OUR METHODS DEMAND BASICS

U of Chicago Div School

“What’s your method?” was always the first question at U of C Div School.  The idea was to establish a stream of precedents that were already known, so as to impose limits and a sort of spine, a line of thought.  In the best of worlds, that strategy would yield an essay that was coherent and intelligible.  Of course, if you chose a method no one liked or understood, you were doomed.

This morning on Aeon.com I ran into a new question:  “Then what?”  In Div School terms, this is teleology.  It depends on what your goal might be.  

https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=feca0f6557-Daily_newsletter_weekend_edition_16th_January_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-feca0f6557-68600437  

Lewis Dartnell

What happens after the accepted methods of our civilization — like exploiting fossil fuel and centering everything on profit — are exhausted, no longer apply?  What methods will save us?  When one is on territory unknown (terra incognita) the question becomes even sharper but the methods benefit from being fuzzy, wandering, and mixed.  This Aeon piece was derived from a blog based on “The Knowledge”, a book or series of books or nested blogs that seem to have their source in a man named Lewis Dartnell.  He’s handsome, young, and smart enough to star in a BBC series and my only question is “why isn’t he?”  The title, of course, is from the knowledge of London streets a taxi driver must have to pass a certifying test; it’s a “where are we going” question.

But here’s where I’m really hooked.  It’s a subject I met in seminary: the wilderness in the city.  Most of my classmates thought of it in terms of people: savage mental pygmies, I guess.  But like many others I’ve always been easily seduced by what some call “ruin porn.”  That is, abandoned industries and housing that are being reclaimed by the “natural” world.  http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/ruin-photography/  This link should take you to examples of how transient anthro-construction can be.  We’re used to seeing Aztec pyramids and Asian mega-statues overwhelmed by jungle, but now we’ve added catastrophic evacuations (Chernobyl) and resource-exhausted communities (abandoned mining towns in the West).  It's not hard to imagine the U of C quads as ruins.

In fact, strictly speaking, my own buildings qualify, since two of them were temporary knock-ups used during the rebuild of Swift Dam, one a shop and the other the caretaker’s shack.  Nature and time are dismantling them, as well as this modest house built in the Thirties with an add-on bathroom and garage.  But my earliest and most vivid images are from the trail in Macleay Park in Portland where my family went to hike in the Forties and Fifties.  It was a WPA project with a lot of stonework, including a little bathroom which became a sin center and then was burned and buried, though the stone walls and arched entrances remain.  Our teenaged babysitter hanged himself nearby, in an earlier wave of alienation among young men.  Our movie horizons are full of post-apocalypse landscapes. 

Macleay Park

A periodical related to this complex, called “Ernest Journal” ,(http://www.ernestjournal.co.uk) guides this line of thought with optimism:  how would we rebuild?  Actual practical information.  How to make glass.  How to make breakfast.  How to survive an asteroid strike.  I have a friend who’s a bit of a survivalist — he just survived major cancer surgery and is restored to his health of years earlier — which means being a bit of a pack rat.  The secret here is knowing which rat to pack, and that means a grasp on basic technologies like electricity wiring, water piping, and gardening.  

Here in Montana where the grid is thin and weather gets cold (it’s generally already very windy at any temperature) one learns quite a bit about dust physics, insulation, smoke management, cooking over fires (the coals, not the flames) and other dynamics.  The traces of earlier civilizations — drag marks of travois, bits of metal or glass beads on the hill tops where bodies were left for the sun to take back, pictographs on stone — are either durable or gone.  They are not likely to be smothered by vines but the boulders are embroidered by vivid lichens, plant extremophiles.

In England which is wet and sitting on what once seemed an inexhaustible mountain of coal, the industrial revolution got a good headstart on a lot of forces that have ended now: colonies, factories, railroads. ships — all of which led to a demographic shift, an influx of people not accustomed to industrial life, a demographic apocalypse that will be the irresistible force that changes immovable Britain.

As it happens, I know quite a lot about molten metal and even a bit about ceramic kilns   In Oregon there were always glass-casters nearby.  They liked to build their studios near the beach for the sake of the cool breezes, the same as we used to prefer casting bronze in the winter, during weather just like this: snow on the ground and zero temps.  With the big fans going, the furnace and the protective gear were bearable.  Technology at this primitive level does not depend upon instruments, except maybe a pyrometer until you learn to tell temp by the color of the molten metal.  It’s a matter of human senses and internalized knowledge that comes from experience.  Less dramatic is woodwork or pouring concrete, or maybe animal husbandry which adds the dimensions of empathy and persuasion.  These are “methods.”

Sci-fi loves this sort of thing, and so do the paleoarcheologists who try to imagine the steps between the last hominid and the first modern human.  Of course, there is no “step”, no “break”, but a series of small developments that folded back on each other, became culturally contagious, used the environment instead of just surviving it.  Some of those uses were glass, stone and metal.  These survive even humans and the pre-ag aeons are named for them.  (Aren’t we the Glass Age, if you count silicon and sky scrapers?  I’ve never forgotten photos of an experimental house built only from scavenged car windshields.)  And now we turn to gravity energy in the tides, solar energy on the roof, volcanic energy in Iceland, and microbial energy in our sewage lagoon.  Clearly, energy is where you find it.

The biological energy we have not mastered — maybe I should say supported — is human beings.  What a waste for people to be drowning in the Mediterranean, starving in Syria, dying of exposure in the streets of American metropolises.  Why can’t we figure out how to address this gradual apocalypse?  This erosion of life?  What if our goal was not to restore the world as we know it, but to find a new way to be in the world.  This is not the first time the question has been asked. It’s teleological. 

Darnell embracing a Martian friend

Here’s Dartnell speaking:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbbvf-GkJcA

CENTER VERSUS EDGE

I remarked earlier that we need to think about defining groups by their outliers, where things fuzz out into the next group or no group, versus defining a category by its nucleus.  Or what about variegated categories where components mix to make a kind of striped group?  Then what holds them together.  What is their axis mundi?

We’ve broken down the sharp lines between male and female, between the many kinds of desire, between various races -- esp. the ones defined by appearance whether skin color or epicanthal fold.  DNA smashes so many of our cultural and governmental categories.  One of the reasons I watch CSI is that it is an easy way to consider what the show writers have already debated over a coffee-stained table and defined for reflection.  What technical tools have reframed the same questions over and over?

Should we each get a genomic printout attached to our birth certificates?  Or should one be made in the womb so that “faulty” or stigmatized elements can allow an abortion of the fetus before it makes trouble?  Or, since CRISPR allows genes to be replaced rather accurately, should we just do that ?  If we can closely control who we are, what will we do?

What does that imply in terms of demographics -- not who prevails so much as how it will confuse the bean-counters.  Now it appears that everyone is “metis,” mixed.  There’s no such thing as a purebred human -- what a scandal to discover Neanderthal genes -- but, in fact, there’s no such thing as “purebred” anywhere anything, not even in a lab where an impure mix of e-coli strains can abort your doctoral thesis.  Even sitting there isolated in a petri dish, the little bugs mutate.

But history has insisted on sorting everyone by appearance and location.  And using location means drawing boundaries, which means the possibility of gating, controlling who can enter or leave.  Of course, a cell and a body MUST do that -- there MUST be a way to keep out poisons and eject debris.  

Recently the most paradoxical use of face-scanning recognition technology is using it to filter who may attend church services.  Troublemakers?  Heretics?  The disobedient?  Someone with a gun?   In the early days of Christianity there was a phenomenon called "fencing the Communion."  That little rail where you kneel and rest your elbows?  It's meant to prevent you from just walking up and helping yourself.  

Or it could exclude some people from the inner chambers where decisions are made and study becomes more intense.  It took me a while to realize the Board of Trustees of the seminary was mostly for show, to identify people with a lot of money, so as to keep them in mind of the next pledge drive.   The real decisions were made by a sub-group.  In the old days, they were men who retired for whiskey and cigars; naturally, rich widows did not attend.

Who's in, who's out.

Maybe you’ve never participated in a pledge drive in a big church.  The committee -- carefully chosen -- sits down with a set of cards or a list of members and guesses the income of each formal member and then informal Sunday attendees.  (There’s always a banker on the committee.) An estimate is made of the capacity of that person to pledge.  (Kid in college?  House burned down?)  Canvassers are each assigned a certain number of people to visit.  The idea is to remind them what good things generous pledgers had made possible in the previous years and then to hint a bit about “norms.”  One of the men I visited -- wives often weren’t present -- was an important doctor.  He knew I was not making a lot of money.  All I had to do was mention the amount I was pledging to cause him to blush and raise his pledge.  

So a lot of norming -- doing what others are doing -- is based on guessing secrets, which money matters normally are.  DNA suggests belonging to a population whose norm is attendance at a good school and many connections among themselves that will help to attract job offers and provide support after getting the job.  DNA counts more than IQ.

Schisms and eccentricities are bad for business, bad for research, bad for strategies -- IF your goal is to perpetuate an institution.  What kind of institution could be defined by it’s core?  Medicins sans Frontiers seems obvious.  No doubt there are differences among them, but the axis of it all is to heal as many as possible.  They have preserved the original pledge of doctors.

Of course, there are always many forces that are uncontrollable.  Even DNA is constantly being changed by the environment -- providing new opportunities or damages and, more subtly, turning various genes on and off.  Genes don’t necessarily control something like coloring but rather things like the timing of maturation or the interaction of sets of linked genes.  If some CRISPR enthusiast knocks out the gene for something linked to, for instance, metabolism, the person may fail due to its own attempt to succeed.

There are many subtle, internal, unseen dynamics of the code that is each of us.  But ethnic populations of many people also operate as codes, esp. when governments are trying to keep track, politicians are trying to persuade, and advertisements are trying to re-norm us so that we just MUST have some gizmo.

After I read about a lot of this teeny stuff, I love to read the macro research.  Like this quote:

“Until about 9,000 years ago, Europe was home to a genetically distinct population of hunter-gatherers, the researchers found. Then, 9,000 to 7,000 years ago, the genetic profiles of the inhabitants in some parts of Europe abruptly changed, acquiring DNA from Near Eastern populations.

“Archaeologists have long known that farming practices spread into Europe at the time from Turkey. But the new evidence shows that it wasn’t just the ideas that spread — the farmers did, too.

“The hunter-gatherers didn’t disappear, however. They managed to survive in pockets across Europe between the farming communities.

“ ‘ It’s an amazing cultural process,’ said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who led the university’s team. ‘You have groups which are as genetically distinct as Europeans and East Asians. And they’re living side by side for thousands of years.’

“From 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, however, hunter-gatherer DNA began turning up in the genes of European farmers. “There’s a breakdown of these cultural barriers, and they mix,” Dr. Reich said.

“About 4,500 years ago, the final piece of Europe’s genetic puzzle fell into place. A new infusion of DNA arrived — one that is still very common in living Europeans, especially in central and northern Europe.”

Dr. David Reich

So this population, possibly sheep herders on horseback, came in from the high north and their clue DNA is present in North American Indians!  Is this an example of NA’s infiltrating Eurasia through Russia?  

“The Ancient North Eurasian line was not present in either the 8,000-year-old hunter-gatherers or the 7,000-year-old farmer, so researchers believe it represents a migration into Europe sometime after those individuals lived but before recorded history in the region.

“These Ancient North Eurasians must have spread into Europe at a later time, and so encountered early farmer- or hunter-gatherer-type populations and mixed with them,” Lazaridis said. “It’s definitely, chronologically, the last thing that arrived in most of Europe.”

“Lazaridis said the period of approximately 4,500 years ago appears likely for the influx, because that is when new types of mitochondrial DNA appear in the genetic record. Reich added that there are hints from other disciplines, including linguistics, that point to migrations during that time span.”

A far more controversial and politically incorrect study suggests:

“A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability.

“The selective force was the restriction of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe to occupations that required more than usual mental agility, the researchers say in a paper that has been accepted by the Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University Press in England.

“He and two colleagues at the University of Utah, Gregory Cochran and Jason Hardy, see the pattern of genetic disease among the Ashkenazi Jewish population as reminiscent of blood disorders like sickle cell anemia that occur in populations exposed to malaria, a disease that is only 5,000 years old.

“In both cases, the Utah researchers argue, evolution has had to counter a sudden threat by favoring any mutation that protected against it, whatever the side effects. Ashkenazic diseases like Tay-Sachs, they say, are a side effect of genes that promote intelligence.”

Tweets between @DavidQuammen and @Dr. Neil Bodie:

 "Why has there never been an outbreak of #Ebola in Pygmies? Very low rate of serious malaria? Genetic protection?"

Now consider what HIV and addiction are doing to the DNA of America.  Which is the center?  Maybe it is NOT entitled white men.  Maybe this winnowing will create a concentration of something new.  The name of the game is survival.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2365516010/     First peoples.  So far, so good.  Maybe.

THE SADDER BUT WISER TOWN

Valier in the middle, Green line is the Rez, GF 80 miles south, Canada 60 miles north

I was trying to find some way to get people to think about the service area around Valier, the families and businesses who are really the source of the town, the justification of it, who the people are who buy their groceries, do banking, mail letters, and so on.  Finally it dawned on me that I could go to the postal ZIP code, the telephone prefix, the school bus routes, and the irrigation canals for maps.  I’m in the early stages of acquiring these, but already it’s revealing.  Here are two I’m looking at so far:

http://www.city-data.com/zips/59486.html

http://www.unitedstateszipcodes.org/59486/#stats

  

The zip code has a lot of data.  This is what hits my eye right away.  59486 has 1328 people in about 548 square miles.  The median age is 42.2 (state median is 39.7) and there are 114 households with kids.  The estimated median dwelling value in 2011 was $92,500, compared with $184,100 for Montana.  

About 15% of people did not graduate from high school.  About 25% have at least a bachelor’s degree.  (I expect most of them are teachers or nurses, so likely mostly women.)   There are 32 students from this ZIP who are attending private undergrad colleges.  No separate figures for the town of Valier or for those attending Montana universities.  I suspect that most of the college students are from ranches, which is where the wealth of the community resides.  You could probably run into their moms in the quite elegant gift section at DeVoes.

5.6% have graduate or professional degrees.  They’re probably engineers or architects and the lone veterinarian.  There are no facilities except the clinic where Shelby doctors visit weekly, no resident ministers, and maybe one lawyer.  (There used to be one in Pendroy.)  UNLESS one includes the southern reservation where Heart Butte has a resident doctor.   She lived in Valier for a while.  I think the ministers there are mostly “inspired” which means no college is necessary.  The priest would be college-educated.

Heart Butte, population 698 in 2000

The 2012 cost of living index in 59486 is 85.2, which is less than the US average cost of living, set at 100%.  There are almost no Hispanics or Blacks.  The Median age is 42.2 which is older than the Montana median age which is 39.7.  (Remember that “median” is the number halfway between the bottom and the top.  If there were two people, one aged 100 and the other aged one, the median would be 50.)

The median adjusted gross income is $21,663 here but $37,845 in the rest of Montana.  The median salary is $25,616 here and $31,190 in the rest of the state.  Taxable interest (median $2,056) was recorded by about a third of people and taxable dividends (median $6,150) were reported by half of people.  Profit from businesses here was median $1,133 but for the state was median $8,849.  22% of people were below the poverty level in 2011 in 59486 compared with 14.8% in the whole state.  In that same year 3.4% of the population of this ZIP code were below 50% of the poverty level while in the whole state 9% -- more than twice as many -- were that poor.  There is no jail in this zip code, nor any nursing home.

I don’t know what it does to these figures to include Hutterite colonies or Indians whose land is in trust.  Land in trust is not taxed, but land that is patented and owned is, except not by the state on the reservation.  There are actually lots in Valier that are in trust with the US Government.  I’m told that Pondera County owns half the lots in Valier, but I don’t know how much of that is due to taxes not paid.  They do have an MDOT yard in town and, I think, a gravel pit.

Valier

Women outnumber men, as is common.  Ten women had given birth in the counted year -- none of them were married.  25 households received SNAP food stamps.  495 did not.  No gay or lesbian households were detected.  Disclosing that status would seem risky here, though I know there are some younger people who self-identify as gay, and -- as every place on this planet -- there are MSM.  (Men who occasionally have sex with men but insist they are not gay.)  Probably not a good idea to get too curious.

Howes Lakes

Lakes and reservoirs listed are Stetler Lakes, Howes Lakes, Heron Lake, Fish Lake, Hidden Lake, Deep Lake, Abbot Lake and Round Lake.  I do not know why Lake Frances is not listed.  Creeks in the ZIP include Birch, Blacktail, Scoffin, Sheep, Dupuyer, Fish, Phillips.  When I have time, I’ll look up each of these bodies of water on my Montana Topo Map, which gives much more info than the highway maps people generally use.  

Dupuyer Creek, which became English Creek in the Ivan Doig books

An unusual feature is the number of Hutterite colonies:  Kingsbury, Birch Creek, and New Miami.  Each has its own infrastructure with self-contained water and sewer.  It appears Valier is not alone in struggling to meet state standards for wells and lagoons.  They are heavy users of the Valier library because the Conrad library made them uncomfortable and because of the lively atmosphere and cooperation provided by the Valier librarian, esp for kids.  The library must have a copy of every Christian colony romance in existence!  Of course, when Hutterites come to town, they spend money.

Kingsbury Colony

In fact, one of the first things I see is that the Valier service area reaches more to the north than to the south where it abuts Conrad's services.  Heart Butte and the south rez people drive here for gas, café, bread and milk, and church.  Professional people, including Native American teachers who are serving Heart Butte, often live in Valier.  When I taught there, I drove to Valier every Sunday that the roads were passable in order to buy the Sunday paper and maybe have lunch.  There is an invisible line across the reservation that only long-time residents are aware of but that has a lot of social reality.  Evidently it has to do with the history of the location of the Indian Agency when allocations were made and relates to who was considered “progressive” and who was “old-timey”.  The line is not on any map but since Blacktail Creek, where the Pepion allotment runs along Highway 89, is in 59486, that is a sign of being in our service area.  Eloise Cobell, whose maiden name was Pepion, lived there before her death, on the original allotment to Politte Pepion.   Her husband, Turk Cobell, still lives there.

There are 53 people who are foreign born, but most of them are Canadians.  I don’t think they are perceived as “foreign.”  Since the bulk of the original residents of Valier were transplanted en masse (with the help of their priest and the Conrads) from their original location in Belgium and since many of them farmed and ranched as far as “Belgian hill” which is roughly where Highway 44 meets I-15 and the ridge that is the location of most of the transmitters of television and other microwave services, then that’s part of our service area.  The old Belgian church is out that way and its graveyard has many familiar names in it.

If there is a theme to all this, it is that appearances are deceiving.  Someone remarked to me that it must be nice to live in Valier because it is so “pretty.”  They had never driven up and down the streets -- only a few times out to the lake campground.  When I began to talk about infrastructure, they changed the subject.  Valier people are very worried about how they "look" to others.  Several of my blog followers have gotten hooked on promotion and expansion as the answer and could not be talked out of it.  This is also the mindset of many locals whose mental picture is a small middle-class town that should maintain a white picket fence except higher -- in short, we’re back to Mayberry RFD, except that each demographic would increase its own people and priorities while conveniently blanking the others.  I think this is close to a universal short-sightedness among all humans.  Not all growth comes from being bigger.  Sometimes it’s a matter of complexifying, growing more sophisticated.