A PERSPECTIVE ON EVOLUTION OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD

This is the way I understand evolution by mutation.  DNA "stutters" a bit and the different ones may be better adapted to survive.  It is NOT about power but about fittingness in terms of the existing ecology.

First, one-celled beings able to move around in water rather than being pinned in one place.  (We call the pinned down ones "plants.")  They had to have a head for approaching food and a tail for backing away from danger.

Multiple-celled creatures who figured out meiosis.  (Sex!) Each generation got a new start.  BUT every repeat keeps the basic plan while adding new code that might change the way the old code works. Rarely, bits of code are gone.  

Worm things, with tube systems for blood and linked bits for sending electrochemical messages.  Sometimes multiple hearts or brains.

Fishes with notochords and then backbones, which are so deep in the coding that bilateralism and quadropods rule from then on.

Amphibians who can go on both land and in water.  The new development is internal lungs instead of gills.  One brain per creature, but increasingly complex.

Reptiles who live on land with a minimum of oxygen or need for calories because one of the things they discard is body temp control.

Mammals with fur for temp control, making babies inside the mother's body instead of laying eggs, which means nurturing, attachment, and elaboration of the brain. This is the beginning of culture.

"Eutheria is one of two mammalian clades with extant members that diverged in the Early Cretaceous or perhaps the Late Jurassic. Except for the North American Virginia opossum, which is a metatherian, all post-Miocene mammals indigenous to Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America north of Mexico are eutherians."

"The simians or Anthropoids are the monkeys, incl. apes, cladistically including: the New World monkeys or platyrrhines, and the Catarrhine clade consisting of the Cercopithecidae and apes. The simians are sister to the tarsiers, together forming the Haplorhines. The radiation occurred about 60 million years ago."  (Says whoever wrote the entry at Wiki.)

"A primate is a eutherian mammal constituting the taxonomic order Primates. Primates arose 85–55 million years ago from small terrestrial mammals, which adapted to living in the trees of tropical forests."

"The Hominidae (whose members are known as great apes or hominids, are a taxonomic family of primates that includes eight extant species in four genera: Pongo/orangutan; Gorilla; Pan, the common chimpanzee and the bonobo; and Homo, which includes modern humans and their extinct relatives (e.g., the Neanderthal), and ancestors, such as Homo erectus

.

Several revisions in classifying the great apes have caused the use of the term "hominid" to vary over time. Its original meaning referred only to humans (Homo) and their closest extinct relatives. That restrictive meaning has now been largely assumed by the term "hominin", which comprises all members of the human clade after the split from the chimpanzees (Pan). The current, 21st-century meaning of "hominid" includes all the great apes including humans." 

We now think there may have been as many as 200 hominins, interweaving with each other, traveling over long distances, gradually accumulating knowledge through culture, which is passing information across generational lines, as in the "stone age," the "copper age," the "iron age" and so on.  We might say we are in the silicon age because of putting code on silicon wafers, but the forecast is that we will begin to write code on the genetic code.  We can now edit our own organic code as created by conception.

"All humans have the same genes arranged in the same order. And more than 99.9% of our DNA sequence is the same. But the few differences between us (all 1.4 million of them!) are enough to make each one of us unique. On average, a human gene will have 1-3 bases that differ from person to person." (U of Utah genetics)

The information in DNA is stored as a code made up of four chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). ... DNA bases pair up with each other, A with T and C with G, to form units called base pairs.  These are what make us adapt, change, develop by pushing each living being up against an environment that supplies different molecular materials, growing conditions, and internal specializations.  

At one time the thought was that the organic creature created through the egg code was separate from the ability to "think" with the brain, which specializes in neuron cells with the ability to form systems or circuits, that are capable of building knowledge taken both from the environment and from inside the body,  called "inskin/outskin."  This knowledge is in "concepts" which are pre-words but organized by sensory information into memories.  When spoken word code developed, this information became share-able between humans.  

When the written code based on spoken word code developed, human information could be passed from one human to another over long periods of time or carried from one place to another by a messenger.  When the Morse code was invented, it was possible to send the written code over wires for long distances.  Then came the telephone that could carry voice code just as far, and then television that could transmit through thin air both sound and sight, but not smell, taste, or temperature -- alas.

Math was capable of expressing complex and abstract code and manipulating it.  Computers greatly increased all these abilities having to do with code, but neglected the sensory life, which led to people overvaluing anything a computer could do, including operating from outer space, and devaluing the human sensory life which is full of information both inskin and outskin, so much that it became an ideal for a person to be like a computer, a reduction.

Meanwhile the operation of the human body has continued to evolve.  Empathy, the ability to respond to the "expressive frame" of face, heart and lungs, has  potentially expanded one person's understanding and creation to a whole community of shared ideas, both deliberate and arising from circumstances.  These communities interacting may be both destructive or constructive.  

Some feel that empathy and the art of self-management, which is largely dependent on the individual's interaction with the community in order to feel safe and think clearly, is the growing edge that will save us from whatever it is left from earlier developments that wants to kill, destroy, prevent change, and dominate.  Bits of those impulses go all the way back to the first "animals," the microbes who still try to eat us.

"OKI, CHEEKEE!"

Whether it is ironic or harmonic, there are two language movements that are "rhyming" at the moment, but yet they have no relationship at all.  One is the recovery of the indigenous languages of the Americas and the other is represented by an English writer, Robert McFarlane, who pursues the old words of England based on vocation or place.  One could say that both are a result of re-empowering the response of the whole body and brain to the world, but that's probably not so interesting right now, a little abstract.  Rather, people give these nearly forgotten words the power of incantation, able to cast spells.

Once I subbed at the Piegan Institute, an immersion school for Blackfeet language.  This was not usual because I'm white, but it was a product of friendship with Darrell Robes Kipp, founder and director, who was caught by a deadline.  The idea was for me to "teach" for a couple of hours.  The kids were junior high students, non-standard indigenous, and the dynamics were interesting but not relevant here.

One girl stood out.  I can't remember why, but I asked for Blackfeet words about horses.  She went to the board and quickly listed and explained the words for a whole series of ages of horses, states they were in, their uses, and so on.  I was stunned!  Not that they existed, but that she knew the words.  And I had confidence that she knew these kinds of horses, could point them out in a band, and probably learned the words from growing up on a ranch with older generations.

That was forty years ago.  Kipp and his philosophical partner Dorothy Still Smoking had composed a questionnaire as preparation and were startled that most respondents said they didn't approve of learning the old language.  It was useless, too hard, and would just get a person into trouble.  They themselves and their parents had been punished harshly for speaking the old words.  This attack on indigenous languages has become a mantra in tribes.  

It is partly because of the efforts of people like Kipp and Still Smoking that this view has reversed.  Before Piegan Institute, there was Marvin Weatherwax at the Blackfeet Community College, Marvin's mother collaborating with Terri Sherburne to use the classroom French mastery sound system for Blackfeet.  People made fun of Peter Redhorn's little brochures for tourists that listed basic words, but I learned some of them.  Nowaday, one can earn a degree in anthropological linguistics in Missoula.  Robert Hall, defender of Rez Dogs, has done that.
  

Jack Holterman, a free-lance public scholar now gone, was a good friend  of Darrell Robes Kipp and encouraged Piegan Institute.  He says this:

"In more recent times, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'i of Canada issued a Message to the Blackfeet Indians, written in both English and Blackfoot. In 1989, Donald Frantz and Norma Jean RusselJ compiled a Blackfoot Dictionary published by the University of Toronto Press. This was followed by a grammar book published a year later. . .

"Among the South Piegans, today called the Blackfeet, several members of the tribe are noted for their dedication teaching the language. Peter Red Horn, Nellie Reevis, Molly Bull Shoe, and Elizabeth Butterfly Lewis made solid contributions to the understanding of the language during the last forty years.

"In 1983, at the tribal college, younger members of the tribe began to acquire a respect for the language, and a strong desire to re-Iearn it. Much of the written work was gathered and studied. Fluent speakers of the tribe soon found themselves sought after in the midst of a renaissance that continues today."

There were compelling reasons for the Blackfeet to revive their old language, but it's more difficult to explain the runaway success of Robert Macfarlane in books that are glossaries of unspoken languages.  The pursuit of language and its development both in depth and across continents, is somewhat similar to exploring genomic information or the broad linguistic questions about how humans learn to speak and write, how languages separate and braid back together.  

Entomologies, the history of specific words and where they came from, are a force back towards standardization instead of being distorted by guesses or simple mispronunciation.  But the only real way to get back to the richness and meaning of old languages is to go to the places and pursuits the words came from, as in Macfarlane's strategy of going to the place where peat is cut in order to understand the many specialized words.   A common use of Macfarlane's concrete but intense vocabulary is in classrooms where the group collaborates on a poem that is a list or a definition of something the students know.  Some of them are quite striking and commonly show up online in social media.

The title I used for this post, "oki, cheekee!" is what Bob used to say if a local tribal person came into the shop, usually to sell something.  It means, "Hello, what's up?"  Sorta.  But besides that is what Darrell explained to me and Bob only half-knew, which is it's a way of addressing a kid, off-hand, not quite respectful.  Bob learned it while clerking at the Browning Merc, his dad's store when he was himself a kid.

My niece, a pretty young mother who drives a pickup, was visiting and we had stopped for gas.  When she opened her door, a big scruffy Blackfeet man, a little bit drunk, came and crowded in beside her behind the steering wheel.  He wanted to borrow money and she was flummoxed by the invasion.  I waited to see what she would do, but she was caught between her romantic notions of Indians and this ruffian.  So I said, "Oki, cheekee!"  He did a quick double-take, got out, and stood at attention.  "I'm Mary Scriver," I said.  Now he could hardly be respectful enough.  He was old enough to remember Bob Scriver and drunk enough to forget he'd been dead for decades.  For once, the slightly patronizing tone was exactly right.  Except that my niece had no idea what I said that worked so effectively.

I laughed and laughed.  It's good to know languages.

STEPS IN THE TRAJECTORY OF A LIFE

A person is not an object, but a trajectory unfolding within and against the context of everything else in the world from planetary climate to molecular isotopes.  At any point the person will be changed, if only slightly, or possibly wiped out.

Some forces will create advantages -- not just economic ones, but also parents who can nurture, neighborhoods that are safe, and nations that are stable.  But some forces will damage and distort the person in that moment or possibly all along the remaining trajectory.  The media is full of accounts of trauma to children in every part of the world, at every economic level, religious or not, expected and explained, or totally unsuspected, like subtle contaminations.

The life trajectory of persons in their first one-fifth or so are subdivided into clear stages according to their development, not taking into account the variations of culture or ecosystem or notions about life.  Damages done to them have far more attention than the positive factors.  After the first one-fifth or so, there's not so much research or even opinion, except that in the "pop" mind there's a reconsideration that used to be marked in women by the end of fertility and menstruation.  Some will posit a male "mid-life crisis" having more to do with physical strength or employability.  

By that point the descendant generation will be able to cope on its own, which can change dynamics.  I'm saying that biology still marks time passing.  In fact, what used to be the turning point towards decline was forty, but is now past fifty and looking at sixty.  We think of two old ages: capable and engaged, and then fading into need.

Enormous pressure exists towards protecting, rescuing and celebrating children.  Gestation also proceeds in stages we call "trimesters".  In the first trimester the pregnancy is hardly apparent and we're told as many as one-fifth fail naturally without even being recognized.  The nausea in the mother at that time is said to be due to change in hormones and even to a barely dampened attempt to eject the new conceptus as a foreign entity.  Things like drinking or organic psychological difficulties (unbalanced hormones, non-functioning bits) can affect the tiny functions of the new cells.

The second trimester is relatively peaceful but the third one makes the growth of the new being crowd and burden everything in the mother's body.  "Quickening," the first perception of the baby moving independently, used to be important but now it's pushed aside by our ability to make sonograms or even use a needle to pull out cells for analysis.  We no longer worry about "ensoulment."

The third, and even the second trimesters, are also affected by a philosophical and political war over whether a gestating infant is a human being in the full sense of having legal standing.  If a mother with a baby inside is killed, so that the baby also dies, is that one murder or two?  This is quite apart from war atrocities that deliberately rip out the baby and kill it.  On the positive side, babies have been operated on in the womb, by cutting access through the mother and then closing it.  I'll just skip abortion.

The point of birth is probably the most dangerous and impressive event in a human life, though only the mother remembers it.  Before my mother's generation both mothers and babies often died, independently or together.  Today's medical world is faced with the problem of the price of saving in particular the baby when it is marginal.

The very first days may expose the baby to trauma in the new harsh environment.  Adjusting to eating instead of nourishment through transfusion is one of the first causes of distress.  The brain would already be capable of forming around impressions of abuse.  Cells are abundant but those not used will die.

The first few months and years of life are parallel to a nestling bird that is born only able to eat, excrete, and gape.  The brain must learn to operate limbs and organs, which isn't easy and could become traumatic if punished or neglected.  This will affect the existential base of personality from then on.  It is physical, nearly impossible to change, though it will accept additions.

From three to age eight or so, the child is perfecting the "human" skills of walking and talking.  It reacts to others but doesn't always remember.  At one stage it becomes fearful, which seems related to brain maturing.  It is vulnerable to torture, deliberate abuse to invite distress, whether or not that is defined as "sexual."

At eight a person can be considered by some cultures to be a mini-adult and asked to work.  This period might be defined as erotic and social, though fertility doesn't come until after twelve or so, but a person at this stage can interact.  I've heard it said by perverts that girls this age may be molested even to penetration because they can't conceive.  Much of our sexual morality is controlled by the fertility of women and was biologically constrained in men by age until the invention of viagra.

Adolescence is a well-known stage in Western Culture but not very well managed.  This stage of life is deeply affected by economics, so that systems that make a marriage partner necessarily obligate a fee or forge a power advantage, can cause boys in particular to be turned out of the family or at other periods of history could change the course of nations.  Fertility-based moral systems blend biology with politics in mythological ways particularly vulnerable to things like medical inventions that change the terms of relationship.  For instance, something like virginity was once a way of guarding the monetary value of the bride and protecting from disease or the damage of childbirth.  It justified the horror of sewing a child's vulva shut and condemned royal wives to beheading.

We don't much recognize the early twenties as a stage except that some would like to put this age gtoup on their parent's insurance.  It is a time of advanced education or employment beginnings, including military careers, all of which shut some opportunities and open others, for which the person may or may not truly qualify.  If they do, they can expect better health, probably less trauma, and more happiness.  The key to a successful life is not money but education and engagement with others.

THERE'S MORE TO EMBODIMENT

I'm a terrible snob who was convinced at about age 3 of being smart -- and even superior -- by all the wrong evidence: 

1.  Our house was full of books.

2.  I was one of only a couple of people in my big high school who were finalists for National Merit Scholarships, though I didn't actually get one.

3.  I had a different full scholarship to Northwestern.

4.  People told me I was really smart.

BUT . . . 

1.  The books were trivial pop stuff, which I didn't know enough to realize.

2.  At college everyone had been a National Merit Scholarship finalist and a lot of people actually got it.

3.  The scholarship I did get was more because I was poor but not embarrassing and was politically justifying to the university.  I mean, they wanted to look generous.

4.  Most people didn't know any REALLY smart people.  In fact, I'm not sure I did until U of Chicago.  But now I redefine "smart."  I'm not.

Nevertheless, two people listened to my undergrad rambling about religion and life and all that stuff.  One was my biology partner, Bill Shaw, whom I loved very much but who was a bit alarmed by me.  He was nicknamed "Hume" because that was his focus.  The second came through Browning in the early 60's and I don't remember his name, but he looked a bit like Bill.  He invited me to come out to his camp on Cut Bank Creek for supper, which he cooked over a campfire.  I did and loved it and he liked me, too.  He said I sounded like Spinoza and invited me to run away with him to Berkeley.  I was tempted, but loved where I was already.  It would have been a very different life choice.

In the Fifties "smart" was for boys and consisted of math and physics so they could go to the moon.  In high school there were two "enriched" streams for smart kids.  One was for boys (math and physics) and one was for girls (lit and writing).  I took the female route and discovered that the teachers were neither competent nor respected.  I might as well have been taking embroidery and piano.  (Actually, I was -- through 4-H and individual piano teachers.  They were taught in the most naive and concrete way, no reference to history or theory, just imitation and repetition of old women in the nabe.)

Going to Northwestern while Alvina Krause was teaching Method acting was an immense stroke of luck, or maybe I was seeking it.  Also, I took courses on religion about the nature of being human, ways of relating, tragic errors and so on  -- the big emotional stuff.  I also took all the psych I could, but it was about white rats, S/R.   (Stimulus/Response, not to be confused with S/M.)  When marriage collapsed and I discovered the Third Wave psych thinkers -- Rogers, Maslow, Erikson, Fromm, and so on -- it was no longer about white rats and nut cases, but began to consider what was not just "smart" but "wise."

The U of Chicago was "smart" in the old lab rat and big technology ways, but there were little signs of a more wholistic way of looking at humans.  I make this statement so it will explain in a minute how I came to respond to Alison Gopnik at "The Edge," a think tank growing out of the Whole Earth Catalogue that started out to be sort of alternative hippie enterprise and than sank back into bossy white men with a bug in their shorts.  Gopnik was one of two women in a conference trying to understand AI, or Artificial Intelligence which is more often focused on prioritizing the male objective/math/science way of being smart, which I mock as being about "a brain in a bucket."  (Somewhere poor Einstein's brain is "pickled", still floating around in hopes it will show how to be "smart.")  Gopnik was pursuing the new neurobiology of what a human is.

I knew nothing about either Hume or Spinoza and have kicked away precedent-based philosophies as far too dominated by both old white men with power or smart-ass male sophomores of any color.  But when I watched this vid linked below, Gopnik was electrifying, tying together things I think about a lot like evolutionary biology and human life trajectories.  I've been eager to hear about embodiment theories and the cell-level proof that guts also "think".  So I started looking for Gobnik online.  She talked about Hume and Spinoza.  Hmmm.

https://www.edge.org/conversation/alison_gopnik-a-separate-kind-of-intelligence

It turns out that there's a lot more to developing the whole-body, emotion-as-information approach than we thought.  Some have been using it all along, particularly those who have escaped the domination of Western culture, whose most salient characteristic IS domination. Gopnik's position is from human development and contrasts the "plasticity" (openness to new ideas) of a child up to a certain "tipping point" when they have developed enough brain circuits to make a jump to a vastly different picture of the world.  It's arrogant to say so, but I feel that I've gone past that point, but many people have not.

In fact, Copnik dares to contrast the effect of some psychedelic drugs (LDS, psilocybin, MDMA and Ketamine) as "mind-opening," restoring the plasticity of childhood.  (This is in contrast to the mind-altering "power" drugs like amphetamines or even alcohol.)  I've never tried drugs or even much alcohol, but people tell me I'm childish.  (Bit of a joke to restore humility.)

People who are "still doing ag" are often considered to be stuck in Medieval times, because the Western theory emphasizes modernizing and finds progressivism always "smarter."  But a circle or system of Twitter connections I've only recently found is that of farmers of a certain kind.  Some are in England and some are in Canada north of Calgary.  They are people who have passed what Gopnick calls "The Tipping Point", meaning they are curious, they ask questions and plan experiments all the time, and  they reach out to others -- even if it makes them see the world differently.  They are capable of cultural abstract language even as they attach to a beloved sensory world of animals and land.  I feel returned to Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson.

Gopnik suggests in her book "The Gardener and The Carpenter" that our modern pattern for care is control-based like cabinetry -- she's too polite to point out that wood is dead.)  But caregiving for living things (Gardening) is interacting with the living and sharing with the environment.  These caregiving relations cannot be contractual, demanding that certain results be achieved.  Rather, dealing with the living is a "transparent attachment", open-ended.  Gopnik is full of phrases.  She says, "Children are a source of unpredictable variability" which sounds to me like unconditional love.  But it's also the basis of evolution through mutation.

She introduces us to a real historical character named "Desideri" which means (loosely) "what we desire." (Some of us used to have a poster of the Desiderata on our walls.  His importance is linking the West to Buddhism through the Jesuits, most rigorous of religious orders, to the "best" of thinking that is about participation rather than control.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/how-david-hume-helped-me-solve-my-midlife-crisis/403195/

"In his 20s, Desideri conceived his own grand project—to convert the Indies to Catholicism—and in 1716 he became one of the first Europeans to go to Lhasa, and the first to stay. He was passionate, emotional, and easily exasperated. He was also curious, brave, and unbelievably tenacious. In an early letter written on his way to Tibet, he says he feels as if he is being torn apart on the rack. “It pleases his divine majesty to draw my whole heart away with sweet and amorous violence to where the perdition of souls is great,” he wrote, “and at the same time with fastest bonds are my feet bound and drawn elsewhere.” He kept up that intense pitch in everything he did."

He looks quite modern!

In the jargon of the people talking at "The Edge," about AI, Desideri was a "high temperature" thinker.  These expert folks are old enough to have been taught that "passion" is a bad thing, so temperature is their euphemism.  The idea used to be that cold was better.  Now it turns out that all that frigid calculating has precipitated us into planetary warming.

More about Gopnik in the future.  Possibly also Hume and Spinoza.

SIGNS OF AFFILIATION: CIGARS, MAGAZINES, GOVERNMENT

Long ago, still stinging at one of those intervals when I'd been thrown off the rez, I went to a local Starbucks on a Sunday morning with a NYTimes under my arm.  People were settled in small groups at tables carried outside because it wasn't raining.  I was just becoming absorbed in reading when another woman my age came over, grinning, and asked to have a section of my paper, expecting to sit at my table.

I blew up.  I was invaded.  A NYT was an expensive luxury I had no intention of sharing.  I gathered it up and stalked off, leaving the suburban white woman with her mouth hanging open.  She had thought she was trying to make friends through the trivia of news.  NOT.  In my world no one approached a white woman in a café unless they were drunk or wanted to borrow money.  Newspapers arrived in the mail and were treated by those rules.  You don't ask to read someone else's mail.

When I had been back in Portland longer, I was working at the County Courthouse and new magazine shop opened, an imitation of men's clubs in Washington, DC, with cigars in wall-to-wall humidors and big leather chairs for those who wished to rest a bit.  In those years I was living through shiny magazines and at first marched in to buy them.  Realizing slowly that this was meant to be for power men only, I enjoyed sitting down to look over which magazines I intended to buy while the clerk scowled at me.  He didn't quite dare throw me out as ruining the atmosphere.  Not welcome.

I never bought any cigars, but it turned out their magazines didn't interest me either.  I had better luck at Rich's Cigar Store which carried a wide variety of 'zines but had no place to sit.  Not only was the new shop so limited that it finally closed, but the ethos from one cigar/'zine shop to the next was different.  Being able to pick up on the rules is part of the ability to relate.

Social relationships are cultural, but also biological.  Research shows that the brain is organized by establishing connected circuits between neurons, based on recording experiences through the senses and thought, which includes the introception of the body reacting -- digestion, heart beat, tuning of metabolism.  Since biology never forgets a good pattern once it is found, this also becomes the basis for social organization.  The motive is even the same: safety, preservation of the entities through relationship and belonging.  Most basic is family; most troubled today is nation.

Humans who try to be individuals are exceptions and often don't replicate physically, which is a lot easier now that contraceptives exist, so individuals don't carry over through generations.  The universal basis of social relationship has been the virtual "space" that opens between the infant and the caregiver through feeding and cuddling and baby talk.  This magical rapport is the basis of communication throughout the rest of life from the intimacy of lovers to the ecstasy of crowds acting together.  Those who teach or preach and are praised for it, are those who know how to kindle communication by speaking.  Art forms reach for it, but art begins in the virtual space between the artist and the world, or maybe just between the artist and the canvas that teems with potential.

We have greatly damaged this ability to give each other safety by separating ourselves with our little cybergizmos.  The group experiences like theatre, concert, opera, festivals, have been seized commercially or just recorded.  The feeling of belonging to society that I once got from my stacks of magazines are replaced and changed by websites.  Here at my keyboard I keep in touch with one sort of systems but by writing conjure up either memory or virtual people.  I construct a fragile safety.

People who don't feel safe are likely to be hostile, to close off, to make bad choices, like joining toxic groups that seem to be powerful.  The key to success in many life-paths is to construct systems of connection but not all of us have had infancies and childhoods that taught how to make those connections -- maybe in some permissive setting if we are drunk or need money.  Everyone wants money, dues, even the church.  We obey bossy sentimental requirements like poinsettias for Christmas.

In their youth my parents and their sibs were country people and family was powerful.  For a while when I first came to consciousness during WWII and just after, those ties and obligations persisted and I remember the welcoming hugs, the food gifts, the memories and expectations.  By the time we were adults, that was pretty much gone.  We'd scattered over the continent and into quite different social contexts.  No one realized how much the relationships were moral, setting a standard and speaking plainly to those who went astray.  For immigrants whole social systems and contradictions must be reconciled.

Porges argues that this most basic safety for humans was made possible early in the dawning development of humans and then allowed cooperation on projects to begin advancing "civilization" beyond what one person could do alone.  We could explain things to each other and accept different roles.  Partly this was a matter of language but, more than that, the capacity for empathy -- the ability to look at another person and feel as they feel.  Not "sympathy," which is identifying how they feel and making room for it, but real sharing of what the other person is thinking.  

I'm slow realizing that not everyone can do this.  It is an evolution that hasn't reached their personal variation on the genome or maybe has been suppressed by their culture.  For instance, both science and business culture has actively resisted any emotional attachments or "gut feelings" because the model has been math, which is thought to be abstract.  We're still very attached to data, often about a mass of people, averaged, which is esp. unhelpful when the average tells nothing about the individual.

The tension between individual and community goes on and probably always will, because often progress is made and boundaries are found by non-conforming or even defiant individuals.  But people welded into institutions that act in unity can steam roller everything else with their power.  We're witnessing that now with Republicans in Congress.  What they fear is that differing from the group that protects them will cause the group to kill them.  Hmmmm.

HOW WE GOT HERE

My first job was teaching English in Browning, Montana.  The school district there is a state function performed in a place supposedly governed by a tribal council with federal "support", which meant the Bureau of Indian Affairs second-guessed and controlled everything.  Today's federal pattern of career people trying to do their jobs while being second-guessed and contradicted by international corporations is very similar.  The additional complication was the underlying family and clan patterns based on personal connections going back centuries, which overrode any thing on paper, rather like the mafia undercurrent in our own government, which first came to attention when local Sicilian families filled the vacuum left by a receding officialdom.

My second "career" overlapped and was based on my attempt to be safe, which meant hooking up with Bob Scriver whose income came from taxidermy and then Western Art, a growing -- exploding -- field where he excelled.  Locals admired him, grew up with him, and hated him in a sometimes racist way.  Like Bob, I was a minority -- everyone else was indigenous.  His culture was Native American in a kind of wrestling match with his mother's brand of Brit worship from Quebec where his parents grew up on adjoining farms in the 19th century.

Then came animal control, which people mock and stigmatize and stereotype.  I was an officer on the street going to homes and neighborhoods, first-hand observing both genteel scuffles over barking and fecal indiscretions, and (as the first woman) venturing into the underworld of drugs and madmen.  It was the beginning of public non-compliant sex roles like cross-dressing and massage parlours.  It was a struggle to figure out the key to problems while overcoming people's hatred of uniforms and violent resistance to control.  Going to court weekly was an education in the Rule of Law.

Overlapping that, mostly through moral questions and the effort to be a respectable citizen, I was becoming involved with the Unitarian denomination where I was quickly sucked into the just developing Organizational Design ideas presented in a week-long intensive workshop along with the Big Ideas like Evil, Death, Metaphor, and Idealism.  The men in the Pacific Northwest District of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association were big, handsome, potent, well-educated and elite.  They had organized a buddy system in which each was assigned to look out for the mental health and career success of another. (A few got into very bad trouble.)  I wanted in, so I wangled my way to a little seminary attached to the University of Chicago.  The little seminary was collapsing.  The U of C was a massive, irreproachable, hard, cold place where I thrived on the ideas and the guarded approval of Richard Stern, a major novelist.

For three years I rode a circuit in Montana of four reluctantly cooperating fellowships, each with only a few dozen members, stirring up ideas as though I were making grasshoppers leap from the grass.  Then was Kirkland, an interim year of delight across from Seattle with a congregation of artists and therapists. Denominational rules prevented me from staying.  Then Saskatoon where a little enclave of wanna-be Brits held a fort against dispossessed indigenous people taking refuge in drugs and alcohol, bitter academics, and Ukrainians who somehow escaped from Stalin's famine.  Two years there and I left the ministry.

I went back to Browning, Mt., where I was sort of the Methodist minister for a year, then on the first high school faculty at Heart Butte in bear country on the foothills of the Rockies.  Two years until being thrown out of there.  After an eight month gap, I took a civil service job with the City of Portland Bureau of Buildiings -- data entry and answering the phone -- at a time when the streets were full of armed drug gangs and my home neighborhood had gone Black with gangs in shooting wars across the lawn of our house where my aging mother and brain-damaged brother tried to live normally.

When my mother died, she left enough money for me to buy this disintegrating little old house in a tiny village next to the rez, where I have barely enough retirement to stay afloat but my internet connections have made me part of the world conversation of panic over climate change and governmental corruption.  It's been twenty years now, and I feel as though the whole story has been continuous, leading directly to where we are now, both myself and everyone else.

I "talk" to people I would have no access to without the internet.  My reading is lay versions of a remarkable change in knowledge as technology opens up a whole new vision of everything we thought we knew, including the idea of Empire and what we've come to call Predatory Capitalism.  Now we analyze traces in rocks back to the beginning of the galaxies, we collect bits of hominins that stretch millennia to the first mammals or even the structure of fishes, we delve into our own bodies to discover how cells work together -- though some were distracted for a while by the idea that computers are us and we are essentially brains in a bucket.  Finally, we came to our senses and for some this is a love affair with the world and the arts, the deep story that we carry in our whole bodies, the unity we can find when we reach through our skins to the world.

What we finally come to is our capacity to destroy each other and possibly all life on this planet.  I myself am coming to the end of my life with no regrets and deep resignation, but also determination to figure it all out before I end.  Every job I've had -- mostly unchosen -- has taught me useful things about the stubborn tragedies we seem to face everywhere.  Stubbornness is what I'm good it.  My personal morality -- no smoking, drinking, lying, fooling around, hoarding, and so on -- is stubbornness-based.  I like to call it tenacity, or maybe integrity.  Depends on your point of view, I guess.  I value the ability to change one's point of view, since everything always changes around us, sometimes because of our bad behavior.

Surprisingly, the highly respected magazine called "Nature" offers a whole set of articles about leaving one discipline and finding a new one.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02123-4?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=e95060d7d5-briefing-dy-20190705_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-e95060d7d5-44122505

A LIST OF TRANSGRESSIONS that pointed to now:

60's:  For some people, violence is as good as sex.  Cops were beating up kids. I let them talk about it. My superintendent defended me to the Chief of Police, but then instructed me never to talk about such things.

Bob Scriver started out blameless, but as he became more famous, he left aside kindness, patience, and independence.  Big shots began to control him.

70's:  The supposed head of Animal Control was a Portuguese German whose parents had died early in his life.  He had gotten a woman pregnant, married her, divorced her, and was hired for AC by a county commissioner who wanted her alimony to continue.  The assistant really ran AC while he went on with a horse stable that hired a lot of teen girls.  He always had a pocket full of plane tickets to Hawaii.  You connect the dots.

80's:  The church had a secret committee.  When it was time to ask for money, this committee (banker, doctor, real estate salesman) met to estimate how much money each member had, so therefore how much to ask for. They used a little muscle.

90's: At one point my cubicle was close to that of the low level City Attorneys. Interesting deals through law suits.  I deny everything.

After that:  Villages are always a trip.  After a while you know who is lying and who is simply silent.  I attended town council meetings for years until a pugnacious couple determined to force people to meet their standards.  They were from a city.  Still haven't really given up, unevenly enforcing laws against people they don't like and ignoring friends, a pre-existing practice.

This is the little stuff that is almost funny until it accumulates and reaches all the way up to international matters.  On this low level it is often what adjusts justice to sidestep law.  It can be humane and even necessary.  Or not.

THE CULPRITS

Below is a link to the posted article that kicked off this line of thought.  It begins with the world of High Fashion that was so spectacular when the pictorial magazines ran startling photography of clothes by the giants of haute couture who are dying of old age now.

https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2016/10/6/1578544/-The-Untold-Story-of-Trump-Model-Management-A-Daily-Kos-Exclusive-Part-1

"In the 1970’s the industry began to change. It began moving away from fashion as a utilitarian concept, and into a kind of pop culture theater of costumes and performance art, all the while promoting an increasingly unattainable ideal of feminine beauty, and blurring the boundaries between women and girls, exploitation and art. There were a number of reasons behind this transformation-but one of the driving forces was the sexual liberation movement, and the dark side of its gains. In the words of writer Rebecca Solnit, reflecting on her experiences as a young teen in the 70’s, “the sexual revolution had deteriorated into a sort of free-market free-trade ideology in which all should have access to sex and none should deny access”

"Pop culture was also influenced by the emergence of Playboy magazine-with its clever use of genuinely good editorial content from respected writers interspersed with pornographic images, was able to re brand what had previously been seen as smut into something almost classy. Cloaked with the veneer of sophistication, and by publicly aligning the brand with the causes of feminism, civil rights and free speech, Hugh Hefner was able to mainstream the objectification of female bodies in a way that had never been done before. He made porn fashionable-and it was only a matter of time before fashion embraced this approach as well. 

This is about Trump and another man, quite like him but more charming, named John Casablancas.  (translates to White House!)  This article, which is only part one, doesn't discuss Epstein, who is also in the same mold.  That there are three men playing this "game" suggests that there may be more.  Some of us will suspect other countries giving rise to them.  If you want more material about Epstein, try this:  https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/03/jeffrey-epstein-200303

Circumstances have allowed a "hand of cards" to form.  The cards themselves are Wealth, Secrets, Sex, Blackmail, Status, the ability of certain Plutocrats to rise above nations, a bored and burdened ordinary person's Hunger for scandal as long as it's someone else, and Gaming the Rule of Law.  The Ace in this deck of cards is Murder.

The sins are not necessarily different from what is local  A man where I worked in this village was not long ago caught in an FBI sting that offered a 12-year-old girl for $200, which caused locals to only say they never liked him anyhow.  (Three others were also caught, but they weren't from here.)  A previous mayor of Great Falls was running a bordello out of the back of his bar, but people said it was okay because it was outside the city limits.  Our society has shifted drastically.  Maybe too much, or using the wrong cards.   But what can we do?  

We have grown more tolerant and analytical about secrets, much diminishing the power of the sex trade to control famous people, it has made some wonder about the wisdom of stigmatizing and criminalizing something so common as sex among humans.  What is hidden and dangerous is always worth more money.  The enormous shift from marriage to cohabiting and the resulting confusion of marriage and family, has called into question government or religious control.  Alongside, giving ownership of women to themselves instead of making them the chattel of men along with their children, has outraged loser men challenged to be worthy.  Working women must split their allegiances between bosses and husbands, but they no longer work at ribbon counters.  They may be major players in federal government.  This card is a Joker.

Another dimension of the movement to make sexwork positive, is that being outside the law can make a person seem dangerous and powerful.  One who seems to have shady contacts may be protected.  Sometimes Trump seems to rely on his mafia family connections to make people back off.  When one gets to the point of needing assassins, they are a double-edged sword.  So many TV plots rely on someone in danger because they know too much.  Anyway, modern illegal business is finding it profitable to be respectable enough in some aspects to eschew relying so much on protection schemes based on violence.  It's bad presentation -- not a good "look."  

I'm not interested in the individuals who appear in these revelations.  But there is a fractal aspect to their stories:  big crimes come from circumstances that cause their echoes in little crimes, or maybe it's vice versa.  Anyway, the changing nature of, for instance, what sex means in our society is plate tectonics in terms of what else happens.  Not every rich man uses Sex as a card -- we're told that some are going to Art now, part of that shift from gallery to auction that is sensational and emotional enough to be worth the effort.  Partly due to a time distance from the WWII stolen art, enabling lawsuits, restorations to original owners, and daylighting of stolen works.  Anyway there's the problem of so many people reacting to powerful men raping little girls is . . . so?

It's not the notorious individuals who hold the keys to scams, but their surrounding and supporting characters who have the expertise and maintain the contacts.  They are invested in keeping the tentpole individuals prominent.  I'll repeat again my joust that when a person becomes a certain amount rich, they must be managed by a system, an organization, which then owns him.  (Very few "hers" out there, so far.)  Maybe he thinks he's making decisions, but all his evidence and considerations (the ones he knows about) come from supposed "underlings."  This is as true of school superintendents and county treasurers as bigshots.  They are no longer independent persons.

How do we design something that will take these perps by the back of the neck and bring them to social norms -- the ones we used to have?  At least ones that protect instead of destroying so many.