WORKING ON IT

When I was a kid, I never did understand "work."  It wasn't just that my father always disappeared and no one could explain what he did.  (He was a public relations/field representative for a wholesale cooperative.)  And it wasn't that my mother slipped her work (book keeping, mostly) past my father so as not to embarrass him for not making more money, until finally she became a teacher, which didn't seem to be "work" so much as a social role.  I understood jobs, counting beans and making things to sell, but not "work."

Nevertheless, I searched until I found a way to understand work as a process, but not quite how to do it.  Today I watched this online vid:   https://www.edge.org/conversation/robert_axelrod-collaboration-and-the-evolution-of-disciplines  One of the men at the table asked something close: "What are you really working with?"  He meant that in the disciplines defined by things, people have substances on lab benches and prototypes in workshops or at least formulas on whiteboards, but where are the "things" of people who study the processes of thought and history?

The moderator (Axelrod) told about a theory of the origin of sex that was new to me. (Surprise!)  It goes back to the development of meiosis, the ability to reconstitute two genomes into one that was original, combining both.  We know that accidental things happen, providing variation, and that the differences may help some beings and hinder others.  That's evolution. Diseases fasten onto specific aspects of our genetics. If those change through recombination, the germ is defeated.    

The agents of infection (viruses, microbes and funguses) are very inventive, multiply so easily and often that they create variations all the time.  Humans are big and complex and take a lot of years to create a new generation.  But if their genomes are always slightly different from one individual to the next, they can outwit the infective agents that prey on them.  Not ALL the time, or the infections would die out, but enough to save the whole of the community.  Sex evolved as the drive to mingle genomes, which we didn't even know existed until a few years ago.  But we admit that sex is about "chemistry."

Robert Axelrod himself is intriguing.  He's a good example of a seemingly obscure and irrelevant scholar who becomes of prime importance because of circumstances, a sudden fittingness.  This from Wikipedia:  "Robert Marshall Axelrod (born May 27, 1943) is an American political scientist. He is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan where he has been since 1974. He is best known for his interdisciplinary work on the evolution of cooperation, which has been cited in numerous articles. His current research interests include complexity theory (especially agent-based modeling), international security, and cyber security..."

"Axelrod received his B.A. in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1964. In 1969, he received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University for a thesis entitled Conflict of interest: a theory of divergent goals with applications to politics. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1968 until 1974."  These are very strong academic contexts that press their students hard.  

One of the most influential books of our time was written by Thomas Kuhn.  (I'll use Wikipedia again.) "Paradigm shift, a concept identified by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. Kuhn presented his notion of a paradigm shift in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)"  The simplest version of this key idea is that when an understanding of what is true and real is changed by a convincing series of evidence that doesn't fit, then a new "true and real" must be developed.  Preventing new ideas is a kind of disease.

This is one of the crucial understandings of the philosophy of science.  As Axelrod says, at once time biology was about plants vs. animals as the most basic two categories.  That has been questioned, as he says "turned on its side" until now the two categories are "what's inside the skin" versus "what's outside the skin." Many forms of life have skins. Some are neither plants nor animals.

When I found that category of books in the Seminary Co-op Bookstore serving the U of Chicago students, I had found my "religion."  But my professors -- who were my age -- were not compatible.  They didn't look at this concept as significant because they were committed to what I consider sub-categories:  Sixties-style social reform, historical movements, and what their own experience taught them.  None of them had been ministers, so it was a bit puzzling why they were teaching in a seminary meant to create ministers.  As it turned out, the more I was gone from academia and dealing with social community, the less suited I was for it -- until I finally left.  But as soon as I could, twenty years ago, I was able to recreate seminary in a Montana village.

I don't look like a success.  (I dress like Steve Bannon in old baggy clothes and even have an old-age "lady beard," though mine is blonde.  Don't get the idea that I approve of SB.)  But I am very pleased with the freedom to WORK on my own terms.  When I was struggling with my thesis, which was about embodiment theory, completely against the body-denying "rationality" of the Div School, I appealed to a professor of rhetoric who worked with poetry, thinking she would appreciate the sensuous.  She found me impossible to understand and scolded me, saying, "You must go someplace quiet and work, really work!"  I didn't understand her, either, but today I begin to understand work.

It's not "Chop Wood, Carry Water," (a book) though that's a big part of embodiment.  It's more like mental weaving one can even do while taking care of tasks.  In a time so terrifying for someone with my moral values (which are not immutable and not conventional) this weaving (refer to David Brooks) keeps me from running over the horizon, screaming.  The main thing I come back to is how many people absolutely refuse to accept the process Kuhn describes, the updating of convictions that is at the heart of science.  They insist on 19th century reality which they learned years ago as absolute FACT and which they have taken as the rules, obeyed as RULES.  They cannot accept modern reconfiguration or even a different view on things.

Toward the end of my ministerial career, a sad man, a man who had come to UUism as a way of escaping sexual guilt, told me that he had lifelong been faithful to his wife, avoided aggression, admired beautiful and attractive women from afar -- and that it had caused him great pain to be so virtuous.  He had missed out on joy.  Now that the culture no longer enforced sexuality so rigidly, he was ready to abandon it, but he felt too old to act on it.

Next to that I put an internet exchange with a "boy" prostitute.  (I don't know how old he really was.)  I said I was too old to worry about sex, might not even be able to respond.  He became indignant and said, "I can give ANYONE pleasure, no matter how old they are!"  It was his work and he knew he was good at it.  He wasn't coming right over to demonstrate; he was in Paris and I couldn't afford him anyway.  But he gave me a wonderful paradigm shift.  I smile as I work, writing this.