THE EMPEROR'S NEW UNIVERSITY

When I was an undergrad at Northwestern (1957-1961) pretending to be a harmless speech ed major when I was actually cramming in courses in theatre, Angna Enters (1897 - 1989) came to campus. She was performing as a mime, though she was a pan-artist, half Isadora Duncan and half Yoko Ono. This was not Marcel Marceau pretending to be in a box or pestered by a fly. This was the transformation of ordinary movement into gestural dance.

One of her bravura pieces was the enrobing of a pope -- or was it a dauphin? At any rate, it was a pantomime of putting on layers and layers of medieval clothing, each more elaborate, voluminous and magnificent than the last until it was topped with a mitre or crown. Rather like the enrobing of Elizabeth II for her coronation, which made her advisors worry that the weight of the vestments (the crown weighed something like thirty pounds) might press the eighteen-year-old down to the ground. The Japanese have a tradition of brides assuming layers and layers of kimonos, but they are silk and relatively light.

Angna Enters was capable of a sort of mass hypnotism so that when she finally stood wearing no more than she had begun with, we could “see” her emperor-worthy clothes, just as in the myth. I am not going to hold up this metaphor (you know it too well) but the reverse: a situation in which all the robes and trappings and prestige are actually present, but the clever emperor, in naked authenticity, has dodged out the bottom and escaped. This is a riff about our institutions: church, university, court, hospital -- all those situations where the priest, professor, judge, and doctor -- who once wore simple black or white gowns to show their prestige and role -- have been so over-layered with additional garments that they have been paralyzed. Pressed into services of all kinds, buildings of pretentious significance, regulations of labyrinthine intricacy, and endless insurance oversight, these institutions now require mammoth endowments and barely have the energy to inspire, teach, judge, or heal.

This is a long blog but a short essay, so I’ll single out universities. One can take such little tales too far into metaphor, but perhaps now that the universities are getting ready for their coliseum seasons of homecoming gathered around the stadium where cheering former students watch ghetto recruits give each other head injuries so they can afford their drug bills, children can point . . . but that’s sensationalism. Surely classes meet and research proceeds, even if international industrial corporations control the curriculum and the teacher is a graduate assistant instead of a tenured professor. No doubt replacing the dusty books in the library with shiny new computers is more than justified. Foreign students who write and speak better English than those from our own country are simply more selected (and more able to pay the tuition). Still, at some point, one has to ask whether universities still educate in the classic way of guiding hard thought to sound conclusions.

People keep fussing about the radical (root) changes in human knowledge brought about by research on DNA, fMRI, particle physics, nano-technology, extra-terrestrial geology, and particularly the internet. U of Chicago's Randel, quoting Readings’s history of the modern university says:

"In general the modern University has had three ideas. The story begins . . . with Kant, who envisioned the University as guided by the concept of reason. Kant’s vision is followed by Humboldt’s idea of culture, and more recently the emphasis has been on the techno-bureaucratic notion of excellence. The distinguishing feature of the last on this list is that it actually lacks a referent. (p. 54)

". . . With the decline of the nation-state and its replacement by a transnational economy in which capital pursues profits across all boundaries . . . The economic counterpart of the hollowing out of political subjectivity that accompanies the decline of the nation-state" is 'consumerism–which is correctly perceived as the most pressing threat to the traditional subject of university education in North America’ (p. 48).”

http://iotu.uchicago.edu/randel.html

I’m a terrible snob when it comes to universities. In my NU undergrad years, I was very elitist about the arts, defining their initiated adepts as more gifted, more “real,” and more penetrating (go ahead, make a pun out of it) than others. But I wasn’t good enough for Broadway (the only possible destination was Manhattan) so I did a reverse (it was the days of Peace Corps) by going to the Montana reservations. After twenty years there and also back in Portland (long story), I had a chance to attend the U of Chicago through the back door by enrolling at one of the small seminaries in the “Cluster” around their eminence. I earned a master’s in the U of C Div School and have gloated over it ever since. In fact, armed with new confidence (possibly unjustified), I’ve returned to my beloved Montana reservation.

It works, you see. Because it’s not about content, it’s about process, it’s about learning how to learn no matter where you are or what the circumstances. Forget prosperity, forget recognition. Forget even the great networking and name-dropping potential. Books -- well, everything becomes a book. Most brilliantly of all, it’s no longer necessary to be on a campus because the Internet has replaced the need for adjacency, as my little cluster seminary now recognizes in its plan to sell the building and leave Chicago.

The problem, for both the university and myself, is monetization. My degree is useless here. I send no big checks back to either alma mater. I do work for which there is no certification, just satisfaction. My scholarship is social security. I’m not the only one. The aging former student body has become a planetary diasphora.

Is that good or bad? Dunno. Mostly just unrecognizable. What will it do to the traditional vested (invested) investment-wearing university? Dunno. Somehow it was the university education that returned me to the naked world of aging hunter-gatherer, gleefully capering over the horizon with a laptop under my arm, proud of myself as any bare-assed three-year-old. Think of it as a pantomime. I hope it would make Elizabeth II smile.

OLD LADY IN MONTANA

Can an “intellectual” old lady find happiness in a tiny Montana village? It seems worth considering since I’m older than the last time I really thought about it. Getting older begins to mean a few chronic complaints, though careful attention to diet has put me “on game” for diabetes, as my young male pharmacist puts it. (My last a1c was 5 point something. Fasting blood glucose is in the eighties. Two hours after eating I’m almost always under 140 which is the point where cell damage is supposed to begin.)

One of the sources of moral guidance says that since God is the creator of all, then a creation’s obligation is to fulfill its nature. So what is my nature? Clearly I’m fulfilling and extending my writing by producing a thousand words every morning and distributing them via a blog. Is there more than that?

What about my education, or should I say “educations,” since there were different efforts for different ends. But a lot of people and the institutions themselves put out a lot of resources to teach me what I know and can do. I have not stayed within those institutions. Their appeals for money go unmet because their assumption was that I would make money, but I haven’t.

My obligation to Bob Scriver is mostly ended. The book is out there. What happens to it now is mostly out of my hands, though I will continue to accumulate, sort and provide information about Bob’s bronzes. I’ve been stunned by the hostility of the very people whom both Bob and I believed had good will. He might have been better served by his enemies.

You already know about my little manifesto that dates back to high school: “if there is a choice between adventure and security, take adventure; if there is a choice between money and education, take education.” But I have some other rules and principles. One is to try to avoid the irreversible, and the other is never to endanger the physical support of my mind. (No drugs, no trauma.) Moving to Valier came close to violating both principles, since it’s unlikely I could sell this house now that the very short Valier housing boom is probably over. This village is risky when it comes to medical care as I age.

But it’s clear that Nineties Portland was killing me: the food, the job, the people, the general picture was high stress to the point of destruction. Portland is a city that pretends to be idyllic and liberal, but working backstage and living there for decades taught me quite a different story. I guess I’ll skip the sordid details -- might need ‘em for a book later. I’ve already used the Seventies dog-catching stories in a book, “Dog Catching in America.”

For a decade I’d been scouting for a good location near the Blackfeet and, because the money for moving back came from my mother’s estate, I have an obligation to fulfill there, too. If you go to http://www.lulu.com/prairiemary, you’ll find the Blackfeet books for Blackfeet that are available there -- more compiled resources than written books. Other than that, I’ve played interlocutor a few times and am trying to to be the best friend I can for a few individuals, mostly former students. But the Blackfeet hardly need me now -- they’re on their way.

So what an “intellectual”? Certainly I’m not a University of Chicago thinker as Richard Stern, truth teller, pointed out to me. Many of the print options for intellectuals have disappeared, at the same time that blogs have opened up. So I ought to keep on taking advantage of the internet while it lasts: while there is still an electrical infrastructure and before censorship begins. But in what way?

Many realms open as minority empowerments, but then those groups -- as they become more organized -- become oppressors and the new minority is those who oppose them. Tim Barrus has reached out to me, simply because I wasn’t afraid of him, and now we have a kind of ministry to each other, while he is engaged in a ministry of his own: Cinematheque, teaching boys to help each other through art. This will put me -- already has -- in opposition to the oppressors of Native American lit which surprisingly are often European. They try to press the People back to the nineteenth century so they can exploit the images.

Three entwined forces have dominated our culture for too many years: sex, violence, and profit. All three have become markers of status and privilege: Big Dogs have whatever or whomever they want, no matter whom it hurts, and at CEO compensation levels. They do not stay within the law. Opposing them is dangerous. Could I have any impact at all? Not alone. But I could if I were part of a network that is international and always thinking. The change has begun.

Valier knows that I sit at my computer most of the time: when they drive down the alley they can see through the window past my snoring cats to me at my keyboard. If they drive down the street in front, they can see my floor-to-ceiling bookcases. I have no idea what they think I’m doing, but several have threatened me with violence (playfully) if I blog about them. Maybe they think I’m on Facebook or YouTube, but I don’t sign up for those “friendship” networks. I don't want chatter or twitter.

I’m “doing” ideas, because if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that an idea is not a passive object (the way they used to teach us in the public schools) but a live thing that can be conceived quietly and privately as in a womb, and then take on a life of its own. This is a religious principle, worthy of my fancy Div School education and my improvised ordination in the Grand Street Theatre (built as the Unitarian Church of Helena, Montana) on the set of “Death of a Salesman,” temporarily decorated with candles and banners.

Someone local challenged me as “trying to move mercury with a pitchfork” and that might be true, but I’m betting against it. Anyway, it’s my nature and it’s good for my blood glucose to keep moving. What I have not expected is to sit here writing a book with Barrus in Paris. What he writes sometimes makes me weep. Not alone. He weeps, too. Not for ourselves but for the world, slowly rising over the moon's horizon, hopefully tipping back towards the light.

A NEW COVENANT FOR FAMILIES

One of my best professors at the University of Chicago Divinity School was Don Browning, who taught ethics for ministers. Red-headed but calm and shrewd, he was warm and analytical at once. In my new copy of “Criterion” which is a publication of the University of Chicago Divinity School that reprints important essays and speeches, he offers an article called “Best Love, Best Interest of the Child, An Integrational View,” which will be chapter in a forthcoming book called “The Best Love of the Child,” edited by Timothy Jackson.

I had not known that parallel to the on-going sociological and religious discussions about what marriage and family really “are” in our pinwheeling, disintegrating, “modernist” times, there has been a parallel legal body of thought developing, pressed along by the need for judges to have some guidance when dealing with aggregates of folks related in various ways that might be defined as family. Blended families -- children who are his, hers, ours and whose? -- must be sorted out as to residence, supervision, assets, covenants, biology, and special needs. Situations never envisioned by the medieval thinkers who could assume obligations by practical criteria have come crowding because of technological breakthroughs like in-vitro fertilization, frozen embryos, and life-saving measures that cannot cure all damage. Increasing numbers of people are merely cohabiting, practicing sequential marriage, or are the same sex, maybe dependent on adoption for their children. At the same time we are a country of wildly varying religious convictions, even within the huge bulgy tent of Christianity, much less among immigrants and revived native cultures. The traditional and previously dominant culture becomes more and more desperate to keep what they consider to be order. But that is the very culture whose Constitution and Bill of Rights prevents the draconian solutions of the past, which simply cast out all the people who didn’t fit.

Browning’s article is a discussion of three approaches to what might be called a “managed paradigm shift” from the covenant of marriage as the controlling contract of family to the covenant of child/parent relationship as primary, particularly the bond between mother and child, even though we can now identify the father through his biological contribution to new life. In fact, our understanding of affectional and care-giving attachment, plus such phenomena as surrogate gestation, mean that a child may have as many as four or even more parents! He points out that “The Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution” asks for three moral commitments:
1. “the good of psychological continuity for children”
2. “fairness for adults”
3. “nonviolence for all parties involved, esp. women and children”

Browning works in an orderly way. First he creates a definition of the ideal, drawing on the best thought he knows, including Kant and Aristotle. The result in this case is: “I hold that to love a child is to simultaneously respect or honor the emerging personhood of the child as well as actively work to actualize the basic goods (sometimes called premoral goods) needed for the child’s flourishing.” Drawing on this, he identifies five requirements:

1. Love for the growing child should respect his or her selfhood.
2. The child’s needs, which vary as the child grows, must be met.
3. The child should grow up to “mediate this twofold love to others, especially the next generation.”
4. “A practical wisdom of love and care must always be surrounded by some kind of narrative that tells a story about the purpose of life and its beginning.”
5. “Love and care always take place in specific social and environmental contexts. How these contexts support, limit, threaten, channel, or fail to channel the best love, care and interests of the child must be a concern of the practical judgment guiding parents, guardian, courts, and the state.”

Now he has satisfied the Div School requirement that one must define one’s method. He proceeds to analyze the work of three legal scholars, all women: Martha Fineman, June Carbone, and Margaret Brinig. The first two seem to begin their assumptions when dealing with the single mother and her children (finding this the most sympathetic version of nurture and also the one hardest to challenge and discredit) and in the context of divorce or relationship breakdown. This argues for adequate support of the mother while raising the child, both in terms of biological or originally covenanted fathers and of society. (This is radically from the idea that the husband OWNS the wife and her products, the children. In the Middle East this can extend legally to killing a wife or child as one would kill a domestic animal. In the modern world this mindset continues underground.)

Carbone also wishes to shift the sacramental basis of family from the marriage between two adults to the protection and nurturing of the children. Both these women seem to surrender to the inevitable -- indeed, now realistic -- dissolution of the basis of traditional marriage both economically and religiously. Marriage today is, as many a sophomore has argued, just a piece of paper.

What is a constructive way to understand family? Browning is favorable to Brinig in part because she wants the legal context to address the beginnings of family as well as the disintegration. She wants “covenant” to remain as a “thick phenomenology” of moral AND emotional attachment, biological AND social institution. That is, family is rooted in our nature but can be shaped. She puts this together with what is called “new institutional economics.”

She suggests that a family is like a “firm” or a “franchise” wherein things go better for the individuals because they are together as a unit. Browning mentions “channeling,” “signaling” and “reputational” aspects of marriage in this sense, but I don’t understand the terms. This whole field is new to me, but I am eager to hear more about it. Many have remarked on the economic toll taken by marriages or partnerships that are constantly breaking up and reforming. Prosperity comes with stability, which is the edge that conservative prosperity-seekers know about and at least strive for. It is also the prime marker for situations that best nurture and encourage children to maturity.

Observationally, I’ve long held that economics leads love: one falls in love with the person most likely to collaborate on a safe and comfortable future and who is, status-wise, within one’s reach. One can’t avoid having a lot to do with status, both because advantages accrue to high status people and because achievers who prosper are awarded status. Around this part of the world, the family’s status is a crucial part of identity. Good families mean good kids.