META COGNITION

In this historical time when we are struggling to understand the truth and value of individuals by watching them in videos, whether fiction or fact, our most basic problem is discovering what a person "is" anyway.  Some of them insist that their virtue comes from the dominating Christian assumptions (which are largely shared by Islam and Judaism) and therefore take "God as their witness."  Others try to show that they are at least as smart as a college sophomore by expressing cynicism about whether any people anywhere are virtuous -- all is naturally selfish so it's okay for them to be selfish.  We just heard this in impeachment hearings.

While we are trying to figure out politically how to leave "God" out of it and still arrive at something ultimate and unchanging, there have been people struggling along to use various tests in the interest of describing a truly "good" person.  At least what qualities might be involved.  This study looks pretty interesting as a place to start.  It unfortunate that it's all so multi-syllabic.  I've tried making their lists look like lists.

https://annals-general-psychiatry.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/healts12991-019-0247-1

"The results yielded two highest order factors 

Self and 

Self–Environment Interaction, 

6 middle order factors 

Emotional Self, 

Cognitive Self, 

Social Emotionality, 

Emotional and Cognitive Control, 

Ethical Emotionality and Behavior, 

Social Emotionality and Behavior)

12 factors at the bottom 

Ego Resiliency, 

Ego Strength, 

Intrapersonal Emotion, 

Personal Space Cognition, 

Interpersonal Cognition, 

Emotional Creativity, 

Externalized Interpersonal Emotion, 

Internalized Interpersonal Emotion, 

Emotional Motivation, 

Self-Discipline, 

Ethical Values 

Ethical Behavior).

"Significant outcomes of the current study

• 1.  The basic psychological structure in humans comprised two separate super-modules (self and its interaction with environmental representation).
• 2.  The two super-modules are ‘bridged’ by social emotion.
• 3.  Meta-cognition seems to be a significant element of temperament and this poses important conceptual questions.
• 4.  A defining finding was the frequent admixture of emotional and cognitive processes in the same module and even in meta-cognition.
• 5.  An important characteristic of the current model is that it does not accept the hierarchical separation of ‘temperament’ vs. ‘character’ and locates both of them across all hierarchical levels and modules."

What I get out of this is that the study accepts the idea I've been proposing that a human being is the self-contained "meat sack" -- as the young rudely call the "in-skin" -- acting against the surrounding environment that presses on it as "out-skin." I'm so pleased to be in agreement, though they don't talk about the necessity of fittingness in terms of the specific ecology: city/country, sparse/plenty, high population/low population and so on.

Then there is the useful list of personal qualities that are helpful without directly saying which is "good" and which is "bad" except noting that having values and behavior requires both cognition (thinking) and emotion (attachments and expression).  I take it that's what they mean by a "frequent admixture of emotional and cognitive processes."

So what is "meta-cognition"?  "Metacognition is, put simply, thinking about one's thinking. More precisely, it refers to the processes used to plan, monitor, and assess one's understanding and performance. Metacognition includes a critical awareness of a) one's thinking and learning and b) oneself as a thinker and learner."  This definition is from Vanderbilt University.

"Aside from these three components, metacognition also has three different types of metacognitive knowledge – (1) Declarative knowledge, (2) Procedural knowledge, and (3) Conditional knowledge. Declarative knowledge refers to the factual information that one knows, and can both be spoken or written."  This is from a psych website.

We have a living public example of a man who has no metacognition because of frontal temperal lobe deterioration.  The part of the brain behind the forehead is crucial to this kind of thinking.  It is not well-taught and is also absent from most of our media.  We teach what will earn money, not what will aid metacognitive knowledge, self-monitoring to see how well one is acting in the world.

What a citizen needs to know (the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, voting law, courtroom procedure) has been dropped in high schools.  The underlying principles of clear communication (intelligibility, vocabulary, context, sentence logic) have been dropped.  Economic principles have never been clearly framed.  The biological sciences are too scary and political to teach.  So there go the three main components of metacognition.  In my experience, kids know what they learned from television and computers.  They have contempt for their teachers because the faculty doesn't know that metacognition even exists. They teach content, not reflection about it.

Instead we learn game strategies, what is popular, and how to "gas-light" to control someone.  Unable to impact their environment, young people try to make themselves indelible and remarkable with tattoos, metal attachments, and radical behavior with no goal in mind.  I'd say they have become like the ball in a pinball machine except that was a game of my childhood, not theirs.

it's always wise to check the sources of "instruments" and studies like these, because then one can judge whether or not to accept the conclusions.  This study comes from a website called:  

https://www.biomedcentral.com  "A pioneer of open access publishing, BMC has an evolving portfolio of high quality peer-reviewed journals including broad interest titles such as BMC Biology".

"Open access" means that you don't have to pay hundreds of dollars to read the studies.  "Peer-reviewed" means that the members of the cohort or discipline that read these articles have read the writing and evaluated them.  "Broad interest" means that the articles are not just of interest to highly trained people, but have meaning for all of us.  They pride themselves on being sustainable (not flash in the pan, like much pop journalism) and continually reforming as knowledge increases, thus escaping the academic trap of one's value being dependent on yesterday's ideas in the heads of aging professors.

What would it be like if our government were open access, peer reviewed, broad interest, sustainable, continually reforming and free of aging legislators?

BIG HISTORY, SMALL POLITICS

People speak of "organized religion" as a way of talking about formalized institutions based on some kind of meaning system.  Most of them are derived from a culture and have an economic basis.  That is, they teach how to survive in the world where they arose by obeying the customs and costumes of the people who find them effective.  God, the inconceivable Ground of Being, was confused with a humanoid avatar, esp. the Father figure.

Sometimes religion is conflated with government, esp. when government is run by sub-categories (parties) that have the fervour and obsessions of religion, partly defined as propositions of faith that must defy common sense and scientific knowledge.  Both religion and government are based on written history, which is largely the history of winners, written by winners, or those who oppose the winners.  Not much comes from genuinely new thought that describes the situation better.  In a square world, no one thinks in circles, much less hearts.

"Axial Age (also Axis Age, from German: Achsenzeit) is a term coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers  ((1883-1969) in the sense of a "pivotal age" characterizing the period of ancient history from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE, " (That is, the 3rd to the 8th centuries before the Christian Era and 3,000 years after the invention of writing.  Something like 7,000 years after the development of agriculture.)  Jaspers' time was one that valued history but in cities, in terms of recorded writing, and through the lens of a self-congratulating and self-empowering culture that became the great evil of fascism, which fools the larger culture into empowering a few controlling people.  That is, they took governmental organizing as equivalent to religious institutions. 

"In addition to Jaspers, the philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901 - 1985) referred to this age as The Great Leap of Being, constituting a new spiritual awakening and a shift of perception from societal to individual values."  Voegelin came out of the same German culture but challenged it as a Protestant and individual standing against the idea of a "master race."  "By the time he became an American citizen in 1944, his name respelled to Eric Voegelin, his overarching question had come down to this: What is political reality? ^" 

^"Anthropologist David Graeber has pointed out that "the core period of Jasper's Axial age [...] corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented. What's more, the three parts of the world where coins were first invented were also the very parts of the world where those sages lived;  . . . Graeber argues that an understanding of the rise of markets is necessary to grasp the context in which the religious and philosophical insights of the Axial age arose. The ultimate effect of the introduction of coinage was, he argues, an "ideal division of spheres of human activity that endures to this day: on the one hand the market, on the other, religion."

"David Christian notes that the first "universal religions" appeared in the age of the first universal empires and of the first all-encompassing trading networks."  Put this idea against his shared idea of Big History and it is obvious that "universal" is an empty adjective.  There were always people who never knew anything about these "universals."  Two new inventions undercut the real and material "trading networks" or expanded them beyond human experience, depending on how to you look at it.  One was bookkeeping which reduced things to numbers, and the other was the internet which trades stocks all by itself in the middle of the night and widens the idea of "universal" peoples way beyond what it has been.

Neither one appears in a more truly "universal" history, explained by the ironically named David Christian.  https://www.ted.com/talks/david_christian_big_history   "This is "Big History": an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life and humanity, set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline."  

In short, this sequence of thinkers is a quick way to understand that religious institutions, a form of government, became secular government, but took with them the great concern for wealth and how to acquire and guard it.  This preoccupation led them to use stigmatizing the weak, advocating their murder as a way of improving the economy.  In the end the strong turned the tables and stigmatized their oppressors, which confused those who think aping Nazis will make them powerful -- and rich.  The "Axial" religions were safeguards against this point of view.

This Madeleine Albright quote is from https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/07/30/on-tyranny-populism-and-how-best-to-respond-today?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/  "Finally, and even more seriously, I fear a return to the international climate that prevailed in the 1920s and 30s, when the United States withdrew from the global stage and countries everywhere pursued what they perceived to be their own interests without regard to larger and more enduring goals. When arguing that every age has its own Fascism, the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi added that the critical point can be reached “not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralysing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned.” If he is right (and I think he is), we have reason to be concerned by the gathering array of political and social currents buffeting us today—currents propelled by the dark underside of the technological revolution, the corroding effects of power, the American president’s disrespect for truth and the widening acceptance of dehumanising insults, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism as being within the bounds of normal public debate." 

"Big History" is an excellent corrective to the short-sighted, limited, narcissistic warped people we suffer from today.  It is as powerful as previous religions.  But it is the result of scientific education and a valuing of our real physical world with all its resources and peoples.  Unless governance is consent-based, radically inclusive, future-aware enterprise, it will disperse the real wealth of living into imagined marks hidden in little node-like institutions on theoretically protected islands and refuge jurisdictions.  When we see that such shenanigans are empty, we get rid of their control over us.  Their pretence of legitimacy is based on our unevidenced consent.  If their secret islands are flooded by global warming, there will be only gilded tears.

HERE'S YOUR HAT -- WHAT'S YOUR HURRY?

The new mayor of Valier lasted about two weeks or one public meeting, depending on how you look at it.  I was not at the first/last meeting so this is all second-hand and possibly unreliable information, but what I’ve heard from several sources was that he attended the Mayor’s Workshop in Great Falls (driving the town truck), decided to continue on to Helena in order to introduce himself around, had a nice meal there and stayed at a good motel, and on his return submitted a bill to the town for all expenses.  They were startled since the usual practice is to combine Great Falls business with shopping or visiting, going and coming in one day in one’s own car at one's own expense.  As well, he asked for reimbursement for a $600 Power Point presentation he had commissioned six months ago in the course of trying to convince the town to back out of their agreement to improve the sewage treatment lagoon, as urged by the state.  In short, he behaved as he has been accusing the town officials and employees of behaving.

At the actual meeting he asked the clerk to run the meeting, saying he “didn’t know how.”  He dispensed with the Pledge of Allegiance.  There were two dozen people present, many of them from the American Legion, because he had previously decided to move his desk to the Boy Scout room that had been financed by the Legion.  He thought his business should be private, that people were intimidated by the clerk in the office where the mayor has previously dealt with business.  He also ordered a much bigger desk.  He was advised to always keep the door open, particularly since he thought there was no need to displace the Scouts.  He proposed that the library reserve fund, meant to be used for expansion or if the next library levy fails, be spent on heavy equipment, about which he had already consulted salesmen.  Then he saw the librarian’s face.

Valier library

There were many other plans proposed in a jumbled, random way.  None were welcomed and by the end of the meeting he angrily despaired of “dragging the town into the 21^st century,” gathered up his materials, and resigned.  Jessie Wunderlich immediately moved to accept the resignation.  It passed.  The town has thirty days to decide on a new mayor.  In the meantime, Velda Loch, who was already the president of the council and who has been mayor in the past, will be acting.

Many questions are raised and so far much of the thinking has been along the lines of high school:  who was offended, whom no one liked anyway, why this town is so broken, and a lot of general emotion and vengeful thinking.  “Those voters deserve what they get.”  It is clear that the vote putting this man into office was really a vote against the previous mayor.  Tom’s wedge-campaign allegations met willing listeners because of several powerful people wanting to do things that the town wouldn’t allow, mostly building projects.  

Mayberry, RFD

In the past building in Valier has been welcome and hooking up the water, electrical, sewer, and other grid connections have been easily arranged with no more cost than the actual materials and labor.  Now that the state is requiring much higher standards, the town has reframed their thinking as not just running extensions, but also requiring builders become “investors” in the whole system as was done to build the original infrastructure.  Instead of the town being seen as a cost-free corporate provider, it is seen as much more of a cooperative venture that must divide the obligation to provide capital among the “shareholders”/voters/landowners, for both maintenance and development.  But the town has no solidarity.

An historic bank building, now an embroidery business

In the past it was assumed that responsible business owners in the town could also be good leaders who acted in the interest of the town.  Now it is said that council members are met with such resentment at any change that their businesses were damaged, threatened with lawsuits and boycotts.  This is the national style.  But I just made a list of the town businesses, using the Internet, and it looks to me as though very few businesses depend on town customers.  The town’s three biggest businesses are the grain elevator, the irrigation company, and the school.  The school runs buses to a wide area.  The other two are ag businesses serving surrounding ranches and farms.  The elevator is outside the city limits but connected to city infrastructure.   After a huge kafuffle over a member of the town council selling the town some gravel (at a good rate) it developed that state law prohibits councilmen from doing business with the town.

A major ranch

Of the approximately forty other businesses, almost every single one serves the area -- not the town.  In fact, many are based on visitors either camping here to fish or moving through on the way to Glacier Park. Many of the basic services in town, from the embroidery business to the Trader’s Dispatch, are run by people who live outside the town limits.  The town clerk, the librarian, the dumpground monitor, the real estate agent all live outside the town.  The newspaper is not just based in another town, it is a rival town with no motivation to explain matters or express optimism.  It’s not in the same county as Valier.  The Pondera County newspaper is not distributed in Valier. 

One of the first things this tone-deaf mayor proposed when he began attending council meetings years ago was to suggest cutting off the sale of water to the surrounding ranches and farms, meaning that he did not realize (though he grew up in Conrad) that a town exists as a service nucleus for an area.  Without the surrounding ag businesses, there would be no town.  And yet those people cannot vote for council members or mayor.  Because he did not think of this, he didn’t consider the power of the American Legion which is based on the larger area and military service, not the town.  They understand money very well, are conservative in many ways but have been places, and have a special care for youngsters.

Calgary, Alberta

My training is in organizational design and development; I’ve lived a long time in this area of the East Slope.  Over fifty years I’ve seen the major cities of Montana double in size. They hardly qualify as cities in coastal terms -- the closest real city is Calgary with a few less than a million residents -- while the whole state of Montana has only slightly more than a million residents.  Billings has almost 107,000 at last count.  Many of the new people are planners and regulators at the state level whose experience has been with much denser populations over much less area, not ag-based.  They have no understanding of either small towns or ag service areas.

Conrad, Montana

Valier’s last population count (in 2012) showed 508.  Pondera County claims 6165. The county seat, Conrad, had 2579 people in 2010. There is no way to define the service area of Valier that I know of.  There is no count of visitors to the area.  Possibly MDOT would have a count of highway traffic.  The number of citizens who usually attend town council meetings would barely break half-a-dozen most of the time.  208 voted in the recent mayoral election.  Most people in Valier have lived locally all their lives.  

At state urging we have established water rights, more than doubled our storage capacity, found leaks, and installed meters so that water is more conserved than ever. The town is dependent on wells inside the city limits and cannot draw on lake water which is owned by the Pondera Canal Company.  The sewage lagoon has not hit its limits in terms of size, but plans are to upgrade its efficiency so that it passes the constant tests the state requires.

The Lighthouse fine dining

Valier has been passed over for optical fiber service (which hurts high speed internet service) from the telephone company but has acquired a cell phone tower.  It is not inside the city limits.    The airport has lost its resident crop-duster (moved out to a ranch) but remains in use.  The railroad spur only serves the elevator.  I’m unclear whether the livestock sorting corrals or in or outside the town.  Our fine dinner restaurant is outside the town.  No minister resides in the town.  Electricity is occasionally interrupted or suffers from flares and sags or “brown outs” when one of the “third legs” is out.  These issues are seldom brought before the council, though they would seem highly relevant to new business.

It’s time we gave up the high school popularity contests and discovered adult reality.  In a way, the two-week mayor was right: we aren't in the 21st century and many of us don't want to be.

WHO'S MANAGING THE MANAGERS?

Every time I hear the scorn over Obamacare’s computer problems, I flash back to my years with the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings in the Nineties.  Oracle was the same computer system provider, though we were forbidden to say so for fear of hackers getting clues.  The people who needed clues were us, who couldn’t make the system work because our equipment was inadequate, our training was nonexistent, and the functions didn’t match the work load anyway.  Most recently the same situation drove us all crazy at a local care center, where the confused results had to be checked by nurses who were already in short supply, but not as short as their tempers.  And, of course, the stakes were higher when dealing with lives.

In Portland our manager was a little hen of a woman who had not grown with her job and whose marriage was tanking.  She managed to hire a good friend who dealt with every problem by adding another layer, a system of brown paper envelopes with addresses on them, colored pencils for marking the envelopes with arcane symbols for sorting, since the computer data was little more than what a typewriter could do.  It made me think of the old Alphone and Gaston cajun joke about a rendezvous:  "If you get there first, make a blue mark and if I get there first, I'll rub it out."  

We didn’t have the information for referrals or the law, much less regulations, though the questions came in every five minutes.  Employee turnover, in spite of the Nineties version of unemployment (I was out of work for eight months, then took temp work until I was hired by the city), was high even with excellent health insurance and a strong union.  

The manager over the hen was another female, but one highly educated in all the idealistic procedures that were supposed to get everyone on board, enthusiastic, and helpful.  None of the techniques worked on the assortment of stubborn and world-wise inspectors who went into the field daily to risk life and limb so as to keep order for politicians and city planners, many of whom were females who just graduated from fine colleges back east.  No amount of sending out for pizza made a difference.

I escaped to the Permit Center, where the computer crisis peaked, at a time when geologists were telling the city leaders that the chances of a major earthquake were high and that most of the bridges in a city bisected by a major river would collapse.  All clerical specialists were instructed as to which forms to fill out -- assuming we could get downtown.  Also, though Timothy McVeigh had just masterminded the Oklahoma City explosion, no one seemed concerned about the rental trucks that parked just outside the Permit Center -- about twenty feet from my desk.  The manager went to an emergency response planning meeting and returned ashen.  “Just run for your life,” he said.  He asked what I thought about taping up Dilbert cartoons in his office.  I thought it might consolidate resistance to the constant stream of crisis management minutia and advised against it.  I also advised him to avoid pointy hair-dos.

Not long ago I was talking to someone competent who had just lost a pretty good job because the owner of the business did his own managing but really didn't know what he was doing, so used what has been called “Make It So Syndrome" after Patrick Stewart’s character on Star Trek deciding what he wanted the ship to do and telling Scotty, “Make it so.”  The sci-fi series convention is that the job is impossible but Scotty does it anyway.  This is the fictional result, but too many terrestrials expect it in the earthbound office.

Right away I admit that I’ve never had a management job, which is what determines one’s life income more than higher education, though some people believe that a college education will make one capable of managing.  The seminary I attended assumed that management could be figured out on the job or else done by the congregation, but in fact I discovered that ministers, because they are on site in the church, end up doing much of the management -- without consistency or the proper temperament.  (Ministers are big on avoidance.)

What does management mean besides a higher income?  Higher responsibility, for sure; an ego that permits learning from mistakes;  a grasp of systems relationships; an ability to delegate and tactfully follow up on completion; a willingness to share goals with people without simply forcing obedience through authority; a broad understanding of the materials needed, where to get them, and timing when ordering them; and regular inspections of the state of the shelter.  In simultaneous order. 

Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple

One of the big lessons in a major church came when the new property management person, a laywoman who protested she knew nothing about church buildings, took over from a man who managed buildings for a living and “knew everything.”  Camera in hand, this woman simply marched through the place, recording what she saw.  The inevitable water leaks.  Shocking crumbles and rots.  Even loosening lead canes in the valuable stained glass windows.  After a slide show for the congregation, checks came in.  Drains were cleared, repairs made.  Whenever that woman spoke, people listened.  Including the minister.

In the early Sixties, when I was starting out, the school superintendent for whom I worked was a legacy Mormon (therefore a respecter of brick and mortar) but also a humanist (I don’t see a contradiction) who was able to persuade people rather than confronting and criticizing.  There is almost no place where this is harder to do than on a reservation where people have been managed by deprivation.  In the early years the people were forced to work by withholding their commodities (food and blankets) if they didn’t.   The result was survival by devious means, covert defiance, and secret rebellion-based alliances that produced at least two generations of unmanageable people.  Computers have nothing to do with it.

In the churches I served in the Eighties and at the City of Portland in the Nineties, the key to smooth operations was supposed to be a mission statement. There was an assumption that if a person had such a definition in mind, the actual management functions would naturally fall into place, because they were such obvious common sense.  (Here’s a good checklist:  http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_28.htm)  

They didn’t.  Not any more than all the work on communication skills over the past decades has eliminated misunderstanding or the many sessions on “getting to peace” ever eliminated war.  Now the tendency is to say it’s all biological and to turn back to the idea of survival of the fittest, conveniently forgetting that most of the big predatory animals are about snuffed out, except for the ones we deliberately protect from their unfitness.  We’ve had the pyramid of survival upside down.  It’s the bacteria who survive and sometimes prevail.

What can we learn from bacteria?  I used to have a poster that said, “Faithfulness in little things is a big thing.  Saint Frances.”  Forget the CEO empires, the cathedrals, the moon shoots.  Feed the babies.  There’s a lot more to it than that, but it’s a place to start and a thing we haven’t accomplished so far.  Do you have to wait for the Pope to tell you what to do?  Pay attention.  He just said, "Let's not produce little monsters."  He didn't mean children.  He meant managers.

Paul allows me to add this comment:  The management description you came up with is something I might be tempted to put on a resume, because it's somewhat difficult to describe exactly what a manager does. Maybe just because there are so many different kinds of management. I might add a couple things. Responding immediately and reassuringly about a need, with enough authority to at least put the requester at ease that they've left the problem in the right hands. Almost never admit defeat right out of the box. My automatic response is, I can do that! Then I set out finding a way to make it so. Sourcing and timing are ever important. Tact, threats, empathy and reward, all doled out at the right time and proper doses.

AMERICAN NATIONS??

Every now and then someone divvies up the not-so-united North American States into regions based on some criteria or other.  The latest version is eleven regions defined by Colin Woodard according to politics as they’ve developed over the history of the coalition.  The book is “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.”   http://www.colinwoodard.com/americannations.html  

I failed to record where I found this handy list:

Yankeedom: Founded by Puritans, residents in Northeastern states and the industrial Midwest tend to be more comfortable with government regulation. They value education and the common good more than other regions.

New Netherland: The Netherlands was the most sophisticated society in the Western world when New York was founded, Woodard writes, so it’s no wonder that the region has been a hub of global commerce. It’s also the region most accepting of historically persecuted populations.

The Midlands: Stretching from Quaker territory west through Iowa and into more populated areas of the Midwest, the Midlands are “pluralistic and organized around the middle class.” Government intrusion is unwelcome, and ethnic and ideological purity isn’t a priority.

Tidewater: The coastal regions in the English colonies of Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland and Delaware tend to respect authority and value tradition. Once the most powerful American nation, it began to decline during Westward expansion.

Greater Appalachia: Extending from West Virginia through the Great Smoky Mountains and into Northwest Texas, the descendants of Irish, English and Scottish settlers value individual liberty. Residents are “intensely suspicious of lowland aristocrats and Yankee social engineers.”

Deep South: Dixie still traces its roots to the caste system established by masters who tried to duplicate West Indies-style slave society, Woodard writes. The Old South values states’ rights and local control and fights the expansion of federal powers.

El Norte: Southwest Texas and the border region is the oldest, and most linguistically different, nation in the Americas. Hard work and self-sufficiency are prized values.

The Left Coast: A hybrid, Woodard says, of Appalachian independence and Yankee utopianism loosely defined by the Pacific Ocean on one side and coastal mountain ranges like the Cascades and the Sierra Nevadas on the other. The independence and innovation required of early explorers continues to manifest in places like Silicon Valley and the tech companies around Seattle.

The Far West: The Great Plains and the Mountain West were built by industry, made necessary by harsh, sometimes inhospitable climates. Far Westerners are intensely libertarian and deeply distrustful of big institutions, whether they are railroads and monopolies or the federal government.

New France: Former French colonies in and around New Orleans and Quebec tend toward consensus and egalitarian, “among the most liberal on the continent, with unusually tolerant attitudes toward gays and people of all races and a ready acceptance of government involvement in the economy,” Woodard writes.

First Nation: The few First Nation peoples left — Native Americans who never gave up their land to white settlers — are mainly in the harshly Arctic north of Canada and Alaska. They have sovereignty over their lands, but their population is only around 300,000.

To my eyes this is a history of transplanted Europeans plus a quick “oh, yeah” postscript for the pre-existing peoples of the continent.  As such, it perpetuates the wars that started with the establishment of Euro-nations, as modified by territorial ecologies of this continent.  (Unacknowledged in this list.)  There is no allowance for the Asian people, the Indiohispanic people, the Middle Easterners, the Russians and “India-Indians” or the African-Americans who did NOT come as slaves, who had origins on the east coast of that continent.  Like tree-roots under sidewalks, all of these were much stronger and more active in what goes on than the walkers think -- until they trip on the upheavals.

My next reflection would be about the influence of scale in this thinking.  I could easily divvy up Montana into similar regions:  the Western valleys between mountain ranges, the High-line that’s roughly along the 49^th parallel, the prairie parkland and short grass east slope which extends n/s on both sides of that parallel, the southern belt of broken mountains that includes Yellowstone, the high grass country to the east, the badlands.  Each has its its own Euro-immigrant history and economic base rooted in trade:  small grain, residue of the inland sea including the oil created by cretaceous swamps and the minerals from much earlier vulcanism, scenery from the upthrust of mountains, underground aquifers created by the melting of the glaciers ten thousand years ago, today’s grazers that have replaced the bison and so on.  All established on top of the pre-existing subsistence-in-place tribes.

Valier could even be divvied into regions:  the original arterial n/s main street that I live on with its mix of new and old (my house was built in the Thirties, some are older), residences and business.  The town hall and the post office are on this street, but so is a former bank now housing an embroidery business, the new bank, the Medicine River Trading Post, and an unbuildable lot contaminated by an early service station.  This street was originally the road to Cut Bank and the bars were built on it.  The cross street is really the east/west highway: the library, the two cafes, the garages, the motel, the pizza-and-beer parlor.

Euro-historically Lake Frances and the water system that feeds and drains it is “constructed” on top of natural waterways and is the main source of commerce.  A rail spur serves the elevators, which are a little old-fashioned now.  Toward the west are the newer better houses near the school complex.  Toward the lake are the quite respectable middle-class houses but mixed with the occasional trailer.

Even here the real action controlling so much is on the international, intercontinental scale. International corporations are allowed to claim the privileges of human individuals though they have supranational powers, are able to control governments which normally rule persons -- our main source of order until now.  Global warming -- a result of the planetary industrial revolution -- is a part of this: China suffocates her people in order to put a lander on the moon and to create a middle class.  (The reach of these planetary enterprises extend through the solar system.)  International drug trade and sex trafficking are part of this, but not interplanetary yet, though you could count satellite use.

The internet is a long web drawing us into relationship -- it IS interplanetary, isn't it?  Talking to the machines headed past Neptune -- supporting a trade based on information rather than raw commodity or manufacturing.  The technology reaches past any language or alphabet into image and graphic math, allowing participation by the unschooled and the very young.

But all this time that the lawyers were playing tug o’war over structuring everything, there were organic (and therefore more resourceful and resilient) layers of society that are utterly secret.  Media stories constantly speculate on what they’re up to -- concluding that there’s a lot of murder involved, because that’s the way the visible world works when laws are burst through by the indignant and tortured --  they express themselves in violence.  I suspect that in these often family-based systems there is less need for murder because everyone gets taken care of.  And now, in the US, we have a penal society, confined but echoing what the industrial revolution created in terms of capital and labor, echoing the military.

This book about USA regions only addresses political governments that have the not-quite-admitted goal of persuasion towards some point of view.  That’s useful, but there’s so much more than that, some of which is capable of disrupting any kind of order.

HOW INSTITUTIONS CAPTURE DEEP EXPERIENCE

Deep experience is not that different, I think, from Maslow’s “peak experience,” which seems to be back in public consciousness again.  The effervescence (explosion is too big a word) of the newer neurosciences -- not just the technological perception of molecular nerve function but also the patterns discovered by computer analysis of mega-statistical accumulations such as internet behavior records -- reminds me very much of the blossoming psych theories of the Seventies when I was just staggering out of a very intense relationship.  

For me, taking the Maslowian approach of looking for what makes people happy and healthy (which, after all, was only pushing forward the Menninger pattern, though the latter was concentrating on “maturity” instead of fulfillment) gave me a place to start.  Erikson’s evolution of the individual from birth to death was helpful, Perl’s counterphobic confrontations, Rogers’ value of empathy as the basis of relationship, Winnicott’s formation of self in relation to others -- all these were miles and miles beyond my undergrad psych classes, which were merciless examinations of rats in glass boxes.  Deep experience is a confirmed, valuable, manageable phenomenon, perhaps the most purely human capacity there is -- so far.

How do institutions capture deep experience?  Call it faith or call it patriotism or even call it falling in love -- all three become captured in religions, nations and marriage. These common social structures (usually built on an economic foundation) use deep experience to capture people.  Institutions are ways of capturing “territory” (actual or virtual or a combination of both) in structured, stabilized systems for the sake of safety, predictability, and therefore profit.  If deep experience dissipates, then usually habit or peer pressure or self-interest will take over, but sometimes it seems necessary to use force and punishment. 

In American society today we are kept in our places by barrages of advertising that model how we should be, what rewards and punishments will ensue, and various stories illustrating those.  Underneath this “mainstream” is always an undercurrent of counter-culture, parasitical culture, experimental individuals and small specialized groups.  These alternative “ways” are closely related to the ecology and to economic niches created by the larger stream.

To make a quick list, religions and nations (and marriage which is a merging of both to keep households orderly, solvent and contributing) use the following means of creating allegiance:

aesthetics:  is it beautiful

brain function: you can’t do what you can’t think

affiliation: with whom do you belong

individual psych patterns: what has life taught you so far

community: where is everyone going

protection: help me out here

stories:  and then what might happen

writing:  recording rules, decisions, bookkeeping

All of these means use content drawn from the ecology and the ways people relate to it.  Thus, the surface of the planet is covered by a mosaic of various human arrangements.  A religion or government developed to fit one place will not necessarily work in another -- in fact, probably not.  But the constant is the human part: if it is true of most or all humans, it will work.  Often these are family patterns, or child-raising practices.

Governing institutions merge with religion to exclude some people, punish others, control behavior with laws and criminalization, and set norms of behavior.  For a nation to function, it must submerge religious dissension, often by ruling it irrelevant.

At the root of both is basic turf protection, the impulse of all living beings to survive by protecting their environment and claiming whatever they need.  Not every living being is driven to expand, to claim more land, more followers, more profit, more domination, but many are.  When it comes to institutions, the drive to dominate seems far more powerful than the drive to submit, though they always go together.  A general cannot dominate the battle without the voluntary obedience and submission of his subordinates.  Though there is a sense in which governing institutions (nations, cities, the securities exchange, the United Nations) have a virtual element (waving flags, brass bands, statues of idealized personification, images of heaven and hell) they tend to be pretty much earthly.

Religion can trump anything of this real world by claiming an imaginary virtual world that seems so powerful as to cause a change of heart: the promise of a better place or the threat of everlasting punishment.  If a religion can use the eight elements listed above to make this happen, it can overpower governments.  The trouble is that then there is chaos, unless the church has an infrastructure capable of taking on the functions of a nation.  Most of them are not able to deal with matters outside their own turf, and their method of keeping order inside the nation might be simply elimination of all competition and difference.  

This, of course, causes something they cannot see because of the smallness of their vision. It makes them vulnerable to the capacity of every other nation to generate prosperity by providing options and a rich inspirational life.  Violence, fear, and threats -- all demand huge economic resources while diminishing the impulse to experiment, reach out and grow.  All force-based nations must fail, particularly if they are rooted in punishment-based religions.

I come from a mildly progressive background that believed in cooperatives, pluralism, and democracy -- not just in the sense of being guided by majority vote but also in the sense of protecting dissent as a valuable growing edge.  To an authoritarian government this “reads” as weakness and confusion.  Indian reservations are a good example of a population where three-handed institutional power (tribe, BIA, state) and multiple styles and goals full of exploitable gradients have been both the strength (because no one can grab the snake by the throat -- there are too many of them) and the weakness (they go off in every unpredictable direction).  This is not necessarily negative.

Deep experience, when described as Native American spirituality, is ascribed to reservation lands and religious practices.  People come hoping to find a guide to achieving something life-changing, but it is a circle.  Deep experience is not in a place or a protocol: it is in the perceiving human.  If those people would simply change their own lives -- perhaps using the Ericson steps, the Perls confrontation, the Winnicott tenderness, the Rogers empathy, and so on -- then deep experience would come to them.  As AA recommends, the first step is surrender of the craving for power.

What may trump all our games of “Let’s You and Him Fight,” (Eric Byrne’s “Games People Play” from that same favorite era) is the great glory of the cosmos and the devastating endangerment of this little planet.  These are pushing the realignment of both government and religion, human by human.

If one’s culture is based on guarding resources, claiming turf, excluding intruders, then it becomes important to preserve one’s literal life along with everything else.  Then immortality is just another form of hoarding, wanting to have bigger, higher, more, even after death and to be deserving of it.

If one’s culture is based on relationship with everything else -- other people, other creatures, other lands to the extent that you can know them -- then the feeling that everything is going on, an enduring process that includes your influence on them, your attachment to them, then a view of death that is a dispersal through the cosmos, dissolving into it, a generosity, is satisfying.