THE U OF CHICAGO WANTED TO KNOW

Sorting through my books in order to discard as many as possible, it becomes clear that my seminary education is almost thirty years old.  I’m gob-smacked.  During the fourth year I was working as a transcriber for the U of Chicago Law School, an entirely different sort of people than the Div School crowd in two different ways.  The professors (among them Scalia, Zimring and Sunstein — Obama wasn’t there yet) were brilliant (just ask them) and part of the elite national establishment.  The support staff were female, middle-class, more dutiful than competitive.  Some were black.  At least one loved Sting.

Computers were barely coming into use.  (This was 1982.)  The professors were just learning by closing their office doors and playing “asteroids”.  The computers were actually work stations with a mainframe in the basement somewhere.  Among the many things computers and the Internet just then began to transform (you might not realize this) was the ability to work with ancient texts, since fragments could be pieced together onscreen, vocabularies in various languages could be kept at hand, and the fear of destroying something priceless, owned by people who wanted to prevent access, was much less.  This meant a leap in knowledge about recorded antiquity.

I’m reading “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World” by Peter Frankopan, a documented account of how the Eurasian continent was transformed by trade and travel which brought together contrasting cultures, fed and shaped empires, and carried exotic luxuries everywhere as indexes of success and power.  This is a much earlier religious account than Karen Armstrong’s “Axial Age” when today’s major religious institutions were founded and began to struggle with nations.  “The Silk Roads” — at least as far as I’ve read — is about tribes who still locate the Sacred on the closest mountain and are just beginning to consolidate under major personalities, a pattern that is related to monotheism and intolerance.  The main hint of this that I got in seminary was the suggestion that the New Testament and the message of Jesus came about because he spent time in the East learning Buddhism.

Somewhere (maybe even on my shelves) are books that compare the cultural development of the Eurasian continent to that of the Americas.  There are always hints and mostly the discussion comes down to geology, the existence and placement of mountain ranges and major rivers, which are the result of plate tectonics and drive extreme weather.  There were no Silk Roads because of the Rockies.  There was no Mediterranean basin but instead the Mississippi Valley.  There were major civilizations, as early and elaborate as Egypt, but they were destroyed by drought — just as they were prevented in Australia by fire.  This is Jared Diamond’s kind of thinking and I find it revelatory, though some people get so angry that one person wrote an academic article entitled “Fuck Jared Diamond.”  Diamond does not address written culture, but rather the underlying ecology.

The people who resist plate tectonic theories of history want to believe in their elitism, the idea that Roman and Greek culture are the source of science, enlightenment, and progress and justify every privilege of being white, male, Euro-rooted and technologically dominant.  Unfortunately, many of the people who believe in this privilege and superiority are not good examples of it, being themselves less educated, less compassionate, less politically adept.  They brag of the wardrobe but stand in the marketplace naked, only accessing a tiny part of it on their handhelds.  They are totally unaware of what they don’t know and claim it doesn’t exist.

The upshot of addressing all this with my decades-old education is that the denominationally defined classes I took are obsolete, the U of Chicago Law School social classes have gone to the top but toppled over, and the U of Chicago Div School principles of inquiry are now central, though their confidence is shaken.  I just answered another one of those abominable questionnaires, half-market research and half-how-ya-doin’?  The bottom line for them is mostly “why aren’t you sending more money since you’re an alumn.  How are humanities to survive if all the money is going to science and commerce?”

Of course my answers didn’t come close to fitting the questions so I had to write a little essay.  Here it is:  how my Silk Roads always lead back to the grasslands and never to the cities, as was expected by the university.  Part of the answer is that now the biggest city of all is the Internet and it is world-wide.   (This is somewhat edited.)

U of C Law School

I came to seminary late in life through the Unitarian movement (First Unitarian of Portland).  I turned forty while I was at seminary so my classmates rang the bell at First Unitarian of Chicago forty times.  They were red-faced and puffing by the end.  We were technically Meadville/Lombard students, meant to satisfy a trust requirement at the Div School that a certain percentage be preparing for ministry.  My first ministry was in Montana, circuit-riding among four fellowships in Bozeman, Missoula, Great Falls and Helena for three years.  I lived in a Ford F150 van.  

Then I took an interim ministry across the lake from Seattle, and next went to Saskatoon for two years.  I made almost no money at any point.  Though Seattle loved my message they were prevented from hiring me because of interim protocol.  Saskatoon was not a good match and I left the ministry.

. . .

Now I barely have enough SSI and pension to survive, partly because of low-pay jobs, partly because my marriage in the Sixties meant not paying SS during that time, and then eight years total of being a student also meant no SS contribution.  The pension is from the City of Portland: $200 a month.

But because of the internet, the availability of low-cost second-hand books, and my U of Chicago Div School education which was about METHOD more than content, I’m as happy as Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch.

U of C Div School

. .

For the last decade or so, parallel to blogging, I was co-writing with Tim Barrus . . . His lifework has been special education and since the coming of AIDS, special pediatric care for boys who are HIV-positive, including those who have accompanying problems such as emotional trauma.  Some, like himself, struggle with avascular necrosis (bone death) and many have recurring lung infections.  Some were needle drug users and many did sexwork as pre-adolescents as a way of survival because of abandonment and abuse.

My input, unpaid, was exploring ways of understanding all this.  Christian ideas worried them.  They expected me to hate them though I’d never met them.  Some had been abused and infected by priests — this is an international group so some of the concerns overlap with the systemic problems in the Irish and British churches as well as American . . .

Unitarian Universalists are proud of their principles, but they are based on the Enlightenment.  Now we are in Post-Enlightenment times.  The “principles” are just too old-fashioned and peacefully academic for teens . . . in search of something solid.  Anyway, congregations and denominations are sociologically homogenous and UU’s are educated upper middle class.  Until recently, they assumed prosperity.

What do you say to a boy who was surviving behind a downtown dumpster by sucking cock at five bucks a pop?  What does God portrayed as a powerful old man mean to a boy who has been taken as a toy for political leaders onto yachts for parties that can end with tossing a boy overboard?  These are not things that preoccupy Div School professors.  Most people have no idea. . . .

Recently two dawning thought systems have influenced me.  One is our post-taxonomizing understanding of existence: how interwoven we are at the electrochemical molecular level and how much environment shapes life, which is close to the heart of evolution.  The other is the frankly evolving Deep Time (pre-literate, recorded in geology and biology) understanding of what it is to be human.  The neurological fMRI research is especially fascinating because the boys often have organic anomalies created by abuse and malnutrition.  But traditional psychotherapy is also effective if it is with someone who has “been there/done that” in contrast to the “nice lady” convention of social work.

These ideas merge into what I’m reading about as a kind of scientific mysticism — they say that congregations are actually forming in some places with the right population.  Deep space explorations provide images more powerful than any theism.  So I am pursuing a theory that is not about salvation as a perfected version of what “is,” but rather the idea of inclusion at every level.  Once you have happened, you are eternally in time as both an effect and a cause.  It’s the social level that’s tough.  No one wants bad boys, except tricks.

. . . I’m writing a theory of worship design that responds to my change in theological thinking. (It’s no longer theology since there’s no theos.)  It is actually an extension of the thesis I started at Meadville/Lombard.

The Div School was a terrific place, but I was a cat attending a picnic — mostly a watcher.  The work that I wanted and needed was sometimes just outside the curriculum:  Eliade, Lakoff and Johnson, Victor Turner, Gendlin, Csikszentmihalyi  — all that fabulous new thought was synthesizing right then about what I had learned earlier about Stanislavski’s method, Blackfeet concepts, and a kind of poetry of being (natural history).  I write all day every day and think constantly about all this, but there’s no money in it.  If I stop writing and try to promote or publish, I will short-circuit where I may be able to go with it in the future.  Born in 1939, I feel the pressure.

Blogging is what works.  From my keyboard to the eyes of the world.  I talk about the U of Chicago Div school all the time.  As far as I’m concerned, Meadville/Lombard is dead, merely a correspondence school for nice people.  I feel as though I took difficult jobs that repaid them for their very real monetary investment in my education.  I read Sightings and Criterion and the alumni mags, but there is no way for me to send money and my estate will be worthless.  But they tell me that anything that’s blogged to the internet is eternal.  Maybe.

DENIAL, EVASION, BLOCKING

Considering how to design meaningful ceremonies that hope to invite the Sacred is not so much a matter of knowing things as admitting that there is so much we — you and I — don’t know, and —even more worrying — don’t know that we don’t know.  Our body does much unconsciously, edits the incoming sensory code drastically, organizes the brain in selective ways chosen in infancy, and supplies cover stories that keep us from access to raw code.  

Much of learning art is figuring out how to get at whatever the body is not picking up on, actively hiding.  Art’s work is revelation.  But if everything that comes to the senses had to be considered, we’d soon be paralyzed — overwhelmed.  And indeed people who have damage to their internal editing process are living demonstrations.  Stunned.

Institutions, hegemonies, families and society in general are also invested in keeping each of us focused on their interests.  I’m always a little startled when I make some kind of generalization, maybe tentatively, that is immediately seized upon and used for institutional evidence and endorsement.  If I write an indictment of Christianity, some Christian is bound to read it as endorsement. 

It means that much of what I call “running the writing through the wringer” is an attempt to prevent misinterpretation.  Families are particularly prone to looking at their members through stereotypes, either those of the bad seed — the assigned villain — or those of the little genius who is not and doesn’t want to be.  If one’s own family doesn’t think one is real, who can?

Harlow's monkey experiment

Bowlby studied children who were hospitalized without their mothers or whose mothers simply abandoned them for a period of time.  At first the little ones roared with protest, made their displeasure known any way they could.  Then they despaired and sank into depression for a while.  The third stage was that they seemed never to have had any problem.  They were just indifferent and went on with life.  But if, after a while, the mother came back, the child did not welcome her, didn’t seem to recognize her.  In fact, rejection was total and deep.  To the mother it felt like punishment.  To the child it felt like preventing anything so painful happening again.

This same sequence can happen with society.  We’re in the roaring smashing stage in parts of the cities right now.  Clearly some politicians are in denial, simply making declarations of the truth of what they wish really WERE true.  Across suburbia and in small towns, the people go right on mowing the lawn and loading the dishwasher as though nothing has changed.  If the daughter is pregnant or the son is gay, throw them out.  Declare they don’t exist.

Sadly, if a child blocks affection, interaction, encouragement and comforting for fear of pain and more rejection, that child’s development can be severely distorted, close to the point of psychosis or at least sociopathy.  The hope is that contact with the Sacred can break through that shell, re-associate the dissociation, and lend the courage to trust or at least test.  But that’s another of the grandiose narcissisms so typical of humans.

The problem is fatal when the dissociation is so severe and seductive that the only safe place is death.  If the cause is “only” neglect or severe discipline, that doesn’t come close to the catastrophic damage of torture, atrocious bodily invasion, culture collapse.  We do not like to think the worst happens to the least deserving.

What many people think is safety is simply conformity.  There are ceremonies and in conventional society — if you don’t think about them or challenge them, they mostly work — if the society is not too confused or dangerous.  But forming little gated bubbles is a great temptation for pockets of like-minded people and doing that both corrodes larger alliances for economic and defensive institutions and limits the evolution of the people in those guarded places.  By pushing out anyone who seems dangerously different, they make themselves targets and psychologically justify the predatory behavior of the outsiders.

Conformity for the sake of safety is a kind of blindness, a paralysis, and it is “fractal” in the sense that guarded anxious people create the same pattern in their family dynamics and those add up to whole communities that are “stuck” and xenophobic, not to say racist.  What was patriotism becomes jingoism, reducing icons of unity like flags and statues to focal points for resentment.  The Sacred evaporates.

It is replaced by greed and profit.  Damaged kids make great little money-makers, either directly (errand runners for drug and gambling criminals) or indirectly through the funding in the institutional response to disorder (prisons and policing).  Of course, they are natural commodities for trafficking.  

HIV, hepatitis, and tuberculosis — plus violence — keep the kids enervated and powerless, so they plug the pharma industry into the system and die before they can form alliances.  Media machines are divided between flogging fear because it sells and converting real virtue into Disneyland ride tickets.

In the face of all that, imprinting and attachment still happen, still make entrance points for change and caring right in the middle of thieves and rapists, racketeers and bribed politicians.  Mutation and evolution happen right in the middle of war and tragedy.  Survival happens.

Not every person is corrupt and selfish.  Many social groups and individuals still manage to raise healthy children and to reach out to the suffering.  Empathy educates us all.  Our mammal hearts are warm.  It has been the secret of the persistence of our kind for aeons.  

The fall of the Roman Empire has been on our minds for quite a while and Jared Diamond has explained vividly how some civilizations thrive and others collapse — mostly a matter of resources rather than virtue.  But now we have the fossils of two hundred rough drafts of hominins and near-humans, mostly their teeth and brain-cases.  They bite.  We should not deny and reject them.  

When I saw that an academic paper was entitled “F**k Jared Diamond,” and by now has followers and even a YouTube video, I laughed.  Now I suppose I’m going to have to sort through it all to see what it means.  It won’t be anything Sacred.   But who knows.  Maybe it will be real.

As a shortcut, I watched the YouTube rant.  It seems a Native American wants to indict Europe for its atrocities in America and uses China as contrast -- blocking out the Black Plague from Asia that decimated Europe and ignoring Genghis Khan.  The irony is that Diamond's main occupation has been focussed on songbirds in New Guinea, not even Chinese bird flu which occasionally sweeps the world.

GAMBLING HAS A RELIGIOUS LESSON

Blackfeet casino in Browning, MT

Sometimes the websites I follow begin to overlap and braid together.  Thus, a thread on Aeon about “religious” ceremonies is meeting inquiries by Mistyne Hall who is working on Blackfeet history through the prism of casinos.  I have contended for some time that the “stick game” or “bone game” that gives its name to a novel by Louis Owens, is at its heart a religious ceremony.  It is the experienced knowledge of what life is like, a survival-issue metaphor-structure that helps steady the believer.  More than 70,000 years ago, someone left a set of stick game tokens in a cave on the coast of the Indian Ocean in Africa.  I reckon we would call their use “stone game.”

One set of theories about brain neurology proposes that language as spoken concepts which became words and then whole systems like art (representation in drawings), ethics, and the things we now call “religion” that first developed in small groups engaged in some kind of activity that required the attention of the people present and their reactions to what happened.  Think craps.

The "craps" scene from "Guys and Dolls"

Whenever the clergy jokes in sermons about football  (cheerleaders as vestal virgins — not so virginal these days — the lines as the furrows of fields, the ball as the remnant of animal sacrifices) certain people take it very seriously.  In fact, the one time I did it, I discovered that they were angry with me for making fun of their religion which WAS football.

European ethical systems, esp. the stricter versions of Protestantism, are opposed to gambling as unethical or even evil.  Since I have a relative who financially stripped his family with compulsive gambling linked to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I certainly see the wisdom of not gambling and understand why it has a shadow hanging over it.  But he did not undertake trips to Vegas or even nearby tribal casinos.  It was scratch-offs and lottery tickets bought at grocery stores.

The Cathedral of Money

I have another relative who is hooked on casinos, but she doesn’t gamble.  She’s after the glamour of the place, a kind of temple of chance, everyone dressed up and feeling anything could happen, like Sunday morning.  She spends her time walking the plush carpets, rarely even going to the shows, and sometimes indulging in the subsidized food.  She would not go to a Native American casino.  If she went to the one in Browning, most people would know her and vice versa, but she likes circulating anonymously in a place she thinks of as “upscale” and white, privileged.

I used to employ a factoid I got somewhere, suggested that one’s chances of being caught after committing a murder were fifty-fifty (probably better now) and one’s chances of succeeding in a small business is one-in-ten (probably the odds are worse now).  The odds for Publisher’s Clearing House are probably far worse, but I always send in my entry.  Yet I reject grocery store Monopoly cards as immoral, partly to tease the clerk. 

Jared Diamond in New Guinea

Jared Diamond is one of my favorite thinkers and I’m currently reading a passage in “The World Until Yesterday.”  He is explaining the wisdom of New Guinea farmers and other peasants who farm small scattered patches, sometimes a day’s walk from one to another.  Western-educated advisors thought this was very stupid and that they should consolidate their land.  But as Diamond explains, things are risky in jungle gardens (weather, pigs, rats, humans), so if the gardens are scattered, the chances of something bad happening to all of them at the same time, meant there would still be enough to eat to prevent starving.  

One anthropologist took the trouble to monitor over 400 of these little patches and their good yields versus disasters.  She was able to figure out just how many had to fare well to support their families.  Since the foods involved could not be stored by drying (berries and meat) or in bins (grain), they could not be held over for a long enough time to let fat years compensate for lean years.  The very smart Euro-observers were imposing their logic over the experienced wisdom of those who had been there a long time.

Cultures swing back and forth, benefiting some and punishing others, much in the way that crops interact with people.  Stigma strikes one category, then moves on to another.  We seem to be in a time that hates leaders, rich people, and rules — and yet we vote for Trump though he is the epitome of contempt for ordinary people, boasts of his wealth, and ignores rules.  The illogic of this is what makes politics/government like roulette or a one-armed bandit.  We bet our lives, feeling that we are as helpless as the old lady who sits on a stool in Reno with a paper cup of quarters to feed into the machine.  But with the possibility of a bonanza — WE might win — which kicks up the adrenaline at the heart of addiction.

Our present national helplessness probably has more than two sources, but I’ll name two I see.  One is science’s fabulous breakthroughs into a vision of the universe that reduces us to the equivalent of microbes staring into an black hole.  Another is the mixing of populations who have a hard time sharing a theory of what survival entails.  Too many have been living out life-risking migrations as a gamble.  

And what about all the people in the middle class who have gone along quietly until suddenly forces beyond their control (sickness, industry collapse, demographics) threw them out on the street.  They die.  They do NOT survive.  But the statistics for the nation in terms of corporate values look good.  The dead wood has been excised.  Rome has crushed the little people once again.  Where is the new Christianity that will give us a new Jesus for the poor people?

What are the new rules for survival?  Getting back to the reservation, the “successful people” right now have been playing by the Euro rules which emphasize the individual.  But maybe it’s time to return to the larger group, the tribe.

The location on a map is not the town.  A town is a set of relationships among people who agree by staying there to cooperate in maintaining community by agreeing on rules and pitching in to pay for infrastructure.  Then it becomes structures and history, but before that, in the very beginning, it was some kind of node or crossroads where people stopped.

Pearl Jam gave this skatepark to Browning!

There are two kinds of gambling.  One kind, cards and stick game, require some skill including awareness of the other people playing.  The other kind is chance, like craps or roulette.  When there is a town, the customs and written laws are like the rules of a game, with the consequences being criticism, possibly ostracism, and even jail time.  

What is under a town, which is manmade, is a structure formed by geology and weather with the possibility of flood, famine, volcanoes, tsunamis, earthquakes — on and on.  And so the town is the human game, but there is a bigger one, which is the land under the town.  It is not so much religion with its rules that saves us as it is something like spirituality — which CAN be contained in religion — but is more directly accessed in the land.  We sit on the Divide and see as far as we can.

Mistyne again -- I needed the metaphor.

THE BACK OF THE BOX

When I was a kid (b.1939), vitamins were such a new idea that the Cheerios box featured educational comics with little pixies, each representing a different vitamin, and a girl named Cheery.  Today Honey Nut Cheerios have had to be taken off the market because people are allergic to nuts, and the new recipe for the dough is announced to be “gluten free.”  We have gone from looking for good things to add to looking for bad things to remove.  

I remember having measles, scarlet fever, and chicken pox.  One of my brothers had rheumatic fever, which can affect the heart.  He did develop a bit of a heart murmur which obsessed my mother ever after, though he was cleared to compete in wrestling in high school and had no problem.  Now people in small towns nearly force their boys to play aggressive football, even knowing that it will probably at some point cause brain damage from concussions.  Our ideas about what is dangerous, esp. for children, change all the time.

Other ideas about what to do will persist without anyone even noticing.  Here’s a benign example:  people know I have a lot of books and that I write all the time.  Their assumption is that it’s like the reading they know, which was mostly in school.  They ask, “How many books do you read in a week?  Three or four?”  The number of books read in a time period is the way schools and libraries try to encourage reading.  You read it, then discard the book.  It’s over.  Consumed.  Consumer thinking.

But I read half-a-dozen books at a time.  Sometimes I only read a few pages, put the book down, come back to it months or even years later.  I read by chasing themes in content, or because there’s a side-issue that’s suddenly gripping.  On the shelves I try to keep general subjects together, which means the contents may be separated in the writing by years.  My grandmother’s books mix with what came in the mail today.

Jared Diamond’s “The World Until Yesterday” is living in the bathroom where I’m working my way through child-raising practices in self-contained tribes away from “civilization.”  More focused on coping with trauma and predation (tigers) than on diseases, there are strategies so negligent that adults often have burn marks from getting too close to fires.  No one intercepted them or taught them not to get close.  Compare with modern fire-retardant chemically treated child’s pajamas which turned out to get into the child’s system with damaging consequences.

On the other hand, children growing up in the Amazon rain forest where dangers are everywhere, are on their mother’s backs at first, then within her reach, then within her eyesight which is close in a jungle.  Lifelong, they go in groups.  But in safer places, like the Australian outback, Diamond assures us that the infamous deadly snakes are rare and there are no big mammal predators.  Children go on “walkabout” alone.

My copy of Gambles’ “Origins and Revolutions” is traveling through the house everywhere.  I have to hunt it down because I read short bits, need a quote, or am ready for the next bite.  Then I’m distracted and put it down in a new place.  I need Diamond’s information about tribes, in that constantly on-going dialogue we’re all having about whether things are getting better or worse and what changes we should make.  Once we accept responsibility for ourselves and our lives, how they evolve, we have a lot of research and thinking to do.   

Are isolated change-resistant enclaves, like the upscale mothers of Marin County — who refuse vaccination and thereby start epidemics — right to so emphasize what’s “natural”?  There are tribes who leave their children almost entirely unsupervised.  Child mortality is high, but those who survive are the ones with brains, gumption, and confidence.  The adults are admirable, except not very compassionate. There is an isolated group that cherishes their babies, refuses all abortion, tolerates handicaps.  The gene for club feet is in this closed population and the rate of affliction has risen to 15% of the babies.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2075152-did-zikas-recent-mutations-let-it-explode-as-a-global-threat/?cmpid=NLC|NSNS|2016-2801-GLOB&utm_medium=NLC&utm_source=NSNSAL

Clearly the way we raise our children is an interaction among morality, danger, attachment, and all sorts of other contingencies.  Now, as this new plague traveling with the mosquitoes expanding their territory across oceans because of airplanes and climate warming, and the first horrific cases of babies with tiny heads are beginning to hint that there are other consequences due to the same virus (possibly paralysis), the best we can do is to warn women not to get pregnant.  As though that ever works!  Women have been warned not to get pregnant for centuries. Might as well warn mosquitoes not to bite.  And I’m not looking forward to the mosquito-phobes (who also tend to be bat-phobes) insisting on intense spraying of Valier this summer.  (Dandelions are also a target.)

When I was a kid, childhood diseases were considered inevitable.  We were all vaccinated for smallpox.  A classmate died of tetanus because her father wouldn’t get her the vaccine because they were poor and it was costly.  About the time I was born, the daughter next door died of polio.  Luckily we never got mumps or whooping cough, since there were no vaccines for them.  Now there are, but people still resist.  Vaccination was a group experience when we lined up in grade school, but now in the US it is likely to be a private experience, which makes it easier to refuse.

I got pneumonia and had a penicillin shot.  Since my bed was up against one of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that lined our house, I found “Riders of the Purple Sage” and read it in a fever haze, my first grownup novel.  Earlier, when my brother had rheumatic fever, I was put to sleep on the couch downstairs, which was very exotic to me.  I had the idea that people only slept on the second floor.  I had found “Biography of a Grizzly” which was a small book with little drawings, so I read it all night while the mantel clock struck away the hours.
  

That's a geyser, not a volcano.

The story happens near Yellowstone.

Engulfed in grief for poor Wahb, dying old and alone, I finished about the time the others got up and had to convince them my fatigue and red eyes were not a symptom.  When I discovered that my mother, on medical advice, had burned my entire paperdoll collection, a village that lived in a suitbox under the brothers’ bed, it seemed to me related to the death of Wahb.  

Holocaust, natural death, disease, and care-taking were combined.  Every bit of fabric was washed with bleach or Lysol.  All surfaces in the room were scrubbed.  Somehow my father’s books were ignored.  It was as though books were a kind of privileged status, protected and protective.  They made your brain big.

When I googled for information about Zika, what I got was advertising for an amusing video game called “Tiny Brains”.  So here’s what we’re teaching kids:  you are entitled, privileged and smart BECAUSE of adults helicoptering your lives and emphasizing amusement.  The adult bargain with fate is that if they pour every attention and expense into the present happiness of their children, other people’s children can go to hell.  They don’t even need school lunches.  And if you don’t obey the adults, they will withdraw that support and kick you out, the same as your boss treats you at work.  What this kind of attitude creates is genocide supporters and gated cities.

By Jim Kirwan

But the planet is relentless.  Mosquitoes, viruses, climates — old age.  No one gets out alive.  What matters is what you do until then.  There are two kinds of survival: individual and group.  Your life is shaped by how you define your group, and to what degree your group helps you survive.  So now what shall we do about Zika and the other plagues coming out of Pandora’s box?  Personally, I don’t eat boxed cereals anymore.  I get my info from books.  And the occasional website post.

https://aeon.co/opinions/artificial-food-has-made-human-civilisation-possible?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f72a7e8e04-Daily_newsletter_Thursday_28th_Jan_20161_28_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-f72a7e8e04-68600437

THE SOCIAL CONNECTOME

Jared Diamond

“The World Until Yesterday” by Jared Diamond is the next book after his mega-popular “Guns, Germs and Steel.”  It’s about the traditional, nearly “pre-contact” peoples he has visited.

Karen Armstrong

“The Battle for God” by Karen Armstrong is about the Axial Age, the historical period from 700 to 200 BCE when the major “world religions” formed:  Buddhism, Hinduism, Confusianism, Taoism, and those troublesome Abramic monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  These two “book-ends” in time mark a period of thousands of years that were powered by agriculture, formed villages, but preceded math, science, industrialism.  Where I live, that period didn’t end until the 19^th century.  This world-period has been fascinating in many ways.  I’m going to focus on the eternal human tension between the individual and the group.

I should say groups, because it becomes clear in Diamond’s book that even with only a hundred people in a tribe, each person is a node of what might be called social connectomes spun from genetics, friendship, working partnerships, accidents of wealth, and the mysterious factor called “love.”  Even after the big institutional, hierarchical, liturgical, book-bound religions had formed, the elements that were always present will re-form sub-groups, processes that push onwards through time.  We are beginning a period of connectome transformation: an internet overlay.

Cut Bank, MT, Masonic Hall

To Bob Scriver, religion in the sense of affiliated and therefore "special" men [sic -- women were sent over to Eastern Star] was defined by the Masons.  In Browning it was a filter for respectability (on their terms) that would accept assimilated and prosperous Blackfeet.  Even the occasional Catholic.  Bob was their chaplain, partly because he could play the piano and partly because his father and brother were members.  His second marriage collapsed, he had quit teaching because it was a misery, he hadn’t re-established a steady income, and -- as the saying here goes, he was "tom-cattin' around," so they threw him out.  He suffered from this rejection, which his father and brother agreed with.  Art was considered marginally wicked, or maybe just insane.  For the rest of his life he kept his Masonry book wrapped in silk scarves in his underwear drawer, that intimate place, and never turned against the group -- only the individual leaders who had wanted to punish him.

When he was accepted into the Medicine Pipe Keepers circle, it became his new Masonic Lodge with all the intensity of his earlier belonging.  He probably knew most of the Keepers better than the white shop-owners.   Their version of Bundle Keeping was regular bridge parties, where the women presented little tableaus of dessert on their card tables and the men indulged in a bit of brandy.  Bob despised them.

Pipe Keeper next to his Bundle, 1880 or so.

Being an individual apart from the main group is always problematic.  If one can stay in the group while maintaining individuality, that’s ideal.  If the groups begin to contradict each other or if the group focuses on punishing someone (scapegoating), the consequences force either a new creation (Scriver Studio) or destruction (the recent firing of two reliable family men in Valier for something they couldn’t control).

Diamond tells about several New Guinea tribes who have an informal set of rules about who can be attacked and killed and who must be treated as equals.  Relations must be protected, no matter how distant the family connection may be.  He gives us a vignette about two small groups of men traveling who meet and discover they don’t know each other.  They sit down on the trail and begin sorting families to see if there’s a tie.  Unfortunately, none comes to mind.  Finally, rather desperately because they don’t really want to fight, they discover that there is a man in the distant village group who has the same name as a man in the local group.  He’s not really related, but the coincidence is enough to work.  The groups go on their way peacefully. 

New Guinea

I heard a similar discussion about who was affiliated enough to authorize the painting of a tipi "skin." (Bob was the Keeper and, since I was with him at the time, so was I.)  In the end the connection was someone who “owned” (tipis are transferred like a Pipe Bundle) a yellow lodge, the same color as the one Bob dreamt about.  Since yellow tipis are relatively rare, this was connected enough.   (The main permission comes as a dream, the same as a Bundle.  In fact, this tipi had an accompanying Bundle.  The whole story is in "Bronze Inside and Out."  The twist is that it was a "badger tipi" and Bob associated badgers with his "pop," the loyal Mason !)

In Valier there is always a sort of tribal tightening-up in Spring among those whose ancestors were in the village group from Belgium who immigrated to be the core for a community of irrigating grain growers.  Genetic descent is strong.  A few families control much of what happens but they can’t prevent people from voting or refuse to serve them because they aren’t Belgian enough.  

Near Valier

So in Spring the filtering criteria becomes who keeps their yards up to what are imagined to be Belgian (white) standards.  Since those who don’t have pretty yards tend to be poor, negligent, old, absentee or drunk -- the village is small enough for everyone to know who they are -- it’s easy to pass a town law that says anyone who doesn’t keep their yard up will be warned with a registered letter (like being ticketed) and then the town will contract to have the yard mowed to their standards and the owner will be billed $100 or more.)

The reality is that negotiations go on that are under the table.  Relatives, popular people, and those with major health problems are simply not sent a letter.  One of the most neglected houses is owned -- but not much occupied -- by a town employee.  Someone decided to “crack down” on him a few years ago and the consequences were explosive, pitting the town lawyer against the employee union.  

In fact, a “new broom” town council was elected at one point and only lasted a few months because they refused to negotiate.  They were “good old boys” and all the resentment against that group surfaced.  The guys were blind to the emotional connectome -- they only saw their version of “facts.”  The last straw for them was realizing that if they made any mistakes that cost the town money, they would not be insured.

Near Browning

I’m only picking on Valier because the reservation connectome is too intricate for me to grasp.  Some of it is hidden, some of it criminal, some of it relates to romantic meddlers from other places (like California, back east, and even Germany), some of it is inspired by post-colonial ideas from the academic world, and much is controlled by laws and grants that are federal.   It all morphs constantly and some of these forces contradict each other.

For a quick instance, consider the treatment of armed services veterans, who are much honored on the rez.  When Montana put up a memorial dedicated to Montana veterans, they left off all the Indians.  This meant that the Mayor of Great Falls could join the protest that got the Indian veterans added to the “wall” by means of individual tiles.  

This was such a politically rewarding thing to do that no one investigated the blood quantum or actual enrollment of the individuals and no one raised a fuss about the eagle feather awarded to the Mayor in gratitude.  (It is illegal for a white man to own an eagle feather.)  No one has kept a register of all the eagle feathers awarded for various good acts, including those who went to the veterans themselves, so we don’t know where the feathers go after the veterans receive them.

Some white people welcome an eagle feather and a new Indian name, and become quite emotional about the actual ceremony.  A few assume that now they are a member of the tribe, not realizing that the tribe is defined by law and is organized on the model of the business corporation, meant to preserve and increase the value of the tribal assets, which are massive, hard to monitor, still under the control of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs.  Individuals are lucky if they get an accounting.  This is what Eloise Pepion addressed.

Valier is about to find out over the next few years just how much federal laws and regulations affect them as well as the tribe: the subject will be water.  At present, most of the water issues are administered by the state.  Irrigation, sanitation, original (i.e. since white contact) water allotments, regulation of well-drilling are all involved.  People are getting indignant about frakking saline and chemical water that makes land useless for crops.

taken by Tristan Scott, the Missoulian

This is a line of thought that will be hard to manage and follow, but I’ll give it a shot -- at least around the edges.  Probably I’ll tell a lot of stories about Indians and Belgians. My bias is always towards the protection of individuals and the land itself.