- lately much more often -- we have to regroup.
Lobster dance.
Alice in Wonderland: “Clean cups! Everyone move down!” “Change lobsters and dance!” Even in Valier we get whiplash: a peaceful wheat-based village; oops, no water for irrigation. A respectable white town: oops, the Indians are moving off the rez and down the street. On the lip of a giant oil boom just like the Bakken, everyone started planning where to put the man-camp. Then the worldwide network of oil sales goes into the tank, and you’d best put your money in beer sales.
The trouble with Xianity is that is that their crossword puzzle was composed two thousand years ago. It just flat doesn’t fit anymore. When the Pope points that out, the people on the tightrope of denial look down and freak out. When the little backwater tribal villages of the big continents realize that they’ve been stumbling around in a fun house that has fuzzed out or blown away or collapsed on their heads, they get really really mad and go out with their scimitars to smite somebody -- anybody.
Nations on continents and denominations (within Xianity) were invented to keep order -- not very long ago. They’re grievously outdated now, unable to find new terms and processes even as the old ones collapse.
In particular we need to draw up a new moral order. Most of it will have to do with money. Some are proposing a guaranteed annual income for every household. Some are proposing a cap on how much money a person can make. Many urge a change in lifestyle. We thought a big house was good, we thought every child would want a room of his/her own with his/her own computer and TV set. That way an adult could slip into the room at night with a little privacy/secrecy and no one would be there to interfere. The baby, that noisy/stinky creature could be isolated with only a monitor feed down in the rec room where the wide-screen, flat-screen, rainbow-ray (wider, wider!) movies are streaming. (OMIGOD! LOOK at that!)
The kids responded. They put their computers in their pockets, walked out the door, and found a pack to join. “You like sex and violence? We’ll show you sex and violence.” They say, “Everyone is doing . . . “ fill in the blank. They listen to peers, not parents. They are “norming”. Social norming is almost always imaginary.
Over and over in the thoughtful media reporters say, “Everyone,” when they mean “everyone like me,” meaning everyone who lives in an expensive apartment in a megacity with a risky job dependent on a rarefied education which mostly amounts to a piece of paper. They assume everyone has a cell phone, that cell phones can always be reached, that if someone “likes” your post they can be added to a list of hundreds of true friends.
A major domain that needs redrawing is, of course, sex. The first thing we need to address is the idea that the big and strong have a “right” to fuck the small and weak -- in prison, in families, in the army. The problem is that this impulse may be embedded in our wiring: violence right next to coitus. What social channeling or capping can control that?
Jefferson was in debt most of his life. He had a number of children by a slave he owned,
who was his wife's half-sister. His wife's father owned the mother of this slave.
Smart and dedicated people have been reflecting on all this for a long time, but it seems nothing sticks -- there’s no handle, no point of entry. The following quotes are from a paper by Cass Sunstein, a formidably intelligent person -- whose whole context is either Hyde Park or Washington, DC. Close to Obama. That’s a handicap, a blindness. Nevertheless, he thinks good things.
Cass NEEDS a guide dog in his office.
“Social states are often more fragile than might be supposed, because they depend on social norms to which—and this is the key point—people may not have much allegiance. What I will call norm entrepreneurs—people interested in changing social norms—can ex- ploit this fact; if successful, they produce what I will call norm bandwagons and norm cascades. . .
“Norm bandwagons occur when the lowered cost of expressing new norms encourages an ever-increasing number of people to reject previously popular norms, to a “tipping point” where it is adherence to the old norms that produces social disapproval. Norm cascades occur when societies are presented with rapid shifts toward new norms. Something of this kind happened with the attack on apartheid in South Africa, the fall of Communism, the election of Ronald Reagan, the rise of the feminist movement, and the current assault on affirmative action.”
“Collective action—in the form of information campaigns, persuasion, economic incentives, or legal coercion—might be necessary to enable people to change norms that they do not like. . .
“Some norms are obstacles to human autonomy and well-being. It is appropriate for law to alter norms if they diminish autonomy by, for example, discouraging people from becoming educated or exposed to diverse conceptions of the good. It is appropriate for law to alter norms if they diminish well-being by, for example, encouraging people to risk their lives by driving very fast, using firearms, or taking dangerous drugs.
“Thus government might try to inculcate or to remove shame, fear of which can be a powerful deterrent to behavior.”
Did you get that? Not that shame is a problem, but the fear of shame.
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