I DON'T WANT BABIES

About 1966

At an early age it was my life decision never to get pregnant.  The gynies write down “null partum” on my chart.  They didn’t believe I haven’t at least had an abortion.  I had an absolute rule that I would not consort with a man who wasn’t sterile.  There weren’t many of them and they were older.  My actual husband was twice my age.  There was plenty of canoodling in that consortium and in fact he had quite a colorful reputation.

The reason I didn’t have children were:

a) I wanted to be a free spirit who didn’t have to always give up my own goals in order to feed and house children;

b) I never found a man who would or could dependably and healthily help raise children — many of them wanted to BE children.

c)  My extended family (cousins and sibs) dropped the family gatherings and the sense of connection.

d)  As far as I could understand, World War never ended — it just moved around and made different groups into refugees.  Walk for miles across barren lands carrying a starving child?  No.  And don't tell me it can't happen here.  Ask an Indian.

Trail of Tears

e)  I was physically terrified of pregnancy and childbirth which seemed to me like a form of cancer.  The prospect of a larval parasite growing inside me was quite accurately depicted in the “Alien” movies.

f)  In my day (b 1939) out-of-wedlock pregnancy was a social disaster — not unlike a social death sentence.  

g)  Marriage was everything (very much entwined with pregnancy) and my mother's worst fear for me was her worst curse: “no one will ever marry you.”  It was the taunt against her as a young woman (she married at thirty) and then converted to teasing predictions that her husband would leave her.  This was totally unjustified. 

h)  I have discovered that men will try to attach to me for reasons other than sex and if they are turned away, they become vengeful, not because of jealousy but because of need. 

h)  My social skills stink.  I’m always reacting as though I were in some other century, some other country, some other part of town.  Some people thought I was crazy and I was determined not to pass it on.

i)  I don’t fit with women.  Maybe one or two.  My political and sentimental patterns are so different they seem hostile.

i)  If I had a child, it would have such an intense grip on my heart that I would kill to protect it and give my own life to save it.  Attachment to cats or maybe very close friends via email is about as much as I can handle, but the people closest to me are male.

The situation on my father’s side was a little different from that on my mother’s side.  Both sides were country people, but my grandfather was well-educated in Scotland and my grandmother taught until she married and homesteaded in South Dakota.  (Brulé Sioux country: Faulkton, established after the Sioux were moved to Rosebud.)  Her first infant was premature because she rode the wagon to town late in pregnancy.  He lived 17 days.  Her sister ran off with an improvident man because she was pregnant by accident. She died in childbirth. 

My grandfather is back center

Beulah, my grandmother, was never hearty and in that inland part of the continent before iodized salt, had health troubles that developed into goiter and pushed the family to relocate to Portland, OR, where the food was often from the sea.  I think she was carrying endocrine flaws, possibly at the level of the epigenome.  She was very strict and a WCTU member because of her brother’s alcoholism.  But no one on that side is religious, just very conscious of propriety.

On my mother’s side the confusions were emotional and connected directly to class, wealth and success.  The siblings married another rural family stream that followed those principles regardless of sin, law and relationships.  But it was as though my father thought subsistence was the only level of prosperity that was safe.  He just never was ambitious and neither were my brothers.  My mother compensated.

All of this affected my understanding of family, marriage and children.  I never saw children as unconnected to those forces or as unconnected to other life on the planet.  To me a baby is not an object, not a doll.  But a doll, even a paper doll, can in my imagination become a Pinocchio, a Velveteen Rabbit.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_m054tLKvs  I worry about them.  Some of them (yeah, the Pinocchios) don’t like that.

University of Manitoba

My father’s education was at the University of Manitoba where his roommate was part of the “Green Revolution”, improved crops that they hoped would end famine, but it didn’t.  If there was more food, the people on the edge had more children, because children were a form of wealth and insurance.  I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of overpopulation and it's tense relationship to grain.

I didn’t escape other people’s children, most directly my step-daughter’s children, whose mother’s early death of cancer left them traumatized and confused in the care of their biological father who had remarried a woman with many children.  It was a freeforall.  They sought love where they could in many different forms, mostly alcohol and sex, but also in achievement. 

Ellison Westgarth MacFie Scriver and Mary Strachan Scriver (me)

Bob had never raised his own children (I was a third wife) and was unreal about his grandchildren.  His mother, their great-grandmother or “Little Grandma”, had never grown up emotionally and did not help, though she mimed being the fond grandmother.  In the end she wanted an orderly prosperous life with one Boston Bull terrier and the pretty daughter of her other son.  It was not narcissism so much as theatre, and children never follow the script.

The place that would have been occupied by babies of my own genome was taken up by animal children.  My arms and pillow were often occupied by pups and kits, but they were transient, only needing months to grow up and leave.  If you put a human baby in my arms, my emotional reaction is so strong that I turn red and begin to sweat, heart pounding.

Me, my mother, and brother.

I was highly skeptical of these baby creatures.

So babies are to me something like bombs, carrying demands and consequences that are nearly impossible to meet.  I think that to my mother her babies were like that except that she managed to give me what she had most wanted:  to finish her college degree and to have a proper wedding.  I didn’t much care about them except as means to a life of my own, but even then I had to take refuge with her again a few times.  By that time my father, who had a closed skull concussion in 1948, was dead, but my youngest brother had also come home with brain damage and so the pattern repeated.

I’m glad I never had children.  The brother who had hit his head so hard turned out to have an excellent healthy daughter whom I know now.  When it is time, which is years away, she will be the one to have my body cremated and my household dispersed and she is capable of doing that.  I’m grateful.

My last baby doll

Christmas, 1950

If one has no children of one’s own, there are plenty of other children who are dying literally for lack of family.  Some of them are inventing new forms, maybe a webwork of street kids or households of criminalized kids or kids raised in care.  Because I am atypical and “normal” life is a mystery to me, I am sympathetic to the ornery, fragile, medically problematic, temperamentally volcanic, and fantasist kids.  They’re a little like those animals I raised.  

The ghastly part is that the bobcats and foxes I had cuddled did not have the reflexes they ought to have been taught and were murdered, often by human kids.  The same thing sometimes happens to atypical kids for something like the same reasons, but the murderers are usually grown men, power-cravers whose own families are not enough.  They’re hard on pets, too.  If I knew someone had hurt a baby of mine, I would . . .  It would not end well.

ONE AGAINST THE WORLD

The Tao by Jennifer Baird

Let’s look at it this way:

The Tao or Way is specific to an ecology and is a person’s strategy for survival -- maybe more than that, like happiness and security.

If the survival is meant to be that of the group and if it is organized by and for the group, which has it’s own internal ecology, then it’s an institution.

If the survival is meant to be the individual, then it’s spirituality. ("Nones.")

Theology is rational, like math.  Formulas and therefores.  Spirituality is a feeling, but that doesn’t mean it’s not-real or other-worldly.  It is a totally involved feeling, when meaning is deeply subconscious as well as conscious.  It is bodily, as are all feelings.

A system or even a Way that works in one ecology might not work in a different one, not least because the material culture will not provide the right metaphors.  (Ex:  Inuit have no lambs, no trees for crosses, no bread, no wine.)

Because personal spirituality is ungoverned and probably ungovernable (though possibly evokable), it can oppose institutional religion and vice versa.  The institution will try to define and control “religion” as a form of governance.  Now consider this study below, which I’m editing for brevity.

Neurobiological Correlates of Social Conformity and Independence During Mental Rotation by Gregory S. Berns, Jonathan Chappelow, Caroline F. Zink, Giuseppe Pagnoni, Megan E. Martin-Skurski, Jim Richards.

“When individual judgment conflicts with a group, the individual will often conform his judgment to the group. Conformity may arise at an executive level of decision making, or it may arise because the social setting alters the individual’s perception of the world.

 Method: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a task of mental rotation in the context of peer pressure to investigate the neural basis of individualistic and conforming behavior in the face of wrong information.

Results: Conformity was associated with functional changes in an occipital – parietal network, especially when the wrong information originated from other people.  [They also tried the experiment with computers disagreeing.] Independence was associated with increased amygdalar and caudate activity, findings consistent with the assumptions of social norm theory about the behavioral saliency of standing alone. 

Conclusions: These findings provide the first biological evidence for the involvement of perceptual and emotional processes during social conformity.. . . a group of individuals is statistically more likely to make a better decision than any one person alone (Arrow 1963; Grofman and Feld 1988). But the superiority of the group disappears when individuals influence each other (Ladha 1992). Moreover, individuals may capitulate to a group, not as part of the social contract, but because the unpleasantness of standing alone makes the majority opinion more appealing than one’s own beliefs (Cialdini and Goldstein 2004). . .

An individual’s judgment has been assumed to reflect what that individual perceives (Coren and Enss 1993), but other factors can influence perception, such as categorization (Goldstone 1995) and social class (Stapel and Koomen 1997), indicating that perception is not simply a passive process.  . . . We hypothesized that if social conformity resulted from conscious decision- making this would be associated with functional changes in prefrontal cortex, whereas if social conformity was more perceptually based, then activity changes would be seen in occipital and parietal regions. . . . To induce conformity while performing the mental rotation task, participants were presented with the responses of four peers, who, unknown to the participant, were actors giving wrong answers half of the time.

Discussion

[Detailed information about which areas of the brain did what when the subject bowed to the outside opinions was redacted here.]

Of course, this does not rule out an executive decision-making process. . . . The vast majority of participants indicated that, at least on some trials, they went along with the external information because they thought that they had arrived serendipitously at the same correct answer. . .One possibility is that the external information created confusion in the participants’ minds where none existed before.

The Pain of Independence

Compared to behavioral research of conformity, comparatively little is known about the mechanisms of non-conformity, or independence. In one psychological framework, the group provides a normative influence on the individual. Depending on the particular situation, the group’s influence may be purely informational – providing information to an individual who is unsure of what to do. More interesting is the case in which the individual has definite opinions of what to do but conforms due to a normative influence of the group due to social reasons. In this model, normative influences are presumed to act through the aversiveness of being in a minority position (Hornsey et al 2003).

The amygdala activation in our experiment was perhaps the clearest marker of the emotional load associated with standing up for one’s belief. Another key component of social norm theory is that the information provided by the group must be salient to the individual. Besides the amygdala, the only other brain structure differentially activated by social independence was the right caudate nucleus . . . It is therefore not surprising that the caudate should be most active when the participant behaved independently of the group, for this is the condition of most salience: conflicting information and social isolation. . . .

Conclusions

To our knowledge, this is the first study of brain activity associated with social conformity and independence. Here, we present brain imaging findings that provide key biological evidence for the major psychological theory of conformity . . . The two main questions surrounding this inconsistency are whether conformity is culturally determined and whether conformity has changed over time as socio-political forces have shaped the relative acceptance of individualism or collectivism. . . The flip-side of conformity, independence, was found to be associated with subcortical activity changes indicative of emotional salience, a finding that lends support to social norm theory (Cialdini and Goldstein 2004).

Some people will be delighted to find that there is an actual physiological reason for what they have felt strongly, that is, the need to think and judge for oneself.  Others will be angry and offended that their identity, their “near mystical” self, is anything but a kind of soul that cannot be located in this reality and therefore empowers and authorizes them to over-rule everything else, even intimate others.  A strong feeling of this kind is a potent force in the face of persecution and even martyrdom.  Ask Louis Riel.  It is a kind of opposition to group forces that does not lend itself to compromise or even negotiation.  I suspect it is a conviction that is an advantage in harsh circumstances such as a challenging ecology like high prairie or seafaring.

As the power and number of the larger group increases, and particularly when that group is unified by “religious” convictions of what reality and necessity demand, then the culture becomes less and less tolerant of independence, redefined as deviance.  Now the adaptive style and brain operation is “go along to get along.”  Those who can manage that will do better.

Until the larger conditions become so difficult -- maybe because of war or famine or simply an economy that makes the lives of many into misery -- that the “religious” rules are questioned.  Then there will be either reform movements (return to the roots) or a Kuhnian reaching for a better system.  I interpret present times as responding to the multiple pressures of overpopulation, partly reinforced by crowding into mega-cities.

Back in the days of rat psych, someone rented a barn and built inside it an inescapable but observable “rat farm.”  Then they let overpopulation run rampant.  The result was very much like today’s cities and Middle East.  Another man, researching the inheritable temperament of dogs, put four different breeds into four enclosures and let the same inevitable process happen, breed by breed.  The terriers attacked each other, the cocker spaniels went nuts, and so on.  That is, brain differences came out.  The rats had just reacted like rats.

I’m suggesting that when the world is crowded, the tension between spiritual (individual) and religious (institutional) is so intensified that it’s hard not to be a rat.  Or a martyr.  The images become powerful.  Attractive suffering.  It can even be sexy.

GETTING RID OF PEOPLE

“The House I Live In” depends quite a lot on the input of David Simon, the originator and writer of “The Wire,” which is basically the same point of view in conventional fiction narrative form.  A few nights ago I watched “Why We Fight,” by Eugene Jarecki, the same director who made “The House I Live In” and with quotes from David Simon at length.  I see both movies as an attempt to move across the divide James Flynn described in the way people think about life.  We are watching people who live in a concrete, self-circumscribed, primary experience life but watching through the mind of Simon, who is an analytical, abstract, systems thinker.  In short, a Raven.  If you can think with Simon, the result is galvanizing.  If you cannot, go read something else.  There’s no use lingering around this blog.

“The House I Live In” is about the drug “war” in the United States, not in Columbia or Afghanistan.  Nor does it blame anyone so much as it reveals a horrifying urge in all societies to get rid of those who are different, esp. if they compete with power or resources.  It is not a surprise that Jarecki is Jewish and still thinking about the Nazi holocaust.  Neither should you be surprised that I apply his conclusions to Irish/Scots and Blackfeet.  The point is that the answers to some of our most horrifyingly tragic forces are looked at in concrete provincial terms so that we always blame individuals as rotten individuals.  That way we don’t have to change the social arrangements that push people into drug use.

Beyond even drugs, the causes may also account for war, famine, and AIDS.  They amount to the same thing as keeping population under control by systematically killing or confining about 17% of the population, one way or another.

Here’s the formula:

1.  Identification:  Who are the people we can separate from the others and that others don’t particularly care about?

2.  Ostracism:  Demonize and stigmatize them so that the mainstream will pull away even farther.  Never let people realize that they are human beings.

3.  Confiscation:  Begin taking their belongings as illegitimately acquired or being bad for society.  This includes abstracts like the right to vote or access to subsidies.  In the early days of the rez the government quietly gave land, timber and hay to the railroads without ever passing the profits on to the tribe.

4.  Concentration:  Create ghettos and gerrymander voting blocks.  “Round up the usual suspects.”  The original reservation idea.

5.  Annihilation:  It’s not necessary to use a machine gun.  Simply make it hard for them economically, educationally, democratically, so that natural attrition -- as much an invisible hand as Adam Smith’s capitalism and often the same thing -- will wear them away without anyone noticing.

So this analytic formula is brilliant, because all we have to do to reverse it is to turn it on its head.  Let’s use the example of Blackfeet.

1.  The identification of who is Blackfeet is a major problem at present and seems like a drawback, a source of damage as people stop qualifying for tribal membership, government subsidies, employment priorities and so on.  But the more it is confused -- both by the fancy definitions of provenance (misleadingly called blood quantum), by the contrasting ways of living that the people choose, by intertribal marriage, and by life off the reservation -- the harder it is to say THIS is a Blackfeet and THIS is not.  Culture is even less specific and concrete.  Blackfeet is becoming an abstract category.  It’s harder and harder to “round them up.”

The hardest “identification” problem is in the concrete public mind where they remain 19^th century horseback warriors.  

2.  Ostracizing Blackfeet gets harder all the time.  There are enough now to field state representatives and to form voting blocks.  Businesses cannot afford not to take their purchases and contracts seriously.  Stigmatizing is easier, when the media is eager to sensationalize every sign of conflict or malfeasance, but tribal members are now lawyers and letter writers who are educated.  It’s easy to ostracize a staggering, slobbering individual as a concrete known person, but it’s pretty hard to exclude people who look and act like everyone else.  Even physically recognizing an Indian face may not be very easy these days.

3.  Confiscation has been a problem since Euros confiscated the continent.  Now the artifacts of the tribe are confiscated at the border when they are carried by whites or for other excuses.  When there is a bottleneck where people can be held until they forfeit, there will always be temptations to use it for selfish ends.  Federal and other officials are high-handed about impounding, quietly converting to private trophies, or returning to favored individuals in the tribe rather than the group as a whole.  Beyond that, confiscation of land is easily managed by debts, federal and otherwise, that cannot be paid off, so result in default.  The feds often seem very generous about granting money for schools or hospitals, but then might deduct the money from the profitable management of the tribal and individual assets in trust with the government.

4.  Concentration on the reservation worked pretty well until wars and relocation scattered half the tribe all over the nation.  Even so, there are internal concentration problems with a small community like Heart Butte or some subsidized housing plots.  Stigma and ostracism within the tribe is as real as it is between the tribe and the “outside” world.  Education is the best and quickest way to scatter concentration, but it is also a form of assimilation to the larger culture.  When educated tribal members return and rejoin their people, the stigma of concentration is diluted.  We should be far more concerned about the concentration of Indians in prisons, but the concentration of Indians in the military appears to be a plus.

5.  Annihilation was once actual, immediate, and bloody.  Now it is subtle: drugs, alcohol, violence, and child neglect.  Abuse of the weak, rejection of justice, and the slow erosion of cultural identity proceeds.

Much of the “help” given tribal people is in the name of “compassion,” which the Blackfeet speakers often translate as “pity.”  The recovery of alcoholics and so on usually rejects “pity parties.”  The idea is to surrender to greater powers and then get to work.  Easier said than done.  Sovereignty taken seriously is self-reliance which CAN be protection of the entire tribe.

There is no doubt that there needs to be a curb on world overpopulation and there is no doubt that it would be easier to just pick out the 17% of the world’s people that we don’t like and simply machine gun them -- although it would take a while to get rid of the bodies.  Some dictators have done that very directly.  They weren’t around to realize that the people they didn’t like (intellectuals, nonconformists, artists and sexworkers) were sorely missed and damaged the quality of life for everyone.  But we can watch them and learn:  Pol Pot is not a good role model.