HOW CAN WE HELP THE HELPERS?

Like Steve Jobs, I have some little key stories, homilies that I use all the time.  One is about my little brother on a camping trip at Lost Lake, which is on the side of Mt.Hood.  We stayed in our folding camp trailer near the shore in a mostly undeveloped campground.  My brothers discovered the salamanders that lived along the edge of the water and enjoyed playing with them.  When it came time to go home, Paul had attached strongly to his mud-puppy with its little hands and wide mouth and he didn’t want to give it up.  

My mother explained that Portland is no place for salamanders, but Paul insisted,  “He’ll be all right.  I’ll keep him safe in my pocket!”  Of course, that would kill a salamander.  In fact, removing any living creature from its environment might kill it, because living beings are interwoven with their surroundings, adapted to them.  Some of those surroundings are created by humans but that only means they are adapted to one kind of person.  In the early days of Euro exploration, when sailors insisted on dragging home treasures and treated other human beings like keepsakes, many Native peoples died in the perfectly comfortable London surroundings of the sailors.  It wasn’t just psychological — it was physical: failure to adjust to food, climate, germs, uncertainty.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_junger_our_lonely_society_makes_it_hard_to_come_home_from_war?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=button__2016-05-18

Sebastian Junger, the war correspondent, has a TED talk in which he points out that PTSD may not always be the result of combat — in fact, a small percentage of soldiers see actual killing up close and personal —but rather the consequence of going from a regimented, organized, tightly bonded band-of-brothers where decisions are made for you, to a society that has become confused, torn, alienated, uncertain, judging and hostile.  It’s not even particularly admiring of soldiers.

People who “rescue” young women from Asian brothels are disconcerted when the girls want to return to where they knew what was expected of them, were protected in some ways, and had many friendships.  Going to another country or starting a small shop was beyond many of them.

“Helping” people depends on the assumptions of the attempt.  Many do-gooders do it because they assume they will be admired and the receivers will be grateful.  When that doesn’t happen, bitterness can be the result. If the “helping” has lasted long enough for the helpees to get used to it and depend on it, removing that help can be devastating.  This is the problem of Indian reservations:  what was intended to be a protecting reserve becomes a unique environment sustained by outsiders, a trap.  It’s heresy to say so, but maybe reservations — which were not used by conquerers outside the British mindset — are only a delayed cruelty that cripples the People so that they can’t function in the larger society.

Such situations are always triage:  some will be able to cope and others will not.  Those who survive will be most like the conquerers — either were in the first place or become that way.  The problem is often those who are neither here nor there or waffle back and forth, like frequent offenders of criminal law who go in and out of jail or prison, carrying subtle dangers in and out with them.  Behaviors, networks, diseases, addictions — all things that were meant to be confined by prison walls.

Less dramatic and more sentimental are the people who come in and out of reservations, partly because of romantic notions about accessing a secret Shangri-la where they will be appreciated at last; partly about the stubborn conviction that spending the summer painting buildings and getting to know old tribal people will do the tribe good; partly as scholars looking for material that can be published to enhance their tenure; and partly by rabble-rousers, usually counter-culture youngsters who bring in radical political notions along with drugs.  These are innocent compared to the people who take criminal advantage of any place where laws are complex and overlapping, populations are in disagreement, the larger culture demonizes individuals, corruption dominates all levels of government and some people suffer so intensely that raw survival is their only concern and the help they wish for is death.

So being a helper can be approached from the values of the helper, from the values of the receiver of help, from those who find the situation an opportunity for abuse, or from the larger context of a nation, a planetary given imposed by the environments of locations.  It’s three-dimensional chess that is dynamic, because every intervention creates a whole new set of givens.  The environmental givens overwhelm everything else: floods and forest fires, earthquakes and volcanoes, drought and famine all challenge the survival of humans, who are — after all — as vulnerable as soft little wet salamanders.

Those who work with minority populations who are suffering — let’s say street people, let’s say delinquent boys — okay, “at risk” or whatever euphemism you want, most of them imposed by helpers from outside — will find that the suffering might not be hunger, numbness, fear of death, loss of family, or whatever other horrors are in Pandora’s box.  It’s not enough to supply food, shelter, literacy, or even skills that can be monetized.  Down there in the bottom of the box — according to the story — was “hope.”  You cannot “give” people hope. 

Hope is an emergent capacity of human beings.  Emergent means that it comes from the right conditions for it to spontaneously kindle.  Those conditions will not always be there even after all the animal needs are met, including a belonging group with a name for itself.  Some have been damaged so deeply — looking at it from the helper’s view — that they cannot be “saved.”  Unless they go back to the life that they adapted themselves to.  The people in that context will consider their return to be salvation.

So this becomes damage to the helper, who feels it as loss, failure.  Where is the helper’s hope?  It can’t come from praise of those who assumed everyone is pleased to be just like them, prosperous and happy, and who enjoy the reflected participation of praising people they define as saviors.  These latter folks will only be damaged by the knowledge that their safety can be removed so easily by an economic Depression, a health challenge, loss of a loved one.  This is the point where some kind of belief system, a conviction of what the world means, will be very “helpful.”  If you believe Jesus loves you, even when a scroungy, mean, hopeless little humanoid spits on you, that “helps.”  If you can’t believe in Jesus, then what?

Hope, the capacity to be helped even by people who ask us to create a new identity, to be “reborn”, can be either a individual emergence or a group emergence, possibly labeled religious or political or even cultural through the arts.  I’m transcribing and consolidating old conversations and note how often the counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies comes up.  Did it do damage by breaking all the rules, just for the pleasure of seeing how brittle they were?  Did it start to liberate us, but then scare us into being obedient suits?  Did we aim for Jesus and get Trump instead?  How do we help ourselves without getting stuffed into someone's pocket?

SHEETS AND LOOPS

A new understanding among the many emerging from our amazing new information access in several disciplines is that of sheets and loops.  I’m talking cells and their communication among themselves that builds the world.  We are accustomed to thinking of these developments as something “done to” life, but now our paradigm, among those who have the information and can respond to it, is shifted in a way that penetrates into our very own cells.  Ouroboros, the snake who swallows his tail, is rolling through us.  This is the url of an article in Aeon that discusses what we might call sheet and feedback theory in terms of cells.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-feedback-loop-is-a-better-symbol-of-life-than-the-helix?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c271aa5999-Saturday_newsletter_23_April_20164_22_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-c271aa5999-68600437

“The most local environment for many cells consists simply of their similar neighbours. This is especially so in a very common sort of structure that we find in all sorts of living things – the sheet. (Think of the surface of the skin, the lining of the gut, the inside layer of your blood vessels.) These sheets are collections of cells stuck together, edge to edge. The cells adhere to one another via a number of very small, specialised junction complexes. The outside part of a junction complex on one cell binds to the outside part of a similar complex on the neighbouring cell, while the inside part binds to long, strong filaments of protein that form a network inside the cell: the ‘cytoskeleton’, as it is known. It is the mechanical connection of each cell’s cytoskeleton to those of its neighbours, via the junctions, that helps to give the sheet its strength.

Cytoskeleton and junctions

“When cells first meet, in normal development or in a culture dish, neither can ‘know’ in advance precisely where contact will first be made. The internal cytoskeletons of the cells cannot, therefore, be built to an advanced plan; they must develop adaptively to suit the precise conditions at the time. The way they achieve this is both fascinating in detail and, in its general outline, thoroughly typical of life.

“The cells that are forming the sheet continuously make new branches of their cytoskeleton network. These branches head towards random points on the cell periphery. Those that do not happen to land on a junction will never experience mechanical force, whereas those filaments that do find and link to a junction will be placed under tension by the neighbouring cell. Now, it happens that cells are full of enzyme complexes that rapidly destroy cytoskeleton filaments. This destruction is, however, strongly inhibited if a filament is under mechanical load. The many filaments that end up in the wrong place are therefore quickly destroyed, while those that happen to be arranged appropriately to carry forces survive. Thus the cytoskeleton’s anatomy organises itself according to its environment and adapts continuously to changing mechanical loads.”

The example is presented in terms of four basic behaviours that cause bird flocks and fish schools: attraction (closing up to another fish), repulsion (increasing the distance from another fish), alignment (altering direction to swim parallel to a neighbour) and searching (looking for a school of fish).  But there is no “head fish” or “leader bird.”  The behavior is produced by natural reactions to the real situation at the moment.

“The feedback loops that guide self-organisation, at any scale, rely ultimately on the action of protein-based mechanisms, and proteins are encoded by genes.

“Genes are therefore essential to self-organisation at all the scales of life – just not in a deterministic way. Rather, the genes are needed to make the machines that mediate feedback-driven self-organisation: the self-organisation is a high-level property that emerges from the underlying network, not a feature of any of the individual components.

“A simple loop would be a much more universal symbol of how life works at all of its scales and levels. Perhaps the Ouroboros, beloved of gnostics and alchemists, has been an ideal symbol waiting in the wings for centuries: there can surely be no more evocative symbol of feedback than a snake growing by devouring its own tail.”

Starlings

This is “meta-“ level thinking.  The term used here is self-organizing, but I’m also seeing emergent used similarly.  Even Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shift suggests that there is some kind of “paradigm” or plan or theory that fits the evidence better.  It’s a redrawing of a new structure that is meant to be maintained by those who use it, therefore tempting them to prevent any future change.  But this new way of thinking is about something more like alchemy:  one atom is changed in a molecule so now we have a prion, a differently folded molecule, which means a new way of reacting to the environment that might be destructive, interrupting the feedback loops of neurology or metabolism so that the creature malfunctions and dies.  I’m talking Alzheimers.  Unexpected, for a long time unperceived — for years I kept googling “prions” and got nothing.  It’s an un-living event that is contagious, upsetting all assumptions.

Those invested in control will try to seize on a paradigm and use logic to design it, plus power to compel it.  Regardless of how that might work in a capital-driven industrial system drawing on limited resources like coal and oil, it cannot succeed in the long run.  Ask a little mammal in the ancient jungle.  Ask a little virus in today’s African jungle.  Ask a Russian or a Chinese family.  There are always unexpected consequences.

Moving from the idea that humans are created and driven by an inherited game-plan enshrined in the 23 chromosomes of double-helixes to the realization that we are enmeshed in the world, animate and inanimate, means it’s our very responsiveness and ability to vary that is the key to homeostasis, which is just another word for survival.

It’s one way to disassemble the stigma attached to certain groups of humans thought to have lesser genetics, a deficient plan.  It's one way to reform the meta-inheritance of our culture through family and education.  It's one way to recognize the forces released by overpopulation, like violence and drugs to increase the distances among us.  It relates to the faulty feedback loops of the body wherein too much or too little exceeds the ability of the body to compensate or regulate.

A new paradigm is forming already, I think, one that steps away from Newtonian concrete mechanisms of the industrial era and into the responsive code world beyond the anthropocene into an understanding of the great SHEET of life on this planet, not just a tree.  

Tony Hartshorn is an assistant professor of soils in Dept. of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences Bozeman, MT, at Montana State University.  This is the place where the concept of “biofilm” developed, wherein cells are studied to figure out how they make themselves into a community of adjoining cells, very thin and very hard to disperse.  In fact, people weren’t really aware there was such a thing.  Engagingly, once it was realized that biofilms exist, an artist made them into “paintings” that could be hung on the wall, continuing to live so long as conditions persisted.

Bioart  "Oglyph"

In a sense, soils are a sheet community wrapping the earth, responsive to climate, molecular chemistry, and the rays of the sun.  We think of it as something like sand, which it might be, until biology gets woven into it in a thousand tiny ways.  Think compost.  Our focus on producing more, more, more food for more more more people (using the whip of more more more profit) has now begun to physically and biotically strip the land of fertility.  This is beyond the ken of most people though it is just as sweeping a disaster as climate change.  Holes are tearing the sheet.

Hartshorn is addressing the Blackfeet reservation and community, which includes much more than just one tribe and more than one species.  He wants to organize students to investigate and record soils across this ecotone, so as to create a map.  This is a little like Narcisse Blood and Ryan HeavyHead walking along this same ecotone to GPS map the old Blackfeet trails, finding and understanding the traces and loops their feet made across the great sheet of grass sustaining the buffalo.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6lHIm5erIo for YouTube short blip with Jamie Davis.)

PRAIRIE HUMANIST SOLSTICE

It’s the Winter Solstice, one of those natural events that is the substrate for a multitude of human religious ceremonies and paradigms, one that escapes all dogmas, all priesthoods, all institutions, all nationalisms, to tilt through our lives once a year whether or not we pay attention.  On the prairie we never escape awareness of where the sun is or the effect on the Great Winds that rule our lives as much as if we were seafarers in the great winged ships of the past.  The jet stream is often overhead and sometimes in our yards.

One of my cousins is a California Prosperity Christian (claiming that he had to overcome his natural narcissism and hubris to achieve that state).  His adversary, he thinks, is secular humanism, so he was a bit disconcerted to be told that our paternal grandparents were quietly dedicated prairie humanists.  This was revealed when a grad student studying the movement in Canada found their names on an organizational roster and inquired through this blog what we descendants knew about them and their ideas.  As it turned out, not much.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-w-smith/prairie-humanism-and-the_b_452696.html

This blog post is a good place to start.  Progressivism and neighborliness in response to very hard times, self-reliance combined with co-operative organizations, are certainly what I recognize.  But also, the fuzzy future envisioning, the weak ability to form a future, the craving to know more, are also part of that strand of my Strachan family which started with immigration from Scotland in order to farm where the Brulé Sioux had just been cleared away.  In the end they didn’t do much better than the tribe.  South Dakota is a tough place to live.

Glenn W. Smith has taught at Starr King, the UU California seminary I passed up in favor of Meadville, the Chicago UU version.  His “skew” is political and if you google him, you’ll find that he’s been fighting the good fight for a long time.  My own “skew” is cosmic.  I did a sideways step to identification with the U of Chicago Div School, but they are merely global.  I was taking writing classes from Richard Stern, sitting alongside the wife of David Schramm, the wildman astrophysics prof who was always seeking the missing “Dark Matter,” not as a metaphor but as what he hoped was a reality.  He died in a plane crash, the sole occupant and pilot.  I lost track of his wife.  The planet is full of dark matter.

I find that somehow, though I respect and will claim prairie humanism, my faith center is not there.  Many have suggested fanciful ideas about how to name this forming “faith” that many don’t even recognize as existing.  “Scientific mysticism” will do.  Non-anthropocentric, often represented in science fiction (especially if one includes the work of people like Ursula LeGuin and the visions of pop film), welcoming to indigenous “spirituality” (whatever that is, so long as it’s land-based), the space program, and the persisting Aquarian thought represented by the Edge, some TEDtalks, the Bioneers, and other think tanks.  

Paul Tillich used to say that symbols can’t be imposed on people as advertising icons are, but must be “found.”  That is, they are emergent from our lives.  This is certainly true of Scientific Mysticism which tries not to be anthropomorphic by including all life as neighbors.  On the other hand, the science part of the syndrome is emphatically NOT about magic and superstition, but rather about the interwovenness of all existence whether it is T-cells trying to resist HIV virus or the nursery of the stars where new fusion-based entities create energy.  We come to understand our bodies as aggregates of cooperating cells organized into -- well -- “organs” and our brains as an orchestra that plays the symphonies that are our consciousness.

Salvation is not found in virtue, but in participation.  Eternal life is not found in the persistence of one skin-enclosed entity but rather in the long-time influence and sharing through eternity.  Once defined, our impact may be small but it is forever.  No “faith” is necessary, just communication, action, connection.  One of the strong influences on the Strachan generations has been a baby named Archibald who lived only seventeen days.  He was the first child of my paternal grandmother, immediately preceding my father.  

The loss of that baby, which my grandmother believed came about because she was so desperate for the company of others that she went to town in the jolting wagon, even knowing she was close to term in her pregnancy, has meant a legacy of sadness.  The birth came on the isolated homestead.  Archibald was kept alive for a little more than a fortnight in the warming oven of the woodstove.  My generation didn’t know of the baby’s existence until I read through the boxes of journals my grandmother kept.  Neither did we know that her sister had died in childbirth and we still don’t know what happened to that baby.  Live babies and conceived but naturally aborted babies are lost every day, often undetected, often due to bad code.

Now we understand that all is code.  The first response, like that of the US government, is to hoard code, to try to get hold of all information in the effort to save everything, like a mechanic making sure to save all the pieces. But this is not the way.  It leads us to the problem of the centipede who was asked how he knew to walk with so many legs to manage.  He ended in the ditch with his legs in the air, a symbol that emerges again and again.  The way forward, as Smith recommends, is a function of desire and focus.  The goal may not be reached, but the minutia will be pulled into some kind of purpose.

Oh, yearning!  Oh, vulnerability!  I listen, I watch.  My kitchen has a big east-facing picture window where I often stand and look up the long alley that reaches to a close horizon, a bulge in the terrain.  From behind it rises the full moon, coloring the snow blue but draining the color from the feral calico cats I can’t resist feeding just under the window, their tails forming a mandala around the dishes of cat food.  It’s a good depiction of the mental and emotional life of a single old woman in a balky small town, using a fancy education in a way it was never intended.  (One is supposed to become a success in one’s field, usually through affiliation with an institution, but when it comes to them I’m strictly a feral cat.)

Words don’t serve as well as music.  Consult Paul Winter.  The Winter Consort at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. http://solsticeconcert.com  

Of course, this is the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.  We are all connected.  Survival drives evolution; evolution responds to the rhythms of the world.

(This is a repeat post.)