RUEFUL THOUGHTS IN THE DARK BEFORE DAWN

It was obvious that about now there would be too many people and the fossil fuel rackets would be ending.  But I don't think anyone expected that we would be locked in the same dynamics that caused war when I was coming to consciousness in the Forties.  

"The Holodomor was a famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. It is also known as the Terror-Famine and Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, and sometimes referred to as the Great Famine or the Ukrainian Genocide of 1932–33." (Wikipedia)  I don't think anyone understood that the unforeseen consequences would be the peopling of the Canadian prairie with very tough survivors and the remainder who found a way to stay there would fight to the death to keep Ukraine independent.

I don't think anyone thought much about how similar the wheat prairie and the corn midwest are to the Russian Ukraine.  Thinkers were preoccupied by the Irish potato famine which also sent a diaspora to North America which was the origin of potatoes in the first place. 

Today's tensions are different in some ways.  Instead of tanks we have predator drones so that rich nations can kill at will without dying themselves.  Even the poor nations can now mail-order small drones that can carry weapons.  The Internet and near-universal access to computers means everyone with a smart phone can watch.  (Easy to get those gizmos if you just steal instead of buying -- and that also applies to a way to recharge batteries.)  

The contraceptive pill makes a huge difference but it turns out that the most effective contraceptive is economic hardship.  We've been bombarded with sexual stimulation so much that behavior is more and more extreme, less and less governed, so that recently a survey indicated that most people think kinks and violence are a natural part of "vanilla" sex.  Also, to support a family takes two people, neither of which has the energy or time to "raise" kids, much less wonder what heights they are "raising" them to.  Without morality, which we don't like because it means nasty stigma for the immoral, blackmail doesn't work very well anymore.  So -- he's done time, so he doesn't bother to marry his women, so he's gay.  Who cares?

The stigma restraints to some behaviors like taking sexual advantage of children, or swindling to get money, or lying to escape consequences, are weakened to such an extent that only the old-fashioned are vulnerable to blackmail.  Very rich people only shrug if the media reveals they are pedophiles, in league with criminals, faking their educations.  The rest of us do, too, because we want to be like rich people.  Our favorite means is living on credit.  Education is so expensive that professionals must be in debt for their whole lives.  (And they're obligated to dress well.)  People know to not get attached to honor or allegiance.  it can provoke attacks, destruction.  Evade hostages by not caring about anyone else.

The consequences we can see coming are unbelievable:  an extinction of much of life, the sixth one we know about but we weren't part of the others.  A climate so different that we may not be able to live in it,  though we created it with a zillion little needs and desires.  The loss of major ecologically-underlain religions that responded to a world we thought was real, so similarly to the lives we now see are temporary.  The losses call into question the very reality of our food, shelter, and water, esp. water.

Science has been our alternative to religion and even in some cases governance, but now that it is a story of limits, esp. human thought limits, we don't like it so much anymore.  Nations and their borders have been a source of control and identity, but now they are so often breached or irrelevant that people escape them and leave behind their sense of who they are.  Money dominates everything, and yet money is not anything -- it's a pretence, a convention.  When they say money is moved to some secret place, nothing really moves.  No gold bars, no pieces of silver -- just records.  If the records are destroyed, the money goes with the lists and sums, no longer attributed to anyone.

The tension between the group -- the small one that begins with attachment  between two people or maybe a small cluster and grows until it is a continental movement -- and the individual whose interests might be served or smashed by the group is not greater or lesser than it used to be, but rather more confused.  What justifies terrorism that destroys innocents?  What justifies the destruction necessary for finding and killing the terrorist leaders, individuals who claim to stand for their community?

What use are the careful studies of how things work if we don't teach the little kids what they need to know to be effective citizens?  If Sesame Street is teaching them to count and be happy, who is teaching them about voting and the Constitution?  What use is the Rule of Law if people see that it is easily redefined, evaded and ignored, as kids learn in school when their parents can intimidate superintendents?

If everyone is writing and memorializing their own lives, but no one is reading because it's not about them, what are books for?  Print exists under glass because it is ephemeral.  A lot of it is about misery anyway.

All this stuff is true.  The best reaction is to laugh.  All this effort and change, but here we are back again with Putin trying to be Stalin so he can starve the Ukrainians into submission while the real action is quietly on the prairies where coastal people never go, just fly over.  The infrastructure was never really completed -- the potholes abide, the electricity has blips, fires are fought by neighbors, and people went to school together.  College is for learning to fix diesel engines so the trucks keep rolling.  

We know that to build a good fire you need as much air as wood.  We know you gotta find a way to survive until the sun comes out and the wind dies down.  If you can get to the local café, there will be coffee and neighbors.  Don't make fun of small towns.

MORAL NORMS

Normalizing and re-normalizing have nothing to do with "normal."  They are the most common kind of morality:  looking around to see what everyone else is doing.  It can be positive -- littering and smoking have been quite changed.  Or it can be negative, esp. when it's not something concrete and actual but rather a protocol like doing business.  I could quickly give you fifty examples of "cheating" that have become normal.  Like little omissions on taxes.  Like calling in sick when you aren't.

The most obvious changing norm has been sex, which was clearly fertility based morality and therefore vulnerable to an effective birth control method.  One of the most gut-level rules of fertility is a product of the European practice of inheritance, which treats a genetic descendent of a powerful person as an extension of that person and the woman who produces that descendent as livestock, her children as a crop.  

This has impact on the state-owned and religion-endorsed idea of marriage.  The reason "same sex" marriage between men is objected to is that they don't produce children.  Same sex marriage between women or sex outside marriage produces children who can't be attributed to a specific man.  Marriage among three people is too ambiguous about which is an extension and which is livestock, an asset or extention.

The impact of these assumptions is felt, but the fact that they are arbitrary is not often realized, because sexual matters are veiled in two ways: by romantic notions about attachment and by a kind of anti-romance which is formally "crime" defined by governments or evil defined by religious theory. (Educated Westerners love binary thought as worked out by Greek theory.)

As we are seeing, political dynamics are very much like sexual norms and entwined with them.  The effect of going to democracy, thus eliminating patriarchy as the godhead of kings and tyrants, has been as disruptive as birth control -- we might call it "succession control."  One class works hard to go back to the old way.

But fertility norms are also key to the nature of biological families, the production and attachment/identification of babies being one of the basic structures of society.  Happily, bonding happens that is not fertility-based.  

This is notoriously true of mafia "families" who develop a system of obligation, secrecy, and benefits.  This is inversely related to government functions: if the state is strong, mafia alternative is weak and vice versa.  In the case of the present USA, the state has gone to a new morality, that of wealth, which has allowed a minority to hoard basics like shelter and even justice, excluding huge categories of people.  This has made mafia strong enough to infiltrate government.  Maybe the proof that we've abandoned fertility is the foolishness of the leader's children and the lack of them in many cases.  

Sex is present as a perq of wealth.  Those who cling to the old ways must resort to criminalizing abortion and even more ridiculous stigma or criminal laws, all imposed on women.  We have not tried to use male castration to create a separate class, as we do with livestock.  

This could be treated as a sub-category of presentation. The following is from Wikipedia.  (You know, of course, that classically a "blog" is a web blog, a record of reading websites.)

"Normalization, or social normalization, is the process through which ideas and behaviors that may fall outside of social norms come to be regarded as "normal". In sociological theory, normalization appears in two forms.

First, the concept of normalization is found in the work of Michel Foucault, especially Discipline and Punish, in the context of his account of disciplinary power. As Foucault used the term, normalization involved the construction of an idealized norm of conduct – for example, the way a proper soldier ideally should stand, march, present arms, and so on, as defined in minute detail – and then rewarding or punishing individuals for respectively conforming to or deviating from this ideal. In Foucault's account, normalization was one of an ensemble of tactics for exerting the maximum social control with the minimum expenditure of force, which Foucault calls "disciplinary power". Disciplinary power emerged over the course of the 19th century, came to be used extensively in military barracks, hospitals, asylums, schools, factories, offices, and so on, and hence became a crucial aspect of social structure in modern societies."

"Second, normalization process theory is a middle-range theory used mainly in medical sociology and science and technology studies to provide a framework for understanding the social processes by which new ways of thinking, working and organizing become routinely incorporated in everyday work. Normalization process theory has its roots in empirical studies of technological innovation in healthcare, and especially in the evaluation of complex interventions"

These two definitions are opposed to each other, one dependent on preserving the old ways in spite of a world constantly being changed by technologies, and the other is the technology itself working to change society.  This is not necessarily happy when one thinks of something like the Chinese governments determination to forcibly brain wash minorities in camps.  But try thinking of it in terms of trans-national corporations using advertising and social platforms to create demand for their products, or at least cover for their motives and practises.  They propose a certain age and attraction associated with the practices they want.

The discipline that studies the second definition is still very new and is said here to come out of healthcare, which is more focused on death than birth, but also interested in prevention.  The newly born and the about-to-die are vulnerable populations which survive happily only when the social structure provides something like families to value them.  "Interventions" can quickly become "oppressions."

It is vital for group survival to preserve abnormalities in terms of individuals and groups.  One of the advantages of "freedom" is to allow them to develop and thrive because they are the source of growing edges, the innovations that may save us all in the future.  It is also an advantage of the "dark," the secrets and hiddenness that preserve them,

TERRAFORMING THE PEOPLE

Terraforming refers to the theoretical ability to reach an unpopulated planet and change it so that it's like Earth -- at least what we think Earth is like, which depends on where you're from: the Amazon or the Sahara.  But humans on a space ship are likely to insist on a planet that is uniform and like what they know, which is mechanical and technical.  No one thinks of "terriforming" the crew to fit the planet.  But given a bit of time, the space ship will redesign the crew to fit its own design.

DNA is not a bar code.  Bar codes arise from a mercantile set of mind which values inventory and sales prices more than life itself, which is always changing.  Control freak humans would rather change the world than change themselves, even grow.  They often operate on the basis of "brands," packaging, sources, profit, treating abstract concepts as though they were "realities."  Even more problematic, they constantly recreate what they escaped in the past, even though they didn't like it in the first place.  People move to the SW to escape hay fever, and then plant the very same growth that makes them sneeze.

Our policies at the Mexican border -- separating children from families, trying toddlers in court for the crime of being in the wrong place, "adopting" brown children, and holding people in concentration camps -- are creating a tomorrow of relentless hatred and disruption.  Christianity has been guilty of insisting on conformity, the same uniformity, when we know that humans and other living things are infinitely various on many levels as documented by "omics," meaning all the intricate networks of reciprocating relationships that are active in a body, not just the  genome and epigenome.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_omics_topics_in_biology

At the same time, the behavior of long-time politicians has taken inexplicable and contradictory turns -- documented by video as never possible before -- so impossible to account for that people even doubt bribes and threats explain the reversal, instead beginning to suggest the equivalent of something in the water, drugging or infecting.

The following links are to life-preserving forces among people.  They are alive, growing and effective.  But we don't see much about them on Twitter.  Yet they are becoming the equivalent of "religion" with various institutions and networks.  People talk about "the Green New Deal."  That's only part of it.  To quote Ausubel's speech:  "Instead what’s rising up is the return of the repressed. Everyone who has been othered, marginalized and deleted. The poor. Working people. Women. People of color. Indigenous Peoples. Immigrants. LGBTQ people. Young people. The last shall be first after all."  The whole planet will flip. We hope.

Following is a series of links to people who are terriforming the way humans participate in the earth because they are part of it.  They say "caretaking" but that's not quite right.  They are joining it, part of it, being in it and therefore being changed as much as changing.  (I include the whole address in case the link gets broken somehow.)

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/11/this-report-shows-how-climate-change-will-affect-every-child-its-authors-hope-congress-will-listen/

https://bioneers.org/kenny-ausubel-end-of-prehistory-video-zstf1911/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=bioneers&utm_content=Kenny%20Ausubel:%20The%20End%20of%20Prehistory%20-%20Bioneers

https://bioneers.org/indigenous-renaissance-julian-brave-noisecat-zstf1911/

When Alcatraz was occupied, Vicki Santana, Blackfeet early lawyer, was there.  Saturday, November 23, 2019

https://www.nature.com/immersive/d42859-019-00121-0/index.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=organic&utm_campaign=NGMT_2_SJH_Nature

My own progression has not been through commitment to one community of humans, though there are several specific groups that I've been part of and have been part of me.  Some tried to claim me as theirs alone but my drive has been down deep through all groups to the bedrock, the existential level that underlies all human life and even on through the bedrock.  I've said geology is next to theology.  There is no god.  There is a planet and the surface on which we live plus its molten heart.  I see them as holy.

This last link is to Terry Tempest Williams and it is an essay rather than a video talk, which is fitting because it's about a writing class.  Wyoming is a little tougher than Montana, arguably, but this is closer to the way I'm thinking.  I  work alone; I don't leave the house.  My experience now is mostly secondhand and remembered.  I say,  "I alone escaped to tell you."

https://bioneers.org/the-council-of-pronghorn-ze0z1910/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=bioneers&utm_content=The%20Council%20of%20Pronghorn:%20Terry%20Tempest%20Williams%20Honors%20the%20Silent%20Witnesses%20to%20Fracking%20-%20Bioneers

These people are demonstrating another thing  I say sometimes:  "Witness and testify."  In this case it is the Pronghorns who must witness, even as they stand dying, caught in barbed wire.  It is the writers who must testify about what it's like to terrorform Earth into a murdering pit for the sake of profit.  I'll end this a bit short.  Go read this essay.  And at the Winter Equinox, listen to the Paul Winter Consort in the Cathedral of St.John the Divine (PBS if you can't travel there), and think of the Council of the Pronghorn.

GET OUT OF YOURSELF

This is a critique of my notion that what I'm proposing is a new developing "religion" that has a different idea of what is sacred and what are rights.  The seed of this idea has been around ever since some renegade insisted on doing things his own way, resisting the group.  But now it is given a new power because of the realization that human limits imposed by what we can sense and what we can make into the individual brain patterns each person makes into "reality" from his or her experience.  

SCIENCE can be considered one way of approaching what actually exists in much the same way as "religion", but says all truth is provisional.  We cannot predict what we will discover next and how it will change our picture of the world.  Yet this is what "religions" propose, because even high Buddhism has some kind of operating premise that it recommends to humans. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/josh-hawleys-striking-critique-of-american-life/ 

This quote is from the recent article linked.  



The critique is sometimes framed as "solipsism" or "narcissism" or "being in a bubble."  This version brings in "market worship and cultural deconstruction."  Yet he wants to bring people together and ground them in their communities through labor unions.  This assumes a boxed kind of reality depending on employers and employees. 

Prometheus was a kind of Pre-Jesus who gave humans control of fire and all the benefits from its use.  For that act, he was hardly "unmoored."  Instead he was chained to a rock while an eagle perpetually ate his liver.  Maybe that's the state of modern America.  But metaphors have limits, even the catchy ones we use to defend what we want to do anyway, like save ourselves and not our enemies.

Alongside the political thrashing that keeps making holes in our lives, a competing disaster tries for our attention, one that cannot be affected by individuals.  Planetary climate disaster is interfering with our ability to produce food, an ability is that is so distant from many people as to be invisible.  Not only are drought, storm, floods, uncontrollable fire, disease, and high temperatures preventing crops and livestock, but also the people who have the expertise and desire to know how to farm are being destroyed.  This economic disaster undercuts infrastructure and compensation -- it is too widespread to save millions of people.  In the past the world's population has been cut in half.  In the future there may be a much smaller percentage surviving, if any. 

Skyscrapers will be of no use. Fish will more important than hydroelectric dams.  The first thing to fail may be our power grid and our satellite web.  No one so far has even been able to provide dependable voting machines.  Forming local institutions and protecting local identities must take second place.  A new "religion" must be planetary.

We thought GPS and NatSav had replaced maps, but then the magnetic north pole moved (it's done that repeatedly, which we forgot) and everything had to be recalibrated.  We know the importance of safe water for humans but whole populations, including American indigenous reserves, have none.  The planet, indeed "reality", does not respond to desire or tragedy or any human moral and emotional context.  The universe does not care about any particular life form or that mode of creation.  It simply exists and we can adapt to it or die.

Blood Quantum Entanglement posting on Twitter says:  "Reminder that electric vehicles run off your extant grid.  Which means Teslas arent fed by Energon cubes or Tesseract energy. They're coal-powered in a really inefficient, roundabout manner."  Not enough.  Not enough.

"This is a case of what Professor Thomas-Homer Dixon, University Research Chair in the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment, describes as “synchronous failure”—when multiple, interconnected stressors amplify over time before triggering self-reinforcing feedback loops which result in them all failing at the same time. In his book, "The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization," he explains how the resulting convergence of crises overwhelms disparate political, economic and administrative functions, which are not designed for such complex events."

Some of the elements of the "perfect storm" are too new to be properly understood, like radioactivity or super germs or human dynamics like selling addictions with lollipop flavors.  The perfect storm is too complex and unpredicted to be addressed by individuals but every individual could help think about it, or even make preparations -- which will not be bomb shelters.  A host of dystopic films have shown us how much we will depend on other people.

Not nearly enough attention has been paid to Porges' understanding that we are hopefully evolving towards understanding each other.  I mean, other people have spoken of the ideal and made an attempt to describe what is shared and yet unique, but no one pointed out the mechanism of human empathy in terms of neural function, actual physical interaction that underlies the virtual unity of all humans through straightforward regard.

It begins to be clear that people are at different stages of evolution: some have not even understood that what they know about the world is limited.  They believe that their own "axis mundi" is the universal and that everyone would like to be them, in fact, is simply a failed version of them.  They assume that like the people who developed the theory of "homesteading", all land is interchangeable, measurable and fertile.  But it isn't.  

The food that is the basis of survival is different in different places and sometimes simply not there. Ask Lewis and Clark who nearly starved to death when crossing the Rocky Mountain cordillera, more complex and wide than they could have suspected.  They had run out of the Peoples who had sustained them everywhere else. 

Darkness engulfs the planet for half of every revolution of the planet.  As we enter a period of intolerable heat and sun-energy driven storm, night might be the only relief and renewal we get.  The symbolisms of the past may swap places. We may become eager to see sundown.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

In all the onslaught of life today, there are two points of relationship.  One is attachment, whom or what do you care about.  The other is presentation, who you say you are, your "role".  This bit of thought is about how a change in "religion" from "Christian" to whatever it is we can believe in, now that science challenges the old three-level world with new technology perceiving a nearly unbelievable world.  The shift is so deep that it's hard to think about, much less believe.  Who are we now?  It's about preservation.

"Self-presentation is behavior that attempts to convey some information about oneself or some image of oneself to other people. It denotes a class of motivations in human behavior. These motivations are in part stable dispositions of individuals but they depend on situational factors to elicit them."  (Baumeister, Springer)

"Goffman puts forth a theory of social interaction that he refers to as the dramaturgical model of social life. According to Goffman, social interaction may be likened to a theater, and people in everyday life to actors on a stage, each playing a variety of roles."  (Thoughtco.com)

Prosperity-based morality, which took strong hold among Americans after WWII because of the belief that we had won and therefore were best/strongest/deserving, has split presentation into two streams.  One is concern to present oneself in a way that would please people with power, so a person can get ahead.  But the other is "authenticity" and opposition to any pretence, meant to build trust for people whose achievement depends on being believed and respected, regardless of income.  

The split between how one presents and the motives for doing it introduces separation between motives and appearance.  People may at heart be quite different than the way they appear.  People are capable of creating "containers" in their identities that limit and defend what they share with certain others.  This is similar to the idea of "dissociation" into several identities.  We always do this somewhat, presenting different aspects of ourselves.  One of the early splits is between the way a child is at home and the way the child behaves at school.

But also, particularly in this time period, teachers and parents want their children to be "great," achievers, money-makers, who can pull the whole family into higher status and more money.  The adult urge children on, sometimes pressuring them so much as to break and deform them. Non-conforming or defiant children might be ejected.  Families can fall apart.

Christian religious institutions of the time supported several national cultural ideas that were relevant to war and are still alive fifty years later, esp among old white men, conservatives.  One is the idea of the Great Man, someone of such superior and prevailing intelligence and strength that women esp. love and support him, while men try to be like him, a military general or his underground version, the Godfather.  The other is the "cult" identified by Philip Wylie as that of the adored and adoring mother, who becomes the faithful and healing wife .  These were constructs, interlocking.  For many decades I believed them absolutely  and in this small town, they still pattern life.  If the patterns work, they are believed to create prosperity as described in many obituaries of long-time survivors.

In a new vision of the structure of the world, scientifically based on the complex interactions of infinitesimal bits of energy and molecules, we fear that the old intensity of families created by passion and dedication, idealism and sacrifice as modeled in the Bible, will fall away and leave us in social quicksand.  it's the same fear that predicted if God were not real and able to tell us what is right or wrong, then the evil of the world will have no restraints and people will do anything they please, no matter how evil.  

But God has been "dead" for quite a while and most people still fail to steal, use violence, cheat each other.  Because the needed order of society demands that.  Ironically, it is the people who claim their virtue lies in their bankbook, who also claim to love their Mommies and that their Fathers are Great Men, who disregard the rules of order, replacing them with sentiment.

Coming to Browning as a teacher, I attached to a Great Man instead of becoming a Magic Mother to students.  I left the mother trope, I thought, only to be challenged by a motherless family who badly needed skills I didn't have, and rivalry with a Great Man's cherishing mother.  I thought I was riding shotgun on a stagecoach to success.  Not.

So then I was an animal control officer, a lone peace maker, who became attached to a new trail boss.  Jumping out of that, I went for holding the reins of a religious community and found I didn't like it.  Now I just want to find a new religious trope to understand.  I'm doing that now.

The Sixties for almost everyone was a presentation, a performance, a melodrama.  We were dancing on the edge of the precipice but that's the way the reservation was -- still is.  "Indians" have always been understood as presentations with little concern from outsiders for their interior life.  The theatre department students were dramatic, risking, watching themselves live, but because they were mostly white university students, their interior lives were a preoccupying engine of control and creation.  When I was out in a uniform, that was the only aspect seen when I showed up in a yard.  

The UU congregations called for performance at the highest level of all, both for oneself and others, but seminary education gave me new powerful tools. Others are also struggling with these issues.  For instance, the anthropologists:  https://culanth.org/fieldsights/reimagining-the-annual-meeting-for-an-era-of-radical-climate-change

"This is a conference wrestling with how to do what is best for everyone everywhere."  Climate is and has always been one of the keys to survival.

Chris Barker and Sarah Kendsior have been sharp commentators on the disintegrating political world under these pressures.   Kendzior remarks: 

"The worst thing about the Dark Ages was that people insisted they were actually in an Age of Light." https://twitter.com/rimrockstudio/status/1197734475397881856…

Barker replies:  "It's like we've found ourselves in a modern Dark Age, ironically ushered in by blinding, infinite information at our fingertips."  It feels highly personal, this matter of survival.

A song, "Quantum Tangle" pulls in love, a form of attachment even in the dark when presentation might fail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=159&v=oM_HoQyc2fk&feature=emb_logo

IT'S ALL CODE: SOS

Socionomic legal attachments.  Here's a starter story. This thought sequence is zero-sum, starting from scratch, so it will take a few days to work through. It's much harder than simply opposing Christianity and calling atheism "new."

Someone expressed to me that they were shocked, SHOCKED, that Thomas Jefferson "slept" with a slave and had children with her that remained enslaved for many years.  My response was that after noting that the slave Jefferson slept with was a half-sister to his first "all-white" wife, both having the same father, and remembering that Jefferson promised his first wife that he would not marry again, I speculated that marriage and slavery were not legally that different -- at least in that time period.  Then my conversant was REALLY shocked.  In her mind each woman inhabited a separate bubble of conventions, attributes and status.  She didn't think about "attachment" in either case. So here are two people making attachment arrangements that accommodate several kinds of systems and identities, but we don't know how each one or the others around them at the time "feel" about it.  Or how to feel about it now.

All living things are phenomena arising from the interaction of a DNA "code" that is electromagnetochemical circumstances emerging out of the environment they are in.  Human beings are an expression of an evolved code that developed over many millennia from microbes through vertebrates, then reptiles, and next mammals.  We cannot read that code except through highly technical instruments or through our own cellular organs of detection, i.e. the senses.  Much of it is unconscious.  What is derived by the senses from the raw code and then sorted by the brain into "consciousness" is where we get our "idea" of who we are, our identity, our attachments.

This matrix comes from the environment, so if the environment doesn't contain something, it is not perceived, not sorted, not incorporated, doesn't exist.  There is always unknown, dark matter.  In a sense this is a "virtual" mind-only version of the world.  "Flat earthers" will not accept it.  You can't see it from outer space as with the planet to prove it is a sphere.  This idea of "what a human is" sounds as preposterous as it did the first time I heard about atoms and was told a chair was little vibrating bits of nothingness that only leave tracks, not images.  But it is the best fact-gathering premise we can develop with all our instruments.

So the code determines where we come from (birth) and where we are headed (death) but all that stuff in the middle is managed from internal code pushing against and drawing from the environment, whatever it offers.  Rivaling in unbelievability all the other institutional religious ideas, it is believed by scientists who try to use virtual ideas to get at something provable with facts, which -- in the end-- may not be very factual in our ordinary sense.

Nerves, muscles and sense organs may use atoms/
molecules to operate, but that's sure not how we think of flesh.  One human with almost no environment, particularly human society, is in a state of torture, freefloating, formless.  Solitary confinement, though the lucky carry with them a brainful of ideas, memories, and systems whether math or words or songs.  These are virtual, but they can save a person's sanity even when in society.  They are a big part of identity and attachment to the world.

In the beginning these are so vital that a baby who has no backlog of experience to use and who is not stroked, cuddled, fed, and rocked, told stories and presented with other humans, is very much subject to death or at least "failure to thrive" which is a medical term when no direct cause is identified.  "Mirasmus" if you need a fancy word.

The first attachment is the umbilicus that connects to the mother's uterus wall. For nine months the mother is meant to be the environment to the new human being and what she does makes a crucial difference in how that premised code-result may turn out, esp. in the early weeks when she has no idea that she has been inseminated.

In conventional prosperous US society, the mother is embraced and protected by a partner, not necessarily a male and not necessarily just one -- so long as it supports a wanted pregnancy.  In our modern terms, she also has the right to end the pregnancy if it has gone wrong or if she does not wish to accept the physical hardships and mental work, or maybe has no support.

The next attachment is to family which again is not necessarily biological, gender-assigned, legal, or even voluntary, though it is much better if -- like pregnancy -- it is wanted and supported.  So the mother is embraced by the partner, the three of them are embraced by the family, and ideally the family is embraced by the local people, who are in turn embraced by the formal entities of the society, which may have sub-societies embedded in it which will create complications for all humans involved.  Like Christianity, they will try to claim universality.

There is no universal religion.  The one imperative is survival.  Whatever supports survival becomes religious.  To create a society that causes people to choose not to survive -- rationally --  is evil. (Farmers or teenagers.)  To create a society that supports life it is necessary to have sufficient beauty, laughter, shelter, food, connection to others. music, and pleasure.  These are blessings.  We don't need them to survive but if we don't have them, who would want to?

The cultural and societal arrangements that once kept people alive were worthy "religions" until they died out.  Then they were history.  No one set of arrangements is permanent nor can it be because the world changes all the time.  The great advantage of code-based life is that beyond the basic code provisions of creating and maintaining creature fleshly life, many variations and reconfigurations mean that there is generally a margin of oddball people alive to design a new system and sometimes they prevail or are renewed.  We may be close to that point now.  We've been there before.  We worry about it quite a lot.  

Many, including myself, do not feel confident enough to have children, but I have survived much longer than I expected.  Much longer than some of my ancestors. My greatest reward for staying alive is now the code of writing, not necessarily novels or poetry or any other genre, but the great pleasure of weaving the words that explore the darkness of modern life.

https://aeon.co/videos/evolution-is-not-only-about-competition-the-cellular-origins-of-a-very-big-idea

WHAT ARE YOU ATTACHED TO?

Attachment is the really tough issue for me.  When I went off to seminary, I thought I'd be learning how to be remote, rational, and rather chilly, but protective and thoughtful. In my own interest as well as others'. Too many people wanted to be my "friend" for their own goals, hoping to use my energy and ideas without attribution.  Not all were men.  The management in city government was largely lesbian.  (I am not, but I discover that Montana jeans and cowboy shirts on women translate that way.)

In seminary I didn't find that the pulpit was a defence.  Instead I discovered a new source of attachment which I didn't share.  I mean, I was supposed to attach to people in the denomination, to leaders in the congregations, etc.  But instead I attached to a novelist professor, a bookstore, and Lake Michigan.  No one else did.

For others, the UU seminary, classmates, and Jimmy's tavern were the points of attachment.  Alas, few attached to the UU faculty.  Today the seminary building has changed hands, the classmates are retiring, and Jimmy's has been closed for years.  But the former seminarians organized a newsletter to keep in touch.  https://uurmapa.org/publications/  This is the publication of the retired UUMA ministers, people who love and support each other.  Enviably!  In this instance including gays but not other marginal groups so much. I mean, there just aren't many brown or black peope and, of course, no American Indians.  Attachment wants to be specific and familiar.  It is also expensive to participate physically with a national organization because it is based on travel across the continent, a great middle-class pleasure and preoccupation even in retirement.

Attachment, which is a less romantic term than love, is -- like human beings -- almost entirely governed by the unconscious.  It is not a rational decision.  The unconscious is perfectly capable of evasion, rejection, and denial.  Rationally, this is lucky.  Getting attached too much or unwisely is not happy.  Attachment across distances can be a problem, though modern internet helps.  Written correspondence persists there.  Even the "frame of expression" between persons is possible on Skype.

For a minister standing in a pulpit once a week, inevitably those in the pews who have no taboo and who are open to impression will become attached to the minister.  Some, wanting more, will come for "counselling." Others will invite the Rev to dinner, maybe to a meal with the whole family as a kind of relative.  Some frankly called me sister. Older women thought of me as a daughter.

Attachment is a mammal mother characteristic, though some reptiles (turtles, snakes) can get conditioned by food.  To succeed, mammals must feed and clean their babies and the babies must not wander off.  That can be extended to petting from humans who are also mammals.  This attachment to mother can end when the babies are weaned, though some can form buddies into adulthood.  Sometimes the mechanism goes berzerk so the mother kills the babies, or males can interpret them as food and eat them.  In this cat colony of mine it took a while (and some swats) for the yearling tomcats to realize that kittens are not mice.

In our own human partnerships and colonies, it is too common for males to punish, torture and kill females, which is a deranged form of attachment.  Sometimes the children are "owned." The object of the violence is needed as much as the object of "love," a perversion of the same force.  In other animals attack also can mingle with sex, maybe a necessary prerequisite, mixing sources of arousal between antagonism and mating.  Cats screaming in coitus.

Maybe because of being subconscious, attachment is closely linked to sensory information.  It can be triggered if it brings back a past attachment.  Some valorized images seem instinctual, like the barest indication of a human face -- a circle with two eyes and a mouth -- that will get attention from an infant like potential attachment to a stuffed animal with button eyes and an embroidered nose.  Animals can attach across species, nurturing and protecting even species that would be more naturally killed as prey, a lion cuddling an antelope.  Size mismatches like a cat with a horse make us smile. 

Curiosity is another potential characteristic of attachment and can lead to the impulse to control.  We want to know the true nature of those we love. If we are disappointed by what we find, we feel the impulse to stigmatize, to limit, and to destroy.  Maybe like taking something apart to see how it works.  The Biblical translater's euphemism for fucking is knowing.  "Trannie deaths" happen.

Our craze about celebrities derives in part from our conviction that feeling this attachment will cause their characteristics and good will to somehow come into us.  This is "identifying" in the sense of trying to capture the admired person's being, almost reinforcing one's own persona.  But also, particularly as youngsters, we identify with family members, teachers, and other close authority figures in hopes of being like them.  We might not make good choices of whom to follow and may not have anyone available.  Attachment mixes with entitlement to intimacy.

Sorting out rational versus unconscious attachments, or even conscious versus unconscious, is the kind of thing one does with a psychotherapist or when writing. 

A key element is the culture, which will valorize and legalize some things but forcefully suppress others.  Consider China, which clings to authority and uniformity, punishing diversity and ignoring what those in the West would consider justice.  I have never heard of a Chinese analyst, though they make very good internists, considering rationally all aspects of their patients.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_Attachment_Disorder  If you look at the wiki for attachment, you'll find an analytical, rational, qualified, checklist description of kinds, degrees, treatments, causes.  Very rational and reconciled.  This is useless in confronting the unconscious aspects of attachment, which can only be suspected through dreams and other arts created naively -- that is, without planning them rationally.  The unconscious can be felt or suspected and sometimes betrayed by emotional response, like desire, but putting it in a manuscript of diagnosis or insurance compensation is a construct, not a reality.  

Maybe when dealing with a subconscious there IS no reality, but only an indication of a constructed brain diagram of the world. Then the "four kinds of attachment have some usefulness.  Each has results in the adult who learns it in early years.

The four child/adult attachment styles are:

• Secure – autonomous;
• Avoidant – dismissing;
• Anxious – preoccupied; and.
• Disorganized – unresolved.

Much of this post is preparation for future ideas about a new way of thinking.  Nothing can be measured by instruments so far. I mean, it's not possible to see this sort of thing in an chemo-assay or MRI.  We have to go by behavior and feelings.  The rest is dark.

RECONFIGURING THE UNIVERSE

The reference here is -- I think -- to Barr's recent speech at the Federalist Society's 2019 National Lawyers Convention.  (I've lost the post link.)  It's not quoted directly but you can read it at this link.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-p-barr-delivers-19th-annual-barbara-k-olson-memorial-lecture

Barr goes to a different point of origin in claiming a human identity, one authorized by "nature," claiming that "nature" is sacred, the real source of theology.  This is a persistent strand of Western thought that defines "nature" in a specific way, quite Hobbsian:  Survival of the fittest, primacy of humans and exaltation in nature go together as a strong idea in Germany and in white America.  Survival in that frame is only meant for the best people, which are naturally them.  Ayn Rand in the woods. In contrast, Native Americans do not see nature as different from themselves -- they feel continuous and embedded.  

The "white" point of view believes that humans are naturally the peak, the goal of either evolution or creation, while all other aspects of nature are simply resources.  It enforces the idea of separation/superiority from animal brutish nature, even as nature is admired as an icon and exploited as an entitlement.  The idea underlay the invasion and forced submission of all "natural" places, like America, all "natural" people like native Americans and Africans.  Things that had bad consequences for humans, like disease, were considered unnatural.

The commentor says, "For Barr, "natural" civil society is theological. God—*his* version—is disguised as Nature. Religious ends are disguised as "natural" teleology. A religious vision of humanity becomes "human nature".

For Barr, "natural" civil society is theological. God—*his* version—is disguised as Nature. Religious ends are disguised as "natural" teleology. A religious vision of humanity becomes "human nature".

Josh Blackman, a conservative Texas lawyer who likes to address the Supreme Court on matters like gun control, interrupts to address these observations thus:

"Conservatives do not seek earthly paradise. We are preserving over the long run freedom and order for healthy development of natural civil society and individaul [sic] human flourishing. We test the propriety and wisdom under a rule of law standard."

The first speaker continues:  "It's not just Barr who does this. He comes from a long, long tradition of sophistic reasoners who try to shoehorn theological presuppositions into the nominally secular language of nature and naturalness, using arcane terminological distinctions to make it seem legit."

"Nor is this restricted to religious reasoning. Secular ideologues have also tried to secure quasi-theological authority for their values by locating their authority in Nature and Naturalness—which are haphazardly conflated with "reason," "essence," "telos," "purpose," and "good."

This view of nature has become limited and even offensive to me.  It is necessary to distinguish between this Emersonian/Thoreauvian view of nature which confirmed to the early Unitarians that they were "better" because they loved nature so much, citing the snowfall outside the sanctuary window as more sacred than communion or sermon.  It is a justification of theologized superiority, that they are the only ones sensitive enough to look at falling snow and see God.  

They recognize the mysterium et tremendum and are properly made humble, but still stay stuck in the idea that they matter, that their reaction gives them entitlement that they should use to impress others.  This is my heresy: that we are all participants but neither unique nor more than momentary.  It won't make me any friends among Transcendentalists, but it will leave me open to new knowledge and the conviction that before birth and after death and in the middle between, I am part of everything.  Everything.  Infinitesimal as each of us is, we all matter.

Going hiking is not the same as "religion", which in our times is often an historical, ethnic, socioeconomic institution not very well applied to everyone.  It's a mistake to think that I'm writing about "religion", which is a big jumble of stuff included in familiar institutions.   I don't think about institutional religion, not even Buddhism.  

I think about holiness and how a human skin-bag of complex one-celled entities -- cooperating electrochemically -- can create a person claiming an identity, can somehow feel the cellular connections as a submergence in unity.  This ethic and principle says that everything is part of everything else and therefore significant and deserving of moral protection.

Science agrees with this. But it is a category of thought that approaches becoming the kind of institution that is religious.  The difference is that scientific knowledge is always provisional -- subject to future research -- defines its method and is conscious that human "truth" is always limited.  Religion commonly wants to contradict those aspects.

Lately attention has turned to the idea of "consciousness" which is, as far as we know, unique to humans, more distinguishing than opposable thumbs and the source of our ability to use the scientific method, critiquing and improving our way of thinking.  We can experience our identity, name it,  change it.  Consciousness, through its massive foundation in unconsciousness, gives us the ability to "feel", which appears to be present in all mammals, part of their survival except that for them it is not reflective.  The fox does not reflect on its own wiliness.  It just grabs a chicken.

"Wild" can also apply not just to what is uncontrolled so far, but to the uncontrollable, that which is beyond our ability to know it either through our senses or through thought or emotion.  The unconscious is as wild as the cosmos.  It exceeds us, evades us.  This idea may make me welcome to the younglings, who are accustomed to feeling the edge of perception.  Words are not so wild as the concepts beneath them that are without grammar and possibly impossible to share without the arts.  It is the Dark.