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.

REFLECTING AT LEISURE

I’m formally taking the position that spirituality is physical, biological, the most basic of concepts and entirely felt -- no theological content.  No organizations. No moral content  Can happen anyplace, can be culturally defined as evil or blessed, and is not felt by everyone.  (Not missing -- just not activated.)  From one time and place to another it is defined differently and offered different places in the culture.  Often it is displaced or reduced or expanded because of other ideas about what human is.  The concept grows when times are tough.  It diminishes when "rationality" dominates.

Right now both are the case.  We are still in growing “enlightenment” times based on science, which is growing in part because of expanding technology that allows us access to so much more.  Science claims a dimension that offers a supra-cultural mathematical strategy for avoiding some kinds of conflict: the scientific method.  Science is, of course, accompanied by a lot of clutter -- bad claims, counter-claims, corrupt results.  “Spirituality,” defined as an individual pre-conscious biological response to the world, is a way of escaping all that by going to meaning of a different kind, farther back in the head, closer to the spine.  I am defining it as awareness of the meaning offered by participation, wovenness, continuousness with the galaxies. 

The Wiki entry about spirituality is an extensive checklist that’s helpful, but I wish I knew who wrote it and who altered it or edited it, since I’m finding that point of view is crucial.  For instance, they didn’t get Unitarian Universalism quite right.  Still, if a person wanted to really study spirituality, this might be a good place to start.  It would not give you a spiritual experience (a Wiki entry is just anonymous words) nor would it tell you where you fit but you’d have some vocabulary to throw around.

I hope it's not a butterfly.

These overviews always surprise me in two ways:  the first is how many versions there are and the second is how far back the historical discussion can reach -- in this case, mostly to the Greek/Roman foundation of Euro-thought.  Contemporary understandings are always intriguing.  Can we reach into pre-history?

“During the twentieth century the relationship between science and spirituality has been influenced both by Freudian psychology, which has accentuated the boundaries between the two areas by accentuating individualism and secularism, and by developments in particle physics, which reopened the debate about complementarity between scientific and religious discourse and rekindled for many an interest in holistic conceptions of reality. These holistic conceptions were championed by New Age spiritualists in a type of quantum mysticism that they claim justifies their spiritual beliefs, though quantum physicists themselves on the whole reject such attempts as being pseudoscientific.

Reflections and refractions

My view is that core spirituality cannot be discussed, programmed, owned, sold or acquired at workshops and seminars.  It’s possible to trigger some related experiences by exposing parts of the brain to magnets or ingesting what are now called “entheogens”, drugs that offer a blissful experience.  In my view it’s like that exercise called “bicycling” in which one holds one’s feet in the air and imitates pedaling.  It’s supposedly good for the body, but when you stop, you actually had gone nowhere.

Nevertheless, sometimes the spirit can be called and I’ve always been curious about what the effective trigger or “bait” might be.  After reading a bunch of saints’ accounts of their beatific or horrendous experiences, it appeared that binaries of experience that were internally contradictory had something to do with it.  Current research suggests that sensory experience (not the five senses but the constant hurricane of electrochemical information tracking the world both outside and inside the skin in hundreds of ways) is what the brain sorts and acts upon.  If that great clamor of particles falls into a relatively resolved state, then the experience might be what we call “spiritual.”

Most thinking about spirituality/religion is confined to the English-speaking world, esp. in Europe and Asia.  It simply ignores African, American, or indigenous Australian notions.  Australia is particularly intriguing since the culture (like the geology) is extremely old and pretty much self-contained, characteristics that seem to relate to spirituality.  Except for the Americas and Mediterranean Africa, there have not been the bureaucratic, hierophantic, city-like, empire-craving organizations of “religion.”  Religion is always wanting to combine with government and power.  

 Today spirituality as a characteristic of the individual is often considered a marker of superiority, as a kind of intelligence in a world that thinks “smart people” are better than others, but this has to be covert and unspoken because the consensus through the ages has been that spirituality is a force for unity, the reconciliation of differences.  People who try to make spirituality trump science are playing with superstition and magic.

Art is spirituality in drag.  --Jennifer Yane

Another humanities realm that interacts with spirituality is arts that can capture the unspoken, the felt meaning of life.  Probably one of the most powerful of the arts today is photography, since that’s what gives us visual access to both the star nurseries of space and the busy mitochondrias of the cells, plus startling face-to-face confrontations of so many other creatures and their vegetal world.  Even minerals photographed can be stunning.  It is good to be stunned, esp. if it results in humility, a key to spirituality.

It is not good to use spirituality as a scourge to punish organized religion or secular government.  That’s the work of rationality and justice.  

Compassion is often seen as an element of spirituality, but my severe (Scots?) temperament and experience in the world -- possibly out of arrogance -- sees deep spirituality as ignoring that dimension, though it is a key to the meaning and value of human beings.  Suffering cannot touch the depths of spirituality.  For a while there was an understanding of God as that great power and meaning that comes to suffer WITH humans in the most literal way, so that if one is tortured, God is right there also being suffered.  This is one element of the idea of Jesus, to show that a deity cannot really care about us if they are so exalted that they never feel anything.  But it never struck me as very comforting.

Modern physics is about sharing, but not about feeling.  It is not about God the Creator but about existence as co-creating itself, unfolding and unfolding in complexity that has only one meaning: survival.  Not of the individual, but of the cosmos itself.  All the emotion is on the part of the witnesses, which are us.  It’s our specialty, more important than just talking about spirituality or even admiring it.

When we calm down enough to really pay attention, what we see is that everything is connected, everything is moving, and we can’t stop it, so we might as well join it.

WE SEEM TO BE GETTING A LOT WRONG

Joseph LeDoux, in his latest column for “Psychology Today,” claims that research for effective anti-anxiety drugs has faltered.  The reason he suggests is that the definition of what anxiety is and our practice of treating the behavior instead of the cause or the actual physiological syndrome has proven inadequate.   Partly the assumed key value of white males as the measure and beneficiaries of all things has deformed or at least limited the science.

At the same time, in the online newsfeed called “Religion Today,” an article summarizes the unimportance of religious issues among Western Society millennials.  There is no suggestion that they are anti-religious, just that they don’t think it matters.  

In other words, in two major categories of culture, mental health and religion, the air has gone out of the balloon.  Has science out-flanked our traditions?  Or is it technology and money?  Or are we the victims of a “metonymy,” mistaking the part for the whole in the first place?   What IS the “whole” of existence?  Our species? (We’re wiping out all the others.) When I see male writers, old or young, making bold diagnostic statements about society, I ask them whether they have taken into account other cultures than their own.  Some shut me down at that point.  Others respond, bravely, “I guess I didn’t.”

It finally registered on some people around here that I’d come back to the edge of the rez. (I’m a borderline person in several ways.)  Two old guys had formed a tiny historical society devoted to visiting the local historical (encounter) places they knew and telling each other the stories.  They decided that I would be the next local historical “site” and took me to lunch.  We had a fine time.  They’re both dead now.  But it certified to me the idea of a particular kind of history, just over the time-line horizon.  I'm one of the few who remembers some things first hand.

Only a couple of weeks ago, a little delegation of Blackfoot scholars asked to interview me at the library.  I was acting as a refugia again, even as an aid in feeling their way towards a new future.  They were on their way to the site of a tragic confrontation, the location of the “Baker massacre.”

On my father’s side I’ve done a bit of family history, because my mother saved my father’s photos and my great-uncle wrote out the narrative.  I sort of “published” it with a xerox machine and so did my great-uncle.  A few cousins seemed to appreciate it.  Their children could care less.  Later today I’ll take a lot of it to the dump.  I sent many of the photos to the Oregon Historical Society.

Sweetgrass Hills

Off and on I’ve lived next to the rez for a half century. The culture of encounter between the indigenous and the invasive (both of them constructed in response to survival) slowly yield to an invasive wave though some niches (Heart Butte) have remained refugia.  (“I alone escaped to tell you. . . )  I myself am a culture refuge of sorts, the Sweetgrass Hills of the family landscape, the twining trails.  

Over the same decades I’ve searched for a way to be a meta-cultural person, mostly through the idea of “religion.” Study and experience reveal the term to mean institutionalized systems, too rigid to survive.  But at the same time holiness is gaining strength both in relation to the land and at the limits of science.  Mystical science is slowly forming into something like a community, but not yet institutionalized, only commodified in this invasive society.  (New Age)  In Afri/Asia sacredness is still a walking meditation, indigenous because it’s on foot.  

A squid

My thought has taken into account all mammals, which is part of the reason I respond to LeDoux’s understanding of the pre-conscious brain -- which has to include the whole body to be meaningful.  Muscles remember, the nerves of distended tissues can be erotic.  I have to think about sentient molluscs, who have followed another path of development.  Consciousness is only foam on the surface.

In seminary I was part of a “formation group” not so different from therapy.  The black male leader became fascinated with my Celtic skin, meant for dark rain, pale and freckled.  Change in emotional blood flow made my face as changeable as the skin of an octopus.  If I scratched an itch, the tracks of my nails persisted for a second or two.  Terror made me blanch.  This was new to him, for some reason, and he tracked it carefully as a window to my innards.  The other group members had no interest and looked away.  But he was a good Christian, intent on being compassionate, benign, and helpful.  Therefore he never saw my poisonous beak, which all octopuses have.  A few women in the circle saw.  

Religions are detached tentacles, even when they try to return to gospel days, even when they try to join ideas from times and places where survival was nothing like it is today and here.  Even when they are so easily morphed that they can fit into small spaces.  But I already covered that.

I want to look at the refugia of confrontation, which prove that it’s not over -- “con” meaning “with” and “front” meaning “plane of contact” -- is a kind of intimacy, accepting the same terms of survival, but interpreting them in quite different ways.  So some therapists try to make the client conform (with-shape) and others try to set the client free (go roam to see what else there is).  I’m just fooling around -- this is a kind of thought-jazz.  Riffs.

So much has gone underground both in our government and in our business worlds that there’s little confrontation.  Maybe that’s why Trump is interesting.  But there’s an excess that becomes bullying and even madness.  The only way to argue with a predator drone is a ground weapon of equal devastation, between the two forces reducing humans to bloody ash.  So fear is legitimate. 

Whole landscapes and built environments are destroyed.  This is anti-survival.  Distancing.  Emptying.  Millennia of orchards, vineyards, and irrigation systems all destroyed.  Something similar is happening financially.  Eurasia is depopulating except for the cities, and replenishment is coming from entirely other people. 

This makes the urgency of refugia stronger.  The old Blackfeet indigenous practice was to go to a high place, build a little rock wall to mark the spot, lie down and dream, echoing the refuge nature of the hills, old volcanic cones that stuck up above the grinding glaciers so that earthworms as long as your arm and plants not seen elsewhere persisted and survived. 

I wrote a story about it.  The confrontation was between a Blackfeet boy who wanted the old days and a modern white girl who wanted reconciliation.  There were animals.  (“Twelve Blackfeet Stories” available at www.lulu.com/prairiemary)   I’m a little wary about telling you this.  Refugia are endangered by exposure.

OUI, JE SUIS CHARLIE

World leaders except the USA.

On one side of my family I have a cousin with very little experience of the world.  He has not traveled, been in the military though he’s of an age that ought to have been drafted, or been to college. He has cocooned himself in right-wing assumptions, a prosperity-based church, and playing the piano in public lounges.  Somehow he has locked onto history as a Truth without any consciousness that dates, names, battles, and triumphalism in general are 19^th century, totally outmoded by the realization that people rearrange facts to suit their own views, dropping out what is inconvenient.  History has been the written work of European white men.  Howard Zinn is one of that tribe, but events jogged him out of the groove so that he among others have asked what about the illiterate black woman -- what does SHE know about what happened, let’s say in the American Civil War?  Or in Africa today?  The answer is "plenty."

Paris beheadings

I was appalled when my California-suburban cocooned cousin responded to “Je Sui Charlie” with a re-copied list of Moslem atrocities over the centuries, concentrating on beheading and implying that the latest acts are typical.  I assume this is to inflame us all with Christian determination to start a new Crusade (send money).  Of course, it would be perfectly possible to counter with one of the most systematic industrial beheadings in history: the use of the guillotine to kill thousands, including the French monarchs.  In its time it was as rousing, popular, and public as the recent march in Paris.

In Valier there is considerable pride that the village immigrated en masse from Belgium. It seems clear to them that this was because the prairie irrigation project that is the keystone of the area was so attractive.  They think of Belgium as being like “Poirot,” the fussy but civilized detective from Masterpiece Theatre.  World War I, which was fomenting in the years just before the migration, seems irrelevant to them.  Neither do they think of King Leopold II (1835-1909) who took advantage of Belgian law to personally and privately own Congo, based on exploitation of natural resources ranging from rubber to diamonds, which he finally sold to Belgium, the nation, for an enormous sum, much as the Conrad brothers sold their ranch to Cargill for a million dollars.  

Congo amputations imposed by Belgians.

Leopold’s Congo notorious management makes the Taliban look like beginners.  Whippings, amputation, death, and the slavery of the people still echoes in political consequences, including the terrible turning of factions against each other in the wholesale machete murders of neighbors.  I doubt you could find more than a half-dozen people in Valier who know about Leopold II and his sowing of dragon teeth.  I’m sure Belgians are not eager to talk about it.

A more entertaining example of the use of history for ego-inflation comes from a cousin on the other side of my family who daily at the breakfast table flung accusations of inescapable shortfalls attributed to essential natures of the family.  This pompous cousin informed us that the Cochran branch of the family was more prosperous because they were tougher.  His evidence was that they arrived in Oregon by walking across the prairie on the Oregon Trail.  (The Oregon Trail people are full of pride, something like the Daughters of the American Revolution, which -- incidentally -- includes descendants of the Indian Nations who fought against the Brits.)  My cousin said the Pinkertons were relative cream puffs because they came on the train.

Traveling on the Oregon Trail

His weak sense of chronology had skipped over the simple fact that when the Cochrans came, there WAS no railroad across the continent, though they could have taken ships around South America.  There was no Panama Canal yet either.  But it WAS helpful that the Cochrans were earlier, when the land of the Willamette Valley had just been taken away from the indigenous tribal people and re-allotted to white people from back East, which was a quick jump to prosperity.  I’ll follow up all this later in other posts.  

In some ways the Euro-American insistence on channeling everything into one fast, slick, industrial channel owned and driven by profit -- like the railroad -- has been efficient and effective judged by prosperity in the sense of money for the right people.  It has also been destructive, mostly to sub-groups of individuals who were sacrificed to national goals, like the Chinese and Irish immigrants who actually built the railways.

This fantasy account of the Pinkerton/Cochran comparison is really rooted in the marriage of our grandmother, a Cochran at a time when the family ran woolen mills and was prosperous enough to cede original homestead land for the Oregon Pioneer Park in Brownsville, OR.  She married a man her father considered beneath her, partly so she could escape a critical step-mother.  She was vulnerable to protection and nurturing by a fiery, seemingly powerful man, but also vulnerable to criticism -- family-on-family --  about who was better, since her husband’s fiery nature turned out to be more proclamation than alliance-building.

Group of King's Daughters

On the other side of the family, cocoon-man’s mother’s history was not known, but her ways were always ladylike and quite English.  She was a poet of romantic sentiments and the only aunt I know of who sent her children to church, though she didn’t attend.  Only recently was the family contacted by genealogy tracers in England who had identified her mother as one of the King’s Daughters, a euphemism for a huge group of orphans whose parents had died in the terrible plagues like cholera that swept Britain.  The children were deported to Canada and Australia with the rationale that the great spaces of land needed people.  It was assumed that they would be gladly adopted or at worst become something like indentured servants.  Their fates varied with their luck.

Out of such historical movements come a great hunger for stability, for family, and for propriety.  This is what IMHO left the grandson welcoming the fundamentalism of religious and political right wingers.  In my own sibling cohort, with a mother who aspired to return to the status of the Cochrans who had endowed colleges and enjoyed prestige, we all went to college -- my mother and a scholarship paying my way, and my brothers going on the GI Bill earned by their service in the Marines.

My brothers, one coming out of the Marines, one going in.

My Pinkerton grandfather and the times played a nasty trick on my mother.  Her father paid her way through the first years at Albany College (which became Lewis and Clark) and she actually earned her tuition at one point by raising corn on leased land with a leased mule.  Then the Depression meant there was no more money and she had to drop out.  What she didn’t know at the time was that as a descendent of the Cochrans, she qualified for a scholarship.  Her father knew and did not tell her out of pride.  Decades later, when she returned to college, he was contrite and helped her.

Fundamentalisms and conservative movements are sometimes seen in terms of making time stop, of getting control of change, or even returning to times conveniently remembered as “good,” due to a little strategic editing -- more unconscious than planned.  Who knew that vaccination and antibiotics would seem to solve the problem of  cholera-orphaned children -- only to be replaced by those orphaned by AIDS or drug-resistant TB or famine or unstable families who simply throw out their children.  Who realized that if it weren’t for the constant pruning by opportunistic disease and addictions, natural disasters and industrial erosions, the population load of the planet in itself would become a plague?

I’ve just read the final 1995 report of Martin Marty’s “fundamentalism project”.  It is meant to be secular, tolerant, inclusive, and postmodern -- abandoning the idea that some sort of climax culture was “modern,” inevitable and permanent.  The hope was that violent terrorism could be understood.  Marty makes it clear how difficult such a stance can be, partly because the fundamentalist groups war against each other, regardless of what the rest of us do.  In the end it’s all families.  

In case you didn't take comparative religion classes, this is Mohammed.

WHEN SEX CAME TO TOWN TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO Part 3 "Free Radicals"

Sex (undefined) has become dominated and commodified by commerce and the law -- both of which are written formulations that have been devised by people in the ten millennia since agriculture, towns, and writing were invented. As soon as everything could be made into marketing, bookkeeping and religious institutions, as soon as sex could be codified and subjected to policing, sex became entirely different from what it was in the hunting/gathering days.  The family became different as well.  Lock up your daughters, own your sons.

Sex when desired has become the very definition of freedom, power, and survival.  But in some ways it has remained the same as in the Old Testament walled towns and on their chariot plains of war -- maybe deformed or disguised, but still essentially instincts that lead either towards or away from survival.  Of course the drive to produce babies has to continue, and the same force can be transfigured into art, science, war and loving relationships, as well as tumultuous partnerships and rivalries as in “Game of Thrones.”  It takes a whole lot more than conception, gestation, and delivery to produce a human being.  It takes all the art, science, and loving relationships we can muster.  But those may not be attributes that will help survival of individual or family.

In the past decades we’ve been slowly and sometimes secretly sifting the debris from Sixties experiments.  Some of it works and some of it doesn’t.  The taboo against acting out bits of hippiedom -- like long hair, pot, free love or going nude -- has weakened, sometimes with bad results.  Reaching into the Asian or African or otherwise Empire-gripped corners of the world means becoming aware of child trafficking, slave labor, torture to the point of mutilation and death.  They’re also here in the United States if only as tourism and images. War and economic hardship mean that the most destructive aspects of what might have been positive freedom instead leaps up in conflagrations like school shootings, mass unemployment, pandemic, riots.

A big part of the puzzle has been gender roles (as distinguished from sexuality).  Male and female have been assigned opposite ends of a binary system:  men are hunters, women are gatherers; men are warriors, women are prostitutes; men want sex without love, women want love without sex; men are about equipment, women are about technique; both want money and power (or NOT), both want children (or NOT), both want security mixed with adventure (or NOT).  But these are generalizations and they aren’t true of everyone.  It is not true of everyone that they are either male or female or some mix.  Some are entirely other, maybe in ways that cannot be seen.

A recent political movement claimed all humans are alike, regardless of gender/sex.  That was provably wrong, but overlapping bell curves can be defended in most dimensions: size, different kinds of intelligence, different kinds of physical ability, different kinds of temperament and so on.  Some things negotiable or trainable, but other things decidedly NOT.  The goal was to prove that men and women were just as good as each other, but saying they are identical is not the same as equal.

A hunting/gathering culture was not romantically happy and pain-free, the jolly world of Tarzan and Jane.  Nor are hunter/gatherers extinct, and I don’t mean they persist in the Amazon or African jungles.  Hunting/gathering is like economic water, flooding under and trickling through the built environments, whether skyscrapers or highways.  The hunting/gathering environments -- dark, secluded, beneath, wet -- must often be shared with creatures other than humans: cottonmouth snakes, raccoons, possums, rats and bats, and the feral domestics.  Bugs.  Therefore, sex in such places is likely to be the kind excluded from orderly, prosperous, accumulating houses with lots of light and plumbing that never fail.  (There is no such thing -- it’s the ILLUSION of plumbing that never fails, electricity that never goes out.)  We come to associate the darkness with desire, even willingly mix pain with ecstasy.

This is the compost of society, the fecund manure that feeds the limit-imposing law-and-order world.  The flooding Nile that renews fertility.  Mutation is just another word for creativity.  Stigma is just another name for fear and ostracism.  The stability-mongers, who hope to maintain their domination, are caught in another paradox:  they need the energy, but they fear high voltage.  They don’t believe that disorder and order can meet in synergy, with wonderful results.

What does “wonderful” mean?  It’s a glib word.  I mean it will be pleasing to humans who don’t have something selfish at stake, it will improve the lives and sustainability of most creatures, it will not destroy valued elements of life or the deep sources of their existence, it will open new realms of possibility and exploration, it will weight honesty and openness over secrecy and deception, and will be activist without simply imposing new rules over the old ones.

I think we’re getting closer to these values.  When I watch a TEDtalk about some simple but vital improvement like an infant warming bunting or a patch drug delivery system that doesn't have to be refrigerated, I see it.  But at the same time we’re getting farther away: withdrawing support from the small, weak, young, old, crippled, and so on.  It takes a cold heart to see that as a good evolutionary strategy, but it is the most common interpretation of survival of the fittest.  Let them die.  Thin the herd. 

This is supposed to be about sex and about the emotions relating to sex.  Mostly the emotions conflict.  Rape is considered to be the worst thing that can happen to anyone, male or female, and yet we continue to order our society in a way that causes a third of people to be raped, usually when vulnerable: the young, old, drunk, weak, scorned, subordinate, and so on.  In the back of our species-consciousness is that constant prompt that the weak should be used and culled, discarded, recycled.  But also we have the idea that sex with the exceptional, the desirable, the powerful will signify that the lesser person will have gained in prestige, will be more respected.  “I slept with JFK.”

A Banksy graffiti image

Hunting and gathering are skill-based, rooted in results.  The book-keeping institutions attribute value according to a mythical concept called “ownership,” the mechanism of accumulation.  It’s true enough that a potent male achiever can have many lovers, but he can keep them all only if there are walls where can he imprison them.  Otherwise, fuck-based relationships must be catch-and-release.  But carrying that over to children -- creating them but not protecting and attaching to them in relationship -- doesn’t work.  It only produces monsters.  (“Game of Thrones.”)  Certainly not in a walled and hoarding city.  Maybe in a tribe of extended families where adults protect instead of exploit.

Applying the concept of “ownership” -- which was invented for the division of crops, land, domestic animals and houses -- to human beings, whether members of family, employees, or lovers is wrong to the point of being evil.  One human being cannot own another.  Forces of order, whether written law or individually responding morality, should oppose and intervene whenever one human tries to “own” another.  It’s a little fine-haired to say the behavior can be the point of a contract, but not the body of the person, but I think it moves the greater good for the better.  

The question is whether a nation can own a soldier.  Do voters own a president?  Can they force obedience?  Can the Supreme Court?  Can a president own a country?  A doctored photo of Obama made it look as though he were winking at a blonde model.  Did this make him seem MORE powerful, or LESS powerful?   More like a sexy football player or less like a sexy football player?  JFK?

LIFE IS A BUFFALO JUMP

The conventional pattern for action in a narrative is vertical: a starting point, a number of points on ascent (base-camps as it were), eventually a climax/crisis of a peak turning point, and then resolution coming down the mountain on the other side.  This might be a jackandjill story -- not the ascent of Everest, which is as dangerous in descent as in ascent.  On the other hand, J+J did tumble down.

A good place to process buffalo carcasses.

Anyway, here’s an alternative based on the layout of Head-Smashed-In buffalo jump.  First there is a grassy plain where the buffalo graze up on the top.  They are gradually moved towards a cliff, gentlygently at first and then in greater panic and confusion, until they fall over the cliff, which is not meant to be so high that it kills all of them but cripples many.  (No refrigeration, so the longer they stay alive but captive the better.)  Then the hard work gradually processing meat, hides, bones and fat -- some of which must be boiled out of the bones.  Maybe this kind of plan for a book or tale would work better for nonfiction, but at the core must be a cataclysm:  9-11, Krakatoa, the AIDS pandemic, a pinch-point that shifts everything into a new pattern.

Maybe it works for a compilation of short pieces, each one a bison with a head and tail, guts and legs, metaphors waiting to be unpacked.  

The theory of deep experience I’m exploring works pretty well with this pattern:  the first part, the grazing, is the gathering of the sensorium and life itself, going along.  The cliff is the moment of plunging, changing, out of control, over an edge.  Then the space below near water is where the experience is sorted, invested with meaning, translated into action, processed.  “Parted out.”  So the people of New Guinea spend the whole year preparing for their climax ritual in small ways, but then in the burst of energy for a week they participate in what they believe (a liminal time), and afterwards they have the courage to survive in one of the toughest environments on the planet.  It feels right and whole.  Same for the Plains Indians.

The pattern works pretty well for the process of writing itself:  the gathering of detail, the gradual movement towards the discovery of the essential conception (a kind of gestation leading to delivery), and then the working out page-by-page and the consequences in feedback from readers, the eaters of the words, the wearer of the robes.  

There is another difference from the usual pattern of Western lit, which is that in traditional stories there is generally a protagonist and an antagonist -- a hero and a villain (and maybe a lover or two) that conflict.  It’s that debate agonistic structure meant to preserve rationality and clarity about what’s happening which is the basis of our law system and often our governance.  But this other buffalo jump pattern I’m talking about -- what to call it?  “the hourglass” with it’s implication of time passing? -- is about a whole people interacting with a whole people, a situation (grazing as usual) grabbed by a massive event (going over the cliff) and then the elements of developing a new complex as the shift of focus goes from buffalo people to human people.  This is more like the pattern of scientific inquiry:  gathering evidence, forming a more-or-less committed hypothesis, challenging and opening up that hypothesis.  It’s also the pattern of discussion.  And harvest.

The agonistic Middle Eastern Manicheist black-or-white way of thinking has dragged us into political gridlock, both between parties and within parties.  It eliminates options and resists the shifting of frames.  This or that -- me or him -- often based on concrete, circumscribed thought and evidence meant to keep people from finding out the limits of the assumptions, rather than realizing finally that the earth goes around the sun and evolution is real.

But the changes just keep coming and we keep going over the cliff:  drugs, stigma-based poverty, the Internet, various pandemics and social shifts.  “The Pill” was a cliff.  The Vietnam intervention was a cliff.  We thought we had a clear idea of what was going on, but then we found out the world had changed into something else, and we’re still struggling with what to do about it because they all interact.  Social dissection is much more difficult when the whole economic system challenges class and education, when black is legally as good as white skin (but what about red and yellow?).  Parenthood might mean almost anything, genetics only being the beginning.  The old biological taboos don’t work:  we need new taboos.  There’s no such thing as not having taboos, not having stigma.  We should have taboos against cruelty and neglect, stigma for greed.

Such complexity.  We wouldn’t be motivated to keep working on this re-assorting and re-programming if it weren’t so painful, so joyful, so technologically powered.  We thought that the Internet meant that individuals were empowered and the chorus of their voices would change the world.  Instead the big tech providers are re-creating network television, dominated by the opinions of the nameless corporations who hide behind them.  The work is a lot harder and will take a lot more group effort than we thought.

Most people think in terms of centuries, partly because around here most of the white people came about a century ago.  Some people think in terms of the Declaration of Independence.  Other cataclysmic markers are Protestant Christianity, the devising of agriculture/towns about ten thousand years ago, the invention of writing about five thousand years ago -- emerging out of bookkeeping (numbers) intended to be mnemonic devices for gains and losses, winning and losing, a way of defeating arguments about whose land, whose harvest, whose profit, the credits went to.  Agonistic.

Early story came from a different place -- spoken or sung, with rhymes and rhythm as their mnemonic aids, with story lines that varied to suit the audience or the teller -- and also, thirty thousand years ago, with art -- repetitiously stuttering sketches towards the truth of horses, aurochs and mammoths.  Story versus numbers.  Testimony of witnesses versus scraping data.  Novels versus spreadsheets.  The poetic possible versus concrete verifiable.  Two sides of the brain.

But now we see that the whole brain -- plus the body which “thinks” with tension, pulses, secretions, sensory information: the chords the feet of the organist play while the fingers work the keyboards above -- is a flexible instrument, a both/and operator that can look on both sides, even fifty sides, and play out the symphony of life itself -- here the grass, here the panic, here the falling, here the boy who got caught in the stampede so that his head was smashed in, here the man whose stone maul killed the bull bison and split its head so he could scoop out the good fat brain to eat.  Here the man and woman, replete and nourished, find a patch of grass and lie down together to make a new boy.  Plenty of time later for the scientists to sort bones, estimate amounts, carbon date the fires, calculate the calories and nutrients in bison carcasses and what impact they might have on Blackfeet genetics.

There are two ways to resolve conflict: the first is for one of the forces to dominate and "swallow" the other.  The second is to break the situation into so many different smaller factors that no two forces are strong enough to oppose each other and all must depend upon coalitions, compromise, and mutual interests.