SO DEFINE "MERITOCRACY"

My high school class of 1957 pushed hard on the idea of meritocracy — that the talented and hard-working can rise to the top and SHOULD do that, but always remembering that their privilege is accompanied by responsibility for everyone else.  When I got to Browning, MT. as a teacher, which was NOT the top — in fact, was considered so low class that it was hard to hire teachers — I had not forsaken being best or bright, but had “re-framed” what that meant.  I was after adventure, artistic quality, and devotion.  I ignored money.

This change was not just due to college -- which was mostly in theatre where there are no small parts, only small actors, and everyone works for a common goal.  But also due to parents whose target was not to get rich or to climb a hierarchy, but humbly to accept life as it came without taking unnecessary chances.  They came from farms, not offices. 

Longer PBS interview of Daniel Markovits:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLEvJUNfyBY

Markovitz “authored "The Meritocracy Trap" (2019), [which] places meritocracy at the centre of rising economic inequality and social and political dysfunction. The book takes up the law, economics, and politics of human capital to identify the mechanisms through which meritocracy breeds inequality and to expose the burdens that meritocratic inequality imposes on all who fall within meritocracy’s orbit.”  (Wiki)

Markovitz ignores a number of things.  One is that there are always more systems than the dominant capitalism that has made empty cynical shells of so many people who control our country.  There have always been “bohemians” or “hippies” or eccentrics who connected with each other in systems, with or without media.  Adventurers, explorers, those who went out to the edges looking for the unknown would endanger the wealth that was their own bodies.  

Most didn’t pay for their adventures but depended on the largess of sponsors, taking advantage of accumulated money of others.  This is also true of those inspired by charity or major aesthetic accomplishments, using the advantages of concentrated money by exchanging for it a different kind of exceptionalism — that of the superior people in terms of prestige and high tastes.  I'm not even talking about crime. 

One of the major mistakes of the Soviet system as seen from the outside is their failure to appreciate these systems.  The country seems a nation of babushkas, heads down, diligently doing minor work while a few militaristic bullies set the rules for everyone else.  This is what Trump admires.

One of the major mistakes of the USA has been poor education for BOTH the middle class and the disadvantaged.  This begins with the poor education of teachers, who often see ed classes in state schools as Mickey Mouse courses for athletes busy smashing their heads together.  The dominance of sports has seriously damaged education IMHO.  Coaches rule and become superintendents.

This vid is a quickie from an entirely different area, those offices.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn2pCNUCpzs

In terms of small businesses, office jobs, and even techie jobs, a major deficit in my experience has been management skills.  Someone told me early in my short “career” as clergy that I would never make money unless I converted my job into management of the congregation’s and the denomination’s organization.  Such jobs did exist but they had nothing to do with my preparation for ministry.  They require really big churches, which are scarce in the UU context because it is a small denomination.

Also, it would have to be urban, a place highly populated with specialized jobs that demand education.  This is structural as well as overtly hierarchical.  Even in the secular City of Portland some managers were so overwhelmed by their jobs that they could not design systems that could keep up, even for something simple like nuisance abatement, which required going into the field to see what was there.  It could not be computerized.

We need a lot more of the kind of training described by this management blog.  It’s not easy when the work arrives unpredictably on its own schedule.  But even students and householders need to think this way.

https://monday.com/blog/product/social-media-plan-templates/?utm_source=mb&utm_campaign=pocketlp.

Another factor that is neglected by this capitalist Yalie concept of merit will not be popular.  It is that of reputation.  Even in a city institution, word gets around about who shows up, who "gets it", and who is lost in the perks of long alcoholic lunches.  On a rez or in a small town, much depends on the reputation of a whole family for honor, dependability, and hard work.  If someone is an exception, they stand out and get discussed; if their reputation is bad or erratic, often passed over.

Yalies think of money and tenure as the only measure of hierarchy.  Out here on the prairie we have another marker for privilege which is about labor — it’s very old, the diff between those who own land and sit somewhere making marks on paper and those who are out in the weather digging, planting and harvesting.  

Children of men on farms who were broken down in old age by hard work, dusty breathing, and risky machines have been urged by their fathers to choose work that is indoors, safe, and clean.  This is considered the reward of merit.  Presumably it escapes the vicissitudes of the climate and the market.  But expert manual labor also pays well, like plumbers.  People don't hold back money from them if they’re drowning.  Still, everyone believes that more education will be rewarded with less strenuous work.  Only sports deserve effort because it is not considered labor.  The backside of this is contempt for learning because it was hard and not useful, often irrelevant to the public mind.

My own reputation as an “intellectual” is hindered by the reputation of Bob Scriver, sculptor judged by income and judge involved in many emotional issues.  It’s hard for people here to separate me from him.  There are a few advantages but no money.  In terms of my major occupation of ministry, I’m too anchored to rural places — NOT environmental issues — to deserve attention.  UU's consider themselves elite and urban. 

So far I’m not seen by publishers as saleable so writing is not a source of money.  Slowly I build another reputation as worth reading because of merit for future understanding.  This is a characteristic of “merit” that’s not necessarily recognized.  My goal is finding deeply shared human characteristics.  This interferes with those who maintain their “merit” by pulverizing everyone else.  But that takes effort -- labor -- and does not give progress to the whole.

If merit is defined by capitalism, I am a failure, not even attracting other people's money.  If merit is defined by other kinds of value, I'm priceless.

PERINEAL POLITICS

Maureen Mullarkey

Perhaps is not so surprising to use this word in a time when science has introduced us — upclose and on video — to non-human meiosis, known in human terms as “sex.”  My favorite example of sexual predation is a bug that bores a hole in the female and injects his sperm.  Bugs don’t have perineums, which is called in slang about women, “the pink.”  Sometimes it’s called “the slash”, which gives it a bug-like violent vibe, or the “slot” which sort of suggests a coin-operated function.  Violence and monetization are two characteristics of human intercourse of all kinds.  We don’t manage them very well.  Men have names for their unruly little man: Peter or Dick.  Technically, the perineum is unisex.

Those of us who try to understand existence in ultimate terms as well as in the framework of “embodiment” have been challenged to the point of shifting the paradigm of theology from one big old gramps in the sky to an infinitely interrelated and constantly morphing fabric or symphony of electrochemical atomic interactions — the atom being, of course, a pattern of energy.  If being is actually, really, this and not the pattern of brain interaction assembly that goes on through our lives, casting a connectome over the universe that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, what are we to use as a guide for human interactions?  

Rule out drilling holes in each other, though the NRA will not agree with that.  Personally, I’m going to the tension in the relationship between the human individual and the human group, even the species taken as a group.  Even “hominins” taken as a group.  The point is life-going-on, which we call evolution or survival of the fittest, though we get all incoherent about fitness.  It’s not about the biggest, strongest, smartest, prettiest, etc.  It’s about what fits.

Most crucially, “fitness” is a shifting target because the planet shifts, the cultures shift, the mood shifts.  Fitness shifts. Therefore, a system (meiosis) succeeds if it constantly creates a variety of kinds, so that even if everything changes, some of the kinds will survive.  Some will not.  (Goodbye hominins.  Goodbye cave bears.)  In a world jammed with humans, individual survival is often pitched against group survival.  Results vary.

A group that has settled upon an understanding of the world that lets its members survive will attract more people and eventually form an institution with leaders, buildings, images, songs, and dogma — lots of stuff to support functioning.  What supports the institution is likely to be written down and enforced by the group.  Until it doesn’t work anymore.  Then, in a freely joined group, people will leave.

Margaret Sanger

American Christian churches of all kinds are shrinking.  It’s not that people are going from one group to another, but that they are simply going group-less.  The larger culture is not recreating religious sub-groups people want.  Or maybe they just aren’t recognizing them as religious.  This may be the case with a new consensus forming about creation.  Some call it “scientific mysticism” meaning that it accepts all the work of responsible science without wandering off into the woo-woo, but is keenly aware of the awful grandeur of ultimates, eternals, and unimaginables that science points to.  I’m hearing rumors about the formation of new congregations, something like the earliest Unitarians and Universalists reacting against Calvin’s paradigm.

Actually it was Luther who admired the pink ruffles of the perineum as a source of salvation.  He famously said, as recorded by his students, that when the devil threatened him, he put his hand between the legs of his wife and was consoled.  It’s a puzzle to me why the more stringent feminists won’t share the wealth of the original container of life.

Artemisia Gentileschi

There are many jokes about the UU heresies.  One is that if there were two gates to heaven, one labeled “salvation” and the other one labeled “discussion of salvation,” all the UU’s would turn off to the discussion access.  But I often think that the UUA is best not thought of as a denomination but as a ground for denominations.  (I’m trying to echo Tillich resolution between being versus non-being by suggesting a “ground of being.”)  Reading “The Silk Roads” is a bit of a revelation in that it traces how the Greek-Persian rivalry/collaboration, the Christian-Buddhist interactions, and all the other tribal institutions formed by ecologies of river and mountain — especially after erosion and exploitation narrowed the world — had to change to survive.

Nothing has changed more abruptly or more drastically than our understanding of sex in terms of fertility, entitlement, protection, identity, leadership and so on.  Now we might be prepared to accept the idea that a virgin can have a baby — but so what?  We might not think that crucifixion is the most horrible death — today’s Messiah might be more likely to die of HIV/AIDS because of being denied meds.  We’ve accepted leaders and heroes who have sex with people to whom they have no legal obligation.  I won’t bother to name them — it’s a good parlor game.

But we have NOT reformed our societal protection of children, who are still partly commodities and partly party prizes, rarely human beings deserving of protection for their development.  There is NO UUA scandal-monger pursuing ministers who neglect their children or have children they don’t want.  The conservatives will punish for abortion, defending it with sentimental appeal to babies, not realistic concern or help for a baby that will need public money and attention.

Virginia Woolf

Can we say that our present institutions and protocols are serving either individuals or groups very well?  So many of our schemes from the 19th century have turned demonic so that peace-keeping forces are rapists, humane societies are money-machines, and hospitals are bombed.  What are churches?  What is the putative role of specifically religious institutions in a world where nothing is sacred?

It’s clear that the journey of the individual has become even more intensely a search for the Sacred, that transcends even individual survival.  Thus, the abuse of the pink perineum as a way of waging war is an abomination.  The  use of someone’s perineum for enjoyment in the face of social disruption is ill-advised but human.  It speaks to a greater lack that the individual is not addressing, but there is always the tantalizing hint that sex is sometimes sacred.  Ceremonies, even those of being drummed out, are not enough.  We must look to the swirling fractals of understanding the Big Picture and I mean galactic, not “me and my neighbors.”

Place settings are from Judy Chicago's Supper Party.

This conversation is not merely an address in a venue on Boston’s Berry Street.  It is now on the Internet and global, googleable.  

EVERY TIME I FEEL THE SPIRIT. . .A

Ever since I started really thinking about the split between a “feeling of the sacred” (which goes back to Eliade in 1978), and began to think about “religion” as institutions complete with bureaucracies, internal hierarchies, and a lot of other trouble-making aspects, like war-mongering, I’ve put my energy into the question of how to summon the feeling of present holiness.  

As we put it in seminary, “Can you call the Holy Spirit?”  Mostly, as the tradition says, it bloweth where it listeth in that big metaphor of wide open spaces like deserts, prairies and skies.  Now and then someone describes it as being like struck by lightning, but many have told about lesser versions of the same thing, more like turning on a light in a dark room.  Evidently the spirit appreciates a little space and time, but can also interrupt.

Out of fairness I should think more about religious institutions, which often claim they “own” Sacredness and have it in a bottle.  Plainly they don’t.  What do they have?  Advantage.  Privilege.

To what end?  Survival.  As a generalization, belonging faithfully to a religious institution that has a good plan for survival, a way of life that is likely to keep you happy, whole, and in the midst of friends, will keep you alive.

Unless the larger conditions change radically.  In that way, a religious institution is just a species, an arrangement that will serve a specific ecological niche.  Sometimes the times change so radically that the institutions are no longer an advantage.  We seem to be in one of those times.

Bob Scriver used to tell a story about the difference between farm chickens and prairie chickens, a kind of grouse.  If you came around a corner and there was a flock of, let’s say, buff orpingtons, in the road, they would stick together so that you would either miss them or run over them en masse.  This is because when you feed a flock of chickens, they all run together to get the food.  The ones that don’t will die of starvation.  But with prairie chickens, the idea is to scatter to find their food independently and to scatter to avoid predators.  If you’re driving a car, it will be hard to avoid crushing at least one of them, but the species will survive.

The strange thing about Christian institutions is that they insist that they are ALL Christian, each in their own way, scattered to suit their circumstances.  To avoid outright war, our unspoken agreement is to just call them denominations.  In fact, some will assert that Judaism, Native American beliefs, Hinduism, and whatever else you’ve got are actually kinds of Christian, denominations.  A distinction becomes so inclusive it is no longer distinct.

“Lefties,” liberals, democratically based institutions, free thinkers, non-conformists, and other labeled “species” of people are prairie chickens.  The biggest problem is that they scatter.  The Unitarians go in and out of Universalism, the Unitarians go in and out of just about every sub-category of life-styles there are, the Humanists go in and out of super-rational Unitarianism, but the Pagans, Feminists, Blacks, Gays all build adjunct institutions though few of them ever achieve critical mass big enough to get recognition as religious from the uber-institutional government.  Like “tax-free”.  

This is like the special treatment of NA tribes who struggle over the profits of gambling.  Strangely few American Indians get very invested in free-thinking organizations.  Maybe they prefer the spiritual side.  Maybe they just don’t have a tradition of individual thought and academic/written culture.  Most of the “left” religionists tend to be individuals and print-based, neither of which is very good for building a consensus group, much less a functioning institution.

The forces that hold a liberal group together are compassion, justice, a canon from the past, socio-economic norms, and aesthetics, though the last is much neglected recently.  Indeed, it appears to have been captured by the commodifiers.

The commodifiers are now so powerful that they subsume everything else, even owning people to one degree or another, the extremes becoming destroyers of survival.  I’m talking about trafficking, oppressive labor, famine, and war.  No longer do they bother much about dressing-up these practices with supernatural spirituality.  They just want what they want and the rest of us are yard chickens, walking dollar bills on the bookkeeping lists.

You’d think that the liberals/free thinkers/minority-justice people would find this so atrocious that they would band together against such predators.  But they don’t.  They turn away.  To survive.

Because the very thing that gave them freedom to read, travel, learn, qualify for good jobs, establish quiet safe homes, is now too precious to give up.  It’s easier to just not know.  I always think of the year we spent re-writing the Portland, OR, animal control laws.  Though the enforcement agency had to deal with cases of bestiality, there were no legal guidelines because the people who wrote the law didn’t conceive of such acts.  It was hard for the more tender members of the panel to face such things.  Today the inconceivable acts are as likely to be against children as animals.  (The tough among us have known this all along.)

But now we realize — thanks to science and thinking that escapes the suppressive mega-corporation commodifications — that humans are not privileged unless they fight for it.  And if the environment around them, their anchors in cultural and environmental ecology, are destroyed, then humans will be eliminated.  Our survival is no longer about family, about institutions, about nations (which are institutions), but about our ability to understand and accommodate the whole planet, because we’re connected to the whole shebang — to the depths of the sea, to the thinnest layer of atmosphere, to the far reaches of the solar system.  Even the butterflies count.

Though commodification has protected science to some degree, and though many groups have found more than enough critical mass to work for survival of the many through the few, it’s hard work.  (I think of Medicins Sans Frontieres)  Restoration of the spirit is key and real, or the inspired will exhaust themselves. 

Dominant cultural institutions will try to control containers of the Sacred but they can’t put the wind in a bag, nor can they prevent the Spiritual from turning demonic.  If they could, they would have by now.  The Demonic is gaining, strong among us.  But the spirituality of the Demonic is not necessarily a bad thing — it can crack the walls of prisons.  This takes us back to the individual versus the group — add the element of Evil and it’s easy to see that an Individual against a group is defined relatively, according to whether one privileges the group or single human.  Sometimes one and many are aligned.  Then we survive.

DESIGNED SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

ESSENCE OF DESIGNED EXPERIENCE 

Jonathan A. Anderson, whose lectures are on YouTube.  http://open.biola.edu/authors/jonathan-a-anderson, teaches at a fundamentalist school that believes in Biblical inerrancy but he talks about the most avant garde kinds of art with full comprehension and insight. Here is an example of his designed sacred experience, a “proof of life.”

"Put a chilled piece of glass in front of you.  An oscillating fan should be running in the room.  Lean forward in your chair and breathe on the glass.  Observe your breath as it clouds the glass.  Lean back.  Watch as your breath clears from the glass.  This is seeing your life."

Part two:

"Get a friend to sit on the other side of the chilled glass.  Put two oscillating fans in the room.  You lean forward to make a cloud while your friend sits back.  Then you lean back and he leans forward to breathe on the glass.  Observe carefully.  You are looking at each other's lives.”

If one is to work at the level of the body that kindles a feeling of the sacred, one must be aware somehow at the level of the 200 kinds of one-celled perception that is posited to have developed to guide us since the beginning.  To a rat it is clear that these cells perceive whether we are next to and following a wall, or approaching a drop-off; whether it is daytime or nighttime even if there is no light; the approach of some living thing bigger than us; whether we are being watched; and many other subtle things most of us pay no attention to.  Worship design is like any other art form except that the focus is survival.

The trouble is that the survival of the group and of the individual can be opposed.  Groups don’t like the atypical.  Individuals do.  The tension between them is either creative, triggering evolution, or deadly, destroying one or the other.  We are sharply aware of that right now.  Worship experience can help reconcile the conflict.

There are three concepts from Paul Tillich that I accept.

1.  If two things are in direct conflict, the remedy is to find that which includes them both.  His key is “being” versus “non-being”, overarched by “the ground of being.”  Be careful to avoid Manicheism, which tries to make every binary into an evil versus good. 

2.  Symbols cannot be “assigned” rationally.  They are “emergent,” forming when the situation provides the force that produces them.  They might not be nice; they can certainly not be controlled.  One can learn to recognize them.

3.  Worship and religion can only transcend the politico-economics of a specific time and place by relating to what he calls the Ultimate, consciousness of belonging and participating in something on the edge of conceivability: cosmic, inscrutable, impossible to describe.  It is what we come out of  and what we go into.  It has NOTHING to do with religion and includes science as a kind of religion.  It has nothing to do with institutions.  It’s the “is-ness” of being even before it’s divided into time and space.  We are submerged and connected in being.

THEORY

Victor Turner provides basics by defining the experience of ceremonies in time as though it were in space, like a room with walls, a door, and a threshold, called a limen.  

The beginning is entering over the threshold which might actually be physical.  But it could be anything that affects the level of consciousness, which could also be defined as reorganizing the connectome, if you know what a connectome is.

A connectome is the pattern of neuron connections at a given time.  It can be seen on fMRI sorts of instruments and will shift as the task of the brain changes.  It’s like an old-fashioned operator’s board for a telephone, plugging in the acoustic-processing center for sounds or the math rules for arithmetic.  If one is trying to think something in one realm with a connectome patterned for another realm, a lot of things will just go blank.  The result might be creative, but also might be an incoherent mess.

What shifts a person’s consciousness into the connectome for an event meant to be sacred?  How the event is thought of will make a difference: a litany, traditional to a denomination, will mean activating memory, habit, association with a certain kind of place, maybe giving attention to a leader.

Sometimes this entry into the sacred “room” can be seen as a task of “entrainment” or “concatenation”, basically getting everyone on the same page.  A song by the group; an entry procession as in a wedding; the literal tuning up of an orchestra, the lights go down, the curtain goes up, the candles are lit, the orchestra conductor raises his arms.  But also walking up stairs and opening an impressive door, or greeting and being greeted by people.  In some ways a sacred event is not that different from an arts performance.

If the limen is crossed in the connectome of those attending, then they are ready for the body of the event.  Turner’s theory is that the people should be separated enough from their daily life to temporarily give up hierachy — everyone is equal in the sacred time and place.  One is released to accept change or to reconfirm their commitment.  It is both a very safe place, and the very most dangerous because of what might be realized.

At the end of this, the task is to send people back over the limen into the real world, but renewed.  Some of the same acts, words, songs, will work.  When this is done powerfully, it will be hard to explain, but people will feel those who were present were changed.

Beginning, Middle, End are the trinity of all time experience, but when they are envisioned as a space, it’s easier to see them as a progression across time.  That doesn’t seem logical, but there it is.

There is another strategy that comes close to the beginning, after the people have justified their attendance (knocked on the door) and sat down together (entrainment).  I call it the Dilation of the Spirit.  You could relate it to what Tillich has said about “ultimates.”  That is, disengaging the mind from the teeny-tiny quotidian and taking it to the absolute limit of imagination. 

First, one thinks of the most ghastly, evil, disastrous things and how we are not at all safe from any of them.  In fact, chances are someone in the group has just been diagnosed with cancer, just lost someone dear, just watched the news of another predator drone attack that killed an innocent family.  With lots of prompting from the media, most of us don’t find it hard to envision Evil, but “nice people” who are surviving on denial and fantasy while they walk on the crust of the volcano, will usually banish it, simply not allow it.  This reduces religious experience to a cotillion, a pleasant night at the card table.

Institutional religion promises protection.  When the dogmas don’t deliver, the people leave the pews.  The Creedal belief in life after death is just about exhausted.  Few of us can sustain the vision of rising out of the grave restored.  Our efforts to believe end up with movies about zombies and White Walkers.  Gruesome and ridiculous.

I go instead to the idea of inclusion, which is simply a bald fact.  Every particle of existence is connected to every other particle and if one is changed, so are the others.  Every tiny thing matters.  That is, life matters.  What you do matters.  You may have just manufactured in your organs a molecule that will change you and therefore your life and that you might pass on to your children, altering their lives and all the lives around you.  Hey, I’ve seen it happen.  Survival is the same thing as participation.  Even if it were possible to separate from everything else, that would be death.  No sensation, no nurturing, no connectome.