GENES AND MEMES

Muhammadu Buhari won election over President Goodluck Jonathan

It appears to be a good time to think about the Yoruba of Nigeria since the long -time leader of this democracy has NOT been re-elected and has stepped down gracefully.   It's a little worrisome that Buhari is a former general and considered strict.  But now we have to think of everything in global terms, so I’ll give it a try.

The Yoruba were an oral culture that didn’t really cohere as a group except with their language until they developed in place “out of earlier Mesolithic Volta-Niger populations by the 1^st millennium BCE.  Oral history recorded under the Oyo Empire derives the Yoruba as an ethnic group to the 4^th century BCE with urban structures appearing in the 12^th century.  The urban phase of Ife before the rise of Oyo, c. 1100-1600 was a significant peak of political centralization in the 12^th described as a “golden age” of life.”

The Yoruba had a council of elders meant to prevent dictatorships.  Their own version of Robin Hood developed from farmer’s union network that went underground and opposed any domination by other groups.  Because one of their basic foods is yams, which contain a plant version of estrogen, there are many twins.  This wasn’t developed by the mysterious writer or writers of the Wikipedia entry.  But there is an echo in Navajo mythology.  Some cultures welcome the unusual and others try to destroy any variation.  The practice of the time was to pay off conquerers in war by handing over people to be slaves, but the Yoruba often just conquered some other weaker group and handed THEM over.  Still, some involuntarily contributed to the human Gumbo of the New World.

Igbo and Ora

This time period caught my eye.  In Europe this was the insanely chaotic and power-mad time that drives the plots and theories of “Game of Thrones.”  In a little essay derived from E.R. Truitt’s book, “Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art” Truitt says, “Certain technologies are so characteristic of their historical milieux that they serve as a kind of shorthand. The arresting title credit sequence to the TV series "Game of Thrones" proclaims the show’s medieval setting with an assortment of clockpunk gears, waterwheels, winches and pulleys.” It appears that Rube Goldberg was a throwback to medieval times.  It was the age when every town had erected a clock tower (cock power).  The Valier Baptist church finally turned off their electronic version, but the Main Street crossroads put up a small version on a pillar in the corner park.  

The emperor's new nightingale

“Most [mechanisms] were designed and built beyond the boundaries of Latin Christendom, in the cosmopolitan courts of Baghdad, Damascus, Constantinople and Karakorum. Such automata came to medieval Europe as gifts from foreign rulers, or were reported in texts by travellers to these faraway places.”  This is no doubt the origin of the idea of the clockwork God, who sets the world to ticking.  More to say about that paradigm in a later post.

Truitt emphasizes the idea that mechanical wonders imported to Europe impressed the people as magic, at root demonic.  Eventually that led to our idea of the contrasting sanctity of the wilderness and nature.

Mechanisms of pain and death.

Meanwhile in Medieval Europe there began a practice of horrific torture to enforce domination and a kind of fatalism about literally crushing individuals for the sake of the whole, which they claimed would continue after death.  Followers of the “Game of Thrones” story recoil at the episodes of torture, but the practices of Medieval Europe rival any examples elsewhere.  I once heard Vine Deloria, Jr. speak to the Portland, OR, City Group, elegant local elites who met for lunch.  He had just visited Powell’s and carried with him a book on Medieval torture which he described to us to make the point that the demonization of North American tribes by whites were quite equal to the white past.  So this suggests another line of inquiry:  why do people torture?  It seems we are now embarked on another Era of Torture, linked to prisons.

Having named an African 12^th century Yoruba culture and the parallel-in-time Medieval period in Europe which started out well but ended with the “Little Ice Age” that seriously damaged agriculture.   That sent adventurers searching for warmer climes.  This period include the years of plague:  “The Black Death was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people and peaking in Europe in the years 1346–53.”  

But the wave of disease that followed the arrival of Columbus in North America killed so many people that the drastic depopulation of the continent actually changed the climate.  Without humans and their fires, the carbon-generated warming was removed.  This is not popular information -- another line of investigation to be pursued.  

In the meantime I found this little time-table from Wikipedia, that dubious source, which seems at least a place to start thinking about pre-Columbian oral cultures, which turn out to have some written codes after all. I left in the links because most people know little about these groups.

• 900–1150: Pueblo II Era in the American Southwest
• 1000–1200: Early Mississippian culture in the Eastern Woodland1000–1200: Dresden Codex written and illuminated. This Yucatecan Mayan codex from Chichén Itzá is the earliest known surviving book from the Americas^[1
• 1000–1200: Acoma Pueblo and Old Oraibi are established, and become the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States^[2][3][4
• 1142: League of the Iroquois is founded, and the Great Law of Peace is adopted by the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, and Oneida people.^[5] Wampum invented by Ayenwatha, which the Haudenosaunee used to record information.^[6]
• 1150–1350: Pueblo III Era in the American Southwest
• The Inuit Thule people largely displaced the old Dorset culture in Arctic Alaska.
• The most important city of the Mississippian culture of mound builders, Cahokia on the Mississippi River opposite modern Saint Louis, Missouri, reached its zenith with a population near 20,000 or perhaps 40,000. No other city in the United States would boast of such a large population until the early days of the Republic
• Natives of the American Southwest began building spectacular cliff dwellings housing hundreds of people in the later half of the century.

Again it appears that the 12^th century began with leaps forward in development and clustering of nomads, but by the 1400’s it is changing and then is ended by the shadow of plague. “ Etiology, the modern branch of science that deals with the causes of infectious disease, recognizes five major modes of disease transmission: airborne, waterborne, bloodborne, by direct contact, and through vector (insects or other creatures that carry germs from one species to another).  As humans began traveling over seas and across lands which were previously isolated, research suggests that diseases have been spread by all five transmission modes.”  Some writers will talk about diseases that result from animal domestication about ten thousand years ago (smallpox).  Both Asia and Africa have donated diseases to everyone else.  Disease is entwined with climate because it affects vectors like insects (mosquitoes are moving north now and bringing malaria with them).  But also famine or malnutrition, stigmatization that prevents access to care, and the simple deprivation and filth of poverty also encourage disease while loading people with what amounts to torture.

Erlich's crew in Greenland

At the eye doctor yesterday I was squinting my way through Gretel Erlich’s powerful and terrifying Harper’s magazine essay called “Rotten Ice,” meant to be a metaphor for the phenomenon of the melting of the ice cap of the planet.  The essay is taken from her book, "This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland."  The people in Greenland -- who exist on the narrowest of terms -- are being destroyed, one-by-one and as a culture.  

I drove to GF and back through the vast mono-crop landscape of wheat-raising on which several nations depend for their bread.  Only a few miles to the north on the higher land the growing season will sometimes be too short to ripen barley, which is tougher than wheat.  If one thinks about the ice-destruction in Greenland, the Irish potato famine, the Black Death in Europe, and the depopulation of the native peoples of North America, one can become very jumpy about the safety of these wheat crops, which are vulnerable to hail or even out-of-season snow, let alone some aberration of their genome or invading entity.

And yet “Green Land” was named that by a people who planted vineyards there in their time.  “A careful examination of the climate record reveals that Europe experienced a relative warm period known as the Medieval Warm Period (hereafter referred to as MWP) between the years 600 and 1150, cooling of the climate between the years 1150 and 1460, a brief warming between the years 1460 and 1560, followed by cooling known as the Little Ice Age (hereafter referred to as LIA) between the years 1560 and 1850.”

The point is well-made by Erlich that both the planet and people are flexible, responsive, adaptable, complex and always changing.  Whatever the cause, the glaciers are melting according to forces and currents that are complex and often unseen, like the warmer water that causes the glacier to melt from the bottom, to “rot” until one day the ice structure collapses.  What that means in terms of civilization can’t be known yet, but it will be painful, support chaos, and winnow down the human beings -- not through their genes but through their memes, their behaviors.

Yoruba trader

THE WINDS OF CHANGE

Very often we can see the jetstream from here.  Because it's eastbound it boosts an airliner’s speed and fuel use, so we often sight or hear jet planes or notice their vapor trails.  The jet stream in that way is like a current of water full of fish who like where it takes them.  More usually it’s the cloud patterns that reveal what’s happening way up there, like the constant formation of bulging cloud storm shelves building up against the west side of the Rockies where moisture-laden clouds are waiting until they dry out enough to cross over.  And then when they come, we see the familiar “Chinook arch” where high wind is pushing eastside clouds in the middle.

At the Oregon coast, which my family used to prowl in the post WWII years, the Japanese current brought whatever was floating on their coast over to our coast.  We looked for the blue-green glass fishing floats that washed up.  No one does that now: the floats are just plastic.  But we had to be careful then because the Japanese -- in an enemy mode -- sent over fire bombs both by the ocean current and by the air current that followed it.  Now we’re told that Chinese industrial pollutions are raining on us from those air currents.   We muse over the studies of cargos of sneakers and rubber duckies from capsized ships that show where the currents go. 

So the air is moving, the water is moving, and we are also more aware now that the earth is moving, because the melting of polar ice shifts massive weight off of land masses as big as Greenland, which then rise since they themselves are floating on the tectonic plates which are very slowly slipping around on the molten interior of the planet.  It all comes from the spinning and from the solar impact of heat.  It’s three-dimensional chess with living pawns.  They call it “dynamical meteorology” and you can google-up moving maps of air movements because of our satellite systems watching from above them.  Weathermen are just local “dynamical meteorologists.”  They play three-dimensional chess, but without any control, only the hope of detecting patterns -- which is the essence of chess.

I didn’t know until I started researching this morning that the other planets also have jet streams, but that makes sense since they spin, the sun energy hits them, and they have fluid jackets.  The currents on Jupiter are what make those stripes.  Wind currents and water currents are just another element of existence that is always moving but humans can both capitalize on that and resent that.  It’s great to have a strong wind at my back when I’m coming home from the post office, but only the bait of incoming used books keeps me going there when facing the same wind.

The ice skating cleric

Part of my childhood lore was about the “Little Ice Age” that caused the Willamette River to freeze over thickly enough for my great-grandfather to cross it with a wagon and horses.  Formally, the Little Ice Age itself pulsed, driving history as people tried to cope.  There’s a term for that, too: “eco-refugees,” people displaced by local climate change.  Until now, it was a European preoccupation, but today we look at the whole planet and realize our extremely low temps in North America are mirrored by extremely high ones (meaning uncontrollable fires) in Australia where it is summer.

For this reason, any of several dates ranging over 400 years may indicate the beginning of the Little Ice Age:

• 1250 for when Atlantic pack ice began to grow
• 1275 to 1300 based on radiocarbon dating of plants killed by glaciation
• 1300 for when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe
• 1315 for the rains and Great Famine of 1315–1317
• 1550 for theorized beginning of worldwide glacial expansion
• 1650 for the first climatic minimum.   The Little Ice Age ended in the latter half of the nineteenth century or early in the twentieth century.

Little Ice Age Fruit of the Loom

Some of the human adaptations show up in small material culture inventions.

Antonio Stradivari, the famous violin maker, produced his instruments during the Little Ice Age. The colder climate is proposed to have caused the wood used in his violins to be denser than in warmer periods, contributing to the tone of Stradivari's instruments.  According to the science historian James Burke the period inspired such innovations in everyday life as the widespread use of buttons and button holes, knitting of custom-made undergarments to better cover and insulate the human body, and installation of fireplace hoods to make more efficient use of fires for indoor heating, as well as the development of the enclosed stove, in early versions often covered with ceramic tiles.

My favorite innovations in the present cold winter are manufactured fleece, down-like microfiber, and electrically heated beds.  Piped heating gas is also a winner.  But those all depend upon infrastructures of manufacture and delivery, which depend upon human cooperation.  When one looks at history, the result of severe climate change of any kind means loss of food, which means famine, which means extreme population loss (up to 60% in some times and places), which means political consequences ranging from riots to despots.  Volcanoes get into it by blocking the sun or raining toxic dust on everything the wind visits.  And then there is water.  Ocean currents control fisheries and shipping, but also have a strong impact on weather, for instance the El Nino phenomenon. 

Human populations -- both in numbers and kinds -- interact constantly with the pulsations and fluctuations and swings of weather temps and turbulence.  We all know about the greenhouse effect now.  Some obsess about loss of forest, esp. the broad expanses like the northern boreal trees or the tropical jungles.  Scientists have become more and more ingenious at finding evidence and drawing conclusions about what has happened in the past.  But we still aren’t keeping up with the permutations of human beings, who should probably change more than they do.

It’s suggested that the Black Death that reduced the population of Europe by one-third was a partial cause for climate cooling because the big timber forests grew back a long time (later supplying hulls and masts for sea-going ships).  The removal of so much water from the ocean because of the respiration of trees and thickening ice, made the oceans more salty, which affected the thermohaline circulation of the oceanic conveyor belt currents, the jet streams of the sea that those ships rode across the Atlantic.  In short, bacteria on marmot fleas carried by black rats along the Silk Road to Europe were the ultimate cause of the Native Americans being pushed aside by Europeans.  Everything is connected.

The point of families, tribes, nations, and the other generational sequences of human beings is in part the preservation of knowledge that the previous peoples have accumulated.  But it can also be an engine of change when the younger generation rebels.  Families try to preserve themselves in spite of the tragedies and boom times and dispersals by instilling pride and telling stories and trying hard to form behavior.  But the future always escapes through the young, infusing the genome/culturome with promise and experiments so that it adapts to new conditions, invents strategy previously unknown. 

This is a flight of bats, a key part of ecology that is threatened by the heat wave and conflagrations in Australia.

These are baby flying foxes, the biggest kind of bats, who have been overcome by heat and fallen out of the trees where they sleep and nurse.  People have gathered them up, wrapped them in dust cloths to control them, and will now feed them with eye droppers.

The inventions of the computer and the internet are the kind of particulate -- folks say “granular” now -- accumulation of knowledge that changes the culture which in turn changes the land, air, and water across the planet.  Sometimes the effects are only local and sometimes things suddenly tip and everything changes.  Human populations have been growing and moving, perturbing everything, inventing new molecules.  A new “religion” is growing, the remnants of the old ones still urging migration (we’re looking for planets instead of heaven, building rockets instead of arks) -- which used to work -- while the edges of the new ones plead for reform using modern knowledge.  In the meantime, individuals must do what they can.