CAPITALISM IS MORE THAN A DIRTY WORD

Capitalism, based on the idea of accumulating wealth that is measured in dollars, suggests several different strategies for individuals and nations.  There are multiple ways of doing this with various sub-goals.  One is venture capitalism, which concentrates on advancing credit for new ideas and developments, like grubstaking a prospector.  But there are more.

One system "classifies capitalist economies into four categories: oligarchic capitalism, state-guided capitalism, big-firm capitalism, and entrepreneurial capitalism."

Another system lists:  Private Ownership, Capital Accumulation. Capital Concentration. Voluntary Participation. Free Markets. Wage Labor. Competition. Welfare Capitalism.

More kinds of capitalism (creating and managing profit) might include biocentric capitalism, which puts energy and attention into the good of all living things; status capitalism which varies according to what a specific culture thinks indicates virtue, like wealth for evangelicals or poverty for mendicants; or arts capitalism where making money is an indicator of achievement, like the book best seller list.  Money sources and awards can close out whole demographic categories, like people of color, or renegade boys.  This is a way of eliminating people, using stigma to deny them prosperity.  But it also drives innovation as determined people look for ways of making money that no one is using, like payday money-lending or street barbers.  There are always betting, gambling, social addictions like drugs, sexwork.

So capitalism, the accumulation of wealth through a variety of means and purposes, doesn't have to be in terms of "money" which is the inventions of nations who work out relativity among them.  It can be in the hoarding of valuable commodities or access to gated events and activities.  It can be based on food or family sharing.  In democracy the idea is to consider justice and the achievement of commons, universal infrastructure.

As time and place change throughout the world, the way to accumulate capital also changes, although cheating, stealing and force generally remain.  But at one point there is a gold rush when people realize they can just dig it up.  At another point substances like the exotic minerals for smart phones can become suddenly valuable.  Fossil fuel in the form of coal and oil have become so crucial that it controls the dynamics of whole nations but the limits have become clear enough that the capital goes into wind and sun energy, throwing the whole pattern of profit into question.

Basing wealth on profiteering food, shelter, water, while letting their built sources deteriorate means diminishing the wealth of the whole and justifies governmental regulation and inspection.

No one realized how radically everything would be changed by the internet and video.  We can barely cope with the change.  McKenzie Wark introduces the term "vectorism" in a book, "Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?"  The new wealth is information, both its transmission and its acquiring in technical ways like data scraping, web-crawling, and automation that can be hacked.  Secrecy is immensely powerful but generally time-limited.  Populations who had nothing to sell can suddenly learn something that is not just valuable but also personal in an intimate way.  Programming is something that can be done by a teenager with one gizmo in a basement.  Now we're talking intellectual capital.  

This shift is beyond the awareness of our leaders, who tend to be old -- still thinking in terms of oil and force, Trump's confidence that if our soldiers guard oil we claim, we are the top dogs, even if he is incapable of the simplest devices and most basic confidences.  This half-shift in which the youngest have made a jump of understanding has not taken us away from capitalism, but simply made a drastic change in the terms.  Wealth is now virtual, not the land ownership or commodities market, but the ways of mapping them.

This also means that we are tremendously vulnerable.  We are dependent on a satellite network that must be maintained to work, occasionally replaced by rockets, and also an energy network based on distribution.  Sooner or later devices must be plugged in.  it can all go dark in an instant.

And our technology, though it is only a map, has revealed new forces like the detection of climate change that is redrawing boundaries, sending blizzard bombs and hellish infernos, altering the chemistry of the oceans, infiltrating everything with debris plastic, and terrifying populations into renewing old superstitions.  All of this has impact on capitalism, not just its accumulation but also its definition.  What's the use of owning a fabulous downtown if no one in it can breathe?  What's the use of one-citizen/one-vote if someone on the other side of the planet can alter the totals?  Maybe without even being detected.

What's the use of cruelty in the treatment of the vulnerable if it creates a nation of bitterness and hatred of authorities, willingness to die rather than be pushed around?  What's the use of smashing families if there is no replacement source for attachment and empathy?  What's the use of advertising everything with sex when sex becomes so debased that one can simply buy a doll with a hole?  I mean, what if you know everything, both good and bad, but can't do it because no one cares about you?  Many have discovered that if they have money, someone will at least pretend to care.  But what if it turns out that true intimacy cannot be bought?

I'm way out in the weeds here, but if there is a way to see the old-fashioned virtues as a kind of capital managed by religious and cultural life-maps, our world-stories, then the terms of life are different.  Wark offers a new French (naturally) term:  "détournement" a technique popularized by the Situationists of hijacking media for new means — as radical intellectual and artistic tools for inventing new meaning across various disciplines, and our everyday lives."  

Her favorite Russian example is Marx.  Mine is Tolstoi.  Among my Twitter feeds are examples of a constant thread that has never given up on the natural world, pre-industrial in origin but capable of accommodating both the industrial and the technological, so long as they can hold onto the wealth of the land.  People like James Rebanks as @herdyshepherd1 or Great Alone Cattle as @GACattleCompany or Stuart Somerville @Stuthefarmer

TWO "NOW-WHAT" PROBLEMS

I’m confronted by two problems, one a problem of what to do with my blogging as a form of publication and the other is a problem of the content that I present on this blog space.  I’ve been using blogspot ( my computer insists on changing it to the word to “bloodspot” and I’m tempted to make something out of that, but it would not be about the evidence of a murder -- which is a MAJOR temptation -- but rather about circulation, getting ideas out there to people who care about them.  I don't write about sex out of porn-mind, but because it is a fascinating human drive that is being changed swiftly and radically by the invention of things like the Pill for contraception, the pill to turn on male performance, the laws about marriage, children, and thus property ownership, and even the nature of sexual identity.  Doctors have always known that some children are born intra-sex -- not quite one and not quite the other.  It's not just autism that's a spectrum.  Maybe nothing is truly dyadic.  We go from taboo to parody to camp to accommodation.

The other problem is that of content.  It’s clear to me that my idea-life has been an entwining of economics and empathy (jobs and affinities), going back to my beginnings as a human being and proceeding through my experience, predilections and education ever since.  That is, I was very attached to the world of natural history and the world of books from early on.  Then I went to dramatics which instilled me with the Antigone principle, which is that it is better to lose your life (like a soldier) in order to risk defending what is good and true (as well as you can know it and even if that puts you in danger) than to conform.  This was not the principle of any church I attended.  It was the ethic of the theatre people I tried acting with.

Then I went to the Blackfeet Reservation where survival was always in question, partly from self-destruction.  As well as teaching, I worked alongside them, learned their physical world -- this high prairie -- and shared much.  Then I had to return to Portland, my home town, where as a  county deputy specializing in animal problems I went from house to house in all of SE Portland, seeing other lives in situ.  That included all the animals and everyone’s “habitat.”  I found the Unitarian Universalist Association which purported to represent the Antigone principle, and thought it did, but it did not.  I went to the U of Chicago Div School hoping to find out what I was missing, but I didn’t find it there -- just better ways to think about Antigone.

Back to Portland where my family was ending, leaving me with a huge set of records of all this stuff.  By now I’m post-family, post-religion, post-institutions of all kinds.  But I have the Internet and time, Beautiful Time, to process it all.  I don't know how much time.

In a small town I can see that capitalism is deforming to both place and person.  What comes after capitalism?   My father, with roots in the great prairie revolution on both sides of the American/Canadian border, committed his life to the cooperative movement.  That meshed with Rodale’s thinking about how to live: ecology, simplicity and localism driven in by the Great Depression.  This in turn leads into one part of the 1970’s idealistic refocusing of living in communes, growing one’s own food, giving the arts high value.  There is another branch that resents all authoritarianism, mocks all definitions of sin, and explores boundarylessness.  I never got into it and, in fact, those folks won’t have me.  I just don’t have the chops for the dark side of the street.  But I do have a lot of empathy for it.  I do not find them valueless.

So I’ve been thinking these order-making things have been kind of exhausted:  churches, rural life, cooperatives, and capitalism.  As capitalism becomes less practical (too many people are thrown out of their lives onto the streets), I become more distressed.  The liberal movements I know (which are all rooted in economic well-being and high education) become more irrelevant and almost punishing, though their t-shirts proclaim “love.”  Their idea of justice is entitlement.  “I have a right to . . .” fill in the blank.  They are only interested in lesser beings they can patronize and "help."

So this morning, still obsessing about what I’m discovering about Social Media, which is that consumers are only high school writ large, I stumble onto Jeremy Rifkin.  Specifically, this vid.

https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_rifkin_on_the_empathic_civilization 

The story begins with empathy, the capacity to feel what others are feeling -- maybe a little more faintly, but truly in the brain cells.  (I’ve been riveted by the research on mirror cells, identity, memory, and what Stanislavski -- way back in my late Fifty’s acting training  -- called “the Method.”)  Says Rifkin, this gives rise to the drive to belong -- which is surely what held me with that theatre cohort -- which then begins to question the nature of one’s self, unless you’re playing by small town high school rules, which means you look around for the richest, prettiest, most successful people and do your best to be just like them.  It’s tribal.

And that means solidarity, like joining a church and marching for causes wearing your t-shirt, and always insisting that you and your tribe are the BEST, NUMBER ONE.  The person survives the humbling experience of leaving home only to discover that there are thousands and millions of others just as good as you and maybe better.  The local kids tend to come home at that point. Or maybe one attaches to a survivor, or one looks around for some way to stun oneself into submission:  sex, booze, drugs, television . . .   

If you do NOT do that, you may find yourself empathizing with others, maybe through the arts: music, painting, film, books.  If education has not espaliered you into robotic usefulness and if you are lucky enough to land in a job where empathy is rewarded instead of suppressed, you will become civilized, a member of Rifkin’s new race:  Homo Empaticus.

Where Rifkin goes wrong, which may only be strategic on his part, is in thinking that religion will encourage a shift to a far larger understanding of your short and fragile life as one strand in a fabulous tapestry of existence.  In my experience, based on the Antigone Principle, the institution of “church” is the cave where Creon walls up Antigone to die.  Church is just another aspect of capitalistic capture, though they vary across a spectrum.  Schools, also, pursue the same ends.  I receive a constant barrage of pleas for money though I am a penniless, solitary old woman in a house so valueless that I hardly pay taxes, because it is assumed that they opened the door to wealth -- they can't grasp that I might not choose to go through.  The local schools teach kids to obey, their school boards constantly de-fund everything that’s artistic, speculative, edgy and put ever more money into sports that literally de-brain them and destroy their knees.  Sports is their religion: their icons, self-worth, moral principles.  Win. Win. Win. Not for the boys.  For the big-bellies in the offices.

Empathically, I understand that this is an expression of fear, isolation, and constricting tribalism (of any color) including allegiance to genetic family.  Around here we still believe in race and inheritance.  We think we are Roundup Ready and that when the ultimate domination (Winter is coming!) finally catches up with us, we can only be safe in a bunker with all the best people.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcPWU59Luoc  Here’s an antidote.  Or is it?  Isn’t this just another bunker?  Rather splendid, though.

NATURAL LAW vs. HUMAN LAW

At one time I used to puzzle over the differences among natural law (like gravity), “divine” law handed down by God ("Thou shalt not kill."), and human law hammered out by governments trying to keep order.  Now I’ve added a new way of dividing the territory, which is “sin” versus “Evil.”  It’s really the same old “human law” versus “natural law” so I suppose the only change is some slight re-definition, and the elimination of divine law, which on examination turns out to be mostly institutional human rules anyway.  ("Thou shalt not wear mixed fibres." Leviticus 19:19)

If the dogs design Heaven, it will probably not be like this.

Human laws are negotiable and therefore controversial and liable to change.  They are generally “emergent” from a specific time and place where a certain set of persons in power can enforce what they think is behavior that will benefit at least themselves and possibly others, including the general state of things.  ("Thou shalt dress up when thou comest to the Montana legislature.")  One of my duties as an animal control officer inventing and guiding public and internal education was to support a citizen committee charged with rewriting the animal control ordinance for Multnomah County, which included the highly developed urban city of Portland as well as rural and even wilderness lands farther out, esp. up the Columbia Gorge.  It took a year.  I did a lot of research, not just on existing law but on what works and how and why.  It's easy to say dogs should go to heaven, but hard to decide how to define a leash length.  Is three feet too short?  Is thirty feet too long?

Burgwin, our boss, specifically hand-picked the members of the committee which was not a democratic thing to do except that it was meant to produce interaction that would serve everyone.  Therefore, he chose people from completely opposite sides of the problems but not the crazies, the parasites raising money, or the tools for outside organizations.  Looking back, it’s interesting that there were no clergy and no environmentalists, but it was the Seventies and those institutions had not yet begun to address animal issues.  We had an excellent chair, Francis Smith, who had proven himself as a calm lawyer friendly to both sides of animal issues.

The ultimate cubicle

So now let’s look at my distinction between “sin” and “Evil” and my theory that sin is about human-defined rules and Evil is about natural laws and forces gone wrong, mostly uncontrollable by humans but making laws crucial and inevitable.  Cruelty is Evil, emerging from emotional deformation in humans and inflicted on the vulnerable for no cause but personal gratification.  It can power laws like those imposing amputation for stealing and also laws that authorize the removal of children from their homes, even though the homes may also be cruel.  Of course, if the new alternative of fostering turns out to cruel, it is no improvement.  Whatever squats in our own culture to make us want to watch movies about torture, avidly follow cases of gruesome murders, use "disrespect" as an excuse to kill the innocent is Evil.  Sin is the labyrinth, Evil is the minotaur.  Sin is a construct, Evil is an unnatural force emergent through the natural.  The "natural" is neither sinful nor Evil -- it is a human construct, created by inventing the "unnatural."

H.M. King 'Abdul 'Aziz al 'Abdul Rahman al Faisal al Sa'ud

Chieftains can be modern if they want to be.

It is sinful to break into a magazine office and murder everyone there, obeying the laws of tribal chieftains millennia ago, not realizing that the template is old and broken.  Acting like the loyal subjects of a prophet defined by that conviction will not work in modern urban Paris.    Human laws won't allow it.  Not even if French bureaucrats act like ancient tribal chieftains in the Middle East, destroying villages.  Refusing to redefine Mohammed on deeper human terms for the greater good is the bigger heresy and an expression of the Evil of wanting to dominate everything without growing.  Good prophets , like good Popes, are not so stupid.

A Victorian patriarch, another broken template.

As the Montana legislature begins, some people -- mostly by polarizing and emotionalizing -- will try to make sins into Evil.  Sometimes this will be silly, misguided, ineffective, or resulting from the pretense that an institution (corporation), a pretense based on special interests accumulating power, is a “person” and entitled to all benefits accruing to a human citizen.  They don’t really mean “person,” they mean the privileges of the patriarch who controls his family, who are only incidentally human.  Patriarchs commonly sacrifice family members.

Both sin and Evil are survival-based, but sin and legislation tends to be confined to a specific delineated group while Evil in its purest form undermines the survival of the entire species, maybe -- in the case of climate change with the consequent impact on continents and oceans -- the world as we know it.  We can make laws against sins, maybe about carbon footprints or frakking, but we seem helpless against the great Evils of human greed and ignorance.  The cause of sins is almost always economic profit, but the Evil consequence is emergent, sudden, and lethal.  Must I point out ebola?  Not without pointing out our constant erosion of stable ecologies like tropical jungle.  Sooner or later the tipping point is reached.

On the other side, the virtue side, it becomes more and more possible to accumulate information and design governing principles that, after all, saves the soaring raptors, cleans the broad rivers, and connects the human planet via small handheld devices.  For all the warlords on their slimy thrones, there are still long tables where earnest people sit together and explore the possibilities of new rules and laws or new strategies of supervision, penalties, funding, points of view.  Who should be able to do what where and why.  Distribution.

The dead from a drone strike in Pakistan.

A website names the victims.  Know whom you kill.

Feedback loops are one key to success.  Incarceration for minor drug offenses (the War Against Drugs) turned out to be Evil.  But it produces so much profit that it’s hard to stop unless the feedback includes the suffering involved and the simple ineffectiveness of it, the encouragement of racism it supports.  Surprisingly, our appetite for witnessing suffering, as in movies like “Oz” or “Orange is the New Black,” has made us identify with forces for reform.  Seeing the results of a predator drone attack makes us question the use of such a dragon.

Returning to the local, I ponder the difference between the economic assumptions of the old agricultural order, the Jacob/Esau dichotomy that hangs on even in Euro vs. Native American assumptions:  wheat vs. wild grass, if you like.   I am the Paternal BIA or I am the obedient/defiant AIM son.  The survival of that order depends on the generational passing of lands without the fractionalizing of ownership that we’ve imposed on tribes.  It wasn't THEIR idea!  

The patriarch imposes his motives on his children with all the cultural entailments: the oldest son becomes the new patriarch, the daughters are excluded unless they use guile.  In Europe younger sons were confined in religious orders, sacrificed in the military, or reduced to employees.  Now on the rez they may simply be pushed to the margin, even off the rez, maybe even off the rolls when blood quantum provenances are changed.

Good and successful men of the ag life in Montana have lived through hardship and then industrialization of agriculture up against competing industrial natural resource development, even industrialization of recreation (transportation and the idealization of the natural) and animal management (going after wolves in helicopters to collar them), and the constant undeclared world wars.  They have concluded that their children could escape through education and professions.  But both of those have been captured and corrupted by the constant drive to commodify (more walls for the labyrinth).  It appears that the minotaur has slipped under the walls as toxins and infection, still claiming our young.

Every wall is a mirror.

We’ve been wall-builders, no better than Hadrian or the Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang who began the Great Chinese Wall.  The walls shielding Israel and the US are not protecting them from invaders or illegal immigrants.  We attempt to make physical boundaries to protect from the sins of economic struggle (drug wars, for instance), when the real problem is Evil on the side that builds the wall, the side that is benefiting from a gradient.  The side addicted to power.  There is no law that can address drug addiction -- laws only increase the value of transgression.  Addiction is Evil.  The hallmark of Evil is its depth in our natures, in our old reptile brains.

Out-dated image.

How do we confront Evil?  The old ways, largely “religious” and institutional, don’t work anymore.  We’re too various and fluid now.  We can gerrymander our walls and laws all we want, but if the problem is Evil, it is a spiritual problem.  No amount of sitting around a conference table will make a difference.  

BUT, as is repeated over and over in historic wisdom, spiritual answers are fire, are wind, are emergent from the ordinary.  Mercy comes as gentle rain.  The more that human understanding and generosity are supported by laws and practices, the more survival will grow and prosper.  That doesn’t mean more land, more money, more control, more uniformity.  Fire, wind, grass are wild.  They are best described in images and music, not words.  They are a resource, not "ownable."

The substrate of religion rests on what it is to be a human being, not what it is to be God.  It is not a matter of divine command, but an emergence from the kind of creatures we are.   We are creatures of the planet, evolving from codes first etched in mud and now so elaborated that we can write code ourselves, even in our cells.  But the planet does not care what we do with that.  The planet will survive until the sun explodes.  It is not Evil.  It is our substrate.

MARRIAGE IS A STRING OF PEARLS

Marriage is a like a string of pearls, matched or graduated, real or cultivated or imitation, in various shades, some more baroque than round.   And now the string has broken and the pearls are rolling every which way.  This is such a “twee” metaphor that I hesitate to work from it, but there have been worse, so I’ll keep going.  The thing to remember is that the elements (pearls) of this category are complex and the string is not the same from one example to another.

Let’s name the pearls -- try anyway:

• True love  (whatever that is)
• Sexual access
•  The conception of children
•  A cultural institution for raising children
•  A family contract made on behalf of children
•  An economic deal to support the family as defined by the culture
• A complex of conventions about what a family is

• A unique arrangement of persons living together that is called a family for lack of a better name

• A religious concept (meaning a culturally endorsed and imaged idea) that might require: 

• Two different genders (leaving ambiguous or mixed genders unaddressed)

• Or “races” (again leaving mixtures out and not defining “race” except for being people who are different)

• Or requiring fertility (sterility can be a deal-breaker)

• Or allowing delegation of  sexual or reproductive obligations to someone else (slave, servant, harem, temple whore) 

• Or might specify how many wives or husbands can be allowed 

freshwater baroque pearls

• Or might defend the right of any person to transcend convention 

• Or might even allow the marriage of people who have been dead for a long time

•   A way of continuing a generation-to-generation sequence of relationships that preserves those relationships.

•   A way of keeping together wealth and land occupation

•  Mutual protection: a small version of tribe which may have been the precipitating group that gathered around a major figure.  A tribe must contend with these marriage/genetic families as divisions within.

•  A governmental category given some privileges like tax breaks and recorded in a central registry for reference and identity purposes.

cultured pearls

•  A legal category imposing restrictions, obligations, privileges.

•  A medical category implying genetic derivations and granting consent for procedures and responsibility for care.

•   An indicator of status

Just married

A lot of other stuff that is too unique to describe and probably not stable enough to stay put as a category anyway.

In response to that -- or maybe in confirmation of that -- is a whole book:

“Over half of all births to young adults in the United States now occur outside of marriage, and many are unplanned. The result is increased poverty and inequality for children. The left argues for more social support for unmarried parents; the right argues for a return to traditional marriage.

“In Generation Unbound, Isabel V. Sawhill offers a third approach: change “drifters” into “planners.” In a well-written and accessible survey of the impact of family structure on child well-being, Sawhill contrasts “planners,” who are delaying parenthood until after they marry, with “drifters,” who are having unplanned children early and outside of marriage. These two distinct patterns are contributing to an emerging class divide and threatening social mobility in the United States.”

So basically the idea is that there is not enough socially accepted definitions for people to maintain marriage or even practice it in some stable way.  This is partly because of the breaking up of binary definitions of sex -- it is now possible to “be” something besides a husband/wife -- mommie/daddy.  “Career,” “adventure,” “success” interfere with the formation of the bonded family that will support children.  Bonding = bondage.  Now no one has your back -- if you didn’t have parents who did that, you won’t even know it’s possible.  

The economic situation is quite comparable to the bait-and-switch story of the vulnerable state of individuals who are not coping.  We shut down the warehouses for the crazy by promising small neighborhood imitation families who would shelter those people -- but they didn’t.  The money wasn’t there.  The warehouses were reinstituted in the jails.  Likewise, the idea was that a woman would have the same income as a man and therefore would not need to depend upon a spouse.  Instead women are still paid two-thirds of male wages, still shut out of really lucrative jobs, and yet are still stuck with the kids.  The idea that the pill would mean only wanted children was about as effective as the idea that pills would mean no more crazy people.

I wondered when we’d get around to defining marriage through the perspective of children instead of just sex or bonding desire (which is NOT the same as sex, though it can start out that way).  Margaret Mead always says our marriage licensing should have two steps:  one a renewable contract between consenting adults that defined their economic and other obligations to each other, esp. concerning property ownership.  If that went well and the couple (ignoring gender but not accommodating threesomes) wished to make the twenty-year commitment to a child, then a new license would be necessary.  It would only be revocable by the state on grounds of incompetence, unfitness, and the like -- whatever endangered the child.  

BUT such a double-decker system would only work if there were a decent way of caring for children who were outside families, either because the government removed them or because they just got thrown out.  The trouble is that people go right on making babies and the babies go right on loving their caregivers, no matter how unfit or ill-equipped they might be.  And institutional child-raising has always been a rotten idea.  

pearl divers

The first problem has always been economic.  In times and societies where resources are scarce and what is thought to be necessities cost dearly, the nations contract into tribes, the tribes contract into defensive families, and the families fail to form or break up under the weight.  Kids must shift for themselves however they can.  Like every other natural spectrum, some of them will be able to manage and a high proportion will simply die, but there will be a middle category of “bent” kids, like grass grown under a board where it survives by sacrificing sunlight.  

Eugene O'Neill

Very soon damaged kids grow into damaged adults -- not necessarily predators but unable to respond in ways that don’t damage themselves, others, or the system that the government is trying to enforce.  Sentimentality (which passes for religion in some circles) holds up the ideal of family in the way it has been defined in the past: Norman Rockwell -- not Eugene O’Neill.  So what was it that held together the Eugene O’Neill aggregations of drunks, addicts, violent people, full of pride and blame?  Was it that a known evil is always better than an unknown evil?  Is it that they knew that without the minimal shelter of the house, they would die in the brush or the alleys?  Was it Irish pride in defying the neighbors?  

I don’t know.  I’m a solitary.  No leftovers, no hitch-hikers.  A small town is my loose family.  I follow along at the edge of the Blackfeet tribe.  But I live an examined life and that is much of what sustains me.  I avoid alcohol, drugs, careless relationships because they keep me from thinking.  (Reading and writing are only expressions of thinking.)  It's not a virtue: it's a coping mechanism.  Writing and only writing would be a mistake if I didn’t have such a huge cache of experience behind me, though the part that was “family” was never sustained.  That is, I have dived for pearls, but then I gave them away.  No regrets.  No strings.  Stories.

RACISM, STIGMA, AND RAW FEAR OF NOT SURVIVING

Racism has become far too chiaroscuro:  black and white. 

In the first place, few people are unmixed nowadays. 

In the second place, this whole race thing is polarized between only TWO races when -- assuming you accept the concept of races -- there are dozens, hundreds, of groups of people interacting, few of them purely anything biological or even cultural.

In the third place, much of what purports to be about race is really about an urban/rural split or maybe only an urban/urban split.  The issues of country people, the racisms of small towns, are not addressed, though they have much to do with economics.  So long as survival is about money, it will be about potential for getting it.  The one thing that makes it easy to get money is to already have money.  The stigma of have/have-not is gaining -- could potentially change the terms of what we’re now calling “race.”  Or even nation.

Tribes.

So in the fourth place, I’m beginning to wonder how much racism is a red-herring.  The real issues -- as always -- are things like education, jobs, marriage, social conformity, health, and even religion.  The real issue is survival in spite of competition for limited resources.

But the most dominant factor, the most dynamic factor, is stigma.  Stigma is deeply biological and erupts through culture volcanically, both the creeping lava kind and the explosive dust kind.  Stigma is a reflex that has in the past served survival, or it would not have survived itself.  Stigma is a domination reflex.  Grabbing the lesser beings by the back of the neck.

One counterweight is pity.  If we feel pity for the stigmatized -- whether lepers or babies born out of wedlock or minorities or the disabled -- then we will tolerate them, even make allowances for them, but if they show any signs of anger, resentment or -- worst -- POWER, all pity is gone and we try to eliminate them.  Uppity women and n. . .   (Don't even think it.)  This is a reflex, below conscious control.  But it teaches people already hampered that they are powerless and dependent.  This is called "demanding respect" even when your drunken father shouts it at you.

Separation of territory is a biological factor.  Groups form when they are separated by a river, a mountain range, or the languages they speak.  One form of separation is exclusion.  Push people onto reservations, into special schools, into ghettos, into menial nighttime jobs like cleaning, into junk housing on marginal land.  Worst: incarcerate them.  Even worse than worst: incarcerate them in a foreign country.  (Solitary confinement is the same thing.)  Know as little as possible about them.  If they come on your territory, drive them off.  Deport them.  Wall them out.  See them as animals, as machines, as zombies.  Contagious filth.

If you can’t exclude them, fort up.  Walled housing projects, red-lining, patrolled universities, controlled-access shopping malls.  Invitation only.  Lock the church doors.  If this makes people angry, say they are vandals, rioters, terrorists.  By then they probably are.  Or in small towns the strategy is to set up athletic competition so intense that rivalry becomes resentment, maybe active hatred.  If you lose the game, overturn the bus with them in it. (Romeo and Juliet relationships are against separation.  War dissolves internal separation in a common cause.)  

Disconcertingly, the world with connections to the former British Empire where same-sex relationships were stigmatized and even criminalized in order to keep lower classes from entering upper classes through the bedroom, has now discovered that gays were NOT separate.  Everywhere they are individuals among us in families, jobs and classes.  When we realize how many and how “normal” they are, the stigma weakens and the laws relax.  Now the gays themselves want gays to be normal -- at least conventional.  

Many people cannot tell “pity” from love, esp. men.  Most women cannot tell “awwww” cuteness from ownership.  These little problems of distinction combine in “compassion,” which makes demands on those able to provide protection, patronage, and other survival-based contributions that maintain separation.  That is, until the receiver of “compassion” begins to feel entitled and confronts, which is a form of connection, so that separation in terms of intimacy resorts to violence.  Separation in terms of welfare safety nets flips to withdrawal and punishment.  Blame.  You'd have a job if you'd accept oppression. 

These dynamics are part of producing and raising children, who ideally DO become separately empowered in spite of parental attempts at control and merging.  This is also biological.  If the crucial biological forces of stigma and compassion are allowed to overwhelm any cultural counterweights -- which sometimes become aligned with those raw biological drives and enflame them -- the result is war: gang war, territory invasion, terrorism, economic “pencil” death, and the general destruction of culture that the dystopic books, films, and theories vividly illustrate for us.

My experience with stigma and compassion has shaped my opinions.  When I came back to occupy this marginal old house so I could write on a very low income, I was interpreted as needy, weak, and pitiful and so people gave me food.  I only accepted it from people who were established long-term friends BECAUSE it marked me as weak and stigmatized.  On the other hand, people who believed I was a writer said they were in awe and meant it.  A few took me out to supper at the nicest place around.

I was respected by people who remembered Bob Scriver because he was famous.  (Though one old farm wife said, "He wasn't THAT famous.  He wasn't Charlie Russell."  In her eyes, that was failure.)  When I showed power by telling what I knew in books -- "an exposé of the Western art world", said the only honest reviewer -- I was re-stigmatized as a bitter old ex-wife.  

As an English teacher I was respected as a representative of propriety.  As an animal control officer I was stigmatized as a persecutor of animals.  As a friend of Blackfeet I was both stigmatized by locals and given status by romantic liberals.  As a former co-writer with Tim Barrus, I was stigmatized except by the other people who love his writing and vids.  I don’t align with the compassion people either, because Tim's work proves daily that even boys pushed out of the system are not powerless.  It is their brave work as observers and interpreters that aligns us.

A sharp issue (indeed, "cutting") arose when the clergyman next door to me refused to see me as his equal -- we both attended the U of Chicago Div School -- and insisted that I was a needy old woman who should be grateful for a gift jar of jam and could be freely dominated if my tree interfered with his desire for a suburban lawn (status).  We ended up in a stigma standoff.  All compassion blasted.  (Much laughter around town -- deserved, I admit.)  We are the same race.  He has more money since for much of his career he was a veteran’s hospital chaplain on salary.  He feels it is an achievement to have children, though his wife did all the work -- as usual.  Religious affiliation can be racial even when color is not involved.

In the interest of self-preservation, there are people in this village whom I actively avoid.  I move on quickly, try not to “see” them.  They are too curious, too eager to find a weakness to exploit, if only by gossip.  There are other situations -- church, school -- that I avoid because I am socialized to a world so different from here that we can’t read each other’s signals.  I was asked to judge a speech contest when I first returned, and discovered that I’d given the highest ratings to those the other judges gave the lowest ratings.  I valued personality, creativity, uniqueness.  They wanted conformity.

Of course, identifying with the rez towns -- Browning and Heart Butte -- does me no good in Valier and it IS color-racial.  In the larger world, I have a hard time not stigmatizing many people in my former denomination and profession.  They seem like a different privileged race, perpetual children so confident of their entitlement that they are inadvertently cruel, greedy, and stigmatizing of any difference.  

It surprises me that they complain they are powerless, since they are not, though their power is a little atrophied and they turn it on each other, like the recent attack on her own seminary by a social activist used to attacking "bad" people.  They won't award her a diploma though she has completed her course work.  She is SHOCKED.  Of course, it means she won't have to candidate for a pulpit and do that daily drudgery or that weekly sermon.  

But she's not used to being gripped by the back of the neck, nor did she realize she would be stigmatized. The world cares about her predicament about as much as they care about the rez kid thrown out of the local high school for being a pain in the butt.  Not only do the two kinds of ostracized students not care about each other, each thinks he or she is unique, just trying to survive.  Neither knows the other exists.  Would it help if they did?

THE MARRIAGE QUANDARY

An institution is nothing but an organized version of a paradigm, a set of culture concepts that people more or less assume to be true and so insist on.  As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, when the paradigm stops working, people stop believing in it.  The institutional paradigm of “marriage” is breaking down.  

Reasons include:

1.  Economics:  a woman needn’t be dependent on a man’s income and assets while many men -- maybe the majority -- no longer earn enough money to support a wife, children, and a home.

2.  Ability to control conception of children.

3.  Willingness to abandon or eject children.

4.  Genetic research indicating that monogamous mammals are practically nonexistent: they all get a little on the side if they can.  Birds are more likely pair-bonded, but not always.

5.  Longevity means that human “life-long” can now be a century instead of a few decades.  Relationships tend to be unstable, accumulating children with blurry claims.

6.  Institutionalized nursing, combat, home-maintenance, and urban living make it possible for individuals to survive on their own.

7.  Obvious suffering of women in the old systems.

8.  Belief that people should not be owned by other people.

9.  Reaching the limits of what people can earn.

10.  Punishing poverty with imprisonment and fines.

11.  Big anonymous cities (hide).

12.  Almost unlimited mobility (escape).

Religious institutions have lost their grip on ceremonies of dedication to marriage and children, let alone respect for celibacy.  What was once a serious matter worthy of counseling has slid into being a sort of party about coming of age, esp. for women.  In an effort to keep children born out of wedlock from being shamed, we have succeeded in making everyone shameless, to the point of frothy white wedding dresses designed for the pregnant bride.

Government has had somewhat the same fate.  Over and over guys who wanted to “throw a leg over” have insisted that marriage is just a piece of paper.  Laws that require a father to support his child, and the DNA proof of which child that is, ought to have a sobering effect, as do divorce laws that automatically award a percentage of the couple’s assets according to the length of time they’ve been married.  Very few people sit down to read the state’s laws about ownership and legal obligations in marriage, instead picking up a lot of miscellaneous ideas from television shows where the screenwriters have invented generic locations.  If marrying an enrolled Indian or an immigrant, legal or not, a look into the laws would be very very smart.

Avoid extraterrestrials

Another medical category is disease, fertility, and so on.  Since even microbes have DNA and even viruses have families, it is possible to discover who was contagious, the bug-donor.  Why should the public care?   Because we’re all at risk, because it’s expensive to fight epidemics, because the emergency room at a hospital and the welfare support system both pay out a LOT to people who are in over their heads.  That’s TAX money.

Government’s main job is to keep order and to provide benefits that can’t easily be provided by individuals, mostly infrastructure networks.  Often this extends into medical contexts, even unto death and burial, by dictating who has access to patients in hospitals or make decisions about their treatment.  Taxation, insurance, liability, inheritance and other matters may include weighting in favor of old-fashioned legally married people and their children.

Prince William and Katherine -- but you knew that.

More than any of that technical stuff, the emotional consequences of marriage take people by surprise.  Violence, for instance.  Loving someone more than they love back.  Discovering pasts that come by ambush to claim energy, money, caring.  One’s earliest experience of nuclear family dynamics can erupt into the present, distorting reality and sanity.  Demands from the partner may turn out to be extraordinary: coping with kidnapping or extortion, involvement in gambling, mutilating damage from burns or war, PTSD, surviving community natural disasters or just one’s home’s destruction, addictions of various kinds, chronic diseases.  Loss of a child.  Stigma.  Community hostility.  These days one cannot discount national revolution and riots.

If the love is a true and growing bond, it will ask for many compromises and heartaches, but on the other hand provide someone who is always there, holding out a hand, guarding your back, keeping the bed warm.  That means you have a lot to lose.

When an institution gets hold of a cultural paradigm, it builds it in, tries to make it a law so it won’t go away.  Think of the wedding industry!   If people are on their fourth marriage, unashamed and still prepared to go into debt for all the fancy stuff, it’s great for sales.  All those slick magazines!  All those teenaged girls escaping into fantasy!  All those middle-aged people marrying who can afford so much more!  All those pretty little churches available to rent by people who are sentimental, but not sentimental enough to have established a relationship with their own church.  By the way, wedding cakes and garters are not religious -- they're only merchandise.

But it is the religious institutions who hang on to marriage the hardest.  They muster all the energy they have to summon supernatural forces, though that often raises peculiar problems: if humans are physically reconstituted in heaven -- at what age? Do you get missing parts back?  If persons were married three or fourth times, how does that work out?  Or, changing institutions, don’t any of those insurgents realize how much trouble a hundred virgins would be?  Or maybe they’re not teenagers -- would that be better or worse?  Pruney old maids?  Does the fantasy include boy virgins?

Like contemporary political parties, today's religious institutions are sundered and splintered and contradict each other into paralysis.  The governmental institutions at all levels and in their various departments are just as bad.  No wonder they have no credibility when it comes time for one to curb the other.  It is all too clear that they are simply preserving their own authority and existence rather than trying to find ways to help the people who fund them and suffer from them.

But most humans hope for a special and significant other that matches well enough for the partnership to go on a long time, long enough to grow together and really know each other, share memories, not have to explain everything.  Synergy is the word for two things that are fine separately, but make a jump into much higher value and function when combined.

So what new cultural paradigm is forming?  Gays who marry -- some of whom adopt -- may require a good deal of economic jiggering, maybe require new legal documents stipulating how to handle property and parenthood.  Will some better way of handling abandoned children come out of this?  We can hope.  What will be the final outcome of all the people who so value genomic children of their own that they pay out huge fees and suffer physical pain and risk?  Even now a divorce settlement must include provision for sperm, ova, and conceptia that have been frozen for later activation into children.  Some people care a lot more about them -- since they’re only fantasy -- than about their own rebellious, desperate children.  The law now forbids using those biological resources for anything but becoming children of the donors -- will that change as the authority of religion institutions is weakened more and more?

What should be the minimum obligations of married people to each other?  What will automatically cancel the relationship?  Should there be two stages: one a commitment to intimacy and the other to the creation and raising of children?  (Margaret Mead suggested that many years ago.)   Should there be tests before people are certified for marriage -- not just for STD’s but for financial competency, home maintenance, child-management skills?  How would you enforce such a thing in a culture where people hook up with strangers in bars without so much as catching their names?  Should there be some system of something like kibbutzim for the raising of children in groups?  (How would they be different from old-fashioned miserable orphanages?)  What would the KIDS want?  I think probably a mom and dad, or a mom and mom, or a dad and dad, or at least a mom OR a dad.  Village optional.