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.

THE MUSIC OF THE UNIVERSE

YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN, DUMMY!  The brain is only the managing system, the dashboard!  Your consciousness is the dials of feedback system (speedometer, oil level, etc.), but what the brain is managing is your body!  Your WHOLE body -- guts and all.  Skin, five classic senses plus many others, some subconscious like beating your heart and digesting your food and healing your cut.  The brain is constantly gathering, sorting, and prioritizing information from the body and deciding what to do about it.  The main goal is survival.

http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_wolpert_the_real_reason_for_brains.html  There are 86 TED talks in the category called “brain.”  This particular one is the closest to what I’m trying to say.  (But I’ve watched only a few of the other 85, so . . .)  I’m right there with Wolpert when he says that the difference between inanimate and animate (living) things is that the latter move.  The fact that they can move for their own purposes, either to approach food and sex or to avoid trauma and poisoning, means that they are alive and have intentions or at least reactions.  In the early moments of evolution, like bacteria, there is only a one-celled animal, but it has both kinds of movement: approach and avoid.  No brain, no skeleton, no muscles, but it can move.

Wolpert says that movement can account for everything a body does except sweat.  I think he should broaden his category to “secrete.”  In the bacterium, that would mean managing the permeability of the cell boundary to let certain molecules in and push other molecules out.  The brain cells must do something like that, because every cell does that, but that’s not interacting with the world.  Still, bodies excrete as well as secrete.  Muscles are involved in excretion.  We even speak of a bowel movement.

People who get all hung up on a person being the same as a brain are thinking of consciousness, which is a late evolution.  I would describe emotion as the response of the body that is both voluntary and involuntary, but both are the movements of organs or molecules circulating (movement) in the solutions of the body.  Some of it is conscious and some of it is not.  Training and practice can move the boundary back and forth.  If the brain isn’t functioning properly, it will be demonstrated to others through aberrant movement.  That movement might originate in a failure of sensory systems, like problems with sight and hearing.  

There is a more mysterious and recent development in the positive function of the brain which is “mirror cells,” which means that if some one else moves, as in dancing or playing tennis, the person who is watching will “ghost” the movement in their own brain and muscles.  It’s possible that this is the beginning of us evolving a more intense empathy -- feeling what other people feel -- that someday might amount to mental telepathy. 

History seems to show that the more we understand each other, the more likely we are to be doing things that help everyone survive.  So how do we get that understanding now?  Art.  Expression.  Story.   This is the eventual conclusion of the following TED TALK.

Damasio is in pursuit of consciousness.  http://www.ted.com/playlists/1/how_does_my_brain_work.html   We have seen that the work of the brain is to manage the body, taking in “a flow of sensory images” both inside the flesh and outside the skin -- the environment we cannot access except through our senses even though it is what we draw sustenance from..  In the process of sorting and weighing these sensory information systems, we spontaneously create “a “self”  which is the consciousness.  These are managed by the construction of a map or grid in our brains, that is actually graphed on the cerebellum as memory in the language of the senses.  Electrochemical impulses, coordinated by rhythm (not the heart’s rhythm but one like it), travel along the axons of the neurons in what is called “the connectome.”  

This shuttling has two goals:  first is the maintenance of homeostasis in the molecular fluid system of the body: water, salt, sugar, hormones of all kinds, and the like -- even the “drugs” like adrenaline or cortisol.  The second is the homeostasis of the body in the environment, achieved by movement which is part of what separates animals from vegetables.  Animals can change location, can alter their environment, can change their relationship to the environment.  The concerns here are food, shelter, freedom from trauma and more, particularly in relation to the part of environment that is other people.

The body is an instrument controlled by the brain:  the self is the music, all of it that is conscious.  Because of writing or video or even actual music or other art, the self can persist apart from the person’s body as memory and emotional response in other people.  A body can exist without a brain if it has support -- person as oyster or what is called a “vegetative state.”  A brain without a body cannot do anything and will not support identity.  People who think the brain can be kept in a jar to preserve identity are wrong.  There will be nothing for the brain to manage.  All dashboard dials would show zero. 

Damasio says the molecular fluid system is the most important set of parameters to keep consistent.  If molecules that are misshapen, missing or entirely alien are floating around in the fluids of the body and brain, the self will be lost.  In addition, the top of the spine  (brain stem) is the earliest part evolved and formed in utero.  It controls the most basic functions of the body.  One half allows consciousness and the other one does not.  If the half that allows consciousness is undamaged but the unconscious half is damaged, the “self” will be trapped in a non-responsive body, a parked car.  This is probably what makes people think they can just remove the brain and have the person. The only part that is missing in a nonresponsive body containing an otherwise functioning brain is the movement part.  The molecular fluid system, the sensory signaling throughout the body must persist in order for there to be consciousness, but that can go on without movement if others supply the basic nutrients and air, so on.  

The cerebral cortex, in Damasio’s words, “conducts the great spectacle of the mind,” the score for the self’s music.   Once produced by an individual, one’s instrument is playing in concert with many other instruments who are “conducted” by sociocultural regulation, the homeostasis of culture.  Just like the homeostasis of water or sugar, the culture keeps behavior within the parameters that sustain life.  (We might call it morality, which is not necessarily conventional since the conditions of society are sometimes outside the usual parameters and demand a new morality for survival.)  The culture can be very wrong about that, which will mean many people will not survive.

An over-rigid culture endangers the curiosity and wandering that allow the exploration of new ways and spaces, perhaps at great cost or perhaps with great rewards, and often identified as art.  It is this force, in my opinion, that takes us closest to what Damasio calls:  “True happiness and the possibility of transcendence.”   We call this "religion", but that implies an institutionalized, bureaucratized capture of beliefs and practices.  

In truth, when the brain is skillfully playing a gorgeous symphony of the senses, perhaps with other people, it is capturing holiness.  It is participating in the cosmos, which is music.  If the brain-body instrument is just sitting in church, that may be playing a tin whistle in a tune that is merely noise.