HOW A PERSON -- BUT NOT A COMPUTER -- UNFOLDS

Easter Island -- always watching

If a person had been following the latest research in what it is to be human (which in our age has replaced— or should — all the worrying about what it is to be God (let Him take care of Himself)  they would have learned things that most people have not absorbed yet.  I shouldn’t say “things,” because the paradigm shift is away from things to patterns, interactions, and change.  Get your dictionary.  

Most people assume that thinking is done only in the brain, that it is accessible on reflection, controllable by “will-power” and at its highest point a matter of words and math.  These things are not true. The whole body counts and thinks, most of it cannot be summoned up by reflection, and many feel its highest use is in the arts.

The essence of a human being is the meiotic synergy of two plans for a body as an aggregation of individual eukaryote cells specialized to operate in a unity.  The plans are encoded in a double helix of only four molecules which are arranged in a specific number of chromosomes that are in pairs.  One pair is either XX or XY — the Y allows the male gametes to leave everything behind (pack ONE bag) except their code and travel to the ovum.  The united halves then begin to follow a specific plan.  This will take nine months or three trimesters in the womb.  At that point the new human emerges and continues the gestation outside for what is considered by some to be a fourth trimester.

A baby ready for the world?

At this point the infant can breathe, eat, digest, pump blood, feel with all senses.  Some say that when newly discovered specialized cells are included (spindle cells and others) there are as many as 200 senses.  No computer or built machine can do this, at least not all at once.  A computer has no access to sense code unless it is provided by a human or an auxiliary machine.  Humans do not perceive directly or consciously many sensory elements, but they always perceive code for waves and molecular interactions that are sorted and patterned in the brain until they reach our awareness as colors, sounds, tastes, and so on.

The brain begins to weave a scaffold for identity: all of this is code and the code is emotion- and memory-based.  This is the fabric for the rest of that individual’s life.  Anything not relevant to this first structure is discarded, literally, by the deaths of those cells. 

We’ve only recently understood the epigenome, which is another set of molecular codes that I think of as a sleeve over the helixes.  However you think about it, it is from the environment and is capable of turning individual genes on or off, sometimes in an individual, sometimes with a wave of effects lasting into three generations later or becoming permanent code.  We are beginning to learn how to turn individual genes on and off though they turn out to be complex interactions with sometimes unforeseen consequences.  We come in a cloud of imperceptible tiny independent creatures: parasites, symbionts.

Hitchhikers and helpers.

The next five years are devoted to learning basic muscle management — standing, walking, gripping, — coordinating eyesight, organizing the perception of senses, forming habits of all sorts.  Next comes reading, writing and arithmetic along with the protocols of interaction among people.   The basic stories, games, management of emotion.  

We now know that the brain is forming the connections among neurons and clusters of neurons that we call the “connectome.”  It is not just through neurons, but also from the production of molecules by organs that form operational loops that control the on-and-off swings of whatever is needed in the moment.  These interact with the autonomic nervous system that controls unconscious operation of the body, often resulting in perceptible emotion.

From about  age 8 to the onset of puberty, the individual is forming an identity, self-talk, reaction style, shape and dimensions of emotion, and belonging to the family, a cohort, and larger sets of loyalty.  

Then comes the challenge of managing sexuality and finding a life work that will sustain a family.  All this greatly involves the pre-frontal cortex, the most recent part of the brain to develop, believed to contain morality, art, and high concept formation which isn’t complete until the mid-twenties and sometimes not even then.

Another capacity is that for empathy which clearly involves the eyes, absorbing another person’s emotion and understanding by looking at them.  To know how another person feels through one’s skill at empathy is mysterious and not anything a machine can do, though a lie detector can record what the autonomic nervous system is controlling.  Muscle movements can be formulated and interpreted, but that’s not the same as activating mirror cells.

A lot of people were seduced by the right brain/left brain idea and the studies that assigned image to one side (females and artists) and words to the other side (men and scientists), but they oversimplified and distorted what happens.  It may be more fruitful to review the evolution of the brain from the first hominin, though much of it is guesswork.  

The aggregated organ we call "brain" was tightly formed by interaction with the environment, which changes for many reasons, or — if the homonins went exploring, the new place changed them.  The two — human capacities and environmental demands — are as tightly choreographed in retrospect as that first dance between the infant and the world.  Homeostasis is the guide.

The human body/mind is a composite that is always in flux, but also always evolving new ideas and skills.  This is so complex that we nearly have to reassemble ourselves on waking every day.  Trauma or disease can interfere to the point of insanity, crippling and death.  

Thus we need communities to sustain us through the ordeals and to learn and remember our work after we are gone.  Communities are individuals gathered and in tension between what is good for one and what is good for all.  In a way this mimics the tension between the parasitic developing zygote and the mother’s resources as a providing body.  It’s a balancing act.

The tension between the one and the many can be governed by religious principles or — after writing was invented — governmental laws.  Greek drama was meant to act out the struggle between the individual and the state.  I first learned about it as a sophomore in high school when we performed “Antigone” in a classroom, theatre in the round.  

One young woman has two brothers who war over power.  Both die in battle.  Creon, the king, has to pick one brother as justified in order to reunite the country and he does it by denying the other brother traditional burial, using his power as a human law-giver to oppose what was seen as God’s law.  Antigone insists on burying her brother, which ends up with her death and the death of her lover, the king’s son.  The play has repeatedly been recreated as opera, which was intended to use the best and most powerful of the elements of staging to get to the passionate core.  A computer can do parts of this, but no computer can compose and perform an opera.

There is another set of stages related to the empathy stirred by spectacular story, progress beginning with focused attention, then growing interest, entwined memories, accordance, intimacy, bonding, faithful dedicated love (not sex or not JUST sex), virtual concepts of what is true.  One can go through these stages with a person, a work of art, an animal, a landscape, and more.  It is what unites the person and the group, the world, the cosmos.  It is the source of the sacred, a felt dimension of human being that cannot be detected by instruments, no matter how sensitive they are.

FEAR v. ANXIETY (referring to LeDoux)

MY THOUGHTS ABOUT “ANXIOUS,” 

a book by Joseph LeDoux  

LeDoux feels that what we call “anxiety” and what we call “fear” are two different phenomena that are managed differently by the amygdala and brain connectome.  

He speaks of the “split brain” research he did with Gazzaniga, in which it was vividly demonstrated that if one side was shown something, it could name and identify it accurately.  If the other side was shown the same thing, they couldn’t name the images but derived a kind of feeling from them and explained it creatively.  Consistently, one side could say what something actually was and the other side would “explain” it by inventing a story.  This has been distorted by some theories, calling it female/male, etc. 

Our culture insists that only humans have consciousness, that consciousness is a matter of words, that consciousness (self-awareness) is “better” and “higher” and is the same as “thinking”, which to them is the management of relationships among words.  The sensorium is assigned “poetry,” which is a language of art, sometimes considered fantasy, invention.

It seems that the difference between anxiety and fear is that anxiety is a felt emotional concept, a state of being, and fear is focused on a legitimate threat to survival and suggests something to be done about it, according to the identity of the individual and the resources of the culture.  The object of fear can be named and addressed, but anxiety is a feeling that lacks a story but drives the person to look for one.  Maybe what psychotherapy does is resolve anxiety by finding a convincing object of the fear and suggest ways to resolve it.  

LeDoux feels that fear and anxiety are addressed by two different connectomes or systems: one that responds to internal felt emotion and one that responds to the sensorium, raw neural information.  Behavior can come out of either or both.

I relate this to “spirituality” which is a felt experience that is hard to name or describe (liminality, transcendence, numinous, sublime) versus “religion” which offers named entities to fear (God, the Devil, atheists, “Commies”) and a narrative in which to embed them.  Thus, I suspect that spirituality relates to the same connectomes as anxiety while religion is about named threats that a theological system can explain.

Today there are so many rational threats that religions should be booming, but the offered naming and abating are not working -- they are only effective for those who live in a world that has passed.  Some “religious” wars are about trying to restore that world.  Even in supposedly peaceful settings, there’s a craving for writing and relationship as a source of surrogate authority. There is also much felt anxiety that is going unnamed in relationships, economics, government.  We’re aware of how much is secret or not what we expected (the internet) and how many of the institutions of reassurance have been dispersed (unions, families, school).

It seems to me that spirituality is a creature of images (sensorium) we can feel, but that religion is verbal, often adversarial, and both narrative and logical but logic that takes introspection as a source rather than the sensorium.  This is at the heart of the “Western” religions.

These ideas generated by LeDoux and team seem to lead somewhere instead of shutting down discussion or new evidence.  Whatever the amygdala has to do with it (which seems hard to pin down), it would be a mistake to assume we already know.  The very long bibliography and discussion of various theories show how hard it is to resist closure.

A FIVE-STAGE ACCOUNT OF 

HOW HUMAN BEINGS DEVELOP

Keep in mind that as each new ability or understanding comes “on-line,” it then loops back to connect with everything previous and that creates new synergies that weren’t possible earlier.

I.

Human beings are self-unfolding, pulling in what they need from around them, and creating their own internal order.  The drive to do this is kindled at conception and guided by the genome, the epigenome, and the womb environment which connects to the mother’s molecular status and reactions.

So the first stage of fear/anxiety is in the mother, whether she is safe and peaceful, or aroused and frightened.  This affects not only the state of the baby -- when the fetus is old enough she will feel its movement and know how much it participates in her emotional state as expressed in the blood according to the secretions of her organs -- but also the development pathways as the baby’s organs are created and calibrated.  Adrenaline, cortisol and so on can influence gender, both whom to desire and gender identity, to say nothing of genital formation.

Once outside the womb, the baby begins develop its sensory systems, not just eyes, ears and so on, but awareness of gravity, nearness, velocity, and some estimate maybe several hundred other things related to what is outside the body/skin.  As soon as something is perceived, it is built into the “map of the world” of the baby.  At this early point the new entity forms an opinion of whether the world is trustworthy, but there are also genetic factors.  If some genes are missing, the baby has no fear.  This anomaly will not last long in an unprotective world.  The original genes were meant to promote survival by wariness.  It is also possible that an epigene might turn off this gene.  There is a named syndrome in females, who are more likely to be protected and even treasured for their fearlessness, NOT the kind that is learned, but rather innate, an innocence.

The development of emotions at this stage is unfocused and unnamed inside the person, but identified and treated differently by the care-giving persons.  Some feelings could lead to abuse, which can cause suppression of emotions with internal consequences.

II.

Once all the senses are in place and the skeletal and muscular body has developed, the adrenals activate puberty, a whole new system of hormones and organs that adds new capacities, but also new reasons for worry.  A changing body can be hard to manage and can evoke predatory attitudes from others.  Increased awareness of other people’s emotions means realizing the state of the marriage on which the family is based, the restrictions and requirements of school, and possibly larger forces like racism, or war.  

By now the impact of the world outside the skin is causing emotions the person is able to name and that the culture will treat according to its way of labeling and managing.  Suppression, soothing, rage, laughter or mocking -- these will teach the person about the world.  The autonomic nervous system, combined with hormonal signals, are felt but perhaps not named nor accurately understood.

III.

By this stage the brain is doing a lot of sorting and filtering.  The person can reflect on what they see, actively reject some things and fasten onto others.  Not until the early twenties are they able to get to the meta level of thought, understanding why things happen, what ought to be done, make introspective inquiries, consider revolution.

This is the most obvious stage, the one we are aware of and act on.  But I begin to realize how many people never step outside their cultural boundaries or even know there is anything out there.  If it intrudes or if they much leave the familiar, they are both anxious and fearful.

IV.

This level is meant to refer to the person’s ability to connect to others.  When there is a threat, to look to see whether the others take it seriously.  As personality dictates, to respond in concert or in defiance.  To assume a responsible role, like a teacher or soldier, and react according to what is one’s duty.  The body of learning from experience is enlarging all the time.  Mirror cells, empathy, bonding, team-building, there’s no way to evade being a social animal.

V.

Cosmic awareness  Transcendence.  Not everyone seems to have this direct experience of “being,” but for those who it can be “the mysterium tremendum and fascinans” that overwhelms with the power of the universe, or the “oceanic feeling” of belonging to everything reassuringly.  Not only is it a felt and emotional concept, trying to define it into a theological system will end it.

PONDERING CONTEMPORARY SEX

Indulge me.  I might not agree with the statements below tomorrow or next year.  But it seems important to think about them.

CHROMOSOMAL MEIOSIS

Two strands of chromosomes, one from “male,” meaning the gender-determining chromosome has an X gene and a Y gene.  It’s also possible but rare to have an XXY or an XYY.  The outcome will not be good, but not as bad as YY or YYY.  The conceptus cannot survive without at least one X.

CHIMERICAL MEIOSIS

Occasionally two sperm may get into one ovum.  The outcome, if there is a viable zygote, would be unpredictable.  An interventional chimera is produced when the nuclear chromosomes of one woman are introduced into the de-nucleated cell machinery of another woman.  (I don’t know what happens with two nuclei but it is probably not good.)  The purpose is to remove the nuclear chromosomes of the mitochondria, which are cells within the cells and occasionally faulty.  Mitos have no secondary chromosomal input from a male.  (It’s also possible for the conceptus to be conceived in a petri dish, then implanted and gestated in a womb that is not the “biological” mother.)

We know that infant cells can migrate into a woman’s body or that an incomplete conceptus or twin can be absorbed into the developing conceptus.  Normally they persist as just a cell mass, but sometimes begin to develop at adolescence, even in a male body.

THE ECONOMY OF THE BIG EGG AND THE LITTLE MIGRATING SPERM

The female must produce the egg and take to term the conceptus.  The male only has to inject the triggering sperm.  Whatever helps the female to maintain the pregnancy and then protect the infant will persist over time, simply because any without advantages have worse chances.  The male sperm is best served by being planted many times in many “gardens.”  But if a man chooses his receptor carefully, is protective and contributes to the healthy gestation and the subsequent infant’s successful growth, then his babies will survive.

INFANCY

Every baby is born into a unique culture, environment, expectations, and so on.  Certain abilities to learn from the situation are probably genetically sourced and will help babies to adapt to some families and cultures but not others.  If the match is happy, the baby will thrive.

MIXED MESSAGES

Not every baby has the expected binary sexual organs.  A small percentage may have both, some might have neither, some might have a mix, a confusion.  Surgical and hormonal intervention is possible and some may choose to be a “woman with a penis” or a man with a vulva/vagina.  Fertility might or might not be related, depending on the status of the generating organs.  A penis is a delivery system, a uterus is a container.  The crucial creative organs are testes and ovaries and their internal support systems, whether organs or hormones.

PSYCHOLOGY OF MALE/FEMALE

If the family and/or culture’s expectations do not match the learning style or temperament or other “hard wiring” of the baby that might not have anything to do with sex, the baby’s sexual organs may not match the situation of the baby’s cultural expectations and the person may end up wanting to change, maybe by impersonation or nowadays with surgery.

ABERRATIONS

Varying from the norm in any culture means “difference” but since humans wear clothes, it is possible to hide or contradict some differences, therefore awareness of them might be low.  In some cultures a variation like twins is considered dangerous and the twins are killed.  In others, twins are highly valued.  In some cultures (this is SO tricky) twins are so valued that their sacrifice is considered efficacious in propitiating the gods.

This applies to some imagined lines of development (the children of bad people carrying “bad seed” or the children of good people inheriting high expectations) which loads up the simple ovum/sperm seams of persons with lots of cultural embroidery. 

CHILDHOOD

Because human babies are born unfinished, they must be sheltered in early childhood.  If the process of forming oneself has the added burden of adapting to sexual demands by adults, the child may struggle lifelong to overcome a felt incompleteness, which some describe as the shattering of the self.  After early childhood the burden of carrying a baby to term or competing with other males for access to a female is so heavy that humans develop in at least two more stages.  First they must unfold who they are and fit into their situation.  Some cultures require children to begin to work at this point, even something so arduous as underground mining.  The second stage, adolescence, is to become sexual in some way, which means managing appearance and drives. 

ADOLESCENTS

If adolescents are unsupported and unguided by the culture, the attrition will be high.  Mothers who are too young produce faulty babies even if they survive themselves.  Boys who are too young to compete are often victims of violence.  Sometimes they are unprotected even within the family and sometimes their drive to perform takes them into danger.  Neither is likely to have the stability to raise babies.  In cultures where youngsters reproduce, there is usually a supporting extended family.  If not, many just don’t survive.  This is not a matter of morality, but simple lack of what is needed.

COMING OF AGE

The last (4th) stage of maturation is post-adolescent, around the twenties.  In this time the most recently evolved brain capacities “come online”  -- both in terms of knowledge and emotional stability.  At this point a human being is able to manage a vast tapestry of cultural possibilities as well as personal decisions and practices.  They might choose to deny parts of themselves, transform other parts, intensify and develop others, or simply jump cultures.  

At this point the binaries of male/female are only a beginning for the multitude of possibilities along several spectrums of measurement: desire, desirability, awareness of other practices, conformity to context, faithfulness, desire for children, displacement to other kinds of creativity and so on.  

HOMOSEXUALITY

Confusion about the reference of this word is rampant.  In Biblical terms it probably had more to do with onanism, since survival of the tribe depended on willingness to reproduce.  Contrast that with the situation of China which is equally draconian about over-reproduction since population density threatens them.  In modern USA we have far more children than there are people responsible enough to protect and rear them, so it makes sense to encourage adoption by gays and het contraception. 

The real threat to “morality” is not same-sex marriage but incomplete relationships that produce children but abandon them, whether or not the relationship had legal standing.  We are only beginning to explore what the legalities of biological parents might be, whether it is in terms of “shoots and leaves” or in terms of legal sperm donors who have created hundreds of biological descendants.  Nor do we know what to do about biological mothers who do not bond psychologically, or those on whom the effect of the pregnancy hormone surge derails them. These aberrations may prevent survival of offspring, but they also damage the larger society, which is what justifies intervention.

It appears that gay men are created in the womb in a number of mammal species (though no one has identified a gay "gene") and persist genetically because they contribute to the survival of the group rather than the individual.  How they might make their contribution as "uncles" probably depends more on the culture, but often is through artistic creativity or other humanities.  They might also be athletes, mechanics, farmers or cowboys.  There is no "build" or "voice" or "gestures" that identify gays.  

Lesbians seem to be more influenced by the culture, probably more in the nourishing, protective maternal style but maybe not.  Since actual fertilization is not necessarily voluntary, women have evolved to survive where they are, even if it is an imprisonment and against their personal nature.

COMMODIFICATION

In a capitalistic and status/class based society, the culture will impose, evoke, and reinforce even such things as sexual characteristics.  Hugh Hefner’s success was as much a product of selling high-end booze, expensive cars, music, fireplaces and smoking jackets as it was sexual liberty and access to bunnies.  The real porn was the advertising.  "Gay" is a market.  Homosexuality is a major Netflix category. “Special” places, clothing, tools, etc. are all pitched to gender differences, sexual markers, and invented categories.  The appeal of them might not correlate with children: skinny women with breast implants who use many chemical cosmetics and get pregnant late in life are not so likely to have the best outcomes.  But the commodification offered to the woman who can pay for ovum donors, in vitro fertilization, mitochondrial transplant, and surrogate gestation has got to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Even that is dwarfed by the kind of commodification called “criminalization.”  Managing incarcerated prisoners is worth billions.  All the adjunct functions like methadone clinics or anger management groups have a sexual valence to them, or why would the media be so obsessed with prison rape?  How else could things like the criminalizing of carrying condoms be justified when they are so clearly beneficial?  The criminalization of drugs is deeply entwined with the criminalization of sex.

These thoughts are in part triggered by reading "The Evolution of Human Sexuality" by Donald Symons. (1979)  It's packed with challenges to people who have dominated the field, maybe unjustifiably.  Anyway, time for a re-think.

A NEW THEORY OF FAMILY AS A PROCESS

Two order-keeping systems are deeply challenged today.  One is nations, which have been breached by the Internet and transnational corporations, including nonprofits.  The other is the human family which persists because of its power to morph, adapting to new conditions.  To try to freeze its form in place is to kill it.

This post is a completely new start on the whole subject of families that is based on a new understanding of a what a person is.  A human being is a community of single cells united in a body by their intermeshing which enables specialization that maintains the well-being of that whole body by keeping it within homeostasis as it grows and develops.  With success, a unique consciousness called an identity will emerge from this body.   So now, drawing on that model, a family is a community of individuals united into a group by their intermeshing, enabling uniqueness that maintains the well-being of those included by keeping it within homeostasis as it grows and develops, with particular care to the sheltering and supporting of the young.  If this works properly, loyalty and skill development create a culture of success.  Can you agree with that?

It has nothing to do with skin color, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual choice, inheritance (except that which guides the cells), biological descent, or legal category so long as the purpose of sheltering and supporting the young is achieved.  (The damaged and the old are not considered here.) There could be one, two, three, four adults -- one child or a roomful -- but there must be enough to provide food, safety, shelter, cultural shaping, and constant interaction.  This is my own mix of memory, observation and reading.  No fancy authorities.  

Okay, now that a human being is recognized as a process and a family is defined as a group of people who are attached and actively protective, we must realize that a family will need different skills and circumstances for different stages of development as the children grow.  Not quite so obviously as some other creatures who actually change shape or shed their skins or grow wings or enter into quite different life-support systems, human beings still go through distinct stages. 

When the child or children are infants, they must be cradled: that means fed, cleaned, embraced, rocked, sung to, and responded to so they know if they have a need, they can cry out for it, and someone will come.  In order for adults and other older children to go at once, they must be attached to the baby by familiarity which means imprinting in the memory system of their sensorium.  If this is done erratically, not enough, by a lot of strangers, angrily or resentfully or too clumsily, the infant will not learn to trust life.  Needs of the caretakers are secondary needs of the child, and therefore vital.  At this stage the caretaker also needs from others warmth, responsiveness, the information and skill to recognize trouble or discomfort signs, what to do about them, when to seek professional help.  These stipulations are not complete, but suggestive.  (I am putting aside the issues of the person whose body has been devoted to creating the infant and which may still be in recovery.)

The toddler learns to talk and write by interacting with other people and manipulating many things.  Constant vigilance is necessary to prevent accidents, but life cannot consist of nononono.  There must be “What does a duck say?” and “Come to me,” with stretched out hands and “you can do it!”  Now the caretaker needs a fund of ideas, patience, and other adults so as to maintain a healthy life of his or her own.  Other adults and children need to be involved.  Infants and toddlers cannot live by themselves.

Primary school is the span for learning to read, count, learn colors and rhythm, and social skills.  Sometimes the caretaker is now sharing with a professionally training teacher.  Brains at this stage are still forming categories but beginning to drop the unused ones out as irrelevant.  A child at this stage still needs adults and though children may try desperately to take care of malfunctioning adults themselves, they are only pups and can only apply whatever physical comforting skills they learned previously.  A primary school child is as smart as a dog and could survive alone to some degree, as street kids do.  They want to please, to be attached.

The years from 8 or so to maybe 12 -- the onset of menarche in girls -- are years of physical growth and increasing skills.  Technically it is called the adrenarche. This may be one of the most crucial periods of life for establishing identity and yet it is barely described in most resources.  The brains are hungry, still physically growing in terms of shaping neurons, and giving rise to self-consciousness -- awareness of one’s self as an identity among others.  I remember it as a time of astonishment and hallucinations, never having enough time or explanation, searching books and environments, and yet believing that I could take hold of any situation and resolve it.  By the end of this time I was riding the bus across town, wearing gloves.  It was 1950.  Most kids, especially boys, are running in packs at this time.   In some cultures females are committed to a “husband” at this age.

Adrenarche is ended by the adrenal glands signaling the sexual organs to start their development.  Secondary sex characteristics develop and one’s own style of sexual drive comes “online” along a spectrum of possibilities in terms of identity, intensity, objects of desire, ability to sublimate, and vulnerability.  The task of the caretaker now is to somehow steer a course between experiment and caution, to treat the person with respect and encouragement but to keep them within the bounds of survival homeostasis and to teach them how to do things by working alongside adults which normally they will want to do.  Most cultures separate male and female at this point. 

The formal legal age of adulthood is a problem, varying from 14 to after 21.  Every culture develops its own solutions.  At one time adulthood was short and “brutal.”  Still is in lots of places, but where families can persist as a growing, enmeshed, emotionally attached group, they continue on through life until the descent into peril and death when it is the older ones who need the caretaking.  What Erikson called “the cogwheeling of the generations” proceeds.  "Teenagers," as we call them, are able to survive on their own or better in groups, but carry additional burdens because of babies and sexual jealousies.  Without older and wiser members, a "family" of teens can work and has worked historically, but not without serious losses.  Income will always be a problem.  Soldiers are usually recruited from this age group.

We acquire and discard family members as we go, changing living arrangements, taste in food, styles and abilities.  Needs vary through time.  Sometimes the demands are very high, more than it seems as though we can bear.  To be intimately connected is to be exposed to grief and loss at many levels. 

Family is a time art, like music or dance.  Laws and institutions must constantly revise themselves, redefine themselves, re-empower themselves by fitting their theories to the realities.  They cannot worship the past, they cannot try to impose us back into rigid old categories, they cannot use violence, fines and incarceration to force genetic and legal families to stay together, because those measures won’t.  Like water the people will slide away through the cracks and holes to find a new and better container for their lives.  They can’t be forced to be good if they don’t have the resources they need -- not even a home -- or don’t know any other way -- or are locked into the mental jail of addiction or madness.  You can invent the most effective meds in the world -- if people can’t take them because of chaos, it’s the same as not having them.  They are outside the boundaries of life-sustaining homeostasis.

We do not own each other -- we earn each other in the course of each new day.

PLAGUE AND PARTICLES

Only one of the Great Human Plagues has been eradicated so far in this ever-so-clever scientific world: smallpox. The suspicion is that someone somewhere (probably us) has a freezer of the last bits of it, so we can use it as a weapon. (Only if provoked, of course, though we provoke rather easily.) Cholera, malaria, flu, bubonic plague, typhoid, tuberculosis -- now joined by HIV-AIDS -- are somewhat treatable and almost completely preventable if their supporting ecological conditions (mostly poverty and hunger) are changed.

At one point I spent a lot of time reading about plagues. Ebola, for instance, is an inefficient disease because it is so virulent that people drop in their tracks in days, which is not always enough time to get to the next host. Another mistake on the part of plagues is the vulnerability of their vectors, which carry infection through the air, through liquids like water, and from one person to another through contact, which means that all those routes, if detected, can be interdicted. Using a condom, eliminating mosquitoes, purifying water, are all effective strategies but -- directly or indirectly -- the greatest ally a plague has is political. The lack of political will allows both the actual infections and their vectors to continue, even thrive and find new resources.

Lack of political will comes from stigmatizing (I always hear in my mind, “stinkmatizing”) and possibly criminalizing those who need help/money. The countervailing force is first, the awareness of other human beings as having value and empathizing with them, and second, the awareness that politicians can very well fall victim to stinkmatizing. They themselves, regardless of disease status, can become marked for exclusion. None of them is invulnerable to tragedy. They must see that though it is effective to have needy clients, whether they are constituents or whole nations, a failed nation is worth nothing and will prey on prosperity.

Many people working from many motives try to throw life-saving resources to suffering people. Most will choose one issue and put all their effort into it, perhaps because of personal experience with it. We become increasingly aware that ALL diseases are essentially molecular and therefore intermeshed, planetary, trans-species. A man just walked across Africa -- the gorillas and chimpanzees were gone. (They think ebola.) A man just drove the highways of Florida. The mammals were gone. (They think Asian pythons.) A disease is only one aspect of economics, ecology, transportation, and constant change even in the surface of the planet and its oceans expressed as climate, earthquakes, tsunamis. Even in the dynamics of the sun with its massive storms sending plasma curtains and particles our way.

I have chosen a location on this planet -- the east slope of the Rocky Mountains -- where I can age out with low resources and high spiritual renewal. For whatever reason, I’ve had access to major thinkers and accumulated a library that guides me to bigger libraries. Our diseases here are Alzheimers, diabetes, alcoholism, meth and violence. Our families are still stable enough -- for the most part -- to get the stink off loved ones, but we still struggle with racism and poverty. Some people seem unlovable.

Activists press me to respond to their issues and I’ve wondered what I should do. If the ethical rule I use is to do the greatest good for the greatest number, then I think I know what the answer is: the deepest cause of malignant loss and self-destruction is our understanding of what a human being is. We think we are nothing, maybe even a plague in ourselves, that can only be purified by apocalypse -- near universal destruction.

Therefore, I choose to address the nature of what it is to be human in an age that is discarding both anthropomorphism (thinking everything, including God, is in our image) and anthropocentrism (thinking that everything should be about us and what we want and need). I have a few realizations.

One is that there is no such thing as an individual. Solitary as I am, my head and heart are so crowded with people (I count animals, maybe even entities like trees or mountains or shorelines) that I sigh to meet new ones. A few are intensely meaningful to me, my very core.

The next thing is that my “identity” and consciousness (I think so I am) is a very small part of what goes on in my body. Eukaryotic cells formed over years of collaboration, drawing on the mitochondria in each cell, have been joined by a jillion little molecular creatures (QUITE real and physical though below human perception) from gut flora to eyelash fauna. Keeping them in harmony means emotion affects them and is produced by them.

To take this back to the subject of plague, my mother nearly died in the Spanish flu epidemic -- in fact, her doctor did. Her mother and grandmother died of cancer. These things intimidated her in a subtle way. She chose endurance maybe more than she ought to have, though she could be a good crusader as well. And endurance, tenacity, are valuable qualities. She is in me now. I am guarded, vigilant.

Constantly I have to fight awareness of all the bad things, mistakenly or on purpose, that I’ve done in my life. The failures, the fudges, the desertions -- I could create a virulent case of self-hate with no effort at all. Some people help me right along with my list of faults and others do NOT help when they refuse to admit my faults exist. Honesty is tough and slippery, but it is what I pursue. It can make me unwelcome, but if I can maintain honesty, it is productive. I get things done.

A human being is one element in an inconceivable interweaving of tiny forces. For two thousand years of Western religion we have tried to preserve our individual selves with a fantasy about everlastingness, but it has become pernicious. Now we must see that our salvation is in participation, to create memories and hope that will speak to others and break down stigma. At the same time we must be judicious, generous, disciplined in some ways and abandoned in others, demanding and forgiving, open and yet observant of boundaries in the molecular moments that add up to a life. If (when) we are taken by trauma or disease or simply old age, then we will have left glowing trajectories across the particle-detecting cloud chamber of the galaxy.

HUMAN CONSENT

“Areas of human consent” is a phrase used by Patti Smith in regard to Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of naked and intimate bodies during an interview with Charlie Rose.  It is an apt phrase for the boundary between the culture and the individual in a context of identity and morality, particularly incursions that involve the possibility of harm, whether psychological or physical.

At present North American culture is in a strange mode where sexual matters, though the very crux of the physical and psychological, are highly ritualized and commodified, with a strong underculture pushback from atypical minorities at two extremes: one experimental and edgy, and the other the community that still relates to the 19th century, considers it a commanded given.   Matters of sexuality (whether gender identity or relationship) which depart from formerly consensus-based “morality” (monogamy, faithfulness, freedom from disease or drugs) will instantly disqualify public figures from any level of respect or leadership.  But leaders can take us into mutilating war and humiliating economic collapse without any punishment.  Only a little regret.  We consider this religious.

What should be the boundaries permitted between people, either by their own consent or by cultural agreement and how can they be marked and enforced?  One of the most obvious is boundaries between a child and an adult, particularly when the adult is a parent.  Consider the extremes.  Today the newspaper described a case in which a mother super-glued her toddler’s hands to a wall and then kicked and beat her nearly to death.  This is about a physical boundary broken, but also a psychological wall that blocked humanness.   A different kind of boundary violation is the smothering, controlling parent who will allow no psychological boundary to form, also preventing humanness.  The public response to the first act (aside from punishment) will probably be something tangential, like banning superglue.  The response to the second act is likely to be approval.  Like God, we try to redeem ourselves through our children, even if it means their crucifixion. 

Mapplethorpe is a good case-study for conflicting ideas about what justifies changing conventional boundaries.  Does beauty justify nudity?  Does racial inclusion?  What if it’s exploration?  Ordeal?  Salvation?  Permission from the model?  

A cultural paradigm shifts in our understandings of the world.  A hundred years ago Mapplethorpe’s work would have been deeply ghettoized if not criminal.  Twenty years after the attacks on his work, it is almost mainstream.  In a world where airline security can take anyone into a back room for a cavity search, a bullwhip handle up the butt is hardly shocking.  Enlightenment and Post-colonial changes in social thought have come about because of increased information -- we see the planet from outer space and our understanding of life is changed.  We realize what the genome means and our understanding of identity is changed.   Television has shown us enough on the news to make us completely rethink what humans can and should be.  There are no norms except greed.

Boundaries of some kinds are enforced by suffering.  This is where the boundaries of the individual, like torture [water-boarding] or religious ordeal [suicide bombers] or SM practices or cancer chemotherapy become a sharp edge indeed.  Many of the Mapplethorpe bodies were achieved only with many long hours of possibly painful disciplined training, possibly with the ingestion of eventually destructive molecules (steroids).

Less benignly, masses (what were once nations) suffer the ordeal of starvation or war pursued by undisciplined soldiers enhanced by chemical weapons -- methamphetamine in one hand and viagra in the other.   Or maybe the people suffer biological warfare “by omission”, not by infecting the enemy but by withholding the available medicines as political coercion.   Then the boundaries of human compassion and morality are challenged in a way that may (should) provoke social movements of protest.  

Gradual erasure of moral boundaries also happens through the opposite technique:  soft comfort, enwrapping convenience, gradual accustoming to privilege, or numbness before the cacophany of messages.  Most of all by closing down the aperture of awareness to a small circle that excludes troubling information.   “We didn’t know.”  “That wasn’t my responsibility.”  “I was not in the loop.”  “It’s too ugly.”   When the black swans arrive in a great flying V of destruction, like WWII bombers, it’s a terrible shock.  Consent by omission.  A hallmark of our times.

Maybe it was a 19th century Euro development that gave “professionals” social permission to ignore the physical boundaries of people.  Doctors are allowed to cut us open and meddle in our entrails.  Shrinks do the same on a psychic level, wearing the white coat of the doc.  Somehow they have managed to delegate this right not only to their students or their nurses, but also to financial gatekeepers.  Now it is the insurance company that says whether your boundaries may be violated, even to save you, and then, if you feel differently about it, you’ll need a lawyer because lawyers are the ultimate permission getters.  There used to be something about priests and pastors in there, but that’s been omitted now.  So messy.  Impractical.  Where’s the money?  Don’t even mention the invasions of journalists or hackers.

So who can stand with you on the moral boundary of your soul?  We’re back to magic, looking for a shaman, each of us pole-dancing with the universe as best we can.  The axis mundi doesn’t really turn any faster, only our human whirligig.  The swarms of dystopias and eutopias come a little faster all the time, mostly sowing confusion.

The United Nations has patiently worked out consensus statements about human rights.  They are worth reading slowly, repeatedly.  Once in the context of maybe Minneapolis;  once with Somalia in mind; a third time as what might have been achievable on an historical frontier when Euro culture was expanding out over the planet and not very worried about the indigenous people.  Kids go to sci-fi and fantasy.  If you don’t have the basics: air, water, food, shelter, sanitation, you won’t need to worry about the rest because you’ll be dead soon.  So many are.  

Where is the next line?  Intimate human relationships?  Love and sex?  Obviously, enough animal-level parenting for babies to survive, but what are the minimums after that?  Education?  Everything other people around you have?  Then look around you: not just the big gleaming dreams people go into debt for but also the people the do-gooders fuss about: isolated, in pain, futureless, terrified, unable to learn or change.  Did they consent to this?  Does anyone ask to be born?

What is informed consent?  Who can own your body and mind -- your ass -- as the street person would say.  What’s the entitlement?  What’s the compensation?  Who’s the enforcer?  What use are you making of what you have?  What others are you helping to enforce their chosen or necessary boundaries?  In England old people have been getting a tattoos over their hearts that say, "Do not resuscitate."  The lawyers say no one will pay attention to that anyway.  It's not legal.

Why are we so belligerent about sex, nakedness, skin color, gender, and relationships while we ignore death and corruption?  Isn’t it the same old magician’s trick?  Confronted with the small body of a dead child, the authority figures say,  “Oh, look over there!  Someone’s fucking!”

When I was a college undergrad and mulling all this stuff (you know how sophomores are), we referred to the struggle between individual and society as “fighting the good fight.”  I still think of it that way: the necessity and morality of defending one’s identity, the right to be oneself.  One’s naked self.  It can’t be taken for granted.  The funny irony is that on the surface I’m actually almost too conventional.  When people get close they find out differently, and it enrages them.  Or sometimes not.  If that happens, where should I direct my gratitude?