EVERYONE WANTS THEIR KIDS TO BE ABOVE AVERAGE

 Now I find this guy named Turchin who studies cultures and nations.  http://peterturchin.com

“Peter Turchin is a scientist and an author who wants to understand how human societies evolve, and why we see such a staggering degree of inequality in economic performance and effectiveness of governance among nations.”

I’m not quite sure how all these “Russian” people have popped up, but they are all immigrants who were persecuted.  I guess one leads to another to the computer’s mind.  But also they think about things I care about.  Turchin had me when he proposed a culture dynamic that leads to a crash, possibly in the US, namely the desire of everyone to join the elite.  I don’t necessarily mean they want to be billionaires, but ranchers and resource workers around here have taught their children that physical labor and trades like plumbing or electricity are too hard — they don’t admit they are “low” occupations to some people.  They send their kids to college to be “professionals” or as close as they can get.

Nowadays, that’s high tech computer people or the CEO’s of international corporations.  Schools gear up to produce the people with credentials for this demographic, the schools assuming that they are the proper providers.  Pretty soon there are more grads than can find jobs.  Things get nasty.  On the one hand, too many lawyers.  On the other hand, not enough plumbers.

Take for example the UU world which is based on a socioeconomic layer of people who are doing well, consider themselves exemplary, and hope for their young to become part of an elite, without quite knowing what that is, but making sure they go to college.  More than one parishioner has told me that he (usually) could give a better sermon that I could.  Then they started wanting to be ministers themselves.  A nice trend for the seminaries. 

Some estimated that given the way things were going, UU churches would have more people in the pulpit than in the pews.  In actual fact, there are not enough churches and people were pressed to found new churches or to invent new kinds of ministry, like social movements or chaplaincies.  I was part of this dynamic, wanting to be like those PNWD ministers but inventing the circuit-riding Montana Ministry.  All the while it was becoming clear that my socioeconomics didn’t fit and I would never go up the pyramid to captain what was called the Grand Tall Masted Ships of the big cities.  Therefore this strikes me as a valid theory.

Here’s another taste of Turchin from another angle.

“Historians of religion have long pondered the relationship between the rise of complex civilization and the belief in gods—especially “moralizing gods,” the kind who scold you for sinning. Last year, Turchin and a dozen co-authors mined the database (“records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality”) to answer the question conclusively. They found that complex societies are more likely to have moralizing gods, but the gods tend to start their scolding after the societies get complex, not before.”

“Humanistic speculation” is not a bad description of the UU religious position, but it is not mine.  I’m a post-humanist now, so radically inclusive that I want to include geology and stars in my systems thinking.

I go along with Turchin, but wonder how one would handle the premise that science is a religion (which I think is close to true) or conversely that a religion is an attempted science, the best people could do in their circumstances to offer meaning and best practices, which I take to be expressed as morality.  What I’m seeing is that we’ve come to a developmental point in science/religion that challenges supernatual anthropomorphism — that which is “above” us mystically but which is just like us — and separates the world between those who are now facing a total reconfiguration of what we know and who we are, versus those who reject the whole field of science and attack intellectuals as destroying reality.  

My own mother didn’t want me to go to a seminary that accepted Unitarianism.  “Can’t you marry a nice Presbyterian minister and settle down?  She was not aware that L.M. Montgomery was married to a depressed Presbyterian minister and neither was I.  The Anne books were a desperate move for economic survival and turned out to be a trap that wouldn’t let her write anything else.  (At death my mother ended up with a kind of sci-fi theory of different worlds and reincarnation among them.)  Montgomery was simply defending the idea of a child who was "above average."

Meadville, the UU seminary attached to the U of Chicago Div School, was of little impact or use, though Ralph Burhoe was around.  His main lifework was reconciling science and religion in the pages of his journal, “Zygon.”  He didn’t have much traction until he was awarded the first Templeton Prize.

The Div School, focusing on comparative religion and the history of religions, was world-changing.  But one of their most significant thinkers, Mircea Eliade, was housed by Meadville.  European, old, pipe-smoking to the point of setting his office on fire, he was a mystery.  I could have taken his classes but didn’t because it was enough to read his books.  I’m still rereading them.

Was this the kind of elite I was craving?  To be a thought-giant respected by the world — well, “a” world?  My mother never heard of him nor has anyone in Valier, probably few even in Portland, and none of my relations.  So I’ll just ignore them.  Can I do this work out here on the prairie without collaborating with anyone else?  Yup.  Books. Internet.  Blogging, which is a kind of endless book with many inclusions.  

But I didn’t want the endpoint, even a book.  I wanted the search.  I’ve got it.  There’s no money in it.  But now and then nuggets of satisfaction.  It seems crucially relevant in a time of uproar and danger.  I'll share to a point.