ABUSE AND CULTURE

Abuse is about bodies, even emotional abuse since emotions are bodily states.  One of the great values of embodiment cognition theory is that is explains starkly what abuse does to children: it shuts down their intake of sensory information that is the basis of thought and understanding.  It makes them numb and dumb.  This is quite apart from invasive violence  bad enough that it causes the brain to skip to another “reality” which is called “dissociation.”

I could say that abuse makes children less human, makes them robotic zombies.  But that just adds more abuse, more blaming the victims.  It neither explains the causes and mechanisms of self-protection-by-shutting-out-feeling, nor gives any guidance for how to remedy the problem, so as to begin to feel again.  Nor does it help us recognize which behaviors are insulation, self-protection:  uproar, overeating, fighting, drugs, secrecy, denial, bullying, staying asleep, hoarding.  Not more wicked things to be stamped out, but things that were meant as protection.  Once we focus on what’s happening in bodies, we can see how adult predators use and encourage these emergency defensive behaviors for their own ends, maybe because they’ve been using them personally all their own lives.

If one is pretty successful at not-feeling, pretty soon the body itself begins to crave some kind of stimulation and what actually gets through the insulation must be more and more intense, surprising, forbidden, in order to get in there.  Until stimulation gets to the point of being scary, which means wanting more protection.  Until the protection itself becomes a source of death. 

Most body functions waver back and forth between extremes that could cause death, but sometimes the flow of variation in something like body temperature or blood sugar or sleep is wide and other times it is narrow, depending on the environment and the specific variable.  Managing oneself means constant monitoring.  The good news is that the brain itself seems pretty good at adding back neurons, connectome workarounds, and new tricks.

The first step in remediating the effects of abuse is safety.  Though the safety will have to be present and felt for quite a while before a traumatized person can trust it.  It may come in the form of attachment to another person they take to be protective.

The next step is recognizing and changing the behavior imprint, the games one has learned to play without knowing it — but change by replacement rather than erasure.  This means generating options, alternatives.  The more physical and sensory the better.  Skill-generating, success-providing.  And often one-on-one close contact and communication with someone skillful, but maybe over a game board like Parcheesi or a small task like washing the dishes.  Think speech therapist.

Someone somewhere is probably figuring out how to use emotional judo to block, disarm and re-interpret the domination games people play.  I wish they had more publicity.  Eric Berne’s book, “Games People Play,” is terrific and so is Steiner’s “Games Alcoholics Play.”  “Triangle theory” that shows how the offender/persecutor/rescuer/ structure of relationships is rigid and yet passes the roles around the triangle without ever revealing an exit.  As a theory this works as well for the whole culture as for families or other groups, esp. marriage.

In fact, kids raised by abusive adults become supersensitive to mood and devise a lot of techniques like distraction, abasement, disappearance, until they are big enough to blast back, maybe with fists or a baseball bat.  With all the thought going into training horses and pit bulls, there must be some of those techniques that will work with the mammals called human.

What I’m working from here is not some counselling handbook, but the study of thinking based on feeling which is rooted in cell systems — not some famous guy’s theories, but just ordinary experience in the world, that old Piaget and Montessori stuff about putting clothespins in milk bottles and stringing beads by tens.  But not excluding what we find out by watching closely people’s faces, sometimes in videos.

We learn how to be ourselves by confronting our environments and having reciprocal impact on it while it strikes us.  The most important part of our environments is always people.  From the beginning to the end they are the difference between life and death.

All this makes Mark Johnson’s “The Meaning of the Body” absolutely crucial in terms of helping youngsters traumatized and distorted by abuse.  There is always something in the “class” of helpers at the master’s level and above that prevents them from grasping that getting a kid clean, dressed properly, and at a higher reading level is not all there is to it, that there is something intractable, maybe ungraspable, about those “hard to reach” kids even when they are in plain sight at the same table.  Johnson explains that their different world-view is deep in the atoms of their cells, not just metaphorically but actually.  They are residual Romans, dazzled by the Enlightment and unable to look farther.

Then Johnson comes to what he considers both a remedy and a social solution:  art (pictures) and music, both of which can create meaning.  He spends some time vividly describing how Western thought, particularly philosophy of a certain kind, beginning with Plato and most emphatically and effectively through the Enlightenment, has scorned the arts and insisted that only logic, syllogism, words and propositions have qualified as thought.  That’s where all that theology comes from.  It is in the assumption that math-based science is “better” than the “soft” sciences.  It is gender-assigned: men are objective, women are subjective.  Anything “corticolimbic” is primitive, animal, and decadent.  One must be linear.

Plato

As it happens, my “ponder room” (the one with the throne) is always equipped with a big fat book worth pondering sentence by sentence.  Currently I’m beginning “The Silk Roads: a New History of the World” by Peter Frankopan.  His premise right away is that when trade opened between Pacific Asia and Atlantic Europe, Rome and Greece were stunned by the luxury of silk, spices, and slow-paced elegant living.  They had sought survival in Spartan endurance of hardship and focus on results beyond all else.  Now, in self-preservation, they stigmatized all luxury and specifically luxurious sex.  Art got caught in that contempt and near-criminalizing.  It was the Devil’s work.  And so seductive if you had enough money to buy admission.  Fleshly pleasures.

The social workers, formerly straight-A English majors who knew their grammar and even a bit of semiotics, are Spartans without thinking about it, earning virtue by confronting the sly camel traders from far away exotic realms where life is known to be a gamble.  Which one would you bet on?  Embodiment Cognition Theory addresses both.  

A LINE OF THOUGHT ABOUT MEANINGFUL CEREMONY (The Bone Chalice)

My approach to the function of minister was through ceremony.  It was NOT about being saintly, theologically correct, politically dynamic, reassuringly therapeutic or running an efficient House of God, or at least congregation.  I did not want to be confessional; that is, staying within allegiance to one tradition.  Nor emotional, that is, escaping into ecstasy.  Therefore, I collected ceremonies that simply struck a nerve in me, then set about trying to figure out what that “zap” was about.  Instead of letting the categories that already existed dictate what I would explore, I explored first and classified later, inventing new categories if necessary.  It was "necessary" to realize whole new realms of information, particularly since many others seemed to be having the same experience.  (In the preface to "Metaphors We Live By" by Lakoff and Johnson, they say, ". . .we discovered that certain assumptions of contemporary philosophy and linguistics that have been taken for granted within the Western tradition since the Greeks precluded from even raising the kind of issues we wanted to address."

Because I was in a UU seminary (whose MDiv included the U of Chicago Div School MA at that point in history), the major symbol was a chalice with a fire in it.  There are historical reasons, but I liked the symbolism: Dionysius contained by Apollo.  Or the major part of the brain “burning” (emotion, passion) contained by the bone skull.  But I wanted theory that could include ALL “religions.” 

I was already moving away from binary systems that were thinly disguised “us” versus “them.”  I was remembering Dean Barnlund's "Language and Thought" classes (1957) as an undergrad, where we struggled to move from debate to discussion, very much like the Lakoff and Johnson thinking that produced "Metaphors We Live By."(1980)

For a while I thought about continuums, but even they couldn’t encompass the whole.  The cross, in the abstract meant something like four-part graphs or Tillich's horizontal v. vertical, but it was still two-dimensional.  So I ended up with a globe that had a core (home) but also extended in rays out into space towards the strange and the unknown.

The Core of Ceremony: Confirmation of Survival

Homeostasis as the terms of survival.

Ecologies as a source of homeostasis.

Individual vs. group survival vs. planetary survival.

The abyss: lost.

This was a sacred mountain in Papua, New Guinea.

Now it is a mined-out pit like Butte, Montana

These were the ceremonies:

The Abrahamic series of burnt sacrifice on an altar, the production of written text which is studied in a group, and prescribed prayer — leading to the Roman Catholic mass as explicated by Dom Gregory Dix.   This discussion is meant to extend from the hunter-gatherer shift to farming (Cain and Abel) up to some of the traditional concepts that are broken now. 

The 20th century “post-Christian” succession of Unitarian Universalist theorists and some experimental ceremonies.

The defense of cannibalism through the symbol of Christian communion.  (The soccer team crashed in the Andes.)

An adaptation of traditional marriage on the occasion of the groom killed on the way to the ceremony.

A minimalist artist's "proof of life" with chilled glass and warm breath.

The Umeda ceremonial cycle in New Guinea about cassowaries as a trope of men’s lives.

A Blackfeet ceremony called “Bundle Opening” which is the local tribal version of all prairie tribes' practice with a calumet which led to ideas of a "peace pipe."

Bob Scriver's depiction of a Beaver Bundle Opening Ceremony.

The women are holding beaver skins and pretending to "be beavers."

Sorting inquiries that developed:

Some are culturally mainstream worship services, some are anthropological, some are therapeutic, and some are artistic.  

I considered these factors:

Whether the participants are in the “believers” circle.

Whether this is a familiar and often repeated ceremony or an
  annual festival or an individually devised experience.

Whether this was text-based, ecologically based, or
  aesthetic.

Whether this was a long-standing community with shared
   values.

Whether this was individual or congregational.

Whether introspection, observation, or participation (meaning
   experience was the basis).

Whether the culture will accept the erotic or insist on the
    ascetic.

Hominin skulls

Evolution of everything

   Hominins:  chimp ceremonies

   Neanderthal/Cro Magnon:  evolution of the brain

   Evolution of the landscape

   Evolving culture that is entangled with ecological metaphor 

   Entangled with government

   

These elements (and more) are relevant:

Story

Image

History

Goal

Brain evolution

   Animal subliminal 

   “Consciousness” 

   Empathy

   Emotion vs. reason

Entheogens and auto-theogens

Orthodox

How you do it:

The sequence of liminality

   gathering

   sharing

   dispersing

The use of the sensorium 

   safety

   focus

   movement

   restoration

   in-skin v. out-skin

   boundaries and nodes

_______________________________

Culture has also evolved.  As sketchy indicators, consider the following. The ecstatic Seventies were iconoclastic, boundary-crossing, and full of every kind of movement and music -- in the EuroAmerican world.  Because of the ebbing of the old colonial order without replacement, the Eighties in the Third World paid a high price in epidemic, famine, and genocide.  The Nineties were technical, extending our understanding out into the universe to the verge of black holes and the echo of the Big Bang, down into the ocean to the lair of the giant squid and lifeforms that never see light, and tracing through the human neurons, genomes, molecules.

The Twenty-zeros were another return to order and consciousness: writing out mission-statements and best practices.  Now the Zero-tens are packed with fear and confusion.  What the heck are we doing?  Shifting into universals, connecting with handheld devices.  Looking at ourselves from space.  

We do seem to swing through periods of grouping and then separating into individuals, through wanting freedom and then clear lines.  Ceremonies can clarify what’s happening, justify it, or push back against it.  Probably best to know which is in play.

Temple frieze in India

I’m reading: list servs, websites, organizational statements, research studies, and books.  I look up all the neologisms, definitions, examples.  If they mention a film, I try to get access to it.  If they talk about a book — well, you can’t buy ALL the books, but you can usually find a talk about it on YouTube or a review about it, or — curse wikipedia — someone's anonymous take on it.  

When the focus changes, power falls away from those who had the attention earlier.  This makes them scared and angry, so that the times are usually marked by argument and emotion.  This makes them a little easier to find.  But the newly empowered don’t always realize that they’re drowning in two inches of water, so they could save themselves by simply sitting up.  That is, they are often merciless and therefore must be approached with caution.  Caution means examining oneself, playing your convictions backwards.

Jane Goodahl

Anthropology is a useful portmanteau sort of discipline which, like the new studies of neuro-function, show up as hyphenated and cross-disciplinary categories all the time, helping to keep us from being trapped in pigeon-holes.  It has evolved quite a lot, since it responds to culture, and at some points is more helpful than at others.  “Useful” and “helpful” are dependable criteria, much better than “correct”, which is only a version of “dominant.”

Over and over again I ask myself: who am I missing?  The assumption of ninety per cent of what I read is that everyone is just like the writer.  This doesn’t mean that if I read minority writers that it will depart from “received wisdom” because the publishers control the rhetoric.  Truly divergent and unique people will never see print.  When we have minority and specialized publishers, we can escape the mainstream.  But that means we also escape the profit.  Any kind of meaning-ceremony that gets entangled in money is doomed.

WHICH KNOWLEDGE DO YOU LOVE, PHILOSOPHER?

Our “group mind” considers a “Ph.D”, a Doctor of Philosophy, to be the height of intellectual achievement, despite the hollowing out and rotting of that degree today.  Nothing like getting to know a bunch of contemporary Ph.D’s to dispel that particular indicator of superiority.  The “love of wisdom” dates back to a time when the Greeks and Romans thought that — reasoning it out — men were all missing a rib because God removed one to make Eve and women had more teeth than men.  Oh, and men are naturally superior to women.  Philosophy meant reasoning things out, which is fine except their original evidence was never collected from reality and there was always a strong tilt towards the status quo.  “Intellectuals” sat around thinking, ignoring the real world, and imagining categories of things that don’t exist.  

The taxonomy of animals (including us) named according to appearance was shaken up when genome research revealed that their category assignments were often mistaken.  (Most comprehensively when Euros renamed the North American animals according to their resemblance to Euro equivalents.  Including, notoriously, Indians.)  A revolution through science and direct experimentation has also challenged our understanding of human thought.  Not just the content but also the way humans are in the world, how they form and use their minds.  This short post is what I’ve managed to grasp so far, so I’m probably wrong in some ways, but I think my core understanding is reliable.

First of all, this radical anthropology is NOT philosophy, and philosophy is NOT knowledge of reality.  (One of the issues is whether there IS reality.)  It is a set of assumptions built up mostly in the academic setting, which has given shelter to peoples’ love of sitting around arguing.  They’ve used the time to invent categories and then hand them out to a world eager to enforce them, even criminalize them, if not build religious systems on them.  First was God, reducing all conversation about religion to focusing on a giant humanoid in the sky or some replacement.  Lately it has been defining desire, both sexual and wealth-defined groups.  Philosophy is a “holodeck” that makes virtual worlds seem real.

The Star Trek holodeck.

I’ll start with neurology, which has been focused on the brain.  Gradually we realize that the brain is only the dashboard for a creature existing as a skin-defined entity in the world.  Thinking -- as the accumulation of data, as decision for action, and for storage of memory -- happens all over the body.  

The first beginner’s mistake is to privilege the neurons that manage relationship with the out-skin world.  Even when I was in college ’57-61, everyone paid more attention to in-coming stimuli of the nerves (tormenting rats with shocks and sounds and isolating them until there was nothing to do but get addicted).  No attention to what the nerves told the muscles to do, which wasn't pretty.  Scientists tried to control what the rats did (conditioning) instead of observing how rats lived naturally, which was intensely social.  They could not see the flesh they themselves “lived in” any more than a fish could see the water it swam in.  And they tended to be cold fish.

Though dominated by how we know the world -- the senses -- to the philosophers or even the scientists not long ago were ONLY the five sense organs.  They had no suspicion that there were 200 different kinds of cells in the brain capable of sensing things like how close to a wall the person was.  The many information systems feeding from cells to the brain (both specialized cells using neurons and regulating molecules that use liquid circulation instead of neurons) — intricate and plentiful as they are — nevertheless are limited compared to an elephant’s feet (which pick up very low sounds from the earth) or the pigeon’s head (magnetic GPS).  

The striated muscles of an imaginary (virtual) being.

"Ganesh, is that you?"

Decisions and control over action can be automatic, nearly automatic, or hard-wired like an instinct that says “if-then” — if you lay an egg, sit on it!  Consider the diff between smooth and striated muscles.  “Smooth muscle is an involuntary non-striated muscle. It is divided into two subgroups; the single-unit (unitary) and multiunit smooth muscle. Within single-unit cells, the whole bundle or sheet contracts as a syncytium (i.e. a multinucleate mass of cytoplasm that is not separated into cells). Multiunit smooth muscle tissues innervate individual cells; as such, they allow for fine control and gradual responses, much like motor unit recruitment in skeletal muscle.”  No one works on developing their smooth muscles in the gym.

Which takes me to the most major ignored nervous system in the reflections of philosophers, at least those with Euro-mind sets:  the autonomic nervous system with its sympathetic v. parasympathetic reciprocality.  They're considered "just" emotional.  Many features in the body are paired: one kind of molecule balanced by its antithesis, one muscle working against the skeleton in tandem with a second contracting oppositely.  The gut, though smooth muscle, “thinks” because it is a kind of second brain with a neuron sleeve and a high response/production of the same molecules as the brain.  We say, accurately, “I have a gut feeling this won’t work.” 

A heart/lung casting made from the real organs.

Another crucial and neglected loop is the hydraulic pumping of the blood through the heart/lung so as to re-oxygenate the red blood cells.  Using the same tubing plus the interstitial fluid of the inner sea that bathes the cells, are the white blood cells.  AIDS has made us crucially conscious of those free-lance identifiers and destroyers of microbial invaders.  They recognize, they act.  Is that not “thinking” of a sort?

But not to academic philosophers who are obliged like lawyers (a side branch of philosophy, creating categories and dealing with them, forgetting they are invented) to rely on precedent and all the big shot thinkers before them.  When the Deconstructionists got to these folks and began to remove the pick-up sticks from their houses built of cards (I love mixed metaphors) they were hair-raising to big shots.  We still don’t know whether they were like Sampson pulling down the temple on his own head.  (Hair, heads, temples.  Such images.)   But there are now cracks in the pillars.

Sampson brings down the temple while in it.

The “thinking” systems within the body, those that maintain the homeostasis necessary for survival, are not conscious.  To philosophers (who were NOT scientists) they were therefore not interesting because they wanted to think about a certain KIND of consciousness which was enshrined in language and far more prestigious, “higher”.  What Ph.D.'s do.  That is introspection, reflection about one’s own convictions.  Anything less than that was “animal,” just flesh.  Subhuman.  Therefore they failed to confront the necessary homeostasis issues that kept them alive to think.  

In fact, they carefully avoided and denied much, to the point of cruelty and oppression.  Physical well-being, unless it is a matter of dominance, doesn’t seem to interest them.  And yet experiments reveal that thinking is dependent on attitude and blood supply, which is a matter for the in-skin body and its well-being, so as to produce actions that take it effectively into the out-skin world. 

Blackfeet at the beginning of the 20th century

The great survival skill of humans is the ability to create homeostasis out of multiple environments.  They can adjust to being peasants living on a lot of hard work and a minimum of high-carbohydrate food.  They can adjust (less successfully) to being uber-wealthy, devoted to rich food, alcohol, uncomfortable clothes, and sitting.  

In fact, our variousness saves us, weaving back and forth through the genome, annotated by the epigenome, and adjusted to suit the materials at hand, so that someone somewhere can survive whatever the environment throws at us, whether an asteroid or a drought.  Sometimes — make that “often” — I think we are most vulnerable because of our thinking in Ph.D. virtual terms instead of relying on our gut impulses.  Bodies know valuable things.

THRESHOLDS, HORIZONS AND THE THALWEG

The word “homeostasis” is one of those Latinate multi-syllabics that suggest things it should not.  I’ve been looking for synonyms and right now I like this one:  “constancy.”  As a quality, it is meant to mean “unchanging,” but in terms of human life, it’s not possible to eliminate all change so maybe the word that works better is “consistency.”  Or self-faithfulness.

Life in mammals is not meant to be unvarying, but it must stay within limits or risk becoming damaging to life.  Those limits are of various kinds:

     Oxygen, calories, blood content, and other physical qualities

     Temperature, intact skin, discarding waste, movement

     Environmental, freedom from disease, movement, contact

     Psychological: autonomic, brain, hormonal

     Social: relationship, legal, education, culture

These are limits from side-to-side, often described as the banks of a river.  One must stay in the river to survive.  There is a geological term: “thalweg” which means the deepest center of a stream-way, but the truth is that it’s not possible to resist forces that push from side to side, except one MUST keep off either bank or die.

The river comparison is also useful in terms of flow.  Consider “headwaters” which is the area from which the water gathers in little trickles, gradually becoming bigger and faster.  Life sets terms of gathering-up and momentum, but can stop and pool until it is deep.

The creation of a human being begins with a big egg and an onslaught of little sperms.  Only one sperm gets through the skin of the egg and successfully winds together with the half-strand helixes of genes organized into chromosomes.  They might not do that task well enough to start growing.  A simple little clot, they will pass away. 

80% of miscarriages occur in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.  The reason in about half of the failed pregnancies is chromosomal abnormality, a broken plan.  If the mother is over forty years old her eggs are as “experienced” as she is, and success is affected by what has happened.  The next reasons might be in the support system: a bad attachment to the wall of the uterus or one in the wrong place, or the egg may have begun to grow in the fallopian tube where there isn’t enough room.  To some degree there must be negotiation between the immune systems of the mother and the baby, or the mother’s body will reject the zygote.

The horizon of birth has become blurred by our ability to support a fetus not quite ready for birth.  At the time of birth, the baby is meant to be able to self-maintain basic homeostasis of the body, given that it has food, warmth, and cleanliness — basic care.  Even then, there might be “crib death” or simply a failure of small parts to develop.  Sometimes something major doesn’t unfold, like the cerebrum of the brain, the most recently evolved layer that contains speech and other functions.  Such a baby is often lovely, but inert, and cannot live long.

At about 3 years a baby begins to have a “theory of mind” and to see causes.  This is roughly equivalent to baby animals beginning to hunt, to explore, and to separate from the parents.  By the age of three most children are walking, talking, and have considerable manual dexterity.  They are relating to trusted others or showing their independence by shouting “no.”

At about 5 to 7 years the child builds the ability to solve problems.  Given an environment fortunate and tolerant enough, a child this age could act like an adult in some ways, taking care of itself even in a household of neglect and abandonment.  This will leave many parts of the child undeveloped and will force it to compensate in ultimately damaging ways.  

At the moment I have in my household a half-grown kitten that nearly starved to death in the past.  He is uncontainable and ruthless when it comes to searching for food or taking it away from other cats.  But he is very seductive and coaxing when wanting something from me. Predators play and play hard for long periods of time.  Eaters of vegetation mostly do childhood gymnastics without focusing on other creatures, but predators are both preparing for combat and for hunting.  This Striped Terror jumps to the tops of things, creeps under and behind things, and loves chasing the smaller kitten, the Dust Bunny.  I’ve caught ST standing on the cookstove twice in the last half-hour.  Luckily, nothing is cooking.

The Striped Terror and the Dust Bunny

But the cat does not stop this behavior once it is fed and full.  Its sleep is instantly broken if there is any hint of activity that might mean food.  The Striped Terror earned his name by being combative, destructive (because of reaching under, knocking over, and getting carried away in play), and inventively resourceful.  He does things that are beyond what the other cats might do.  My house rewards this, as it is a yard full of fallen branches, a garage of saved boxes and jars, indoor surfaces with paper piles and small objects like paper clips and paint brushes, and un-prompt dishwashing.  The two pre-existing ancient cats sleep through everything, but if the Striped Terror bothers them, they are literally sharp in their reaction -- tooth and claw -- which he regrets and remembers.

The Striped Terror came from nowhere but I suspect lived in a house for a while.  He wants to drink from the toilet and stubbornly believes there is a door where there is none, which means his mental map is not adjusted to this house.  Because of the weather patterns in Valier, all the house doors open to the south side, but ST thinks there’s a door on the north side, so maybe he’s come from somewhere far enough away to have a different climate.  Maybe he came as a stowaway.

The Dust Bunny

The Dust Bunny, born in the back shed, was developmentally messed up because of some kind of disease or trauma when he was very tiny.  At one point he was just a head and the body of a sparrow and I thought he would die.  He was missing for weeks, and then one day appeared with his mother though she wasn’t pleased.  So he claimed the Striped Terror, who was from about the same birthing season, but twice his size.

The DB’s mother was a runt, unusually small, and she was very attached to her mother, Patches.   I called her Smudge, a little gray shadow in the grass at her mother’s heels.  I can’t go near the Dust Bunny, who is even vaguer and fuzzier than his mother, but he is devoted to the Striped Terror, who mothers the little fellow.  They sleep on the bed — in fact, on me, with the comforter in between — but if the DB sees my head or hand, he’s gone.  Still, DB watches ST very closely and imitates him and ST loves to be petted and cuddled.  This pairing up is done by at-risk kids and even adults.  If these cats were dogs, they might join a pack. 

So now we have the same teleological problem as every living creature.  Successful constancy, in terms of a whole life, is usually defined by where it is going.  For the sake of the species, the goal has to be making more examples of the creature, but that might be achieved at the sacrifice of some of them.  We don’t mind that — if the creatures are rabbits or chickens — but we DO mind when it comes to humans.  If we know them.  We pretend we don’t and if the pretense is broken, we don’t like that one bit.  We don’t even like thinking about what happens to housecats.  These are cat boys who will fight the tough local Toms.

There’s no use in doing reparative work for youngsters of any kind if there’s no life for them when they reach adulthood.  But changing society in order to find roles is tough when the roles themselves are in such a storm of change.  College professors and doctors are finding life tough, too.  The cats are missing several one-time niches.

The good old days

No one wants more pet cats — we’ve all got enough and there is an outcry against them from bird lovers.  Wheat farmers still need more feral cats who will keep down rodents as they’ve done since the invention of granaries millennia ago.  These days attrition among feral cats around farms is very high because the predators who once ate rabbits or pheasants now can’t find any because of the way wheat is raised, constantly plowed and poisoned.  Therefore the predators eat cats.  It is a role with a short script.  I do not like to think about hawks eating the Striped Terror or the Dust Bunny.  But this is exactly what we are doing to feral children, letting them be destroyed by predators.  We even begrudge them the drugs that help them endure it.

None of the classic questions of philosophy are beyond a seven-year-old’s understanding. If God exists, why do bad things happen? How do you know there’s still a world on the other side of that closed door? Are we just made of material stuff that will turn into mud when we die? If you could get away with killing and robbing people just for fun, would you? The questions are natural. It’s the answers that are hard.
-- Eric Schwitzhebel

RESPONSE TO "JUST BEFORE THE CURE"

I'M INCLUDING THE ROUGH DRAFT HERE -- NO ILLUSTRATIONS.  FEEL FREE TO RESPOND.  I'LL KEEP EDITING AND REFLECTING THE REST OF THE DAY.

12:22  I JUST ADDED "EMOTIONAL HOMEOSTASIS" AND WHY ART WORKS

12:48  I JUST ADDED A BIT ABOUT SEXWORK

3:56   THIS INDIVIDUAL BOY WITH HIV

DEEP HISTORY

In the beginning there was nothing but environment.  Then tiny structures began to form which were only boundaries around part of the environment so that they could create their independence and get more complex.  Because they were separate, they had to create ways get their nutrients from the environment which at first were simply matters of osmosis, just soaking it through their boundary wall.  But they couldn’t use everything that got in, so to keep from getting too full they began to also push the leftovers back out.

As time went on, the little one-celled self-creations invented meiosis, which was swapping half of their nuclear directions with another one-celled creature.  Then things moved along a little faster.  But there was still only one cell, though it could do two things: take in nutrients/push out leftovers.  It was floating in water, streaming the environment through itself, dependent on currents to get around.  

Even before it evolved some way of propelling itself, it needed two sentient awarenesses: sensitivity to where nutrients were so as to move towards them, and sensitivity to danger.  Both were dependent on perceiving molecular signals in the water where the creature floated and swam.  This is the origin of neurology, knowing what to approach and what to avoid and having the ability to oppose the forces of the environment that might swirl them towards or apart.  It was choice.  You could call it a sort of miniature free-will, which made it a sentient creature instead of a blob. 

Things kept evolving, sometimes getting nearly wiped out by forces beyond the abilities of ingesting, excreting, and moving around.  Sometimes there was only a partial wipe-out, either because of luck or because of having some anomaly of structure that was an advantage: a shell, faster propulsion, fewer leftovers because of efficient use.  Basically, it was all about survival:  those who were a little better able to survive went on through time and those who didn’t cope very well or were subjected to a new environment which they weren’t suited to, just died out.  We call this “survival of the fittest” which humans almost always define as the strongest or the smartest.   Not necessarily. 

Generations are formed by generating new beings which respond to the passage of time -- which means the changing of the environment driven by huge planetary forces or maybe just something local.  The ability to generate new generations is part of survival, which proceeds by survival of both individuals and groups.

Today we -- who are creatures who evolved from all of creaturedom by making ourselves into cooperating groups of one-celled animals -- have developed a lot of specialized subgroups called “organs” and now we are “organisms.”  We still have skins around the cells but also skins around the whole being.  We still take in and throw out substances from the environment, both through the skin and through a tube from the mouth to the anus.  Food and leftovers travel through us in this tube, our GI tract.  They are moved through the cells by circulation of blood and lymph, an internal sea that has captured some of the old ocean.  If that internal sea is drained out, the creature dies because the constituent cells still operate by osmosis.

But the creature still needs to take in, throw out, and avoid danger.  This is the origin of the neural in-skin intra-communication center as well as the neural out-skin awarenesses and movement in the out-skin world, the ability to respond to the environment.  Now there is so much coded information being sent along the neural network that a dashboard develops in the skull of the creature.  The network is of two kinds, according to what it monitors:  that which responds to the environment and a new system made necessary for the management of the in-skin.

Homeostasis is the process of keeping operations within the limits that will support life.  It is the basis of the thermostat on the wall that keeps a room at a livable temperature and in fact, body temp is one of the things that the in-skin monitoring system keeps track of.  98.6º, give or take a degree.  Warmer than that is a fever.  If fevers go much over 100º, they do damage.  If body temp drops too low, one is hypothermic.  Both variations can cause malfunction and then death.

Mammals are capable of controlling their body temperature, but only within narrow limits.  Beyond the automated, self-governing systems the creature must become uncomfortable enough to move into the sun or deeper into shade.  This is feeling.  It is part of being sentient but it might not be conscious.  The creature might not realize that it’s adjusting in order to feel better, to avoid discomfort.  

When self-awareness finally developed, because it can manage whether our sentience can be moved from unconscious to conscious.  Not just for the purpose of sleep, when systems are shut down, but also awareness of problems of other kinds..  It made us far more efficient because the brain dashboard can only handle about seven different concepts at once.  To keep the platform cleared, once the body has learned and resolved awareness into habits, it is unconscious of the problem that has returned to normal.  But if something can’t be dealt with by habit, it will return to consciousness, returning to the working platform. Bothering.

The working platform is where we figure out what changes can be made to the environment: build some shade, start a fire, put on a sweater.  If something can’t be resolved, particularly when it involves relations among creatures, matters of group survival, it can either provoke “acting out,” in an attempt to bring in some kind of outside reaction that will yield more information or at least jar the situation loose, or it can just freeze, repress, delay, push it out of consciousness and limp ahead without any fix.  This is more often good for group survival than for individual survival.  

But if all the individuals are gone, there is no group.  Even the collaborating cells of the body know that and know they can only survive only if the whole in-skin world is surviving.  It is in the best interests of groups to preserve and improve their members.

Consciousness is what governs homeostasis, which is what keeps the creature alive so that a whole species of creature, organized into interwoven communities and environments, can maintain its bit of the ecology.  That is our word for the whole set of relationships that forms a kind of ur-creature (both living animals and plants, and the mineral world) but one without consciousness of itself sufficient to manage homeostasis.  Ways form to take in what’s needed and eliminate what’s leftover without gradually eroding the whole for the benefit of the parts.

But “feelings,” the same awarenesses and love of sensations that keep humans alive as individuals and groups, can be applied to the environment so that we “feel” good about harmonious and familiar things and bad about disruptive, diminishing, painful things.  Right now we are feeling pretty bad, because we have failed to manage things we weren’t consciously aware of.  We hid from ourselves the damage of fossil fuels, human created chemical molecules, radioactivity, and just simple overpopulation.  So now we have become conscious of them, but our group managing platforms (government and religions) are not keeping up.   They're stuck, quarreling. We’re pushing so many individuals off into confinement, exploitation and disease that the whole platform is endangered.  This means effort to control the deranged sub-platform behaviors and to create alternative opportunities for the seething mass of creatures that prey on us.  Predation and parasitism are effective strategies until they kill the ecology.  Then all the creatures die.  And it feels pretty bad.

CULTURAL HOMEOSTASIS

Lesion research is removing something from the body to see what the consequences are, in hopes of using the evidence to understand what the “something” does.  Normally, we say we never perform such surgeries on human beings, unless we are Dr. Mengele using what he considered sub-humans: Jews, gypsies, gays, the retarded and so on.  But surgical removal of the uterus or the male foreskin is near-experimental in some cultural circumstances, and yet widespread.  Other lesions (wounds) are accidental and present opportunities to study what has been destroyed in human beings without surgery.

A popular surgical intervention in human beings, experimental in many cases, was called lobotomy, the severing of the frontal lobe of the forebrain.  It was imposed mostly on women or the insane, recently enough that Rosemary Kennedy was tortured this way.  The idea was that their troubling “ideas” (bad feelings) were in that place -- now considered the location of the working thought platform -- and they would relax if they were inaccessible.  What actually disappeared was self-control, ability to predict, reflection, cultural taboos, and other things -- the same things that people lose when they have forehead concussions, as when playing football.  They did NOT lose what we call “consciousness.”

When perfectly rational (in cultural terms) people begin to reflect about this subject called “consciousness,” they didn’t think about lobotomies because it is a painful subject and when things are painful, we avoid them.  It didn’t occur to them that people with lobotomies did NOT go “unconscious” but rather were unrestrained and unreflective.  When the scientists began to try to find an “organ of consciousness” in humans and couldn’t find one, they went back to experiments on cats and started taking out parts of their brains.  

They started at the front, because in our culture “consciousness” is supposed to be “rational” and we now located that behind the forehead.  But they went farther and farther back in the brain -- not left-brain/right-brain but in what was the add-on order of evolution.  It wasn’t until they got to the brain stem close to the connection to the spine that the cats went UNconscious.  That doesn’t mean they fell asleep, because if the main brainstem was spared, they followed the normal sleep patterns, nor did they go comatose or zombie-like, staring at nothing.  Instead they became very anxious and active, trying to turn their consciousness back on, to regain the “stream of consciousness.”  They couldn’t guide themselves, but they craved the information that had been provided by their in-skin and out-skin awareness.

This is the state that solitary confinement imposes.  It is an effective form of torture.  We now know, but haven’t really assimilated, is that what we call “consciousness” is located at the top of the brain stem.    I has nothing to do with rationality.  It is a process, NOT an organ.

Mark Holms is one of dozens of scientists who have been exploring this for the past decades, a little frustrated because we are still so dominated by 19th century ideas about the mind.  And even more resistant when we realize what the implications are. Even the experts of the mind, at least the workings of it, like psychoanalysts or reflective philosophers, are most resistant because they have learned systems which assume things that are vital to their vocations.  They will lose status, dominance, and wealth if they turn out to be little more than charlatans, discredited by a paradigm shift.

Holms has been a Freudian and has carefully reconciled that system with the new research.  The main realization is that feelings -- which the 19th century insisted had to be controlled, denied, and subjected to rational, near-mathematical science -- are actually the process of consciousness.  It is not an organ, but a process of sorting sensations between what is vital to homeostasis and what is not, between in-skin and out-skin.  One after another, we’ve located pain, addiction, attachment, and so on in the brain, NOT in the sensations reported from the two nervous systems (one for taste, sight, sound, smell, et al and the other for the state of the in-skin) that constitute our reality, each of us in our own reality.  

Our next mistake is thinking that the brain is only the organ in our skull.  Rather “the brain” is  the entire body, the whole complex of neurological reporting, sorting, and acting.  If the sorting platform doesn’t believe that something is true and discards it, that person’s reality will not include it.  If the sorting platform is saying something IS true, it is, as far as that person is concerned.  This principle arrived partly through research to relieve phantom pain after amputation, partly through study of PTSD. 

Much of the in-skin reporting is unconscious physical homeostasis regulating hydration, blood sugar, digestion, heart beat, breathing and the like.  These things are not usually accessible without a laboratory capable of analyzing molecules, though much of it is in the autonomic nervous system.  This means we must consciously control exercise, drinking, eating, and so on.  Using a little exterior monitor to read blood sugar means that one can bring it to “consciousness” and act on the information to maintain homeostasis.

Cultural homeostasis is a real process: the elimination of whatever threatens the system as it is, the addition of compensations for that threat.  (We're trying to figure out mass shootings.  Two of them today.)  As in the body, if the wrong things are strengthened and the right things are undermined, the consequences will be death, cultural rot and imploding destruction.  It’s a kind of auto-immunity in which that which is meant to protect becomes a danger in itself, destroying all the wrong things.  Like Jews, gypsies, gays, the retarded, the avant garde, progressives, heretics or any other minority that can be stigmatized.  Then the culture sets about destroying them, kind of half-consciously, letting their diseases and poverty do the auto-destruction by withdrawing support and eliminating the basic needs of humans, like food and shelter.

Lately, our culture has begun to hate boys, pushing them out of families, shooting them on the streets, pushing them to be cannon fodder, forcing those who are rebellious out of the schools.  Incarcerating any caught using drugs or condoms.  Crusaders are desperate to raise consciousness about this.   Ironically, at the same time we push boys to succeed, to be brilliant, special, reflecting well on their families.

There is another challenge to homeostasis, the 2% who are ultra wealthy.  They have been able to form a membrane around themselves by controlling the government and therefore the laws meant to protect the whole, now giving themselves an in-skin advantage over other people.  Part of the trouble is that they take in so much, and what they throw out is other humans.  They are like gated communities who forget they are dependent on the infrastructure provided by other people and the land itself.  They constrict until they self-snuff, doing great damage to the whole world.

Others try to make a membrane around themselves by going “off the grid,” so that their infrastructure is either made by their own efforts on the land or by the natural “stream of consciousness” of their own interrelated selves.  Religious groups spontaneously try to do this and in the Seventies many simply “different” people tried communally to return to the first villages of human beings millennia ago.  They cannot provide something like the Internet, space travel, opera or other fabulous constructions that require many people of many kinds, but they can be tribes and families, joined by feelings.

Being rational is not enough.  The feelings that are necessary to sustain cultural homeostasis are present in our literature and interactions as “compassion.”  Our worship of rationality has reduced this to mawkish sentimentality or simple numbness.  The result has been zombies craving drugs or rage and rebellion, both illustrated vividly in our stories and poems, our terrorists and our dictators.  It is the kind of result that forces us to act or die.  AS A CULTURE.

REACHING EMOTIONAL HOMEOSTASIS FOR BOYS AT RISK

Parallel and entwined with the physical homeostasis of a person (homeostasis not having anything at all to do with being gay, just the prefix referring to sameness) is emotional homeostasis, that is, the management of the basic needs that form in the womb, in infancy, and in babyhood.  The basics before birth are dependent on the well-being of the mother.  The ones after birth begin with the basics of food and shelter and expand into whatever space the culture will give them, often differentiating between girls and boys.  This has nothing to do with genitalia or the object of desire, but is about “what girls do” and “what boys do,” or what Americans or cowboys do.  There will be pressure and suggestion from the adults.  Gently, as a Hopi elder saying,  “That’s not the Hopi way,” or violently, “I’ll beat the homosexuality out of you!”  Nowadays kids don't get much attention.

If there is confusion, emptiness, contradictions, forces that work against one’s physical nature, then the creature will be unhappy and the unhappiness will show, if only by noncompliance or freezing up.  Quite apart from such majorly dysfunctional contexts as drug houses or extreme poverty, it’s possible to compensate by comforting.  The baby also makes judgments about life -- what it’s about, how it works.  These might be accurate and true, or they might be quite wrong, or they might need serious adjustment if the environment changes.

At this point the changes are in the “sea within,” the molecules that the body’s organs secrete, as they try to adjust to the miserableness.  These are managed by “pathways” based on various interactions: serotonin loop, dopamine loop, or whatever.  They can’t be seen except by molecular analysis, but they can be felt as emotional changes.  In our times, with so many drugs available and people so willing to use them, the mixing of emotion, hormones and other molecules, can seriously interfere with the basic physiological homeostasis of the creature.  Excessive, sustained, habitual, mixed substances, either produced by extreme emotion or by ingesting or injecting substances, or maybe through trauma, can mean it will take a long time for the body to sort out what it’s supposed to do, let alone the thinking and emotional aspects of doing it.  

It’s hard to push a string, but you can pull one.  A kid with a goal will be willing to risk and motivated to try to give up old ideas and take a look at new ones that seem very strange at first.  His feelings may be all out of kilter so they tell him he will punished, destroyed, killed, if he even considers disclosure, cross-dressing, or falling in love with the wrong person.  Recovery will have to fight that.  A community of people with the same affinities is vital, but also someone experienced who understands what’s going on in him.  Emotions respond to other people with whom they have empathy.  Empathy expands one person’s evidence into a whole realm of sharing, and demonstrates what it is like to be in a new way.

For a while now we’ve understood how vital metaphor is to managing concepts.  It is a large part (if not all) of how the “sorting platform” of the brain operates, since it is a way of “bundling” ideas into one vivid image.  This is art.  Art IS thinking, IS using the sorting platform of the brain, IS a way to grow.  Art engages all the sensory equipment, including the ones we’re just finding a cell at a time, it FEELS GOOD which is the reward system of the "unconscious conscious", as Mark Solms renames it.  Feeling is a trustworthy guide to homeostasis, a way of identifying and coming to peace with something morally incomprehensible.  If that makes you think of a room of combat veterans all fingerpainting on huge rolls of papers, I think you get the idea.

It’s very hard to want peace or love or success without getting a taste of it and TASTE is the right word.  Boys have enormous energy and DANCE is the word for shaping it.  Boys have seeking eyes evolved for hunting, great for PAINTING.  Boys can listen and make noise -- call it MUSIC.

In my experience, boys during adrenarche and adolescence are so hormonally vulnerable that they need protection, meaning confidence and love.  That’s why they are vulnerable to pedophiles or street tricks trying to take advantage or altar boys at the mercy of priests.  There are no cultural prohibitions about violence against boys -- man up!  Don’t be a wimp!  Give as good as you get!  An aversion to violence is not being weak -- it’s being smart.  So why are “solid” male citizens in little Montana towns organizing semi-secret extreme fighting between admired boys for the purpose of betting?  In Great Falls, Montana, cage fighting is quite open and admired.  And violence is linked to sex through arousal.  Arousal is all systems GO.  Do that enough and the whole body is depleted.

WHO IS THE CLIENT WHEN SEARCHING FOR HOMEOSTASIS?

Everyone.  The boy, the therapist, the other boys, every boy on the planet.  Anyone who knows a boy or loves a boy.  This is where the metaphors about little drops of water and little grains of sand come in.  Drop by drop, bit by bit.  Pretty soon a beach.  If all humans were at or near their own homeostasis, enormous energy that now goes to struggling could go to creative inspiration instead.  The benefit to the culture would be major.

Since boys have enormous energy and creative powers, once the homeostasis begins to work and they know how it feels to be there, they become self-propelling, beginning to interact with the environments in ways that maintain the culture, getting out there to put collars on polar bears or numbering the hawks.  Even a gigolo who doesn’t want to give up his well-paid life can whisper reassurance in his clients’ diamond studded ears, male or female.  Moving people towards their own emotional and physical homeostasis is a moral thing to do.

At first glance, sexwork is physical work at first glance, but soon becomes obviously a task of maintaining the emotional; well-being of the provider.  Good nutrition is as important as tattoos done under sterile conditions.  Healthy people are good-looking; good-looking people are attractive, so long as their emotional balance is also healthy.

Providing homeostasis to the client by selling something that would otherwise have to be natural in the course of relationships is helpful to the culture.  If it's helpful in the largest sense, it should be culturally approved to write about sex and design a machine or robot that seems like sex.  But people who are at the mercy of the marginally functional -- the abusive, the denigrating -- may not think so.  If their culture and their bodies insist that they should be used and abused, then the homeostasis is out of whack all the way around.  I’m not qualified to say much more, though I know a lot of second-hand stories.   A casually sexual life works for bonobos, but not all humans.

THIS INDIVIDUAL BOY WITH HIV

When Colonel Pratt decided to make whites out of Indians, he had the idea that if they were cleaned up, given proper haircuts and clothes, and made to mind their manners, that would do the job.  Likewise, people tend to think that if they take a feral boy off the street who has survived on his own for most of his life and do the same things, the boy will be grateful and act just like his savior, who figures he will automatically give up all the strategies that have kept him alive. But first they want his diseases cured or at least addressed to the level of chronic and noncontagious.  The problem is that the change involved in that -- changes in habit patterns, internal molecular loops, and just general ways of being in the world -- are too much to address while still hungry, shamed, guilty, terrified, and essentially alone.  These are matters of identity and losing one’s identity will only cause panic and rage.

First, there should be food for all kids, places to wash up and eliminate waste that are safe, places to sleep that are safe and warm.    One thing at a time.  Starting to take AIDS meds -- even assimilating the fact of being infected and figuring out what it means (esp. if you think it’s a death sentence) -- might be sort of down the list.  The BEST thing is a trustworthy human contact when you don’t even know what that feels like, so you never look for it and maybe don’t appreciate it when you get it.

Consider that there are plenty of grownups who have the same problems as listed above, even the ones who live in “natural” African villages might not have a trustworthy human contact, which might account for ill-advised out-on-the edge sexual behavior.  There must be a high proportion of incarcerated people with no idea how to guide their own behavior, who will die before they ever find out.  There must be people who function only with constant professional support.   People can stop feeling anything.   But somewhere there must be people who have their boundaries established, keep between the limits of their bodies and minds, live in a supportive community, and still (or maybe consequently) have more energy and insight to offer others.

The tragedy is that most of diseases that can be addressed to the point of becoming chronic must do so in terms of behavior much more complex than taking a pill.  Just taking a pill on time and in the right amounts, just facing the diagnosis which is no longer death but still a lifetime ahead of monitoring and paying.  Getting the meds (even at a free clinic), are an ordeal that presume no competing activities, like a job or even school.  It means stigma, that blood sucking leech.  On the other hand, addressing one disease at the level of habits and sufficiency will probably control secondary diseases at the same time.  Hep C, TB, the usual companions.

But not all boys who behave badly have HIV.  Not all nice boys who have done very little to break rules will escape HIV.  It’s a virus, an opportunist, and skips through the land like a forest fire, creating a mozaic of infection that is undetectable at first without deliberate testing.  It will be years before the HIV impact on the body may be detected, long after the original point of contagion could be identified.  Only recently has it been possible to reduce the HIV viral load below the contagious point.  The good news is that what will control HIV will bring a body into homeostasis and good health FELT as happiness and peace. Some turnaround in emotional life and the personal power that even a boy has will be brought into alignment.  Art and community can do the job.