RENEWAL

The main storm has passed now and the streets are being plowed.  Someone proving that small towns have their benevolent side has plowed out my driveway.  When the snow sinks down a bit more, I'll struggle my outside doors open.  (I'm always grateful that one of my doors is the overhead left from when the garage was used for cars.)  The cats can go in and out of their hole and the lawn chair that became cat furniture is melted off enough for a cat to sit on the arms.  The two kittens are enjoying the sun shining on an old wicker indoor chair.  

I didn't get as much improvement done as I had hoped, since so much of the past few days was about coping and taking measures.  The temp is 13 at the moment, will go just above freezing by afternoon, hit single digits tonight and be back in the forties in the days after that.  There will be water running everywhere for a day or so, but the town crew has been trying to clean out drains and culverts.  This weather was unprecedented, but not a surprise.  

Regardless of what didn't get on paper, I was writing in my head the whole time and did have some time to keep reading LeDoux's "Deep History of Ourselves."  My education, and probably yours, was not just Cartesian, not just Newtonian, not just shaped by WWII, but deeply impressed with the doctrine of individual achievement as measured by money.  We mocked and excluded "emotion", felt that community was irrelevant except in terms of class, and didn't believe the old Mediterranean threesome of religious institutions but didn't really know why -- just didn't.  A person was religious by believing in impossible things, or was secular.

Since that time most of what I thought has disintegrated, been revealed as illusion, and did damage to me and others.  But also, in coming apart, it has revealed a huge symphony of tiny forces united in shifting paradigms.  No one of them is real, many can be effective, and each offers new paths.  

In my early days teachers and parents watched closely for signs of merit: good grades, high IQ's, little awards and achievements.  The merit was meant to come back to the families and communities.  Highest merit went to boys and those who were most meritorious were meant to become professionals.  It was nothing more than the old continental and Brit class system, brought to the US which some hoped would be different and others hoped would be the same except include themselves at a high level.

The Rule of Law and the Constitution were invented by these people, who assumed that everyone would either be like them or want to be like them.  This was just before the Golden Age of anthropology that proposed that cultures were boxes, complete in themselves and none as meritorious as the anthros themselves.  They didn't realize that all those indigenous "savages" were also sizing up the anthros, who wanted to record these strange peoples, publish the resulting books, and become famous -- before the boxed cultures were smashed.

They WERE smashed and that released the people from the boxes imposed from outside.  Today even the Yamomamo in the Amazon are interviewed and carry cell phones.  No waiting around for rock stars.  Now it is the rich and overeducated who are stuck in boxes, even those who felt that French/Algerian philosophers had at least revealed that everything was illusion and oppression.

So here comes LeDoux and calmly explains the "reality" our new technology reveals, a matter of tiny increments and accidents.  Step by step, alternative by happenstance, little changes make new ones possible.  Everything accumulates rather than dominates.  It's all highly conserved but things do drop out or get converted to new uses.  For instance, the biological family that was once the basis of hominin groups gets smashed by drugs, but the need remains and soon new "families" form on the basis of other ties beyond the obviously generational biology.  

At one point the gathering of people in urban mega-populations made possible many special ties and reciprocities.  Then came the Internet so that people can form connections that stretch around the planet.  It always  astounds me that when I look at Clustrmaps.com, they record "hits" from places I never heard of.  According to my blog, sixty people opened it to read so far this morning even though I didn't post for days.  These are far more people than could or would read a book.  In fact, my bio of Bob Scriver was printed in a run of 700 or so books and only about half have sold.  Kenner's question:  "What does it mean?"

LeDoux and plenty of others see a human being as a process, never meant to hold still or be apart.  From the moment of conception when the two formula halves of parents merge in a new being, the conceptus has to push back against its flesh environment until birth.  Then the person has a double challenge: to develop both physically and in terms of "culture" which is a schema developed both physically and mentally (which are also aspects of the same thing) to give meaning to what happens.  

The confusion and pain of the moment is that the old meaning of existence doesn't work anymore, probably least for highly sophisticated people, but the new one hasn't quite formed yet.  Even when it does, the full deployment of the insights might not work until a new generation has come to maturity and influence.  If Greta is any indicator, that might happen sooner than we have assumed.  These days it's the creeping rigid, often alcoholic, senility of leaders that is more dangerous than rash actions of youngsters. 

It may turn out that it's not the fabulous round blue jewel of our planet floating in velvet black space that is the unifying and definitive image of our times, but rather the weather map with its streams of force, blobs of polar temps, deserts too hot to occupy, seas fomenting hurricanes of unimaginable destruction.  These phenomena are on our doorsteps, forcing adaptation, and either taking us to a new level of evolution or to the end, just like all the other hominins.  When "they" find our fossilized teeth in the remains of cities, they can admire the dentistry of the elite, a technology forcing biological conformity to culture, and wonder why so many people didn't have dentists.