PATTERNS AND PUZZLES AND JUST RIFFING

Techie stereotype

While friends of mine are wrestling with the Medium.com abyss between the platform-developing techies dominated by young California “Asians” -- maybe we could call them Confucians, since they revere authority, success, and doing what was always done -- and the wildly Celtic hairy writers who wish only self-determination and experiment (maybe we could consider them pagans or even barbarians), the rest of us who can spare time for thinking -- though that’s a little dangerous when driving to work -- would like to consider the complex and slippery category called religion.  It’s not unlike “writing” as a category.  One of those “humanities” things that get in the way.

The first thing to get a grip on is that the terms of being human have changed -- RADICALLY.  “Radical” means going to the roots, which means in this case “survival.”  So -- for the Blackfeet in early days, that meant tribal loyalty at the family level (including the in-laws, rather guardedly) to handle aggression, and harmony with nature, the source of food and shelter.  For some grizzled old wolfer with his bottle of strychnine, it meant obsession with the wolves and a willingness and ability to do whatever was needed: a situational lack of conscience or connection, enabled by the oblivion of alcohol, meth of the time.  The pattern remains in some places so it must be effective if you don’t mind having a short life.  Maybe the terms have not changed so much after all.

Contemporary wolfer

What change there is comes through technology that gives us access to the unseen, the inhuman world in all its complexity and seething connections -- star nurseries and gut biomes -- and its challenge to prove who we are.  The Abrahamic religions, which originated in the same place on the planet as our contemporary “sand wars,” are belligerent and unforgiving.  But Jesus, like Buddha, counseled compassion.  (His God went on being unforgiving.)  The question is compassion “for whom” and Jesus’ answer was “everyone.”  I’m not sure he included beetles or supernovas.  I'm not sure Paul agreed.

Giving up all this speculative fantasy, which is a Celtic sort of affliction of mine probably related to not drinking and which leads me into a kind of speculative ruthlessness (damned Puritans), I’ll go to H. Richard Niebuhr who simply looked at the “is-ness” of the American world, its version of organized religion.  The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1929) suggests that people stick together when they understand each other and that is closely related to their economic success.  Most aware people understand that Anglican/Episcopalians are high-income, high-education, people who still shelter Brit class-categories.  Pentecostals tend to be marginal, low-income suffering people who can be ecstatic.  Then there were the denominations considered “mainstream” which were related to the values of the bourgeois shopkeepers: self-controlled, thrifty, clean, sexual only to the extent necessary to create children and consumers.

These denominations are sort of reductions of the 11th century revolutions of the major religions called “axial”, the Big Three:  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam which come out of each other over time.  Karen Armstrong spent a lot of time thinking and researching about these three monotheisms in terms of ideas, and had to consider Hinduism and Buddhism as alternatives defined as being -- um -- Axial-like in terms of importance, mostly indicated by size.  There have always been smaller groups, sort of ethnic or alternative or ecologically supported groups.  

To most people “religion” is all these organizations and bureaucracies, because as soon as there is enough population density, things have to get bureaucratic and written down, which means they are pinned in place, more or less.  Forget what these various groups say they believe.  That’s embroidery.  Most of them believe in survival and, if the situation allows, prosperity.  Prosperity comes from power.  With enough of it comes corruption and decay, ineffectiveness.  This is where institutional religion is today, mostly.  Reform is no longer idealism: it is survival.  And the prosperity may be missing.

I subscribe to religion newsletters (not as many as science newsletters) and have been reflecting on two situations:  Pope Francis who comes in to an organizationally petrified institution whose power and nature developed in Karen Armstrong’s Axial religion time (11th century) and is now forced to question the terms, like money-dependent survival.  And then, curiously, the growth of the Southern Baptists (example next door to me) which was based on the importance of conversion and strong (Confucian) rules of behavior.  The shocker is that they sent out thousands of missionaries through the planet but that the potential “saved” people are now busy with their smart phones creating micro-banks.  Worse, the reward on earth the missionaries were supposed to receive (pensions and a Fifties sort of old age peacefully dominating their lawns) was spent by the denominational leaders.  The estimate is that 80,000 jobless missionaries, some of them aged, are now wondering how they will survive.  I think some of them are counting on coming to Valier to revive the church next door, but their main supporters in this town have gone to Heaven, which one hopes has not spent their trust fund of Golden streets.

New understanding of the world, which is mostly science-based, does not define evil as “anything that departs from our norm” (for instance, binary gender assignments -- either male or female and only one of each can marry the other).  It says something far more radical:  gender assignments are arbitrary, sexual attraction and identity are fluid because they are an interaction between a physical/molecular creature and the ecologically organized universe.  Marriage is an economic arrangement.  Whatever it takes, including sequential multiple parenting.  One of today’s science newsletters says that tests of gender preference and identification in women show that women do not have desire only for the opposite sex.  Maybe it comes from cherishing and protecting babies, no matter what they're like.

Hefner is 89.

It remains to understand why “men” are so linked to power as synonymous with desire, sexual or otherwise.  (“Desire” being code for domination and control.)  And why are the markers of those who are “desirable” culturally connected to the small, blonde, weak, fascinating, and transient characteristics that some cultural commentators connect to ethnic history -- like the advent of “elfin” pale aristocratic Normans coming  among the low-class Saxons, blondes much preferred by Hugh Hefner until they are of voting age. 

Power becomes attributed to appearance, not just gender but color.  Satan is red and black: Celtic or African.  Other.  (I’m just riffing here -- not making claims.  It’s all unverified speculation.)  How many Catholic or Baptist missionaries went out to convert white people, unless they were really poor and clueless people who relied on superstition.   (Excluding the Abrahamic superstitions)  And forget that the Big Three religions were all Arab, though the Virgin Mary and Jesus had that blonde elfin look in European art.  Sort of glow-in-the-dark.

There’s an age-thing in here somewhere.  Confucius aged; Buddha did not.  An aged Jesus would be as startling as black or female Jesuses have been.  Judaism, which is the oldest of the organized Abrahamic religions, accepted and admired old age from early times.  Recent mainstream Protestant religious leaders in the pulpit (not the academy) have been young men who rolled up their sleeves to show their muscular forearms and challenged Satan to wrestle.  Now we are reduced to Billy Graham’s son writing a book that he purports was written by his century-old father to support the franchise, a family empire like our American political empires now under challenge by their own patriarchs. 

Fifty Shades of Pink.

As I think about it, some of these factors are highly relevant to Medium.com where the dominant style of writing seems to be female, young, blonde, sweet, elfin, and -- just below the surface -- hungry for money and power.  It’s not that the barbarians are crucified -- it’s just that they are pressed back into the forest where they won’t embarrass anyone.  Just riffing.  Just saying.  It’s all speculation and idle reflection.  But that’s writing!

Tomorrow I'll take on spirituality.  No facts.  Just riffing.  Whole different subject and it's NOT religion, which is bureaucracy and property.

BIG BLUE BALLOON

BEFORE:  The female ministers of the UUMA in the PNWD

Seattle, always ahead of the curve, welcomed female ministers because the men were smart, energetic, hard to threaten and fond of women both as a category and as individuals.  Then everything changed.  Look at this collection in about 1985: mostly young, pretty, and very funny with our bubble gum cigars and real brandy.  I have no photo of "after" because I left.  The new women in the smaller congregations are hefty, older, and into social justice.  SO entitled.

I made my own robe from 9 yards of blue taffeta.

I was going for a kind of 19th century look,

 except that in those days women wore hats in the pulpit.

Conventional clergy robes cost hundreds of dollars.  The black silk robe I borrowed from my supervising minister while doing my internship was old and fragile, so that the breaks in the fabric revealed how much lining and tailoring there was inside: very much like a high-end suit: layers, padding, basting.  At the time a lot of UU clergy were wearing unbleached cotton monk's cassocks with a rope belt.  Their stoles went for an ethnic look, maybe Mexican except not American Indian because that would be stealing their income and mocking their heritage. 

Women since have gone for a Supreme Court look: black robes with white ruffles at the bosom, fishus instead of dog collars or full-out ruffs.  The stole I finally made was black velvet with silver moon, crystal stars, and a blue metallic Earth.  Too theatrical, actually, but little kids liked it.  Little kids like me in general because I'm soft, rosy and wear glasses, which they try to snatch off.  (My glasses have sometimes cost $400.  Now I've found direct from China sources:  $35.)  But I could not be less prepared to be a Sunday School teacher -- or "Full-Span Religious Education Minister" as the job is now styled.  Professionals are out; moms are in.

My previous life strategy for protection, which was appearing funny and non-threatening, now came back to bite me.  People saw the Vicar of Dibley.  There was a female minister in Saskatoon who was like that:  overweight, complaining that she never got laid anymore, that people wouldn't invite her for dinner -- but she wasn't funny.  (I do NOT like BBC comedy anyway.)  I dislike the Vicar of Dibley.

The Vicar of Dibley -- note truncated cross.

Sinead O'Connor

I had in mind something more like this.  Irish.  Socially conscious.  It would help if I could sing.  Or lose weight.  About equally possible.  Anyway, I don't accept the idea of a deity as a lover.  It's only a step to "who's that huzzy in the pulpit?"  Anyway, no one in any congregation would accept a shaved head on a woman.

It took me even longer to realize what was under this fixation on child-like women clergy.  People want their female clergy to look prosperous, successful, in the pulpit because they are winners -- not losers.  They don't want to feel as though they're going to have to pull them along, take care of them.  It's supposed to go the other direction.  It's okay for a male clergy to be threadbare -- it means his mind is on higher things.  But a woman who is threadbare is an embarrassment, exp. since most of the congregation are usually female.

A minister is supposed to have power -- power trumps love, unless love IS power.  (It's not.)  The denomination "sold" female ministers -- suddenly there were a lot of late-life women who needed jobs because the seminaries had needed their tuition money -- by assuring the congregations that a minister could make the group grow and get richer.

UU's are generally prosperous.  This is because they tend to be in the denomination because they are educated, liberal, used to thinking and leading-- but don't like the ritual of Episcopalians.   Mostly this results in higher income.   They are the values of our culture.  The idea of making very little money means you're trying to be a nun.  So the idea of circuit-riding, living in a van, was not a contribution to the movement, a gift to the people -- it meant to them I couldn't do any better, couldn't get a proper church.  Only a few professors in Missoula actually said that.   I accused myself of it. 

Public school kids who struggle are always given the worst teachers and the kids who already excel get the really inspired people.  This makes no sense, but it is a pattern that surfaces over and over.  The other end of the spectrum might be the ghetto storefront congregations who turn their clergy out in splendid bespoke suits and plenty of bling.

In UU circles there is another element and that is persecution.  Not by UU clergy, but retaliatory for conservative and punitive clergy and priests of the past.  In one workshop experiment, a small group was asked to design and deliver a conventional Christian service.  In spite of cautionings not to indulge in mockery, it was soon full of vengeance -- pay-back.  So a non-threatening minister seems good.  But the suspicion doesn't go away.

The joke witch -- they provided the costume at Halloween.

Not a cougar -- a ridiculous tiger.

I turned forty in seminary.  There were two men who understood that by that time I was almost desperate to get back to Blackfeet Country.  One was Emil Gudmundson and the other was Russell Lockwood, both powerful prairie people.  David  Pohl, Director of Ministry, had been a gear jammer in Glacier Park.  He understood.  Alan Deale had been my own original church minister and he was at that point a powerful man, chair of the Fellowship Committee, a strong believer in whatever would grow the denomination.  

They did NOT think living in a van and circuit-riding was frivolous or a hair shirt.  They wouldn't have minded doing it themselves -- well, with a proper RV.  That's how the fellowship movement began in the first place.  Monroe Husbands went across the country and even up into Alaska barn-storming Unitarianism.  But these senior men worried that my social skills weren't up to it.  They were right.  On the other hand, that's why I could do it.  I didn't mind the solitude.

I DID think it would sort of challenge some of the men who walked into cushy jobs and stayed there, all comfy.  They WERE non-threatening, not inclined to rock the boat.   They dressed well, but always in good taste.  In 1982  when I graduated -- or at least left -- he grip of American stereotypes ("The Man Called Peter") was still strong.

The Role Model

I had several strategies for sleeping out in the van.  Sometimes I parked at someone's curb so I could use their facilities.  Sometimes I had no choice, like the time my radiator hose broke late at night on the main street of Great Falls.  I just went to bed right there -- the only problem was waking up early enough to feed the meter until I could find a mechanic.  Sometimes I went into wilderness.  The scariest time there was when I had a can of Spaghetti O's for supper and left the window cracked enough for a flying squirrel to squeeze in.  It badly wanted to take the Spaghetti O can back out with it and its efforts made a tremendous clatter.

The best times were when it wasn't too cold because I couldn't afford a true winter sleeping bag and so just piled on comforters.  I had a little heater and ran an extension cord out the wing window.  Most Montana businesses have an outdoor electrical connection so they can plug in their head-bolt heaters in winter.

I'd lie there flat -- I just fit over the axle, side to side,  and feel the planet turning.  There was a little pattern of holes by my pillow where there had been bolts for some kind of antenna. If there were any wind, it played a chord.  (That guy on the motorcycle in the photo above sold me the van and got into trouble for it because he gave me a big break while the boss was out of town.)

Solitude is not being alone.  It's more like merging with something enormous and symphonic.  No one ever asked me about it.  In fact, they've mostly forgotten about that crazy idea.  A new member from one of the fellowships I had served contacted me not long ago to ask if I could remember the name of that woman who used to drive around Montana preaching.  No one around there knew what it was.

MIDDLE CLASS CHILD ABUSE

Most representations of child abuse (and to some extent domestic violence) tend to be portrayed in terms of drug-fueled degenerates or else debauchery among privileged high status power players.  There’s little discussion about ordinary respectable-seeming hard-working middle-class people and what makes them either use physical punishment inappropriately or sexually abuse children, their own or those of others, without ever admitting to themselves or others that they are doing something wrong.  

(I want to make a side-remark that a large part of the criminal under-class has all the earmarks of the respectable middle class: hierarchies, careful management, enforcement of standards, prosperity -- they’re just antisocial standards that support criminal activity by a kind of in-group.  Not all of it is as dramatic as a TV show, and in fact, flying beneath the radar is one of their values.  The crimes may be entirely on paper, but -- in terms of the larger culture -- as destructive as shooting people.  Within the smaller self-contained group, this is simply what "our" people do.  No guilt.)

Much of what supports and even encourages child abuse is old-fashioned ideas about discipline.  I remember complaining to the parent of an unmanageable boy.  The father sighed and said,  “All right, I’ll beat him again, but I don’t think it will do any good.”  It didn’t.  And I had never suggested such a thing.  But clearly the father thought he was obligated to do his part and had no argument against it.  This was a white family, nothing remarkable about them.

Prison punishment, 1912

High School punishment, 1950's  (a reenactment at the time)

Contemporary sharia law

Calvinist religion put much emphasis on punishment, ultimately God putting individuals into eternal burning hell.  In those days power was raw and torture was considered effective.  Diluted versions of those assumptions hang on in our own ordinary government and -- secretly -- in full intensity.  The ancient grisly practices persist in all their intensity in individuals and the Middle East.  I will point out that in Africa the present tin god authorities were taught by the overseers of Empire, right down to amputation of hands and feet.  (Look up Leopold II of Belgium).   In unsophisticated parts of the world, some people confuse intense religious devotion with a kind of merging with God, which means trouble for the “children of God.”  People still say "Spare the rod and spoil the child" and really mean it.

"Board of Education"

In my own family my humanist father was a spanker -- I’ve explained that this was related to pre-frontal cortex trauma that let anger get out of control -- but my mother used a switch on my bare legs hard enough to make stripes.  My cousins on both sides deny any such thing and I never witnessed any of them “getting a licking,” but I don’t think my parents ever punished us in front of family or neighbors.  My parent generation was moving “up” from the farms, as were the majority of people as the cities of today formed.  They were used to managing animals by using a switch or whip.  Children can seem pretty much like little animals.  I can’t remember anyone in the decades after WWII getting upset about corporal punishment.  Schools all had wooden paddles.

In rural and small town settings, a “front” of respectability is key to success to the point that one of the most destructive byproducts of any sort of deviation from the accepted code (alcohol, gambling, promiscuity) is the enforcement of secrecy, esp. on the children.  Given serious problems, family members will be separated from outsiders.  Even in country days, even with the reluctance of small community institutions (school, cops, government, church) to get involved, kids could let information escape that would punish the adults.   My country cousins were not allowed to tell how much acreage or how many cows they had.   Business is a poker game.

The counter-advantage of those places was that relatives could be a buffer who intervened for children in a quiet way, an advantage lost in the anonymity and mobility of the city.  No one would even necessarily know how many family members there were, so a missing kid might go unnoticed.  The more force is used to keep secrets, the more secrets there are to be kept.  The more hard work is needed for survival, let alone upward mobility, the more stress there is.

In places where men do hard life-threatening work, alcohol is often the buffer that makes their life bearable.  Strangely, littering with the empty cans is more frowned on than when, how much, and where they were emptied.  Drinking can be seen as an entitlement of management, a tool for deal-making by administrators and legislators, a bonding mechanism among CEO’s.  Alcohol is entwined with athletics as a source of identity and being “number one.”  Both beer drinkers and wine drinkers indulge in beverage snobbery.  Every movie shows big shots sipping whiskey from cut crystal glasses or lovers holding champagne flutes.  Putting an age threshold on drinking has made it a potent symbol of adulthood.

Now to add the element of sex.  It is generally agreed that much sexual abuse is not about the act of coitus, but in the imposing of authority, the assumption of privilege, a defense against the perp’s own weakness, frustration. and self-hatred.  Sex is the core because it is violation of intimacy, the most protected of our inner selves, replacing it with ownership, stealing our souls from us.  Of course, the perp gets nothing.  Not even an illusion.  Which is why he returns.  Alcohol is a way to undermine resistance if you don't have access to date-rape drugs.

Sex has been a highly tabooed aspect of life, controlled by the notion of marriage which muddles entitlement with ownership while pretending it's about love.  Few taboos still remain unexploited by the media.  Men with an uncertain sense of their own life will be drawn to transgression, even within their own family.  In fact, the incest taboo may add an extra kick rather than a restraint, the smugly risky feeling that they can get away with it.  A little child who can’t yet talk won’t tell.  What damage can it do?  No marks on the body.  Deep marks on the formation of the child from inside.  And economic motivation for everyone to look the other way because it is dad who pays the bills.

Violence even to the point of death and sexual misuse are biologically deep in humans (those apes), and no culture yet has succeeded in controlling the forces entirely, though we try in many different ways.  Probably the real maximum of protection is equal economic safety, which is not possible on a planet swept by drought, hail, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, catastrophic fire, and so on.  We have not solved the problem of territory- or identity-based wars. 

So what are we to do?  If we are trying to develop a “better” civilization, then clearly secrecy and neglect are not the answer.  They only perpetuate what we’re trying to get rid of.  As we grow more able to understand and address the individual human brain, more possibilities for healing and protecting develop in our groups.  Institutions are changing in response to what science tells us about the cosmos, the planet, the other life here including microbes.  Less force, more strategy, better patterns for the creation and care of children.

The persistence of species is based on the conservation of behaviors and ideas that help humans survive as both individuals and groups.  We can make pretty good guesses about what will be “conserved” but we may be wrong.  It may be that those who are willing to get drunk, rape children, set cities aflame, kill, cheat and steal, will be the ones who survive.   That’s sometimes the way it’s been so far.  Roll the dice.  Before we run out of air and the oceans become vinegar. Otherwise, why survive?