CHILDSCAPE

The Bullshoe Sisters: a force for education

when they grew up.

One of my chief pleasures and a driving reason for me to read is finding new ways to look at old things.  This is not widely shared around here.  People like to find the BP (“best practice” which is an interesting phrase linked to technologies, including health care and enforced by insurance) and then stick with it, even though new discoveries and goals develop.

Writing about historical indigenous people is often a matter of rehearsing the same old scripts and assumptions, some of them mistaken interpretations imposed by the oppressors of the times: missionaries, cavalry, railroad magnates, Euro adventurers and the like.  Even today the academics arrive with their heads full of romantic factoids which the local tribes are happy to exploit. 

So I’m pleased to be reading “Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory,” by Clive Gamble.  Gamble is English and thinks about the two major “revolutions” in the three million year history of hominid evolution: one is the sudden (in archeology years) explosion of creativity that created art, music, religion, language — the whole realm of metaphor that some believe is the real beginning of modern humans — the second is the development of agriculture and the relation to sedentary life.  (Not sitting down but settling in one place and building an environment that can be defined as containers, like houses.)

For instance, there is a lot of difference between a hearth and a fire.  A hearth is a place specially occupied by the fire, a “fire place,” which is related to crucibles, blacksmithing, and other technologies of metal that demand high heat over a short period of time.  This is different from the “fire place” that is used for cooking, even baking, because a camp fire can be improvised and baking can be done in a hole with a fire built on top of it, the way Blackfeet prepared camas roots.  People who do metallurgy are sedentary and repetitious.  People who only use fire as they travel are improvisers.  

This is one major difference between tribes.  The people of the Pacific Northwest lived in cedar plank long houses and built hearths, erected totem poles, created shell middens of considerable size.  The people of the prairie used technologies of tanning, cording, flintknapping, and left evidence of camps along streams where cottonwoods grew in predictable favored spots according to the seasons.  Since most of their materials were biodegradable, they are invisible to us now.  

Blackfeet kids at Heart Butte used to complain about getting more light-skinned as though it were yet another incursion of “pale faces,” but it was clear that they don’t go outside much these days.  This is windy country so it is a temptation to stay indoors by the TV, a kind of hearth, and they keep the light out for the sake of viewing screens.  In the days of lodge-dwelling, people were mostly outdoors, even maintaining a separate cooking and smoking fire outside the lodge.  They were good at rigging shade with pieces of tipi or leaned together leafy branches, but it was bright shade.  Photos that record skin ordinarily covered by clothing reveal much paler areas.  So having an “indoor hearth” has changed the people and what they do and what they think of themselves.  

Gamble talks about what he calls “scapes”, the environment one is aware of and uses, so there is a landscape of habit which for early Blackfeet would have meant trails more than “bushwhacking” which on the prairie would mean something more like “grass crushing,” the social landscape meaning how the people are distributed and connected, and the task scape which might mean hunting patterns or might refer to special sources of materials like the yellow clay used for paint.  He discusses the “childscape” as the territory and the pattern of knowing it through travel and work that shapes and limits the raising of children.  This is one of the uses of story which always includes the sky for Blackfeet children. 

When I was still teaching on the rez, I took a photo of the Rockies and used it to learn the horizon line of the peaks until I could “write” it like a cursive sentence.  I’d walk to the blackboard and “write” it or put it at the top of a page.  The kids always recognized it, but were surprised that it could be learned, which means that they had lost the map-drawing skills of their ancestors.  But there was a fascination with “white man’s maps” in Atlases and highway guides.  

Reciprocally, whites who come to the rez get very frustrated with the lack of street signs because people here (even whites) go by the social landscape and the task landscape, which are learned and repetitive, often anchored by landmarks like the location of community dumpsters.  People whose garbage is invisibly collected don’t register such objects or the logic of their location.

The Rockies at sunset

Anyway, white man’s maps are drawn as though from a satellite, looking from the top down. Indian maps, especially along the Rockies, are from the side and mark distinctively shaped peaks as well as the erosion valleys and canyons with uses.  The criteria for most things is experience — reacting to what one has learned through living with the sensory characteristics that translate to usefulness.  But other things known have been arrived at by analysis or implication, more often recorded as narrative than as abstract ideas.  

“Fittingness” becomes the criteria for something persisting unless it is an exceptional or "counter" practice or object that grabs the imagination.  The wheel was not invented by Blackfeet because it is mostly useless without roads, esp. in gumbo country where a “stone boat” — a wooden sled — or a travois can go places where a wheel would soon be bogged down.  In some ways glassified stone that could be knapped to an edge was more useful than metal.  But mirrors were fascinating, unique.

A childscape doesn’t just provide knowledge of materials and territories.  It teaches how to do things, how to learn, how to tolerate failure or even pain.  Missionaries and other Euro-taught and now-teaching people have pressed most rez kids NOT to rely on themselves but to ask for the “proper” way to do things.  They are punished if they do the wrong thing, which teaches them to do nothing without permission.  Guided by social opinion from the very beginning, they can be crippled by confusion and double-binds.  Pretty soon there is rebellion.

Since the Sixties, living territory has become even more treacherous because of political counterculture resistance to “best practices.”  In fact, the generation breaks introduced by new technologies and coalitions of same-aged kids — supported by music waves, the internet, and the media’s fondness for labeling — mean that kids don’t look to adults anymore but depend on each other, even when it comes to risky stuff like mind-altering substances, sex and reproduction, criminal matters, and precautions in a dangerous environment.  These are all part of the childscape, which patterns the child's thought into adulthood.

Gamble demonstrating how to butcher a sheep.

Clive Gamble is hard to read, partly because of anthropological neologisms for concepts that are uncommon and partly because of more classic jargon.   But far more than having to learn vocabulary, it is necessary to reframe one’s childlike from-the-outside perceptions -- as though “Other” people were dolls -- into the world-as-perceived-with-the-senses and the assumptions about them that are experience-based.  We are used to filtering, skimming, reducing to materials that can be marketed.  We are not used to being submerged in a landscape.  Sub- merged.  Land- scape.  Judging from computer games and videos, we want these experiences, but don't know we're IN them.

WHICH KNOWLEDGE DO YOU LOVE, PHILOSOPHER?

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

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

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

The Star Trek holodeck.

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

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

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

The striated muscles of an imaginary (virtual) being.

"Ganesh, is that you?"

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

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

A heart/lung casting made from the real organs.

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

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

Sampson brings down the temple while in it.

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

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

Blackfeet at the beginning of the 20th century

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

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

THE BEAUTIFUL FOREHEAD

Here’s the message of the “radical anthropologists” as simply as I can state it with my current level of understanding.

The enormously expanded knowledge about human fossils, the genome of various homonins, the neurology of brains, the weather of the past, molecular geology, have presented an amazing wealth of information about the deep past before there was writing, or speech, or anything resembling apes — much less hominins.  We’re far beyond the days when educated people still believed the Bible was a literal account or even that a mega-humanoid made little humans out of clay and breathed life into them.  But there are echoes.  

A little group of people who studied ancient skulls of humans and their predecessors were very aware of the well-known fact that at some point there was an expansion of the brain in what came to be called the “pre-frontal cortex” that pushed out the skull into a forehead.  Experts know that the brain responds to use by creating more neurons, so strongly that like a dandelion pushing up the cement over it, the neurons can bulge the skull.  But what use did these very early pre-humans have for the part of the brain we know houses things like the “working platform” of the senses, empathy through bits like mirror cells, ethics, self-management, much of what makes us human— all the things that JFK’s sister and Tennessee Williams’ sister lost when they were lobotomized.  A lobotomy erases a million millennia of evolution.

by Lucian Freud (l.) and Carracci (r.)

Trauma to this area means a higher likelihood of being involved in violence, more likelihood of ending up in prison, less ability to hold a job or develop a relationship with another human.  I had both a brother and a father who suffered “closed skull trauma”.  My brother fell and my father was in a car crash in 1948.  If you’re keeping up with the conversation about football and boxing damage, you know what I’m talking about.  It can be very subtle and develop over time.  Both had rage attacks, but none became violent except that my father spanked us for small infractions.  My brother was dependent on my mother to guide him, though he seemed normal, and my father changed into an erratic and domineering but passive man. 

What these anthropologists wanted to know was what made that forehead area bulge in the first place.  It happened too early in evolution to be speech, too early to be tool-making, way too early to be agriculture.  At the time the species involved were hunter-gatherers, moving around in small groups, just on the verge of figuring out how to use fire.  Once cooking was invented, the human body suddenly took in far more calories of higher quality, easier to digest, extra energy for thought.  Brains burn calories rapidly. 

They stood up, which meant they could carry and throw, and some of the gender dimorphism faded, since the massive jaws and robust bodies of males were not so crucial.  A smaller area could supply enough food for more people so the group size expanded a bit.  This is what we call “the Stone Age” because most of the fossils from the time are stone.  Bones, too.  Body-stone.  These Brit scientists speak of “lithic times” — “lith” means stone.

The trouble is that aside from flint-knapping edged tools of enormous effectiveness (surgeons have reported that flint-knapped scalpels exceed metal edges in sharpness) and considerable beauty, the rest of their material culture has disappeared except for remnants in deep caves.  No one was making pecked out or painted images yet.  The remnants were incredibly stable — nothing seems to have changed for another million years and more.  So — these scientists asked — if these hunter-gatherers have this pre-frontal cortex with its developing working platform, essentially the brain’s dashboard, and we can’t see anything physical, what might have been going on in those neurons.  What are we missing?  What is the dashboard managing?

Their answer was social collaboration, partly for hunting and partly for relationships among themselves.  Of course, a big part of the relationships was managing hunting and the products of hunting and gathering.  “You go with Herb to track grazers and Alf and I will circle the mountain to see what’s ripe now.”  When they got back, they shared out the food, in conformity with the group's customs.  You want to be quiet while hunting, so a gesture language developed.

Some of this was happening before physical evolution created the larynx/pharynx shapes and placements that allow language sounds: the vowels; the hisses, stops, smacks, trills, and clicks of consonants.  I listen to my cats communicate  quite clearly without words.  The Striped Terror bursts through the cat flap and announces, “I’m back safely!”  The Dust Bunny goes looking for his beloved Terror, calling, “Where are you?”  More relentlessly than any alarm clock, the two of them come to my pillow and say, “Catfood.” 

Maybe you’ve seen a little group of humans working on some project that they agree about.  They watch the main person, adjust to them, learn from them, interrupt them — all without words.  It’s why YouTube works when you want to learn about plumbing: you can watch.  Gambling is one of the things people watch most intently and a game like stick game is the most absorbing of all because it’s watching other people to see the "tells" of what they’re doing with that little marker.  One of the earliest stone artifacts is a little marker with diagonal lines on it that looks very much like a stick game marker.  Africa.  Blombas.

So the Radical Anthropologists are saying that watching and interacting with each other developed all those pre-frontal cortex neurons until finally something triggered the explosion of art, music, and language that until now we have thought were the first signs of being human.  It wasn't the development of the pre-frontal cortex that caused elaborating humanness but the USE of that tissue for material objects that suddenly clicked.  Someone made a gift for a beloved and said, "I love you."

Here’s the real-life, right-now significance.  The assumption of the Victorians, etc., was that people without writing were without culture (written words WERE culture), therefore could be morally oppressed and treated like animals.  To them it was very important to be distinguished from animals, which is why evolution was such a terrifying shock.  It meant that humans could be treated like animals, as meat, which was self-evident to armies, cops, doctors and cannibals.  It challenged religion.  

The problem of indigenous non-European people who had only oral cultures was something like the problem of early Euros who didn't have metal yet, and thus were assumed to be dumb.  Experts kept labeling Indians "Stone Age."  American Indian culture had no churches, no writing, no metal, no flags and no boundaries.  To Europeans, that meant they were not quite human, fair game for oppression.  The Euros had no ability to perceive the intricate, spiritual, and powerful systems of the North American people, just as they never speculated about the extremely early lives of pre-humans and portrayed them as hairy knuckle draggers.

Much attention has been paid to the idea that agriculture was what pulled us into modernity, technology, and the other wonders of science.  This is probably true, at least partly, but there was a lot more out there before agriculture than we are used to assuming.  An intricate pattern of useful soft materials has been lost, though we can see chimps with their little twigs and sticks, prying insects out of their holes or knocking down high fruit.  The whole reason that Leakey was so determined for Jane Goodall and those other women to go “be a primate” was for them to learn the social culture that underlay everything else.  And they did.  A lot of it was “monkey business,” tricking, hiding, hoarding, “look-over-there!” and other poker shenanigans.  But also compassion, grief, and attachment.

I think that in this vid of a release, recognition by the chimp took even Goodall by surprise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsUP2dftN9w

This is all before the appearance of language — oral or written — and though even a bonobo can learn human behavior and words, they have no sentence syntax.  We don’t know about their consciousness. They certainly know where they are and what to do. 

The next step is learning how to use metaphor and the use of material culture to mean things.  This is the verge of modern thought, though that, too, continues to evolve, partly because of the internet.  That’s the next step that I’ll pursue, and it means doubling back to 1957 and Dean Barnlund’s “Language and Thought” class at Northwestern and to sweep up Turner’s and Lakoff’s ideas about perception and expression, being in the world, creating meaning.

DUNBAR'S NUMBER

Class Notes

Thinking about Dunbar’s number (150), which is about the number of people who can really know each other on a supportive basis, connects with a lot of thinking from my past.  One is Alban Institute’s work on church size.   They persisted a long time but are now gone.  Their work was trying to understand what made congregations survive or fail.  At the time I knew about Alban, in the Seventies, 150 people was about the number it took to maintain a viable church with a building and a professional minister.  Now it would take three times that number but many congregations have shrunk to one-third that number.

Ranchers and wildlife experts are familiar with the idea of “carrying capacity,” the number of animals who can occupy an ecology without destroying it.  Environments have the ability to rebound from overgrazing or drought and can increase their carrying capacity by complexifying or when conditions improve.  Conversely, some exotic plant or animal can crowd into the ecology and tear the relationships apart.  Drought and floods throw off the balance of everything, but some ecologies — like the bottom of the Grand Canyon where regular periodic floods in spring are necessary to replant the cottonwoods — need that disruption to drive the systems.

When I did the three-year extension ministry for the UUA, which meant circuit riding among four groups who probably added up to 150 people, it was interpreted by most people as a “salesmanship” problem.  Make UU sound wonderful, promise it will be profitable, and all will be well.  No one thought of it as an ecology, not even me.   (Well, I did a little bit.)  We did use the Alban Institute’s figures for “carrying capacity” which they estimated to be about 2 potential UU’s per 1,000 population.  That means that in Valier, there should only be about one-third of a UU person.  That must be me.  Thirty-five years later, only one of the groups has died — it was Great Falls where the town is also struggling to keep its people.  The one that flared and grew was in Whitefish/

Kalispell, glamourous, growing, the banana belt of Montana.  This group was not part of the program.   For success, the economy means far more than preaching.

My preaching gown

My seminary finally adapted to its tiny student population by converting to a mail-order low-residence school in leased offices.  They're living off the profit from selling the building originally created for them.  They haven’t quite resorted to the strategy of a minister in the midwest who used to destroy all graphs by claiming thousands of church members.  It turned out he had a radio ministry and claimed everyone in the listening area.

These problems of exceeding or diminishing, as related to economic carrying capacity, are affecting everyone across the Montana Highline.  It’s hard enough to gather and organize people to create a town, but then when the economy collapses, it’s even harder to cut back.  Schools must combine, ministers must travel, and roads don’t get repaired.  The local/state/federal balance is distorted — or at least changed.  As new sources of income are developed and old ones disappear, the kind of population changes.  If no new sources of income are found, the existing population ages in place, creating new needs while destroying old supplies. 

Sometimes you're the cheetah,

And sometimes you're the baboons.

It’s strange to think about hominins, about how they came down out of the trees.  How many individuals must have been lost due to the new conditions without trees -- no place to be safe -- and yet whole new ways of living on the land appeared.  They had to overwhelm their own biologically rooted desire to stay in one place, do the same things, even when that didn’t work.  What finally made them change?  A drought?  A dream? A mutation?

Just as more new converts are needed, the churches empty out — all the different kinds from prosperity mega-operations to little remnant rural groups of grannies and grandpas.  The denominations used to grow, inventing new names to identify themselves and their splinters, just like the expanding economy that demanded new forms.  But now the Walmarts are closing down and no one knows what’s next.  Well, they do — they just don’t want to admit it.  Amazon.  Infinite numbers of people?  Maybe.  Growth as a marker of success?  Being challenged.  Maybe "Small IS Beautiful."  What's after Amazon?

New product?  We’re sort of on the cusp of development.  VERY expensive hightech breakthroughs, but at the same time cheap cell phones and computers for everyone. An interesting development is the realization that while many were rushing around with their salesmanship ideas, there was a whole layer of society that was quietly and persistently developing “organic food,” “counter-cultures,”  "heritage seeds," “co-operatives,” off the grid.

My money, my stockbroker.

One of the interesting things about the economics of art is that on the edge are always very rich people who buy, sustain, found major institutions like museums and so on.  These are the 1 or 2% of people who control, er, “own” the great majority of the wealth in the world.  Artists are part of their infrastructure of prestige and so we visit them, sell to them, get to know them.  

What I am just now realizing is that a really rich person is not at all what we ordinary plodders think.  They are NOT individuals who can do what they want.  Instead they are managed by all sorts of people who tell them what to do.  They have the same problems of expansion and contraction in their Dunbar’s number (friends and family), and often have losses in that context, particularly if they’re not good at “grooming,” (meaning the innocent maintenance of relationships) or pervert friendship grooming into the acquisition of people as though they were bought.  Very wealthy individuals may have a lot of family, but because of English-originating law over inheritance, that can be a serious disruption.  It drives many a BBC plot.

Disney Studios

The truth is that very wealthy people, particularly those who come into a lot of money suddenly, like movie stars and rock singers, are almost immediately converted into being corporations, a business machine with its members intent on keeping their jobs and expanding their control and remuneration.  When someone like Walt Disney dies, it’s barely noticeable because he goes on as a franchise, still keeping all those folks on the payroll, adding lawyers searching contracts for more profit.  He’s just a trade name now.  

Organizational design was another way I came to understanding the importance of these arrangements that are NOT REAL.  They’re like money — it’s only paper that stands for profit.  Who supervises whom, the chain of accountability, divisions and assignments, all that seemingly boring stuff can make a major difference.  Management today is a crippling problem, a failure of producing people who have the skills.

The receding tide of “religion” -- which to the media and most citizens is some set of beliefs and the machinery of an organization -- is not serving the core "carrying capacity" of spirituality.  Rather they are shrinking the spirit.  It hasn’t got anything to do with “theism” or any of the other tent poles of the world’s systems.  It’s about human beings and their 150 friends, neighbors, and relatives, who no longer sing together unless they’re drunk or pushing a political agenda. 

I have no trust that any present venue will increase the spiritual carrying capacity of the country.  But I’m very intrigued by experiments like the one that recorded people all over the world singing the same song and then blended them into one giant chorus.  The “flash choirs” around Christmas always make me cry.  Spiritual content is not the words of the songs, nor even their familiarity, but the human voices — no matter the number.

"The Chorus" about a boys' school.

Here's a link to a terrific French film called "The Chorus" about how the unity of song can redeem misguided morality.

http://www.netflix.com/watch/70019005?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C0%2C03dc472065f5306cd985db4d73dc8a3f469a0603%3A5adfb04c3165f7d026977f96b0413bc7975bcec2

THINKING BIG: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind"

In pursuit of understanding humans IN THEIR ENVIRONMENTS,  I have accumulated and borrowed through Interlibrary Loan a great many books over the last decade.  I have a basic kit of close experience with certain communities with quite different basic characteristics and an humanities education rooted in the Fifties ideas of “language and thought”.  Right now I feel as though I’ve found a book that is a handbook (so trendy that there’s a new verb:  “handbooking.”) that wraps around and illuminates all this stuff.

The book comes out of the United Kingdom, including most prominently Australia.  The basic argument is this: that we know a lot about human fossils and can now even reconstruct the weather and responding environment in fairly specific ways, including what there was to eat.  In the past scientists have taken a very strict approach to ideas about deep (pre-literate) history, esp. the transitions within and between the following groups:

Anthropoids (all primates including fossils, monkeys, hominins and humans), 

Hominids (all great apes (gorillas, orang utans, chimps, bonobos, gibbons), hominins and humans, 

Hominins (all our fossil ancestors),

Humans (us)

Anatomically modern humans without substantial evidence for cultural accoutrements (art, burials, ornament, musical instruments)

I don’t know where Neanderthals fit into this, since they genetically merge with modern humans.

There are three authors: 

 Clive Gamble, whom I already know from his book, "Origins and Revolutions", 

John Gowlett, who is associated with “Radical Anthropology” (a school of thought with a journal), and 
Robin Dunbar.

Robin Dunbar

Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar (born 28 June 1947) is a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist and a specialist in primate behaviour.  He is currently head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, and a visiting professor at Aalto University. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships”.  The dependent theory is that the bigger a group of known and interacting people, the bigger the brain is likely to be.

These people, mostly English academics but researching in Africa, diverge from Cartesian object-and-logic thought, but have a  firm grip on the implied forces of evolution, which is what makes them radical.  Evolution is driven by the acknowledgement that time forces change and every change opens new possibilities.  The study of solid evidence of fossils and geology have reluctantly opened their more responsive minds in the face of the usual opposition of status quo thinkers.  The study of the evolution of the hominins AND all other humanoid forms (including us) in terms of brain development  (evolving along parallel to the rest of bodies), and the resulting social interactions between individuals, has been invisible.  A strong question has arisen:  why did the human brain-size in Africa remain the same for hundreds and thousands of years, but then suddenly -- without changing size -- explode into art, music, decoration and story?  Was it something they said?  Something they did?  

This book opens the door to a whole new realm.  These men often make distinctions: they repeatedly say, “two things are relevant” and then those two things are not opposed to each other, but either interacting in shaping ways or diverging from each other to explore new territory.  This is Bibfeldtian "both/and" thinking.  (Bibfeldt is a mythical scholar invented to counter "either/or" thinking.)

Lady bonobos

For instance, two things have shaped "apes".  One of the most intriguing little hints is that somehow our closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees, diverged because bonobos went with social interaction as the primary focus of life (including sex as greeting, much to the fascination of humans), and the chimps went with tools -- which might have led to our technologies.  (I’m waiting for the invention of a keyboard for chimps — but, wait!  Hasn't anyone tried to get a chimp to use a tablet computer?)  Modern humans evidently came from a branch that refused to exclude either society or tools, until now they've converged.  These authors speak of the sensory ability and the materials available, both expanding interdependently. 

A fascinating riff on the subject of the "occipital bun", which is a pushed-out part of the rear skull, suggests that populating the northern territories required big eyes to gather more light, and therefore needed more brain processing space, which is at the back of the head.  Neanderthals have big eyes and that "bun".  The thought is that this meant the pre-frontal cortex behind the forehead couldn't develop, which kept them from the abilities housed there.

The authors do not indulge in silly thoughts, but stick to the serious business of survival as the planet constantly makes our current arrangements obsolete, maybe even impossible.  What’s the most basic crucial understanding we need?

One element is group size and the basis of their cohesion, which turns out to be music and laughing.  The proposition is that the following table is pretty universal:

5 people are an intimate group.  The authors call them “soul
     mates.”

15 people are a foraging group, best friends or maybe co-
     workers

50 people are a band, which they rename as “overnight
  camp groups”, all of whom know each other and get along.
  I recognize this as the named Blackfeet traveling groups,
   partly family.

150 people are “Dunbar’s number” — I’ll come back.

500 people are mega-bands related by marriage or trade.

1500 people are tribes united by one language.

Print it out, maybe enlarged, and add the names.

Good workshop exercise.

150 is about as many people we can handle in terms of trust and obligation.  These are the people we greet by name at the post office and linger a few moments to trade information.  

You may notice that each increment is threefold.  The authors relate it to classic military unit sizes:

12 men in a section

40-50 to a platoon (3 sections)
150 of 3 platoons to a company

500 is a battalion (3 companies)

5000 is a regiment (3 battalions)

5000 is a brigade (3 regiments)

15,000 is a division (3 brigades)

Dunbar’s number, 150, is the size that will allow balance between enough interaction to maintain social cohesion (grooming in apes, greeting in humans) and the time that will economically work to support survival.  The less time spent on work, the more there is for social cohesion, and vice versa.  In hunter-gathers groups a great deal of time is devoted to what we consider to be "idling" but is actually bonding.  What we consider work is often divisive.

Our technological society has been hard on neighborhoods, which in my post-WWII childhood were about 150 people who knew each other, by spreading them out over space on the Internet.   We even shop there.  People are reading my blog around the planet, which always startles me, and impresses me with the obligation of somehow providing what they are looking for.  

Some are boys or were when I got to know them.  I am sharply aware of the universal tendency to exclude young boys from both social protection and individual reassurance, which are the purpose of groups.  When the leopards come, the hominins go up trees, grabbing the babies to carry as they climb.  Some children can climb.  But the youngest boys are left on the ground.  At some point the hominins also began to act like leopards and destroy the easy prey of their own young.   (Abraham was not sacrificing his daughter. Just saying.)  There must be some survival value to the vulnerability of boys, or it wouldn’t have persisted so many millennia.  But what is it?

I recently read a disturbing account of young males, tortured dismembered discarded — it turned out to be about male dairy calves who are seen to have NO value in terms of human society.  Value = Survival.

Grown but uneducated men in a tech society are in a similar fix.  They can’t even sell sex.  Their blood, maybe.  In some cities they can’t sleep outdoors or in cars.  Those who wish to help them are forbidden to provide soup kitchens where the “nice” people live.  No one will even do what baboons do for each other: pick off fleas.  We’re devolving.

You’ll notice that I’ve left Radical Anthropology now and entered upon Social Commentary.  The line between is permeable and that’s excellent, because it means there are more variables affecting survival.  I was intrigued to see that these authors appreciate what they call “hot” cognition empathy — which is sharing on an emotional level — and “cold’ cognition empathy (theory of mind) which is aware of what others are thinking and feeling, but emotionally detached, even Machiavellian.  Babies seem to be born with hot empathy, but don’t develop Cartesian-style “theory of mind” until maybe age five, kindergarten.

There will be more as I explore this realm of thought.