KAREN ARMSTRONG V. URSULA LEGUIN

Karen Armstrong

This is a “compare and contrast” exercise between two women who approach “religion” in quite different ways.  One is Karen Armstrong, an Irish woman who began as a nun and through scholarship about the world’s “great” religions has reached “success” as a speaker and historian of religion.  She is explicitly a promoter of compassion and peace who has organized a “non-profit” called “Charter for Compassion” whose symbol is the sign for infinity that is fraying on one end.  I don’t quite get it.

Anyway, this is the definition of a charter:  “a written grant by a country's legislative or sovereign power, by which an institution such as a company, college, or city is created and its rights and privileges defined.  Synonyms:  authority, authorization, sanction, dispensation, consent, permission.”  It looks to me as though you can take the girl out of the convent, but you can’t take the convent out of the girl.  There’s gonna be a pope in here someplace and I can only hope his name is Francis.

There are all kinds of dimensions, meetings, sub-organizations, and even a store where you can buy t-shirts.  To join, one simply signs up, as though for any other non-profit newsletter (which will be the mailing list for request for money, like the Humane Society of the United States, another compassion-based organization) or for a Unitarian Universalist fellowship or church, though that sign-up will be in a book.  Lists are the basis of organizations — even nations.  This is why the churches have always been willing to keep the lists of who’s born, who marries, who dies.  Religious institutions are founded on organization.  They are sales franchises.  The dogma is just a sales pitch.

http://www.charterforcompassion.org/index.php/component/k2/item/298-the-charter-for-compassion-market-place-opening-nov-2015

Ursula LeGuin

If you think religion is organized and structured, justified by theology, kept effective by hierarchical management and money, then you will not think the other woman I want to talk about is even religious.  Her specialty has been iconoclasm.  Ursula LeGuin is a self-described anarchist and pacifist — so the two women both want peace.  But LeGuin plays with structure, knows that it is rooted in the environment’s requirements for survival, and understands that everything is always subject to unpredictable consequences.  She plays with the core ordering concept of sex and gender roles.  Her characters (fiction) change genders, are intra-gender, just as they are flexible about “races”, sometimes treated as almost different species — so what if they were?

Ishi

Behind the figure of LeGuin is not the Pope, but the phantom of Ishi, the last of his indigenous tribe, who was rescued by LeGuin’s father and written about by her mother.  She herself was born too late to have met him.  I do not travel in the rarefied circles of Karen Armstrong who received a prize for her work — not from Templeton but TED.  But I used to run into LeGuin every now and then when I lived in Portland.  I lived a couple blocks from a feminist bookstore on NE Broadway and she was in and out of there.  She even sold homemade stapled booklets from their shelves, one of which I regret giving away:  it was a gentle mockery of liturgy that included the directions for doing the schottische if you’re a scottie dog, with the usual little diagrams for where to put your paws — er, feet.

When people in general think of “religion” they think of Karen Armstrong’s world.  The anonymous Wikipedia says:  “In 1984, the British Channel Four commissioned her to write and present a television documentary on the life of St. Paul, The First Christian, a project that involved traveling to the Holy Land to retrace the steps of the saint. Armstrong described this visit as a "breakthrough experience" that defied her prior assumptions and provided the inspiration for virtually all her subsequent work. In A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (1993), she traces the evolution of the three major monotheistic traditions from their beginnings in the Middle East up to the present day and also discusses Hinduism and Buddhism.”  They have to be “great” as in “great big” and they have to be bureaucratic.

The contrast in terms of LeGuin is Dao/Tao.  (Do you say “saddle” or “sattle”?)  “Taoism is not a religion, nor a philosophy. It is a "Way" of life. It is a River. The Tao is the natural order of things. It is a force that flows through every living and sentient object, as well as through the entire universe.”  (Ellie Crystal)  The most recent scientific work on “deep time” and “big history” is very much along these lines and pulling those who work with the concepts into a kind of mystical regard for existence that will probably form itself into an influence on governance and boundaries.  Not by signing everyone up and making them pay taxes, but from a kind of ethical point of view that understands symbiosis and does not think profit justifies death by neglect — neither humans nor landscapes.

It’s telling that the British Channel Four considers St. Paul the first Christian.  I know what they mean: Jesus was a Jew boy.  Only when there was an organization were there "Christians."  But surely there is something ironic about Jesus Christ not being the first Christian.  Was it Gandhi or some other wry commentator who was asked what he thought of Christianity and said, “It sounds like a good idea.  I think they should try it.”  

Forgiveness, lunching with whores, going fishing with brothers, overturning the tables of money-changers, telling stories.  That’s Jesus.  Writing endless letters to little congregations to get them to grow, that’s Paul.  (The latest thing in seminaries is preparing ministers for a congregationless, denominationless world.  It’s been tried before, usually because the franchises are shrinking and are suddenly inspired to throw in together.)  Paul is a good manager trying to improve performance.  It would be more honest to call Christians “Paulists.”  Of course, real Paulists send women back to the kitchen.

LeGuin writes fiction and poetry, not rules and dogma.  She says, “In my own mind I’ve moved on quite far from the utopia of The Dispossessed to the semi-utopia of Always Coming Home, where I did try to make it simply a lifestyle. There was no political basis at all, in the sense of European or large nation politics, therefore people think that I was trying to idolize the American Indians or something. What I took from the Indians was, essentially, running your lives without a central government and using consensus as the basic mode, which you can’t do in a big society, it’s a matter of numbers. But I wanted to think out what it might be like.”

We need a word for “way of life” that’s not “lifestyle” which implies buying a lot of stuff for your house, clothes closet, and kitchen.  More emphasis on what one does, what one produces, how one relates to everything else.  “Commodification” and national boundaries are about exhausted except in the Third World.  So here’s what LeGuin is thinking about now:

“Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) founded one of the major philosophies of ancient Greece, helping to lay the intellectual foundations for modern science and for secular individualism. Many aspects of his thought are still highly relevant some twenty-three centuries after they were first taught in his school in Athens, called “the Garden.”  “Epicurus's philosophy combines a physics based on an atomistic materialism with a rational hedonistic ethics that emphasizes moderation of desires and cultivation of friendships. His world-view is an optimistic one that stresses that philosophy can liberate one from fears of death and the supernatural, and can teach us how to find happiness in almost any situation. His practical insights into human psychology, as well as his science-friendly world-view, gives Epicureanism great contemporary significance as well as a venerable role in the intellectual development of Western Civilization.”  www.epicurus.net  

PATTERNS AND PUZZLES AND JUST RIFFING

Techie stereotype

While friends of mine are wrestling with the Medium.com abyss between the platform-developing techies dominated by young California “Asians” -- maybe we could call them Confucians, since they revere authority, success, and doing what was always done -- and the wildly Celtic hairy writers who wish only self-determination and experiment (maybe we could consider them pagans or even barbarians), the rest of us who can spare time for thinking -- though that’s a little dangerous when driving to work -- would like to consider the complex and slippery category called religion.  It’s not unlike “writing” as a category.  One of those “humanities” things that get in the way.

The first thing to get a grip on is that the terms of being human have changed -- RADICALLY.  “Radical” means going to the roots, which means in this case “survival.”  So -- for the Blackfeet in early days, that meant tribal loyalty at the family level (including the in-laws, rather guardedly) to handle aggression, and harmony with nature, the source of food and shelter.  For some grizzled old wolfer with his bottle of strychnine, it meant obsession with the wolves and a willingness and ability to do whatever was needed: a situational lack of conscience or connection, enabled by the oblivion of alcohol, meth of the time.  The pattern remains in some places so it must be effective if you don’t mind having a short life.  Maybe the terms have not changed so much after all.

Contemporary wolfer

What change there is comes through technology that gives us access to the unseen, the inhuman world in all its complexity and seething connections -- star nurseries and gut biomes -- and its challenge to prove who we are.  The Abrahamic religions, which originated in the same place on the planet as our contemporary “sand wars,” are belligerent and unforgiving.  But Jesus, like Buddha, counseled compassion.  (His God went on being unforgiving.)  The question is compassion “for whom” and Jesus’ answer was “everyone.”  I’m not sure he included beetles or supernovas.  I'm not sure Paul agreed.

Giving up all this speculative fantasy, which is a Celtic sort of affliction of mine probably related to not drinking and which leads me into a kind of speculative ruthlessness (damned Puritans), I’ll go to H. Richard Niebuhr who simply looked at the “is-ness” of the American world, its version of organized religion.  The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929) suggests that people stick together when they understand each other and that is closely related to their economic success.  Most aware people understand that Anglican/Episcopalians are high-income, high-education, people who still shelter Brit class-categories.  Pentecostals tend to be marginal, low-income suffering people who can be ecstatic.  Then there were the denominations considered “mainstream” which were related to the values of the bourgeois shopkeepers: self-controlled, thrifty, clean, sexual only to the extent necessary to create children and consumers.

These denominations are sort of reductions of the 11th century revolutions of the major religions called “axial”, the Big Three:  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam which come out of each other over time.  Karen Armstrong spent a lot of time thinking and researching about these three monotheisms in terms of ideas, and had to consider Hinduism and Buddhism as alternatives defined as being -- um -- Axial-like in terms of importance, mostly indicated by size.  There have always been smaller groups, sort of ethnic or alternative or ecologically supported groups.  

To most people “religion” is all these organizations and bureaucracies, because as soon as there is enough population density, things have to get bureaucratic and written down, which means they are pinned in place, more or less.  Forget what these various groups say they believe.  That’s embroidery.  Most of them believe in survival and, if the situation allows, prosperity.  Prosperity comes from power.  With enough of it comes corruption and decay, ineffectiveness.  This is where institutional religion is today, mostly.  Reform is no longer idealism: it is survival.  And the prosperity may be missing.

I subscribe to religion newsletters (not as many as science newsletters) and have been reflecting on two situations:  Pope Francis who comes in to an organizationally petrified institution whose power and nature developed in Karen Armstrong’s Axial religion time (11th century) and is now forced to question the terms, like money-dependent survival.  And then, curiously, the growth of the Southern Baptists (example next door to me) which was based on the importance of conversion and strong (Confucian) rules of behavior.  The shocker is that they sent out thousands of missionaries through the planet but that the potential “saved” people are now busy with their smart phones creating micro-banks.  Worse, the reward on earth the missionaries were supposed to receive (pensions and a Fifties sort of old age peacefully dominating their lawns) was spent by the denominational leaders.  The estimate is that 80,000 jobless missionaries, some of them aged, are now wondering how they will survive.  I think some of them are counting on coming to Valier to revive the church next door, but their main supporters in this town have gone to Heaven, which one hopes has not spent their trust fund of Golden streets.

New understanding of the world, which is mostly science-based, does not define evil as “anything that departs from our norm” (for instance, binary gender assignments -- either male or female and only one of each can marry the other).  It says something far more radical:  gender assignments are arbitrary, sexual attraction and identity are fluid because they are an interaction between a physical/molecular creature and the ecologically organized universe.  Marriage is an economic arrangement.  Whatever it takes, including sequential multiple parenting.  One of today’s science newsletters says that tests of gender preference and identification in women show that women do not have desire only for the opposite sex.  Maybe it comes from cherishing and protecting babies, no matter what they're like.

Hefner is 89.

It remains to understand why “men” are so linked to power as synonymous with desire, sexual or otherwise.  (“Desire” being code for domination and control.)  And why are the markers of those who are “desirable” culturally connected to the small, blonde, weak, fascinating, and transient characteristics that some cultural commentators connect to ethnic history -- like the advent of “elfin” pale aristocratic Normans coming  among the low-class Saxons, blondes much preferred by Hugh Hefner until they are of voting age. 

Power becomes attributed to appearance, not just gender but color.  Satan is red and black: Celtic or African.  Other.  (I’m just riffing here -- not making claims.  It’s all unverified speculation.)  How many Catholic or Baptist missionaries went out to convert white people, unless they were really poor and clueless people who relied on superstition.   (Excluding the Abrahamic superstitions)  And forget that the Big Three religions were all Arab, though the Virgin Mary and Jesus had that blonde elfin look in European art.  Sort of glow-in-the-dark.

There’s an age-thing in here somewhere.  Confucius aged; Buddha did not.  An aged Jesus would be as startling as black or female Jesuses have been.  Judaism, which is the oldest of the organized Abrahamic religions, accepted and admired old age from early times.  Recent mainstream Protestant religious leaders in the pulpit (not the academy) have been young men who rolled up their sleeves to show their muscular forearms and challenged Satan to wrestle.  Now we are reduced to Billy Graham’s son writing a book that he purports was written by his century-old father to support the franchise, a family empire like our American political empires now under challenge by their own patriarchs. 

Fifty Shades of Pink.

As I think about it, some of these factors are highly relevant to Medium.com where the dominant style of writing seems to be female, young, blonde, sweet, elfin, and -- just below the surface -- hungry for money and power.  It’s not that the barbarians are crucified -- it’s just that they are pressed back into the forest where they won’t embarrass anyone.  Just riffing.  Just saying.  It’s all speculation and idle reflection.  But that’s writing!

Tomorrow I'll take on spirituality.  No facts.  Just riffing.  Whole different subject and it's NOT religion, which is bureaucracy and property.

IMMANENCE VS. TRANSCENDENCE

The first commandment of this approach to deep meaning in human life is the simple advice to “pay attention.”  But in my system commandments and advice are ruled out -- the need to pay attention should and will arise inside you.  The most basic assumption is immanence, that life unfolds by itself without tricks, drugs, instruments -- because that is the definition of life.  All the rest is captured and exploited by imposed terms describing someone’s idea of transcendence.  This is not a bad thing unless it is used to oppress, but then it can kill.

It turns out that there are far more then five senses.  The brain alone has maybe 200 kinds of neurons, each specializing in some kind of perception of the world outside the creature’s skin.  One of the most recently investigated was a little locus behind the top of one’s nose that tells you how fast you are going.  It remains to figure out what electrochemical signals it is using and whether it is accurately and actually reporting the real speed you are going, or just the speed you THINK you are going.

An apparatus for training the sense of smell to perceive meaning.

It turns out that what you THINK far too easily (from my stubborn point of view) overwhelms what actually is being reported via electrochemical signals to the sub-sorter cluster of neurons, which edits before sending to the brain where it is edited some more.  I do not like the idea of neurology being organized by dropping out information to preserve earlier heuristics -- giving clarity more importance than reality -- but what alternative do we have?  

Brains are limited because there’s only so much space inside a skull.  That’s why the originating sense-cells are all over the body -- but there’s only so much space in a body, either.  The skin limits a creature, even a dinosaur, who didn’t allot much energy to thinking anyway.  If the skin weren’t limited, we would simple dissolve into the energy needs of the environment and its other creatures.  We are only borrowed from the world because of our skins making the boundary between oneself and everything else.  This way of thinking is biological, practical, operative.

Is this about food?

But what we think of as psychological also has a boundary, which is not perceptible but built (immanent) from the interaction of the neurons trying to understand what’s going on and therefore forming concepts which is a way of creating divisions, boundaries, categories.  They are heuristic:   “involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods; also :  of or relating to exploratory problem-solving techniques that utilize self-educating techniques (as the evaluation of feedback) to improve performance.” 

This is in sharp contrast to supernaturally-based institutional religions, whose “magic” is believed to be inalterable, unvarying, and the only real interpretation.  The claim is that unnatural things of another realm can be known by only one source -- person, book, god -- which demands obedience.  A ring, a token, a crown, a throne, are understood as the button that controls power.  If you argue with that, it is justification to confine or destroy you as a danger.

A cat can look at a queen, but what does it see?

Perceiving the world outside one’s skin in a way that respects immanence, the being of something simply as itself, gives one’s inner life many ways to connect and create, which are the third step after sorting and recording what is perceived.  Then one can connect with others (fourth step) and feel the simple obvious fact of being embedded in the universe, separated only by one’s skin and one’s assumptions (fifth step).  

This might not be pleasant. Suffering, awareness of death, rage, sadness, and loss are real.  To look for a supernatural (rather than metaphorical and symbolic) escape is an overwhelming temptation and can successfully fend off despair.  It is those who have no way of interpreting the world who are dangerous.  It is a death and some deaths want to be shared, maybe with a gun.

But interpretation is the second step.  The first is only feeling.

Some geneticists are asking whether one’s ability to create inner categories that are based on peace have anything to do with human wiring as it results from particular helical molecular constructs.  Our skills and knowledge are too primitive to know.  It has been heuristically suggested that the Euro-personality might be operating off inherited Neanderthal hunter/gatherer traits, emphasized by the need to fend off a wave of evolved African people.  And that the Asian genome, after millennia of agriculture, had become peaceful.  This doesn’t allow for the dynamic horse-based people who galloped down from the Asian steppes to spread Genghis Khan’s genes all over Europe.  Obviously it must be over-generalizing.

“Mongols were highly tolerant of most religions during the early Mongol Empire, and typically sponsored several at the same time. At the time of Genghis Khan in the 13th century, virtually every religion had found converts, from Buddhism to Christianity and Manichaeanism to Islam.” The anonymous expert in Wikipedia includes only one Asian system and three from the complex of choices in the Middle-East.  All are the systems that Karen Armstrong (and Karl Jaspers) explicitly felt were “Axial”, foundations of today’s major institutional religions.  These are transcendence-based systems, claiming supernatural sources as authorization.

Alexander Nevsky among the Shamans

The foundational religion of Genghis Kahn was shamanic which is an immanent system.  Its super-powers are rooted in reality, like bears or cranes or mountains which should be taken as symbols with meaning rather than imitation humans.  The religious systems of Europe before the “Axial” religions were shamanic and so were those in the Americas and Africa.  Institutions are creatures of settlement and wealth.  Kings and armies.  

The 13th century in Europe is described by some historians as “high,” which is not about altitude but about prestige and power.  Maybe it comes from the practice of putting powerful people up on a platform where people could see them.  “High” table, “high” church, and so on.  These are all institutionally ascribed, but also we associate “high” with the sky, whether angels or bomber planes, images of power, though we don’t recognize bombs as religious unless we call them “demonic” -- which means they should be connected to underground, like landmines and terrorists.  Immanence is considered “grounded”, an eruption like Pluto bursting up in his chariot to seize the innocent Persephone, which deranges the order of the seasons.  The earth is "low," meaning vulgar, uncivilized, dirty, and probably sexy.  Maybe childlike.

St. Mary Roman Catholic Church, High Hill, Texas

So does that mean that the intended “high” civilization of skyscrapers, space stations, and church spires has deranged the world into famine and rising oceans?  Maybe.  Or maybe our categories are just wrong.  Are the Bioneers verging into institutional hubris?  Is the media now a hegemony imposing its own worldview from broadcasting satellites?

I would argue that the immanence of pure perception and a willingness to break down boundaries through empathy and compassion are the true Sacred strategies.  How to do that is hidden behind dark glass.  We should be cautious: it may be protective.

POST-WRITING AUTOCHTHONOUS THOUGHT

EGYPT

We’re all pretty clear that somewhere around 12,000 BCE or 10,000 BCE, maybe because of the weather which was warming (up to that point it had been very cold), humans in various places began to invent agriculture, each with the plants and animals of their place.  Jared Diamond suggests that the locations with easily domesticated animals (cows, pigs, donkeys, camels, horses) were propelled by more ability to use animal power both to travel and to work.  The places with plants with seeds that could be stored, like grain of various kinds, could produce enough food to keep everyone fed plus a surplus to use for trade.  None of this happened all at once, but gradually.

The next step was hierarchies and specializations.  Some people toiled in the fields, some people had little shops, some people were artisans, and some were priests.  Copper smelting begins in 5500 BCE.  Around 3200 BCE, in Mesopotamia writing had been invented, then in Mesoamerica separately around 600 BCE.  People were in towns, and trading paths had been established.  Northern Africa was drying up, with one of the largest lakes draining to the north. All this increased sophistication and awareness of far places that had previously only been possible in sea ports.  Once writing is established, history begins.

Karen Armstrong’s argument appears to be that when the Axial Age arose, defined by the formation of the big religious systems between 700 and 200 BCE, it was prompted by two things.  One was compassion for the suffering of all the peasant classes who did the labor in the fields, and the other was a failure of "paganism".  I disagree with both of these.

I do see that the Axial Era was a time of systems forming, reflecting on the “long history” of humans through the lithic eras.  Infant versions of the great dominating professions formed and grew to be called Western Thought.  Law, medicine, and theology formed thick nodes of population and luxury in some places, all joined by travel-ways.  Pilgrimages.  The Silk Road.  (The original one.)  But truthfully, in any time period I don’t see anyone with much compassion for peasants, esp. in a time of slavery.  I think there was probably more worry about revolution, internal war.  Or why would Jesus and hundreds of others have to be crucified to maintain control?

Many were crucified along the roads.

This image shows up in "Game of Thrones"

I have a lot of respect for paganism, which I don’t interpret as “worshipping” self-indulgent gods of this and that.  I see it in the much older Eliade way, a felt pattern of what is sacred and what is profane.  The idea that a lot of people were being oppressed and this made them yearn for transcendence just doesn’t work for me.  More likely they yearned for freedom, comfort and progress.  Or just went blank.

It seems to me that medieval Europe had plenty of peasants, oppressed, bullied, taxed, and required to attend the local religion which was fused with the local government and justice system.  The transcendence part may have migrated to romantic narratives like the King Arthur myths.  The church was competing politically and thoroughly.  The transcendence seems to apply to the cathedral architecture.  But there IS an ability to imagine virtual systems built on abstract thinking.  

Peasant life

Commerce was the engine and commerce was the corruption, the source of all profit and many alliances.  I don’t see evidence of Heaven as transcendent.  It looks like another seaport to me -- escapism.

My interest is not in going back to the Axial Age as an imaginary Golden Time when everyone was unconflicted and kind nor before that to the Stone Age which Jean Auel half-explored and half-exploited.  I want to know more about the time before writing, even before agriculture.  Call me Esau, the red and hairy hunter.  The Axial Era was a later time when all the systems and hierarchies were just forming.  Our time now is growing pot-bound and still rewards the few at the expense of the many, which Armstrong feels is what triggered the Axial Era.  I think she’s suggesting a new shift is happening.  I agree.

We skipped a few steps in our shift to agriculture, perhaps didn’t make a complete transition from hunter/gatherer, because there’s a LOT of difference between stalking game and plowing.  Things that had to change were the organization of family, the allotment of gender roles, child-rearing, and education.  The new life removed the advantages of one kind of person, replacing it with people who had entirely different characteristics.  Lately there has been a lot of fuss about the diet changes, moving from meat to wheat.  But maybe the invention of writing in 5,000 BCE  (the beginning of history) has been a more subtle and profound change.  Literacy still separates whole populations from everyone else.

I’ve never heard anyone discuss the psychological consequences of switching from hunting/gathering to agriculture.  Part of it is like the difference between television and the internet: television is passive receiving and the internet is active seeking.  (Big institutional and liturgical churches ask the believer to receive.  Active seeking is more the function of the university, but they also establish limits and don’t allow pre-verbal thought unless it is in written description.)  Hunting/gathering is responding to what is really in the world and trying to figure out what the other creatures are doing.  This is like internet exploring.  Gathering means studying the responses of the plants to the climate.  But agriculture means taking control, whether by weeding, planting or watering.  This is more like academia.  In fact, seminary means "seed bed."

Another change is a loss of privacy since in fields and settlements everyone can see what everyone else is doing, in contrast to small groups or individuals going off on their own into forest.  And maybe a change in the order of the day, since hunting is done on the schedule of the animals, usually diurnal and sometimes nocturnal, unless they are in large herds.  To work with plants is to be awake and active through the day.  Cooking would also be changed, with plants often needing shucking or chopping and then boiling or baking.  Meat needs much less fuel which means less wood gathering.  Fermentation and leavening appear: bread and wine.

These changes would be reflected in ceremonies.  For instance, burnt offerings of meat  -- modeled on sharing meat from hunting with family and band -- converted to vegetable crops, pottage, and finally wheat bread in the Christian communion -- seems to have been hard emotionally, considering that Jacob and Esau’s rivalry was probably a narrative meant to persuade men that the change was right by bringing in the previous generation, the old blind father.  (Aside from its function of justifying succession and animosities.)

Hunting is not so far from war.  Where does the aggression go when the culture shifts to working fields?  Raiding and defending crops is probably not enough action.  It’s hard to imagine that the energy goes into the stone buildings and streets that persist today.  Maybe it goes into violence against women, children and domestic animals.  For hunters, reflexes and complexes from their dark and animal brains are quite fitting and find their uses.  No animals do agriculture on any scale.  The neolithic psyche is explored today in terms of adaptation or lack thereof in the modern (using metal and writing) world, which is once again a conversion of patterns and energies left from the “Axial Age”.  World religions at that time did urge empathy and compassion.  Not that it made much difference.

The human ability to adapt to different contexts is, of course, what keeps us from being trapped in one environment which extinguished some animal species, but ability is not willingness.  People distribute themselves through classes and places according to their adaptations.  Maybe the lighthouse keepers and fire tower watchers are reacting to a primal arboreal life.  The walking gene is still strong in many people and still good for our basic physiology.  People thrown out of mainstream culture, maybe for lack of literacy, form their own tribal groups.

In every culture, but particularly in ag-based communities, there is a strong will to keep things the same.  The overwhelming variable for farmers is the climate, which is totally uncontrollable.  Weather comes from overhead and is occasionally as destructive as Noah’s flood.  By the time prayers and hymns are written down, the evidence of weather as a deliberate religious act by a god or Gods is certainly there and gets carried into the Axial thinking, possibly through things like studies of seasons and the creation of systems like irrigation to manage fields, to compensate for the arbitrary reward and punishment.

The other big ag variable is the market, which exists if there is enough food left over to sell.  In some times and places, greed has taken the people’s food to sell for profits that the elite can grab.  We feel this is happening now, and that the major religious systems devised in the Axial Era have been sold out to major commercial corporations, partly because they have become religions themselves and the religious institutions have become corporations.

The “Axial Era” was a long time ago.  Something new is forming, something granular, coded, and differently limited by cosmic physics and our own brain function.  I don’t think it will be writing-based; I think it will be arts based and that we will recognize technology as an art form.

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.