DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH, BUT . . .

On Sunday afternoons, along about now as I write, there is some kind of shift from being the end of the last week to being the first of the new week.  I'm hoping that we'll come to some such shift soon.  Not just from the end of WWII thinking into something that will give us survival in the coming climate shifting extremes, but the enactment of the zillion little particulars of Being into one big vision of the planet, the one we used to have when we first saw that photo of the Big Blue Marble from space.  I always wanted to have a flag with that on it, but I refrain from getting one because the household next to me insists on flying a Confederate flag with a skull in the middle.  I don't want to start anything with them.  Maybe a DUI or uncut fentanyl will simplify the future.

But I'm not sweating the small stuff.  I'm waiting for a sea change, something as sweeping as a new "religion," a vision of life that is quite different from this one.  Until now it seemed impossible that law and order would ever come knocking on my door to take me away unjustly, but now I've read too many stories about that happening to others like me.  In truth, when the end comes knocking, it will be Time.  I only know personally a few of my family since so many are young and faraway, and most of my best friends are dead of old age.  

I started to watch the UUA General Assembly vids and quit out of embarrassment.  There is no major thought, just self-congratulation.  They believe that this will grow the denomination -- notice that the word ends in nation?  What comes after nations?  United Nations isn't working or no child would be in a concentration camp.  Democracy isn't working because no child would be in OUR concentration camps.

"We" are described now as "predatory capitalism" which has developed (or maybe re-developed) in the last twenty years.  It seems to come from credit spending, money-laundering, and the gerrymandering of boundaries and laws.  All of these could be reversed, but maybe not through democracy, because of particle-ization, disengagement, and lack of empathy.  Empathy was once an element of democracy, the People's awareness of each other and willingness to work together for big projects.  One chilled and bruised snotty-nosed toddler with no diapers belonged to all of us.

Partly we are facing the clear possibility -- even the inevitability - of the end of human life, maybe all life, at our own hands.  As Bob use to joke, "If it's hopeless, let's all eat, drink and make Mary." But make me into what?  About twenty years ago I had a terrible dream about the ending of myself, this house, my pickup, and my blogging.  They begin to show cracks, pieces fall off.  We are told that we should have courage.  Oh, sure.  But more than that, we need a vision of "the other side," when Trump has died of his character flaws which may happen sooner than impeachment.

It's a good sign that the big McMansions built in the housing bubble will not sell.  Some of this new vision will just happen.  We need to get the millions living on sidewalks and in their cars into basic homes and we know what they look like, can settle for them now.  Infrastructure is most in need of redesign.  Water, including sewer.  Electrical grids, satellite-dependent electronics, and cyber-managing of everything from dams to street traffic are all terrifically vulnerable.  It's not just elections that hackers search.  This will probably push us more and more towards being off-the-grid.  Something similar will discourage "just in time" supply chains.  Distribution is key.  It may be that division in the sense of making us less able to delegate basics to distant controllers will make us closer to paying attention and taking care of ourselves.  Then there's famine.

We are shifting from a time of radical individualism to group dynamics, some of them toxic.  We have a split between needing quantum mechanic engineers and needing people who can do a decent job of running a village water system or can deal with household plumbing that's asked to do too much.  Hierarchies still hold us down.  It's not just the boss and secrecy systems of mafias, but also the alliances between editors and politics or business that keep reporters from telling the truth.  ALL of it.  Ask them.

I friend of mine asks "what have you done?"  I went apart.  When I was working for the City of Portland, I sat at a desk that was supposed to answer questions from citizens.  But no one knew what the answers were. I was discouraged from telling some truths about their entitlements, because they were a pain in the patootie.  

Sometimes I just sat and thought about the problem, appearing to do nothing.  A senior plans examiner used to pass by and curse me under his breath for being lazy, doing nothing.  He was bad-tempered because he was always in pain because when inspecting a house he had fallen through a faulty floor to a cement basement several stories down.  Though he didn't die, he broke a lot of bones and damaged a lot of organs.  He refused to take disability or retire because he wanted to DO things and be in control.  I understood.  He was a personification of a broken world.  I joked, "I'm just  sitting here stinking -- er, thinking.  Somebody has to do it."

I hang on through all the Twitter nastiness and emptiness because it helps me stink -- er, think.  We're both processes.  I think this is the key to the future -- it's a process getting there and it is a process essentially.  Forget objects, permanence, control of things.  Life running through one's hands like a silk rope.  What fantasy.

But it is not a fantasy that each of us is a temporary aggregate of small bits from a tiny beginning through a (hopefully) long trajectory that leaves traces on the lives of others, maybe not all of them human, until we return back to dispersed molecules and atoms.  They used to tell us that air we inhaled might have once been exhaled by a dinosaur.  That's not wrong.  We're someplace between dinosaur exhalation and our own inhaling, but who will snuff up our exhalations?  Just keep breathing while you wonder.

GET OUTTA HERE WITH THAT PARADIGM

Many people know to say “paradigm shift” and some of them know what it actually means as proposed by Thomas Kuhn.  In 1947 when new ideas were fermenting but not developed, he was asked to teach a class on science to humanities students.  In preparation he read — for the first time — in the then undefined field of “history of science.”  He read pieces back as far as Aristotle.  Plainly at different times, depending on what people knew already, they thought about science in quite different ways.  He saw that when new dissenting information was introduced, at first the difference was tolerated — just sort of pushed to the side — but as more evidence accumulated, the person and the culture began to see the big picture differently.  Usually it was so gradual that no one noticed.

So Galileo and others, now that they had lenses for telescopes and microscopes, could see things they had never seen before.  The poetic metaphor about the spheres around the earth on which the stars were attached, revolving to music like a carousel, now was obviously wrong.  So the paradigm shifted.  There are so many paradigm shifts today that we can hardly keep up.  Many are happening in medicine and many more are being demanded in government and economics because of malfunction.  Maybe it makes sense to say that realizing we need paradigm shifts IS a paradigm shift.  And that many people hate science because it welcomes paradigm shifts.

It appears that what you see depends on how you look at it.  And there is NO big final reality outside of human thought.  That’s HUGE.  Humans construct the world, each by each and culture by culture, according to the evidence they have.  If a shared version lasts long enough, it becomes institutionalized and institutions will then be invested in making it hold still — no more shifts.

WWII is still so painful that I found I couldn’t watch “Band of Brothers” and simply returned the discs after the first one, though it was my earliest childish world paradigm (b.1939).  I had wanted to look at it with adult eyes.  About the time I was in seminary, some individuals made it their business to DE-construct the world that had already been nearly destroyed across Europe.  The names are notorious:  Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and my fav Deleuzeguattari, which is really two men.  Deleuze and Guattari were as interested in creating a new paradigm based on the pattern of rhizomes as they were in the take-downs many of this kind of philosopher apply to any institutional assumptions, including capitalism, colonialism, and other dominations.

In the opinion of some, this business of pulling out all the sticks in the structure has been a disaster, far more than the social hippy anarchy based on pleasure.  For others, it clears a way to the future, though the future they describe sounds familiar.

Since this is a post for Sunday, I’ll take on religion.  (That’s an assumption right there: seventh-day religion.  Friday, Saturday or Sunday?)  It has been announced that God is dead, there is no God.  This is obvious.  No mega-humanoid lives in the sky and throws thunderbolts on our heads.  But people refuse to give up the assumption.  The tribal need (probably biological) to have a Big Guy we can pin our hopes on is so deep that we simply redefine God and go right on as usual.  People who hang onto old-time religion this way are fewer and fewer.

We can talk about theodicy (the puzzle of how a “good” and all-powerful God can allow babies to suffer and die and other evil atrocities) or we can talk cosmology all we want.  Within ten minutes Western people will be speaking again as though there is a God.  They’ll say,  “God is love,” or “I really mean Fate.”  They will NOT accept the idea that things happen because one-thing-leads-to-another and we can control our response, but that's about all. We can control what we do as individuals and collectively.  Sometimes.  Sometimes not.  Most of the time we don’t really know what’s happening anyway.

https://aeon.co/essays/why-does-the-vatican-accept-the-big-bang-but-not-evolution?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=959ffae83b-Daily_Newsletter_20_May_20165_19_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-959ffae83b-68600437

Half a paradigm shift — not liking the present but not being able to construct a future — is about where we are as a culture now.  There are think tanks and individuals trying to imagine where to go — in terms of religion we seem to be moving towards something like mystical science — especially those who don’t reject felt meanings, gut level.  The rule-based commandment morality dimension is more of a problem.

It’s been fascinating to watch these patterns play out in terms of sex, which old-time religionists seemed to feel was by far the most crucial and defined part of religion, though times have changed sex more than anything else except the economy and violence which people are too scared to think about.  It’s as though sex were a proxy for money and violence.  They were always entwined.

The sexual “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” have changed — not just whether who can “know” whom, but also “whom” one is.  Did God make a few clay rough drafts and lay them aside, so that now they come to life?  If you met a Denisovian, should you hook up?  People in Europe evidently hooked up with Neanderthals.  But the Denisovians went to Australia as the original people of that continent.  Do white Aussie fellows have some Denisovian genes by now?  I’m pretty sure Genghis Khan didn’t get there.

So much law is dependent on genetic inheritance, but who has inheritance rights for a baby with implanted mitochondria, the genetic “three parent” child?  Far more painfully, what about the child who has no functioning or accepting parents when people are so hooked on the idea of genetics being the main connection?  These are not just surface ideas, like whether automobiles are wicked, but rather go to the core of being human.  

Morality was once enforced by the community, who shunned the wicked or possibly stoned them or chopped off their heads.  Here we are millennia later watching that on the internet.  What do we do about whole cultures who refuse to shift their paradigm?  Will they inherit the world?

A lot of paradigms are a big mess.  Instead of voluntary communities, organically developing over years, we’re being pressed Onto lists of dependency for insurance or banking, if not pressed into prison cells for disregarding financial obligation.  College graduates aren’t made prosperous for life — rather they are so encumbered with debt that they move off the continent to escape.  

The good side of this is that it’s so awful, so intolerable, and so obviously can’t be cured by going back to the past, that we MUST find new ways.  They may be very harsh, like the ascetic cut-backs in Europe now.  Some are suffering, some are dying, and some are blaming the victims.  They say that the girls that Boko Haram kidnapped to use as slaves and “wives” are being returned one-by-one, but are so stigmatized that their lives are worse than captivity.  It’s beyond any animal behavior — more like insects.

Those who have the answer to the future are those who will be able to survive long enough to see it and be it, or who will be able to protect children who can survive.  No need to be genetically connected.  Probably the forces that will draw them together will be caring for each other and forming groups with effective skills, like cooperation for enough emotional support to confront reality, no matter how unpleasant it may be.  Like global warming, for instance.  Or the state of the Ganges, destroyed by religious paradigms.

People will weep.  People will die.  This paradigm is likely to be tragic.  But not necessarily.  Today I read about a group of murderers released in a pardon program.  Outside they formed a community to help each other.  None has gone back to prison.  None has killed again.  If this story turns out to be invented or the group begins to fail, I don't care.  It's a useful story.  A paradigm.

THE WAY

A few years ago I became acquainted with an extraordinary man whose life has been a roller coaster, a ferris wheel, a daredevil carnival ride.  He has also been a faithful husband, a boy-saver, a dependable father and grandfather of girls, a guardian of family secrets, a sailor before the wind.  We thought of writing a book that was a conversation and believed it would be interesting because we are so very different.  Writing it was fun and we pulled in a few others.  But I was the one in charge of marketing and I failed.  Partly they thought I wasn’t real -- that the other writer invented me -- and partly they thought he wasn’t real, that he was just pretending to be himself.  Pecos Bill and Calamity Jane.  Very American.  Paris gets it but Manhattan doesn’t.  Anyway, publishing was desperate to save itself by repeating itself.  They’ve never found a way forward.

For a long time we went on writing back and forth between Paris and Montana, an attunement on email, until part of him died, a miraculous boy who lived in that narrow space between angelic and demonic where only a few people could find him, searingly addictive as he was.  There were other boys, equally gifted, who invented something between a family and a tribe they called an art school.  To the outside world it sometimes was regarded as a leper colony because they all had HIV-AIDS and pasts full of torment and transgression -- but sometimes not.  Their lives divided between art exploits and folding the laundry.

The death of the boy called Tristan collapsed everything.  The book we had written was withdrawn.  It was all a dream, a fantasy, self-deception that other people despised and thought insulted them.  There were life-threatening surgeries, the money ended, we were waiting for death.  But in that classic mythic way in which The Singer is killed, dismembered, then reincarnated to rise again, a new colony on the coast of America formed.  Not so sophisticated, less protected, humbler and more dependent.  

Back in Montana things were different.  I was set outside the gates of the fort.  It’s okay -- I’m on good terms with Indians.  The archetype of success, a Tribeca gallery called “Tristan’s Moon”, was created but then destroyed by a storm of Biblical dimensions.

I search my heart to kick out of it a lot of prideful debris about being a writer, which I had thought would redeem everything.  The rubble left from the collapse of publishing was irrelevant, though I walked along the edges of it and noted what I saw.  I was waiting for a death that never came, revealing to myself what was at stake by writing, writing, writing.

About memories and the past, my friend is a card sharp -- shuffling, prestidigitating, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, but the cards have meaning and the game has had consequences -- not literary but intrafamilial.  Sometimes solitary. I love the shadow show, the forming and dissolving patterns, both his and mine and the echoes.  Surprisingly congruent.  Sometimes the game is Tarot -- more often it’s Hearts.  No one messes around with chess, that snob game.  Nor the roulette wheel because life is enough of a gamble already.  The truth is that no one has a monopoly.  Truth (if there is such a thing -- maybe there are a lot of truths) can’t be hoarded.  But there were no lies.

Gradually I saw a way forward, reinvented and yet conserved, though stupidly in stacks of paper and a labyrinth of computer documents on disc -- half-written, mis-labeled.  All the while, the world changed.  A whole population of gatekeepers who believed they knew what was real and what to do has disappeared.  This new cohort of people cares nothing about anything that happened more than ten years ago -- that’s their “event horizon.”  So much to explain all over again.  But they don’t care about history anyway.

Life is an art project.  Here is what the Connectome looks like in a computer representation of all the connections in one brain in one second.

Here is what the basic design of the universe looks like in a computer representation of fractals, Fibonacci’s Golden Spiral, a mathematical truth.

And here is the Anthropocene.

Depression is a dissonance.  Dissonance is a kind of pain, a disorder that signals change -- both needed and suffered.  The whole world is depressed: World Depression II.   But who’s counting?  We’re all busy surviving.  The air is warming, the sea is acidifying, the islands are sinking, and soon the great ocean current gyres will change and then our population problem will be solved.   The cosmos is both pointillist and sedimentary, but always merciless.  Yet dissonance is a brain game.  Get with it.  http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2008/12/dissonance.html

My grandmother was born in Quincy, Michigan, in 1871.  Tim’s grandfather was born in Michigan in 1907.  They had the same birth date except for the year.  It might mean nothing.  Michigan at that point -- the Victorian/Edwardian years to use the BBC as a reference -- was the Old Frontier, while the New Frontier was just opening on the prairies.  They shared an attitude, that individuals matter because they carry the honor of the family, and that one must take responsibility.  Get ahead!  It has not been helpful.  My grandmother’s great adventure was Dakota homesteading.  Tim’s grandfather’s adventure was the automobile boom after WWII, and Tim joined him in San Francisco where he was part of a cultural revolution that swept the Euro-American world in the 1970’s in much the same way as the 1770’s.

Fibonacci’s Golden Spiral, the intercontinental gyre of the culture, the Connectome reaching out to trafficked and abused boys all over the planet -- that’s Tim, a grand paisley with dancing fringe, always boarding an airplane.  (Not me.  I’m the one with the bonnet: everytime I google myself I get “Little House on the Prairie.”)  A theologian friend in Montana wrote a book about the paradox that one can’t achieve one’s goals until one gives them up -- stop trying, let it happen.  You don’t have to fly -- it’s enough to hold your arms out.  Even that can be hard work. 

Publishing used to mean that someone “bought” the right to ink one’s sentences onto paper, bind them into an object and sell the objects.  It’s not quite broadcasting, which means sending words out into the air at a specified time.  Now writing is a hybrid, unbound, cross-media.  The path forward is a braided one, like the grazing paths made by animals.  It covers the globe, even along the invisible whale-roads under the sea.  Each of us goes step-by-step into the future.  This brief time of traveling together connected me to a layer of society often exploited for its dark energy but lately endangered by the neo-puritan drive towards profit by defining a narrow way based on oligarchy and military.  I reject that.  How do things work?  What are our songlines?  How have institutions made them into toll roads?

CHILDREN & WEALTH

With very little effort but consciously and voluntarily, I’ve managed to avoid acquiring either wealth or children. However, I’ve paid attention to those factors in other lives.

This morning when I sat down to the read the paper, I noticed that more than half of the stories were about either wealth or children or some relationship between the two. Most of the stories were bad news: autism rates and premature birth numbers rising, wealth acquired the short-cut way, either at the point of a gun or through some kind of swindle. Newspapers don’t usually dally long over good news.

I don’t quite know how to classify the story about Roman Polanski: is it about children or wealth? The child in question was not his. It’s kind of a mystery where her parents were. Wealth has on the one hand allowed him to escape immediate punishment but on the other hand has not been able to keep him from being banished but on the other hand (I love three handed arguments, which tend to break up polarization, I hope.) have not prevented him from making lots of money which probably gave him access to a lot more of other people’s children (a little older, I hope). There is such a gap between the event and the court date that in the meantime standards for sexual ethics have shifted drastically, or more accurately they have shattered, idealisms of various sorts being pitted against overwhelming realities. Outrage gathers in defense of Polanski’s victim while the world simply looks away from widespread human trafficking of children. Of course, most of the children you can buy are not blonde.

Much of our morality when it comes to sex is the goal of our children inheriting our wealth. Much of our practice when it comes to children is to use wealth to secure them an advantage. This was true when the first white traders came to the high prairie and gave their half-white children the resources to get ahead of the indigenous people whose world was diminishing and it is true today in the “highest” circles where Prince Charles looked for a healthy commoner to give him vigorous sons. But the terms of the relationship have changed.

In law, if a woman cannot give a man a male inheritor, she throws the basis of peaceful transfer of wealth and power into chaos, leading to competition and overthrow. On those grounds she can be divorced or annulled, or as England knows, simply beheaded. If a husband will not perform the act that will give a woman a male breadwinner to support her in old age, he can be legally divorced. These laws have encouraged a certain amount of legerdemain to provide an heir, who sometimes looks rather like the milkman. Or prompt representations of obligation to support a child conceived outside of wedlock. (LOCK!)

So the first monkeywrench in the old arrangement is that nowadays the inseminator and the ovum producer can be identified scientifically through DNA. The locus of the transaction may not be a bed but a petri dish. The motivation for a man to keep a woman locked up in order to guarantee he is the only one with access to her reproductive machinery is in question.

The second monkeywrench is the nature of the more recent sexually transmitted diseases (like AIDS) which are not obvious until it is too late. This has put an unnatural premium on sex with children, too young to reproduce but presumably too inexperienced to have caught an inconvenient virus for which there is no cure. On the other hand, HIV is a powerful consumer of wealth and if the government or NGO’s cannot provide the prevention, the cure research, or the palliative treatment, the motivation for creating wealth through criminal sexual transactions (including trafficking) is much higher.

And the third monkeywrench is the globalization of the planet, the loss of boundaries which once kept people local, and awareness of the huge wealth disparities on the planet, which so increase rage and frustration as to fuel wars in which sexual assault is used as a weapon. Resulting in unwanted children.

In spite of my total rejection of censorship, which interferes with rational inquiry into these social problems, I cannot help deploring the constant use of sex and wealth to hype media popularity. It is the very complexity and intensity of the problem that both triggers the tendency to hide, cover up, deny, at the same time as to tease with half-knowledge and scandal. We have all noticed the connection between the supposedly virtuous with their secret transgressions.

The question is how to address both children who are destitute and children who are neglected investments in tomorrow. Neither is getting the kind of nurturing, attention and focus that will build a better world for us all. Yesterday’s advice no longer applies. One of the chief characteristics of both kinds of children is their loathing of hypocrisy and their ability to spot it in adults. Sadly, most of our beliefs about families and institutions like schools are simply hypocrisy. I hardly dare mention the relevance of drugs, whether those meant to keep child-whores at work or those meant to keep disruptive kids under control.

Too many families are meant to be signals for acquiring wealth: “Trust me!” Too many schools are wealth-accruing strategies for teachers and administrators. Too many religious institutions have crossed over into politics that guide wealth and supposed virtue into dubious hands. Too many governments are confused about their obligations and assets.

Many of the stories in today’s newspaper are about damage to children caused by prematurity, autism, baby-selling, and other universal social ills. Eight soldiers killed in Afghanistan, no one knows how many killed by tsunamis: the sorrow and political consequences, like funds needed for recovery, are beyond anyone’s capacity to estimate.

Yet millions of children die early, carry irreparable damage through life, or never get enough support to thrive and learn. We note that, but don’t do much about it. We’re too busy obsessing about the proper punishment for Roman Polanski, just as earlier we were split between punishment and apologies for Michael Jackson. And more recently obsessed with the captor of Elizabeth Bright. It’s so much easier to understand, or at least think we understand, a story about someone that it is to digest numbers that in fact might be telling us more about both wealth and children.