GAMBLING HAS A RELIGIOUS LESSON

Blackfeet casino in Browning, MT

Sometimes the websites I follow begin to overlap and braid together.  Thus, a thread on Aeon about “religious” ceremonies is meeting inquiries by Mistyne Hall who is working on Blackfeet history through the prism of casinos.  I have contended for some time that the “stick game” or “bone game” that gives its name to a novel by Louis Owens, is at its heart a religious ceremony.  It is the experienced knowledge of what life is like, a survival-issue metaphor-structure that helps steady the believer.  More than 70,000 years ago, someone left a set of stick game tokens in a cave on the coast of the Indian Ocean in Africa.  I reckon we would call their use “stone game.”

One set of theories about brain neurology proposes that language as spoken concepts which became words and then whole systems like art (representation in drawings), ethics, and the things we now call “religion” that first developed in small groups engaged in some kind of activity that required the attention of the people present and their reactions to what happened.  Think craps.

The "craps" scene from "Guys and Dolls"

Whenever the clergy jokes in sermons about football  (cheerleaders as vestal virgins — not so virginal these days — the lines as the furrows of fields, the ball as the remnant of animal sacrifices) certain people take it very seriously.  In fact, the one time I did it, I discovered that they were angry with me for making fun of their religion which WAS football.

European ethical systems, esp. the stricter versions of Protestantism, are opposed to gambling as unethical or even evil.  Since I have a relative who financially stripped his family with compulsive gambling linked to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I certainly see the wisdom of not gambling and understand why it has a shadow hanging over it.  But he did not undertake trips to Vegas or even nearby tribal casinos.  It was scratch-offs and lottery tickets bought at grocery stores.

The Cathedral of Money

I have another relative who is hooked on casinos, but she doesn’t gamble.  She’s after the glamour of the place, a kind of temple of chance, everyone dressed up and feeling anything could happen, like Sunday morning.  She spends her time walking the plush carpets, rarely even going to the shows, and sometimes indulging in the subsidized food.  She would not go to a Native American casino.  If she went to the one in Browning, most people would know her and vice versa, but she likes circulating anonymously in a place she thinks of as “upscale” and white, privileged.

I used to employ a factoid I got somewhere, suggested that one’s chances of being caught after committing a murder were fifty-fifty (probably better now) and one’s chances of succeeding in a small business is one-in-ten (probably the odds are worse now).  The odds for Publisher’s Clearing House are probably far worse, but I always send in my entry.  Yet I reject grocery store Monopoly cards as immoral, partly to tease the clerk. 

Jared Diamond in New Guinea

Jared Diamond is one of my favorite thinkers and I’m currently reading a passage in “The World Until Yesterday.”  He is explaining the wisdom of New Guinea farmers and other peasants who farm small scattered patches, sometimes a day’s walk from one to another.  Western-educated advisors thought this was very stupid and that they should consolidate their land.  But as Diamond explains, things are risky in jungle gardens (weather, pigs, rats, humans), so if the gardens are scattered, the chances of something bad happening to all of them at the same time, meant there would still be enough to eat to prevent starving.  

One anthropologist took the trouble to monitor over 400 of these little patches and their good yields versus disasters.  She was able to figure out just how many had to fare well to support their families.  Since the foods involved could not be stored by drying (berries and meat) or in bins (grain), they could not be held over for a long enough time to let fat years compensate for lean years.  The very smart Euro-observers were imposing their logic over the experienced wisdom of those who had been there a long time.

Cultures swing back and forth, benefiting some and punishing others, much in the way that crops interact with people.  Stigma strikes one category, then moves on to another.  We seem to be in a time that hates leaders, rich people, and rules — and yet we vote for Trump though he is the epitome of contempt for ordinary people, boasts of his wealth, and ignores rules.  The illogic of this is what makes politics/government like roulette or a one-armed bandit.  We bet our lives, feeling that we are as helpless as the old lady who sits on a stool in Reno with a paper cup of quarters to feed into the machine.  But with the possibility of a bonanza — WE might win — which kicks up the adrenaline at the heart of addiction.

Our present national helplessness probably has more than two sources, but I’ll name two I see.  One is science’s fabulous breakthroughs into a vision of the universe that reduces us to the equivalent of microbes staring into an black hole.  Another is the mixing of populations who have a hard time sharing a theory of what survival entails.  Too many have been living out life-risking migrations as a gamble.  

And what about all the people in the middle class who have gone along quietly until suddenly forces beyond their control (sickness, industry collapse, demographics) threw them out on the street.  They die.  They do NOT survive.  But the statistics for the nation in terms of corporate values look good.  The dead wood has been excised.  Rome has crushed the little people once again.  Where is the new Christianity that will give us a new Jesus for the poor people?

What are the new rules for survival?  Getting back to the reservation, the “successful people” right now have been playing by the Euro rules which emphasize the individual.  But maybe it’s time to return to the larger group, the tribe.

The location on a map is not the town.  A town is a set of relationships among people who agree by staying there to cooperate in maintaining community by agreeing on rules and pitching in to pay for infrastructure.  Then it becomes structures and history, but before that, in the very beginning, it was some kind of node or crossroads where people stopped.

Pearl Jam gave this skatepark to Browning!

There are two kinds of gambling.  One kind, cards and stick game, require some skill including awareness of the other people playing.  The other kind is chance, like craps or roulette.  When there is a town, the customs and written laws are like the rules of a game, with the consequences being criticism, possibly ostracism, and even jail time.  

What is under a town, which is manmade, is a structure formed by geology and weather with the possibility of flood, famine, volcanoes, tsunamis, earthquakes — on and on.  And so the town is the human game, but there is a bigger one, which is the land under the town.  It is not so much religion with its rules that saves us as it is something like spirituality — which CAN be contained in religion — but is more directly accessed in the land.  We sit on the Divide and see as far as we can.

Mistyne again -- I needed the metaphor.