DUNBAR'S NUMBER

Class Notes

Thinking about Dunbar’s number (150), which is about the number of people who can really know each other on a supportive basis, connects with a lot of thinking from my past.  One is Alban Institute’s work on church size.   They persisted a long time but are now gone.  Their work was trying to understand what made congregations survive or fail.  At the time I knew about Alban, in the Seventies, 150 people was about the number it took to maintain a viable church with a building and a professional minister.  Now it would take three times that number but many congregations have shrunk to one-third that number.

Ranchers and wildlife experts are familiar with the idea of “carrying capacity,” the number of animals who can occupy an ecology without destroying it.  Environments have the ability to rebound from overgrazing or drought and can increase their carrying capacity by complexifying or when conditions improve.  Conversely, some exotic plant or animal can crowd into the ecology and tear the relationships apart.  Drought and floods throw off the balance of everything, but some ecologies — like the bottom of the Grand Canyon where regular periodic floods in spring are necessary to replant the cottonwoods — need that disruption to drive the systems.

When I did the three-year extension ministry for the UUA, which meant circuit riding among four groups who probably added up to 150 people, it was interpreted by most people as a “salesmanship” problem.  Make UU sound wonderful, promise it will be profitable, and all will be well.  No one thought of it as an ecology, not even me.   (Well, I did a little bit.)  We did use the Alban Institute’s figures for “carrying capacity” which they estimated to be about 2 potential UU’s per 1,000 population.  That means that in Valier, there should only be about one-third of a UU person.  That must be me.  Thirty-five years later, only one of the groups has died — it was Great Falls where the town is also struggling to keep its people.  The one that flared and grew was in Whitefish/

Kalispell, glamourous, growing, the banana belt of Montana.  This group was not part of the program.   For success, the economy means far more than preaching.

My preaching gown

My seminary finally adapted to its tiny student population by converting to a mail-order low-residence school in leased offices.  They're living off the profit from selling the building originally created for them.  They haven’t quite resorted to the strategy of a minister in the midwest who used to destroy all graphs by claiming thousands of church members.  It turned out he had a radio ministry and claimed everyone in the listening area.

These problems of exceeding or diminishing, as related to economic carrying capacity, are affecting everyone across the Montana Highline.  It’s hard enough to gather and organize people to create a town, but then when the economy collapses, it’s even harder to cut back.  Schools must combine, ministers must travel, and roads don’t get repaired.  The local/state/federal balance is distorted — or at least changed.  As new sources of income are developed and old ones disappear, the kind of population changes.  If no new sources of income are found, the existing population ages in place, creating new needs while destroying old supplies. 

Sometimes you're the cheetah,

And sometimes you're the baboons.

It’s strange to think about hominins, about how they came down out of the trees.  How many individuals must have been lost due to the new conditions without trees -- no place to be safe -- and yet whole new ways of living on the land appeared.  They had to overwhelm their own biologically rooted desire to stay in one place, do the same things, even when that didn’t work.  What finally made them change?  A drought?  A dream? A mutation?

Just as more new converts are needed, the churches empty out — all the different kinds from prosperity mega-operations to little remnant rural groups of grannies and grandpas.  The denominations used to grow, inventing new names to identify themselves and their splinters, just like the expanding economy that demanded new forms.  But now the Walmarts are closing down and no one knows what’s next.  Well, they do — they just don’t want to admit it.  Amazon.  Infinite numbers of people?  Maybe.  Growth as a marker of success?  Being challenged.  Maybe "Small IS Beautiful."  What's after Amazon?

New product?  We’re sort of on the cusp of development.  VERY expensive hightech breakthroughs, but at the same time cheap cell phones and computers for everyone. An interesting development is the realization that while many were rushing around with their salesmanship ideas, there was a whole layer of society that was quietly and persistently developing “organic food,” “counter-cultures,”  "heritage seeds," “co-operatives,” off the grid.

My money, my stockbroker.

One of the interesting things about the economics of art is that on the edge are always very rich people who buy, sustain, found major institutions like museums and so on.  These are the 1 or 2% of people who control, er, “own” the great majority of the wealth in the world.  Artists are part of their infrastructure of prestige and so we visit them, sell to them, get to know them.  

What I am just now realizing is that a really rich person is not at all what we ordinary plodders think.  They are NOT individuals who can do what they want.  Instead they are managed by all sorts of people who tell them what to do.  They have the same problems of expansion and contraction in their Dunbar’s number (friends and family), and often have losses in that context, particularly if they’re not good at “grooming,” (meaning the innocent maintenance of relationships) or pervert friendship grooming into the acquisition of people as though they were bought.  Very wealthy individuals may have a lot of family, but because of English-originating law over inheritance, that can be a serious disruption.  It drives many a BBC plot.

Disney Studios

The truth is that very wealthy people, particularly those who come into a lot of money suddenly, like movie stars and rock singers, are almost immediately converted into being corporations, a business machine with its members intent on keeping their jobs and expanding their control and remuneration.  When someone like Walt Disney dies, it’s barely noticeable because he goes on as a franchise, still keeping all those folks on the payroll, adding lawyers searching contracts for more profit.  He’s just a trade name now.  

Organizational design was another way I came to understanding the importance of these arrangements that are NOT REAL.  They’re like money — it’s only paper that stands for profit.  Who supervises whom, the chain of accountability, divisions and assignments, all that seemingly boring stuff can make a major difference.  Management today is a crippling problem, a failure of producing people who have the skills.

The receding tide of “religion” -- which to the media and most citizens is some set of beliefs and the machinery of an organization -- is not serving the core "carrying capacity" of spirituality.  Rather they are shrinking the spirit.  It hasn’t got anything to do with “theism” or any of the other tent poles of the world’s systems.  It’s about human beings and their 150 friends, neighbors, and relatives, who no longer sing together unless they’re drunk or pushing a political agenda. 

I have no trust that any present venue will increase the spiritual carrying capacity of the country.  But I’m very intrigued by experiments like the one that recorded people all over the world singing the same song and then blended them into one giant chorus.  The “flash choirs” around Christmas always make me cry.  Spiritual content is not the words of the songs, nor even their familiarity, but the human voices — no matter the number.

"The Chorus" about a boys' school.

Here's a link to a terrific French film called "The Chorus" about how the unity of song can redeem misguided morality.

http://www.netflix.com/watch/70019005?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C0%2C03dc472065f5306cd985db4d73dc8a3f469a0603%3A5adfb04c3165f7d026977f96b0413bc7975bcec2

IF WE COULD JUST GET ORGANIZED . . .

At one point in the Seventies -- high on new-found knowledge discovered at a UU Leadership School -- I thought organizational design would save the world.  If we could just get properly organized so that everyone had found their niche and had proper communication channels, institutions could rock along doing their jobs and we’d all whistle as we worked.  Wrong.  The usual devious greedheads went right on making all the marbles roll into their corner and the usual brainless blunderers couldn’t remember what they were supposed to do, esp. if it were new.

But now things have gotten bad enough around the world that TED talks are urging us to re-think democracy, health has become a worldwide exercise in relativity with viruses scarier than a-bombs, while Indian tribes and college grads are so far in debt that there seems to be no way forward.  Casinos and advanced degrees were supposed to guarantee success and prosperity.  It’s a bait-and-switch world.  The idea of the greatest good for the greatest number has somehow morphed into “winner take all” and some kind of repetition compulsion.

I’ve been on a jag of WWII movies, right now watching “Winds of War” (Herman Wouk’s series) by streaming, alongside “Enemy at the Door” (BBC) on discs.  Netflix recognizes what I’m doing and feeds me more suggestions, everything from “Foyle’s War” to “Restropo.”  The best of them use war to comment on the larger civilization of the times. (If you can call it civilized to be at war).  Marriage does not come off well.  Robert Mitchum and Polly Bergen demonstrate an heroic, high-status man who has enough income to support an ambitious but asinine woman whose most admirable quality is her manicure.  The women in Wouk’s world have no skills, are obsessively attached to men by something mysterious called “love,” and balk, disagree, and go off on a tangent at every difficult moment.  Of course, it’s great dramatic fodder.

“Enemy at the Door”, about the German occupation of the English Channel Islands (Jersey and Guernsey) shows little flashes of this sort of drama, but it really is about rigid organizational design versus human resourcefulness.  The central hero is Dr. Martel, excitable but dependable and his quite unsexy but resourceful wife.  A recent episode was about the pain-in-the-butt SS officer trying to curry favor by organizing a chess tournament he is sure his superior will win.  Instead, in spite of intimidation, that worthy is defeated -- by a woman!  Luckily, the German is a wise man who plays by the rules of a higher game.  This series is about an informal but coherent society on the islands, based on different assumptions than the regulated society introduced by the occupiers who find their own system difficult to manage.

The problem in many places now is the dynamics of interwoven but not-the-same cultures, often too inventively human to be captured by any bureaucratic assumptions.  I see the TED talk today is about immigrants who send money back to their families on the other side of the planet: their allegiances are double.  But isn’t the welfare of families a universal?  

Valier is a village (300-400 people, depending on who’s counting) that is mostly coherent because of history, since on a few generations ago they came as a group from Belgium.  The same people who were leaders in high school are still prominent business owners and leaders of traditional organizations.  It’s not that they’re against innovation so much as they can’t grasp what that might be, so they do more of what they did last time.  

The rez next door is a sprawl of 8,000 enrolled people plus a lot of other people who refuse to be counted.  Some don’t even want their real names known.  In fact, they will claim the right to change their names as an ancient tribal custom and they would be right.  They also claim sovereignty while sending the bills on to the USA.  Every new scheme, whether generated internally or handed down from on high, is quickly scoured for loopholes and choke points that might yield profit.  They’re like corporate lawyers reading tax codes.  Bone game.  Stick game.

It’s surprising to have two such contrasting systems next to each other.  Managing the interactions between them is problematic.  Drawing on all this WWII stuff, I started thinking about sentry and sentinels.  A definition search yielded the following:

A Sentinel Event is defined as any unanticipated event in a healthcare setting resulting in death or serious physical or psychological injury to a patient or patients, not related to the natural course of the patient's illness. . . Sentinel events are identified to help aid in root cause analysis and to assist in development of preventative measures. 

Medical Definition of SENTINEL. : Being an individual or part of a population potentially susceptible to an infection or infestation that is being monitored for the appearance or recurrence of the causative pathogen or parasite.

Sentry definitions are military, a guard who is armed, but also can be computer programs, for instance,  a program called “Sentry,” whose motto is “Shit happens.  Be on top of it.  Sentry gives you insight into the errors that affect your customers.” 

In a week or so I’ll have to chose a new Medicare plan.  I plan to change.  I let myself be passively assigned to Silverscript, which was then bought by the CVS drugstore chain.  The result was a steady stream of automated phone calls and letters nagging me to take my meds, buy my meds NOW, account for why I wasn’t on the schedule they thought I should be on.  This strategy has backfired.  I will never go in a CVS drugstore again.  But I dread the job of wading through all this junk and fine print, which they reserve the right to change on the spur of the moment anyway. Humana has leapt into the breach, offering personalized guidance by “trained” professionals.  Is this reassuring?  Not at all.  Trained to guide me into Humana, right?

I looked up “bureaucracy” which put a lot of emphasis on the fact that the administration of systems is not elected.  Increasingly, I see that as not being the key problem.  Instead I suggest that the people making decisions -- elected or not -- simply don’t know what they’re administering.  They never go there, never listen to the people whose lives they are controlling, never get rain or sun on their heads, barely get out of their town cars long enough to enter their office buildings.  They look at statistics, design algorithms, and make graphics according to some GPS.  No one has ever convinced them that the map is not the territory.  They have no sentinels.  

So I’m claiming that military sort of role: the sentinel.  I’m watching at town meetings, I’m watching a giant digging machine tear up the next street over, I’m watching old people struggle in and out of their cars at the post office.   I'm watching kids and a few grownups on bikes.   I’m not a canary -- my watching is not based on vulnerability.  

I see that the institutions we used to count on -- churches, libraries, schools, hospitals, newspapers, movie houses, orchestras -- are starving for money and failing to serve the purposes they were originally intended to serve.  Most of them are culture-based, expressions of the humanities.  The big discussion websites, even the high-minded enviros, get hung up on pets, favorite songs and cooking.  If one tries to talk about religion or even spirituality, they're willing, but cliché ridden.  There is no vocabulary for it except what institutions supply, which no longer fit because they are so culture-bound.  So the subject is discarded.  But aren’t these witherings of humanities institutions “sentinel events”?

HEART BREAK BUTTE AGAIN

This is the Heart Butte school compound which includes teacher housing, as though it were in a foreign country.  The actual town is down the hill a ways.  Teachers are sometimes referred to as "those on the hill up there."

My blog is late today because I’ve been thinking and thinking takes time, which may be why not a lot of people do it these days.  The subject is how to talk about Heart Butte in a constructive way.  In the April 28, 2011, issue of the Glacier Reporter, an open letter from the current superintendent of schools, Gerald J. Gray, Sr., as he styles himself, appears under the headline “Heart Butte Schools Making Positive Changes.”  The background is that some of the Heart Butte students staged a strike recently, sitting out in the bleachers for hours on a cold day.  This was triggered by the non-renewal of contracts for several teachers whom the students liked.  In Montana (rez schools must obey state laws and regulations unless they are independent bodies like charter schools) a teacher is vulnerable to dismissal without tenure law until the third contract renewal.

I taught there from 1989-91, inventing the new-then high school curriculum for English 7-12, and teaching all but remedial English classes.  There were unique problems, like students who had flunked English for three years in a row (mostly because of bad attendance) and were therefore scheduled to take three levels of English at the same time.  And so on.   I often opposed the superintendent and the principal, who could not understand either my philosophy or what I was doing in the classroom.  I received an award from the National Council of Teachers of English for my innovations.

At the end of the first year,  the superintendent came into my classroom just before classes had started and demanded that I resign.  I didn’t.  The music teacher got the same demand the same way.  She didn’t.  The Native American home ec teacher was also directed to resign.  She did.  The second year the superintendent again recommended that I not be rehired.  This time he had reached deep into the guts of Native American spirituality politics and my own long history on the rez and had gotten hold of scandals that would damage a lot of people if dragged into the open.  I don’t think he really knew what he had hold of.  Some of it was criminal and involved child abuse.  I resigned rather than expose anyone.

I wrote a book about that battered little community, called “Heart-Break Butte.”  Chapter by chapter, it was part of the early months of this blog, but was found by activists who misquoted and misused it.  I took it off.  Several publishers looked at it, teetered and then backed off.  A lawyer looked at it and advised against publishing, on grounds that it made people look bad and they had suffered enough.  John Tatsey, “Black Moccasin,” had had a mocking column in the Glacier Reporter for many years, very much admired by lovers of the “Stay Away, Joe” style of writing.   As the only Heart Butte law officer, he knew what was going on from a certain angle and used it.  His story of the officer who was roped off his horse and dragged to death by renegades was replayed in local newspapers for decades until the officer’s family finally managed to get him a law enforcement award for courage and death in the line of duty.  Now the Tatsey family is a bastion of righteousness and political correctness.  There is still only one officer in Heart Butte, as far as I know.

So walking into all this, what did Gerald J. Gray, Sr, have to say?

1. 2% of the community are negative bullies.
2.   They accept no responsibility for their own or their children’s bad behavior.
3.   Teachers are afraid to contact these people “for fear of being verbally or physically attacked or threatened.”
4.   “Out of fear, some teachers fail to enforce behavior policies or consequences.”
5.   Staff and visitors stand in the kitchen drinking coffee and eating.
6.   The school boiler rooms were filthy and full of garbage.
7.   The entire janitorial and maintenance staff had to be replaced by new people.
8.   The HVAC system is dysfunctional and dirty, so a contract to repair it has been signed.
9.    The cooks are too dependent on processed “fast” food.
10.   School buses have been making a second run to pick up tardy students and big buses were used when little buses would have worked.
11.   The community is not involved and parents don’t feel welcome.
12.   Teachers and staff are not team-oriented.

In short, it appears that the non-rehiring of teachers is represented as just part of a reform plan, although it’s unclear why all these efforts are recent instead of starting last fall.  One assumes that the teachers are judged on the basis of their teaching, but there is no discussion of test results or curriculum development.  I know these have been pursued for years, partly with the support of Northwest Education Labs which has a long connection to this reservation.  Their head of the Native American program until recently was Robey Clark, a graduate of Browning High School.

These exact some problems have appeared in Browning in the past.  (Mary Margaret McKay Johnson, Gerald’s cousin, has done an admirable job of resolving them.)  They were also major roadblocks at Cut Bank High School in the months I was there.  (I didn’t wait to be told to resign -- I bailed.  No other teacher would sign on before or after me and the reasons I left were again too egregious to be aired, so there was no lawsuit over my breaching my contract.)  These are SYMPTOMS, not causes.  They have nothing to do with race.

The causes are many, some historical and some even geological.  The flood in 1964 emptied a tiny old-time village and then brought it back -- through the paving of roads and the building of housing developments -- into an outlier town that has overwhelmed its infrastructure, including any sources of employment, though it’s easier to commute to Browning now.  The school is NOT part of the Browning School District #9 or even Glacier County, but rather an outlier on another level from Pondera County, thirty miles away from Valier where the high school students used to attend, and forty-five miles away from the county seat in Conrad.  The sheriff of Pondera County is NA and lives in Valier, but the Pondera County Commissioners who direct the sheriff’s department and other resources, are all white and very much dominated by Conrad interests.  The present State Superintendent of Public Instruction, who oversees Heart Butte, is NA.  Her parents were administrators there, not so long ago.  Same problems.

“Outsider” journalists who come around wanting to make friends with Blackfeet generally want to write about the romantic stuff, the wars, sometimes the alcoholism -- the whole edge-of-tragedy mindset.  Influential Blackfeet often share the missonary-righteous, Chamber of Commerce facade insistence that the image is what counts.  They feel that airing dirty linen will reflect badly on them and they are right.  But they forget that the locals already recognize the dirt and stains and know where all came from, though there might be good reasons for keeping some things secret, esp. the blood stains.  

I’ve ordered a new book called “Five Percent, Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts," by Peter Coleman.   The 5 percent refers to the percentage of hard probs that seem unsolvable -- not to the “2 percent” of bad actors.  The superintendent who put me back on the street kept a list of ten targeted “bad” students and ten targeted “bad” teachers.  It never seemed to occur to him what every organizational design expert knows:  the troubles come from dynamics and structure -- NOT individuals, who will be replaced by others as soon as the Ten Most Wanted is eliminated unless major strategic changes are made.  Lucky for the US, the federal military and administration have figured this out.  I hope that Gerald J. Gray, Sr., gets a clue from them, but I suspect that he’s made enough enemies to break his contract by summer.

BEYOND THE SPIDER AND THE STARFISH

Single-idea books with cute titles are supposed to be one path to big profits. So consider “The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations" by Ori Brafman, Rod Beckstrom (Author)” or “Brainticklers : Beyond Y2K : Questions for the New Millennium and the Year 3000,” by Elizabeth Arnold and Rod Beckstrom (which is the same as what I call a “slap pack” of questions) or even “An Introduction to VAR” (1995) by Rod Beckstrom. (VAR turns out to be variable, a scientific concept, and also a program for sorting or creating algorithms.) What is being sold with this starfish/spider metaphor is an organizational design concept contrasting the centralized hierarchical model and the small local decentralized pattern.

This morning on NPR the author was interviewed on All Things Considered http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129310098 and professed to be surprised that the Teaparty movement had picked up the book. I don’t know why he should be surprised. In fact, the original movement that started this country pitted the decentralized colonies against king-headed England. And then the more-or-less “united” States spent the next century fighting the even-more-decentralized native American tribes on the rest of the continent. What’s being talked about here is basic guerrilla strategy, the same discussion that goes on all the time about whether modern terrorists have one leader who can be conveniently assassinated or many small local leaders, hard to find and hit.

Unitarian Universalist people are also used to struggling with the dilemma of whether their denomination is a free-association (many small independent units -- some call it “disorganized religion”) or should be unified (a third “U”) under a strong leader. They often use as their point of focus the idea of “values” that Beckstrom talks about, calling them “principles.”

Having been struggling with Deleuzeguattarian thought, I see the contrast in patterns in a slightly different way. Their “rhizome versus tree” is the same contrast, but what they discuss is how forces in society can and will self-assemble a kind of “machine” for specific purposes. That is, affinity-needs interact with the ongoing forces we might call “history-in-the-making” and the purposes of government (acknowledged and unacknowledged) and commerce to produce groups. Deleuze and Guattari also consider that rhizomes are in communication with each other, like cells in a resistance. Therefore one seeking to understand this phenomenon would need to know a lot more than what values the individuals share.

If we look at the Tea Party movement, we see that forces might include onerous taxation and regulation (the putative focus), the vacuum left by dysfunctional and deadlocked political parties, the schism between those who are educated to understand science and those who prefer to use authority figures, modes of media (decentralized blogs versus cable), overpopulation, distressing economic patterns often attributed to corrupt and greedy big shots, and so on.

The NPR host, possibly because the example offered was the Tea Party movement, seen as right-wing, then went to a bit of bad reasoning known in the trade as mis-placed concreteness. The author had proposed the advantage of the starfish is that if you cut off its arms, it can regenerate and continue functioning. But a spider cannot grow a new leg and, when its head is cut off, is dead. So the host pointed out that a spider doesn’t have a head: the “head” is part of the body -- to have a head, you need a neck. And technically neither animal has a brain. And besides that, sponges can be put through a sieve and resume function as a lot of little sponges. So do you want to be a sponge? Very funny. (I would consider the function of prison as a sponge sieve.)

We have not yet really looked at the forces that shattered lucrative arts organizations into hundreds of local groups and individuals. The switch to electronic communication was only part of the change. Publishing, for instance, is not being replaced by ebooks simply because it’s possible. The quality of the books offered; the over-hyping of them; the economic piling up of profit in the hands of a few (both within the publishing house where faithful editors were thrown out to live as independent agents, and outside the publishers when they were acquired by conglomerates who knew nothing about books and only wanted profit); the failure of schools to teach people how to read; the rise of fancy critical theory resistant to understanding; the failure of marketers to reach out to thin and specialized populations; the movement of populations both displaced and immigrant which require different languages and information; the new consciousness of the hidden costs of paper which were no longer so hidden; the diminishment of the status of “famous writers” (Partly because everyone forgets the renaissance of books after WWII when GI’s learned to read paperbacks and writers had plenty of raw material); the new private habits of passively watching television or actively playing electronic games; the necessity of working hours that don’t leave time for reading; the demand for living in big houses that need a lot of maintenance and earning enough profit to pay for it -- not a little used bookstore at the beach that supports one old singleton and a cat. You get the picture. One could devise an algorithm.

One of the most powerful forces is the proportion of the world population that is young versus those who are old. The young are not “into” preservation and history. The world, so far as they are concerned, begins with them and they see themselves as creators as much as consumers. Connection comes naturally to them, but not hierarchy. All the authority figures have proven themselves inadequate if not outright wrong. Families no longer exist in the sense that they did. International corporations are plainly and defiantly trumping nations by imposing their lines of supply across borders and evading any kind of accountability: kids know that.

So, will a persuasive leader arise to unite us again? Maybe not. The central unifying force that CAN pull the population of the world into cooperation is probably a threat to human life en masse. But so far no one has vividly enough explained AIDS or global weather change or starvation in terms that can be more compelling than the Tea Party movement. And NPR, which is vulnerable to all the forces I listed above, needs to check their algorithm.

THE RHIZOME'S STOLON

“In biology, stolons (from Latin stolō "branch") are horizontal connections between organisms. They may be part of the organism, or of its skeleton; typically, animal stolons are external skeletons.” [replication by mitosis]

“Stolons are shoots that bend to the ground or that grow horizontally above the ground and produce roots and shoots at the nodes. The term, "stolons" is often used in describing the botany of lawn grasses. In contrast to stolons, rhizomes dwell underground.”

“Rhizomes are used as storage structures for nutrients.”

I think I pretty much “get” deleuseguatarian rhizomes (or if you prefer, plateaus). The advantages (and disadvantages) of smaller roughly equivalent nodes as structure compared to a “tree” top-down hierarchy are clear to this veteran of congregational polity. (Unitarians are independent congregations who collaborate through an association -- which constantly tries to impose uniformity and hierarchy, all the time protesting that it is not.) This leads me to consider what the connections among the groups might be like.

Between 1982 and 1985 I WAS the connection among the Unitarian fellowships of Montana which normally, because of distance, had little or no connection to each other or even to the district or national and international offices. The four groups that I served, as well as the two I did not, were all ostensibly of the same faith group (though sharing freedom of religion beliefs is rather different than being Catholic) but slightly different in practice, so that a person used to one group would be slightly off-kilter in any of the others. Economics and ecology were at the heart of those differences.

Two groups were university-based, so their members-per-population were higher, but one was “the” liberal arts university and the other began life as the “cow college”. Missoula considered itself highly sophisticated in its sequestered valley. Bozeman was frankly athletic in its own much higher valley. Helena was the state capital with many bureaucrats looking for a personal community base. Great Falls was both agricultural (grain and beef) and military, which didn’t always mesh. The railroad and smelter had left by the time I was there, but I doubt that they brought in many members anyway.

The UUA was underwriting this circuit-riding experiment and their premise was that by connecting and nourishing these small groups, I could make them “grow.” In the end their goals were the same as Louis Hill and Paris Gibson, who wanted enough tax-paying and crop-shipping people out there to support a railroad and a town of merchants and banks. That is, the UUA wanted me to promote the interests of the UUA, which were dues income and prestige. This wasn’t ideological so much as just practical. It certainly wasn’t ever expressed frankly to either the congregations or myself. The experiment lasted three years, which both fulfilled and exhausted me, and was probably blocked for a while afterwards by the depression of those years which keeps popping up in comparisons with the most recent couple of years.

The connectors (“stolons” in botanical terms) I used were myself and my message, which I repeated four times, twice a Sunday; the newsletter I put out once a month; and statewide events. It took me some months at the beginning to develop what kind of variation on the denominational message (formal principles) would work in Montana for all four groups. It took the whole three years of our grant to get down past the decorations to the heart of the matter: friendship community among a group of real people with affinities as well as status in the larger community. I’m not sure they recognized the second part themselves. They did understand the community part and the three year plan helped that aspect very much. But as a person who rejects “status” in most social contexts, I was not helpful except that I was very low cost and attuned to the local. Status is expensive.

My experience with rhizomatous community is strong. Probably the earliest was family, and then next a neighborhood friendship group among women who started meeting for games and dessert when one of the sons committed suicide by hanging in a public park. He was our paperboy. The women meant to support the mother through her grief and had enough momentum to last until most of them had moved away.

The most glamorous example of rhizomes was repertory theatre, partly in the academic scene of Northwestern University and partly as summer theatre at Eaglesmere, PA. The “stolon” that connected the two was Alvina Krause, a famous acting coach. I was only a costumer but it drove the idealism deeply into me and associated it once-and-for-all with the idea that there are no small parts, only small actors.

The example that dominated our family was my father’s job as a field man for an ag wholesale co-op. Like my circuit-riding gig, his task was to be the “stolon” among the many small ag co-ops of the Pacific Northwest. Some grew into major organizations, like Tillamook Cheese and Gresham Berry Growers. The wholesale co-op itself gradually became much more of a corporation and the bitterness of that also accompanies me in my thoughts, since the focus shifted from the original purpose to cash profit -- not growth in depth and meaning. Marketing.

Today I live in a village which operates as a cooperative except that no one wants to do the work of maintenance because it takes time and puts a target on one’s back. In a way my blog acts as a stolon, because I attend the town council meetings, take notes, and comment on this blog. The worst enemy of rhizomes, in my political understanding, is being secret. I want them daylighted, which is where I part company with revolution. I want evolution in response to situation. So part of the duty of the “stolon” is to carry “nutrients” (information and response) back to the rhizome. Still, I am against the violation of privacy and know that “uprooting” families and businesses can destroy them.

My last romantic example of rhizomatous organization is the Blackfeet tribe in its position as a sovereign entity. Beginning as “gens” or loose collections of people -- family and territory based -- they have evolved into a tribe conceived and defined by outsiders who want to impose a “tree-shaped” corporation model and who have some success in creating an oligarchy. Fascinating to watch, painful to be in.

Such metaphors are only useful if they are abandoned when they don’t fit, but this rhizome idea is strong and necessary help in resisting the flattening and harrowing by the media, underwritten by corporation/government collusion.