new essay in Aeon Magazine

A new essay in Aeon Magazine on being a Quaker and an atheist who really believes in magical stories. It's complicated. I originally titled it "In Praise of Gods That Do Not Exist," but I'm OK with the title they assigned to it: "I contradict myself."

As always, comments welcome, here or on the article itself. Enjoy!

Nakedness

Over and over and over we get hung up on the questions of "who are we?" and "what kind of person am I?" When we name ourselves as a group, we seem to need to ask why some people are inside that group and others are outside. How do the outsiders get in? Will I ever be forced outside? Can I be a part of this group and of that other group over there?

Over and over and over, the cries of protest and rage by people who have felt the pain of exile—that is to say, all of us. We are afraid of being alone, angry that our people might decide that we are not their people.

Maggie Harrison's been creating the latest variation on this stir, telling blog viewers "YOU ARE NOT A QUAKER (so please stop calling yourself one)." All the comments and responses are heartfelt, but I find myself sliding into a tiring deja vu-like state. Who is a Quaker blah blah blah, how can we all call ourselves Quakers blah blah blah, how dare you call me out as not a Quaker blah blah blah... on and on an on.

I do like the foundational idea of Maggie's work. It is to shed the clothing we have put over our spiritual nakedness: the pretense we know what we're doing, which covers the shame we feel for being imperfect.


How I long to take all the names I wear—Quaker, non-theist, Democrat, American, Cartographer, White, Male, Straight—and take them off one by one like pieces of clothing, to be able to stand there, shivering slightly because it is February in Minnesota. And be joined by others who have also taken off their name-clothes. Not so we can have some kind of nameless orgy here on the tundra, but so we can see each other a little more truly, even just for as long as it takes before our toes begin to freeze.

And then, eventually, I and my fellows will put on at least some of those name-clothes again, and go off into the world, because we homo sapiens need these labels. This is how we make ourselves into a people. This is how we say who we are.


So why do I find myself wearied? I feel like this is becoming old territory to me, and I want to stop going around in circles, coming back to the same arguments. I want to move on.

I want three simple, difficult things:

1. I want to be allowed to wear the labels that fit me. I want to be an American, a Minnesotan, a Quaker, a straight male, of European descent, a geek, a morris dancer, a cartographer, a father, a son, a husband, someone of middling economic means, a Case, a resident of Northeast Minneapolis, a beer-drinker, a lover of various musics, a song-leader, a person, a member of the species homo sapiens... I want to be able to wear any and all of these labels, and I want to be able to participate in the groups these labels imply that I belong to.

2. I want to not have outsiders to these groups assume they know what it means when I wear any label. I want people to approach unfamiliar identities with humility—either curiously, or seeking some other label they can use if they just don't have the energy to learn about the unfamiliar label.

3. I want my fellows in the groups I belong to, to recognize that identity groups are fluid. Organizations may not be: it may be necessary to keep the inside/outside relationship of the group clear. But no organization will ever be able to exactly line itself up with people who hold identities, not least because all those identities are themselves fluid, and depend on spending time and attention: I might move to St Paul, and while I would then hold Northeast Minneapolis as a dear place in my heart, I would have less say in what Northeast means, being absent.

I think this last is really important, and points to a shortcut in our name-labels we too easily take. We think that holding an identity ought to be like earning a medal, that it ought to secure a relationship to a group, permanently. If you've earned it, you can put it away in a drawer and pull it out when needed. And some relationships are like that: the conversation picks up where it left off years ago. But some don't. Most don't.

I have a recurring dream, where I go back to my old college, and I'm so out of place. I haven't checked my mailbox for months or years. I'm not sure where my stuff is: I still have a dorm room, but haven't used it for a long time, and I need to find my stuff to bring it to where I'm living now. Professors have changed, and I don't know what courses to take for that one last term I need to get my degree.


Identity labels are a shorthand for membership in a group, for belonging. If we do not act on those labels, if we do not live them out, we pull away from holding them. This is a terrifying prospect for most of us, because it means we are that much more alone. Even typing the second sentence in this paragraph, part of me was saying, "Nooooooo!"

Being a Quaker, to go back to Maggie Harrison, feels like it ought to belong to the territory of common practice, or creed (or belief anyway), or following a common teacher or guide. All these things we recognize as the hallmarks of "religious" commonality. But some of it, perversely, is just wearing the same "clothes," the very clothes Maggie urges us to cast off. We are Quakers because we choose to wear that label.

Can real nakedness be the basis of identity? Could it be that all the stuff we use to bind ourselves together is getting in the way? If we wish to utterly open ourselves to truth, to go out naked into February, do we need to shed the very name itself? Is the truest Quaker the one who accepts no common identity—no meetinghouse, no clerk, nothing? How could such a Quakerism survive? How would it avoid frostbite?

Feelings

I had a dream a few nights ago, where I was some sort of volunteer assistant teacher in an inner city school. The kids in my group were all African-American boys, about second or third or fourth grade. They had a series of little books about feelings on the table near them, and they were really pissed off about having to read them. Their objections amounted to, "Don't you go telling me what to feel, asshole." Probably not in that language, but I could feel their rage coming off them.

And so I tried talking with them, saying, "You know, of course you have a right to feel what you feel, but do you really always want to be drawn into a fight whenever you feel mad, or burst into uncontrollable tears when you feel sad? And when someone else is mad, do you have to just go with getting mad right back and getting into a fight with them?" I think that's what I said, or something like that. Hard to remember; it was a dream. And I woke up before I could hear any sort of reaction from them.

I've had a couple heated discussions on Facebook lately. One was with a guy in my neighborhood arguing that conceal-carry laws are good: he carries a gun as he walks around the neighborhood and it makes him feel safer. I'm not a fan of conceal-carry, but it turns out most of our energy about this comes not from facts but from communal beliefs: he's a passionate defender of individual liberties, while I tend towards a passionate interest in communality and mutual responsibility. When you get to statistical studies, having a firearm is more dangerous to the carrier because of household accidents and moments of passion, and in terms of public safety, conceal-carry a statistical wash.

But here's the thing I noticed about our back-and-forth: he came out of the box spitting mad—calling names, making accusations, saying things that weren't threats but carried the structure of threats ("If you... then I..."). And of course he has a "right to his feelings," but what I was seeing was how much his anger in and of itself washed over the relationship. It almost instantly stopped being just his anger. It was anger that I also had to deal with.

We use the word "feelings" to describe emotions, and this makes sense for little kids that are just learning about themselves: "What do you feel?" is a really good question for little kids to step back from themselves and name the churning mass of stuff inside them.

But I'm wondering about the use of that word in adults, because feelings in a group of people are more like waves: they aren't felt by you as an individual, they are emanated. They are like germs: sometimes your neighbor gets infected, sometimes her immune system kicks in with its own anti-emotion. But none of us live in emotional bubbles. Even those of us who try to, end up emanating their own weird little "can't touch me" vibe.

The other Facebook discussion was with a friend of a friend, about this letter and quickly turned into a debate about tyranny (taxation) vs reckless individualism (anti-taxation). And the guy I had the tête-a-tête with was pretty hyperbolic. He's clearly been through the comments-section school of political commentary and debate.

If you read the comments section of pretty much any article on the internet that touches on politics, you know the language: a group of villains is named, fear-and-anger-inducing words are invoked, and and either a plea for divine retribution or a call to arms concludes. These are the tools we use to try and win arguments. Except they utterly fail at that. They help us gather allies, and maybe we swing one or two people who are confused and unsure where they stand, but they don't turn anyone from the enemy camp, because they make it clear the enemy camp is the enemy.

When Jon Stewart made his plea for civility and less hyperbole ("These are hard times, not the end times...") this summer, I was interested to see some of my left-wing friends get pissed off because to them Stewart seemed to be saying "Stop fighting for what is right." And I didn't really know what to say to that, because of course we want people to fight for justice. And liberty. And freedom. And communal responsibility.

But who are they fighting? And how do you fight a demagogue, or a whole sea of demagogues? When we say we are going to fight, we invoke a specific set of analogies: there is a battle, there is an enemy, there is going to be some kind of combat. There's a poster/t-shirt slogan, "fighting for peace is like f***ing for virginity," which makes the point crudely, but the problem is, we don't know how to talk about large structural issues except by fighting.

And I think the root of the problem is the tidal-emotion thing I started this post off with: When I am passionate about something, a lot of what you—my audience—are paying attention to is the passion. The work of understanding the something itself does not come in presentation, it comes from our internal processing and piecing puzzle pieces that fit our internal unanswered-question puzzle-pieces.

And so I wonder about the place of passion in public debate. It seems to me that opening more of a place for testimony from personal experience, and clear, interesting delineations of the field of debate, are needed. But that's me. Actually, I was bowled over by this discussion of the divided mind, from a recent talk at the Royal Society of Art. It may sound boring from the title, but the conclusion about the sort of balancing needed in our world, is profound:

Blind Spot

There's an old trick where you place a dark spot on a white wall, then sit back and with one eye open, look slightly to the left or right, and at some point, the spot will simply disappear from view. This marks the small area (scotoma) on the retina where there are no visual receptors (no cones or rods) because that's where the optic nerve connects the retina to the brain.

I think we each have points like this is our psychic landscape, which cannot be approached in the direct way we know how to approach most of the world, not because they are too painful (that's another story—see below) but because they simply contradict our ways of understanding; they are incomprehensible because they are in the blind spots of our comprehension.

The annihilation of being is the big one for most people. Of course we can see death all the time; all living things die. But we cannot understand what it means to die, because it would be to imagine not imagining, to think about not thinking—ever again.

We construct all sorts of ways to bridge this blank spot, but at root it is almost impossible to understand a world without a self. That is to say, a story with no narrator, a picture not drawn from a point of view. So when a character in a story (or, in the particular case I'm thinking of, a play I saw last week) considers his or her undoing, and the creator is portraying this as straightforwardly as possible, there comes a kind of gray moment, when the artist (and character) is simply lost.

All of this assumes that the "soul" does in fact die, that consciousness, the self, does not have an immortal component. And I suspect that the power of that "blind spot" is a big part of the impetus to discover alternatives to total death of the self, whether immortality of the soul, or reincarnation, or some other process by which something happens after the end.

Well, something does happen to the body of course: it decomposes and—one way or another—is eaten. And that eating is a root of horror. There was an interesting discussion on Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning recently, with the author of the hot new werewolf novel, The Last Werewolf. My question for him was about the horrific effect of having a sympathetic character become meat, how viscerally painful this is for the audience, and how he as a writer used—or at any rate dealt with—this horror. He said that specifically it was being eaten that to his mind was the horror: that all you have worked for in your life is summed up in being a meal for some other creature, and that this was in a way the key to horror as a genre and as a tool. I think he was spot on. Like death, the prospect that we (or our bodies if our sense of self is gone) will be consumed elicits a visceral turn of the stomach.

It is not, however, as powerful a blind spot, because we can in fact imagine being captured in a great monstrous maw like a bird in a cat's jaws. It's painful and horrible but the horror is comprehensible.

I wrote earlier about Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, and about my troubles with the ending. In the denouement, she pulls from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets an image of Nowhere as a place, in her book an eddying gray horror, a pool at the foot of a garden, the maw of Hell — not a fiery place but an utterly empty negation of everything, good and bad. I think this is the blind spot, and perhaps this is why I find the ending of the book unsatisfying: it takes us up to the lip of a visible impossibility, and then uses a sort of rule-manipulating trick to turn us away, pull us through and out. In the end, that horror is simply left behind, unaddressed.

I recently read William Styron's Darkness Visible, an account of his own deep clinical depression. The book was recommended to me as the truest and clearest description of clinical depression a friend had ever read. It is an excellent book, but one of the things it makes very clear is that depression in itself is indescribable: you can approach it, you can say something about it, but it is a pain of absence, an experience of void, and as such is not really possible to put into words, because the words fill a space in the audience's heads that are simply missing in the sufferer. Depression is like a blind spot of the self, a place that by definition cannot be held and looked at directly. It can be described in the descent, and—as Styron notes, quoting Dante in his return from the Inferno—in the ascent back out of it, but because description is itself something, the void cannot be captured in words.

Is there any way out of these blind spots? If the analogy were perfect, one could just open the other eye. If one trusted the vision of others, one could ask what they saw, but no-one else can truly see our selves from the inside, or be a sufferer of depression for the sufferer. People describe near-death experiences, but these experiences are unsatisfactory because they are about someone else's negation, not ours. Our blind spots are places where our frame of understanding is fundamentally personal, and because we are conscious in some essential way within our own bodies, there is no sure-fire way to add the equivalent of parallel vision. Even a close companionship like Styron had with his wife can't bridge the disease, though of course it sure can't hurt either. It probably saved his life—his realization as he considered suicide that he couldn't just do this selfishly to those he loved. But it didn't cure or offer a window to his condition.

Buddhist practice, with its focus on non-self and non-being, maybe comes closest. But here I fall short, never having really studied such practices. And my understanding is that in Buddhist meditation, the goal is a stilling of self so one can experience the not-self, not the prospect of the soul's extinguishment.

Perhaps the key to addressing these blind spots is to think of them not in terms of their being things we see, but products of how we look. That is to say, it is not self-negation, or death, that we cannot see, but our way of seeing that keeps us from seeing death. The idea—and this is really just an untested idea on my part—that depression is similar in kind to the gray space around the idea of the absence of self, suggests that there is something organic in us, as there clearly is in depression, that makes our seeing unclear. If we saw the world differently—as some who believe in an immortal soul do, for instance—that nothingness would not be a gray and shimmering horror.

What the blind spots do show pretty definitively to me at least, is that description, the set tools we use to say what the world is, has inherent paradoxical limits. It's not that we won't look at them—in the way we won't look at being eaten, or at any of a number of bogeymen and women we set up as furniture in our psychic household—it's that description itself is housed within a finite, mortal frame and cannot therefore see the absence of that frame itself.

Who are we and what are we doing here?

I wrote this back at the end of December, and I'm not sure why I never posted it. But here you are...

I'm not sure this is ready for prime time, but I feel compelled to post.

An interesting thread on Facebook earlier this week began with the posit that the writer could not see a "place in the modern Pagan movement for spiritual values that do not embrace values of feminism, environmentalism, and the deepening of genuine, engaged community."

Now, I'm all over those values, but played devil's advocate, imagining a neo-pagan with strong patriarchal values, a sense of human entitlement to lord it over the earth, and a desire to live alone in the woods away from other homo sapiens.

And it went back and forth and was interesting, but what I wanted to get to in this post I'm writing was near the end of the thread, when the original poster, who is also a Quaker, talked about her experience of discernment, as an invaluable process to not just "believe whatever you want," but to hold your understandings up against a standard, to measure them and allow them to be tested. It's something she wishes she saw more of in the Pagan world.

And here's what rose for me: the difference between coming to an understanding of what we are, as individuals or as a group, vs. coming to answer the old question Tolstoy asked of Russian poverty, echoing Luke: "What then must we do?" That terrible, burning question, which I first ran into as the crux of the movie The Year of Living Dangerously, reminds me of friend Marshall Massey's description of early Friends as expectant courtiers, waiting for instructions by their Lord. It's a yank-your-life-around kind of question for people who try to address it fully.

But I think it often then overwhelms that first question, one I've been wrestling with in various ways in this blog: what is this "we" we talk so much about? and what about this other "we" I belong to over here? How does that work? And even deeper, what is this "I" thing I'm so attached to?

Maybe the balance between the two questions is like the urgent vs important dichotomy Scott Covey talks about. Or maybe (this is my take), the question of identity is not one the universe really cares about, but that we as homo sapiens find essential, like food and water and fiction. Whereas the universe actually does care about what then we must do.

OK, so as a professed non-Christian, I'm going to take a leap here: the distinction between these two questions is like the distinction between worshiping the person of Jesus and following his teachings. On one hand, some people get so caught up in the identity of being a Christian, and of following Jesus as a person who lived and breathed and died and was resurrected and saves and sits at the right hand of God and is part of the three-is-one, no he isn't, there's only one godhead and your mother wears army boots if you believe that and his divinity is reflective of universal light and no it's not it's light itself and your mama wears army boots and you're not a real Christian and and and and.

And so the nice reasonable people come along and say, let's just drop this whole worshiping Jesus thing and just be nice and reasonable and follow his teachings... well, the ones that are reasonable anyway, not the ones where he goes all I-am-the-way-and-my-way-or-the-highway and then we'll sing a nice song and and and... why aren't you paying attention to me?

My point is this: the hard questions need to be asked by a person who embodies them (or we need to understand them as being so embodied; stories about embodiment work almost as well for human beings as physical presence to that embodiment). Otherwise, we don't pay attention, and in particular we can't be a group united in approaching that embodiment. Without the identity, without the personhood, we hominids just plain lose interest. On the other hand, with an identity in hand, we tend to start paying more attention to the person than to the questions. It's a tough balance, and lots of groups (my own included) claim to have found the mechanism that makes it work. But it is always hard work.

The poison of "The People"

It's a well-known fact that the name of many "tribes" and "nations" is simply the word "people" in that group's language. The implication being that we are people, and then there are those other not-quite-people who we can't even understand.

Populist and socialist politics did much the same in the era of popular revolution: "We the people" overthrew the British royal government in what became the United States. Communist revolution established "People's Republics" all over the globe. "People power" toppled Ferdinand Marcos and has been a byword for popular revolt ever since, including the ongoing changes in the Arab world.

I was struck again this morning by how that language permeates Bob Herbert's warning opinion piece this morning in the New York Times.

I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in January 2010. He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S. but not at all daunted. “If there is going to be change,” he said, “real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves.”

The problem is, of course, that what "the people" rise up against is, well, other people. And there's a thread in liberal thought that emphasizes the unity of homo sapiens (and more recently, the whole earth as one ecosystem). But we still have this idea that "the people" will empower themselves... and as we've seen in the last few weeks in Egypt, when the bulk of the population finds itself utterly at odds with a ruling elite, they will in fact do just that: take back the country.

So what's next? That's the theme of commentary over the last couple days, as Mubarak's exit seemed clear to everyone but himself. And I think part of the answer lies in how "the people" comes to be formulated in Egypt's new formal political and social structures. Nasser founded the modern Egyptian state on rhetoric of popular nationalism, borrowing heavily from his Soviet sponsors. Like those sponsors, it was in large part a smokescreen for oligarchy, and as the socialist pretense wore thin and was eventually dropped, the "people" that the Egyptian state was supposed to be founded on found themselves adrift.

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"The People" is a powerful concept. It makes every human an equal component of the group in question, whether it is a nation, clan, religion, association, or rock band. But it also implies a false dichotomy whenever it is invoked: we are more human, they are less human. And whether you are dealing with class struggle or inter-national conflict, it dehumanizes.

As a concept, the equality-making "People" is offset by how we humans generally self-organize: with leaders and followers. The feudal model, of a king and his lieges, is the other extreme of a pure democracy, but both need the core element of the other: without leadership, a nation is like a ship without a helmsperson, drifting aimlessly. It can get along fine in calm waters, but watch out when a reef arises—and a reef will inevitably, eventually, appear. Likewise, when a purely power-based king forgets that he depends on his lieges' loyalty, and that that depends in turn on a feeling of commonality, he'll be chucked overboard at the first opportunity, like Captain Bligh...

European nations, and their political heirs, have been struggling with this balance for centuries. Do we endow a king with god-like power? Consensus seems to be that a constitutional balance is better in the long run. Do we let anyone run for president? Hitler was popularly elected, and most democracies have exceptions for parties or leaders who explicitly want to undo democratic institutions (remember the presidential oath to "uphold the Constitution" etc.?). And on and on...

What I find intriguing and kind of exciting is the potential of the current revolution in Egypt especially to change the nature of global political thinking. Islam, unlike Christianity, has an inherent, core philosophy of radical equality: we are all equal before Allah. There is no Islamic Pope, no priestly intermediaries. There are wise scholars, and there is the Prophet, but the structural basis for a "God-given mandate" is really a lot thinner than in the West, reserved for fanatics like bin-Laden. So we will see.

In the meantime, could we in the West please watch out for invocations of "the People"? Please? Remember Louis Armstrong's comment:

"All music is folk music. I ain't never heard a horse sing a song."

Despite what you may have read, we've never had a horse as President or CEO either. Let's find some other way of saying "the people who are not in a leadership position, who are oppressed by those above them in power."

We are all the People. No exceptions.

Nebraska's Culture

Marshall and I had an interesting exchange on FaceBook a couple weeks ago. It started with his noting Nebraskan culture being distinct, and my arguing that Nebraska, as a granfalloon (an group identity with no real, lasting bond between its members) couldn't really be called a distinct culture. Marshall argued back that Nebraska is unusual among states for its coherence, for a variety of historical and economic reasons. I still demurred that defining the culture by the bounds of political geography was a problem. And we let it go.

The fact is, political boundaries do define culture to some extent. Where they bound areas within which migration is relatively easy, but across which it is comparatively difficult, they provide a the edge to a shape within which things are comparatively blurred: this is the source of anger to Tibetans, who feel their nation being homogenized into China, and who thus want restored their sovereignty: the sense that Tibet has a border that Han Chinese could not then blithely migrate across. It also explains why Canada and the USA, while culturally similar in many ways, are in fact noticeably different at the border, all the way from coast to coast: they are each broadly homogenous, but each of their homogenizing occurs (comparatively) more within its own borders.

Even where migration across the political border is easy, if there is a state-to-state difference in political culture, it can show up in the wider culture. Marshall talked about this to some extent in his home town of Omaha, where the political culture of Iowa is in fact different from Nebraska. I know this is true from experience from living in Vermont within sight of New Hampshire. Even though the part of New Hampshire across the river from me was the most liberal part of the state, Vermonters still made a point that they lived in a progressive state, as opposed to what was then a very conservative-dominated state.

In thinking about Nebraska identity, it's hard also to ignore sports. Memorial Stadium at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln is, in itself, the third-largest city in the state on game day (with a current capacity of 81,067, it has sold out every game for 38 years). Without a major-league team or any competing land-grant university, the Cornhuskers have an unusually central place in Nebraska identity. But in general, sports provides a rallying point for group cultural identity, like it or not (and I do tend to inwardly sneer at the cultural influences of sports). Here in Minnesota, the Vikings and the Green Bay Packers help define Minnesota from culturally similar Wisconsin.

But sports can create group identity that cuts across political lines. I grew up in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, which sits on one side of the old "Province Line" between the colonies of East and West Jersey. Legend has it that on a summer's evening you could walk down Province Line Road (which mostly follows the ancient political line) and hear New York Yankees baseball broadcasts on one side and Philadelphia Phillies on the other.

In fact, professional baseball teams' "fan-sheds" have very little to do with political boundaries: see common census's survey-based map and Nike's United Countries of Baseball. These have more to do with cultural spheres of cities (as I was arguing with Marshall, Omaha's sphere probably does not match up all that precisely with the political boundaries of Nebraska), and especially with news media.

College sports are different, especially where they are dominated by Land Grant colleges, which are dominated by state residents and whose mission and program is tied to the state's economy. Hence the Nebraska Cornhuskers.

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I think the other problem Marshall and I were having (or at least that I was having) was the hidden baggage that the word "culture" carries.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the path of the word: originally it meant the planting and care of crops (as in agri-culture), then other things that needed to be coddled along (like cultured pearls). By analogy, one could "cultivate" or "culture" one's mind, developing taste and refinement... also an early usage.

The first OED use in the anthropological/sociological sense of "Nebraska's culture" is 1860, from A. Gurowski's Slavery in History: "This Egyptian or Chamitic civilization...preceded by many centuries the Shemitic or Aryan cultures."

The idea of "a civilization" has fallen out of fashion. So too, to some extent, has the word "subculture". Civilization implies that those who are not members aren't civilized, and are therefore somehow sub-humans. Subculture also implies a kind of irrelevance: members of a subculture are part of a fringe, not part of the dynamic center.

The violent and totalitarian side-effects of nineteenth and early-twentieth century nationalism are a big piece of why the idea of a national civilization is viewed suspiciously today. Hitler and Mussolini used the same fierce sense of national identity to create oppressive states as had been used to form Italy and Germany into nation-states only sixty to seventy years earlier... around the time of that first use of "culture" as a synonym for "society."

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And this gets to the root of my problem with "Nebraska culture." It's the same as my problems with any normalizing identity that then can get reinforced back on its members. I mean, Nebraska as an identity is pretty harmless, but the definition of "American" culture can be (and has been) turned back on those someone defines as "un-American." And this basic dynamic—define a "culture" or a "civilization" or a "type" by average characteristics and then enforce that average back on the whole—is tremendously destructive.

So how to deal with the fact that Nebraska is different from Iowa (and the other surrounding states) as a whole? Or that there is a "gay culture" or a "cartographic culture" or a "morris dancing culture"?

First, recognize that all groups of people that we can identify as a group end up looking to outsiders like their average member (or to be more precise, their average as heavily nuanced by their public leadership/spokespersonhood). And it does little good to say, "there is no average member of X group because they are all individuals. We instinctively seek to identify and characterize a typical personhood out of a bunch of people. It's how people are built.

Second, consider the back-and-forth dynamic of a formal structure arising around a shared identity, which arises around a formal structure, and so on. And consider what a mess inheritance makes of the dynamic between the two: Generation 1 founds a new institution around an idea, generation 2 grows up tin that institution and so a culture becomes embedded around that institution, but some of those members move away from the institution, and by generation 3, some birth members of the institution no longer feel connected to the culture of the institution, though they are members and may still hold to the institution's ideals. In generation 4, there is a revival of focus on those institutional ideals, while the descendants of those who moved away from the institition in generation 2 want to return to the patterns of the culture, but not necessarily the ideals behind the institution...

It all gets rather muddled, rather quickly.

Third, consider the relation amongst the culture, the markers for that culture, and the degree of choice one has about those markers. I can choose to be a cartographer more easily than I can choose to be of Yankee extraction, middle-class, English-speaking and pink-skinned. I can choose to be Minnesotan by residence, but I can't really choose where I was raised. And if I moved somewhere where I couldn't pass as local (the bayous of Louisiana for instance, or Scotland), I would always be an outsider.

Finally, and this ties in to all of these, recognize that culture is fluid, even as entities that it forms around are comparatively rigid. By naming a culture "Nebraskan" we are claiming a relationship between a box and the contents of the box. In this case, the box is porous: a milk crate filled with packing peanuts. We can identify the container, we can pull the container up and look at it, but peanuts fall out of the holes, and other stuff gets in, and the identity of the peanuts ends up having a statistical rather than an absolute relationship to the container. Doesn't mean there's no relationship, but it is not simple as 1-to-1.

Letting the story go

An alignment of three things:

1. A comment on Facebook on stories. The original poster was commenting on how hard it was for her to talk with a creationist. Someone linked to the XKCD comic here. My response to a few more comments on stubborn ignorance was:

Methinks, as the comic points out, the issue is really an issue when it comes to power. Which it always does come down to one way or another when dealing with parents. But I don't care what my postal delivery worker or the guy at Mr Tire believe about creationism; or if I do care, its in the sense that Ingrid talked about: because it makes a good story.

It's kind of how I've come around to being able to (mostly) deal with Christian religious stories: I was raised by my agnostic/atheist parents to hear Biblical narration as part of an effort to push me to an orthodoxy—to exert power over me, in the same way that jingoism, pursed-lipped grandparents, and social conformity are. And so it's been great to be able to (for example) hear Ingrid tell our son the Easter story "from the inside," where it can live as a big powerful story, not part of some attempt to make me or Roo or anyone else into what the speaker wants us to be.

2. in Meeting this morning, a Friend rose to talk about her experience with other people's stories, with other people's baggage they bring to hearing your story. Her husband had come out quite publicly as bisexual, and she was recalling the pain that other people's assumptions and baggage brought her in that experience. There is a sense that when you speak Truth, that Truth is released from you—it is no longer yours. I think most people don't get this; certainly the idea of intellectual property works against this. But really, to release an idea is much more powerful than holding it. To try and hang on to it is mostly a salve for the ego. Or an attempt to control income—not that the experience of "colonized" musicians, who sold their songs for pennies to producers who then made fortunes on them, is a good thing. No one should starve when someone else is feeding themselves from one's work. But the idea itself benefits from truly being free to roam.

3. Christa Tippet in this week's Speaking of Faith, talked with Alan Dienstag, who wrote this companion commentary about his work getting early-stage Alzheimer's patients to write memories as part of their comign to terms with their illness. Part of what he talked and wrote about is writing not as hanging on to memories, but as giving them away.

As she neared the end of her life, my grandmother seemed to understand that if you can give something away, you don't lose it. This, as it turns out, is as true of memories as it is of objects and is yet another aspect of memory that is often overlooked. Memories are, in a sense, fungible. Writing is a form of memory, and unlike the spoken word, leaves a mark in the physical world. As a form of memory, writing creates possibilities for remembering, for the sharing and safeguarding of memories not provided by talking. The writing group gave memory back to its members. They were transformed in the experience of writing from people who forget to people who remember. A member of the writing group once said that when the group was together "— we forget that we don't remember." This is a statement of cure, not of biological and cellular disorder, but of the human disorder, the disorder of loss of personhood brought about by Alzheimer's disease.

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There is a scary power in letting go an idea, a teaching, a word, a picture...anything that comes out of oneself. To put your name on it keeps it somehow tied to you. It is a radical idea, to create anonymously and remain anonymous so as to be able to let the idea truly go free. It's almost a painful idea. But I feel myself drawn to it. It is an act of submission, an act of saying "these things are not mine."

I have no idea if I could do it.

Over some kind of threshold

I've been getting the sense over the last couple weeks that I've stepped over some kind of threshold. The pieces of it I can see all look like "ideas", but they also feel deeper than ideas... I think maybe they're something else besides ideas too:

Parts of parts of parts: The idea that as we are made of parts, so we are also parts ourselves, The "bigger things," the "powers" that so permeate religious life are in fact those larger entities that we are part of, going all the way up to the unimaginably huge. That's really the heart of the place I'm sitting now.

Cells and communities: Analogous ways parts work together, forming entities that do different things than we or cells do as individuals. I am also mindful of the ways that those functions are often autonomic, not under any really Mindful will.

Steering and the cerebellum: Not every entity in the universe has a cerebellum or a medulla oblongata or even a vestigial nervous system. And yet the most basic bits of matter have this "tendency" to move this way toward each other or away from each other. To me this feels like the most elementary part of "will." If you steer a boat, some of the skill comes from knowing how to get the boat to do what you want to do, but part is also being aware of currents and the boat's momentum, things about the larger system of you and the boat that aren't really under your present will.

The ordinaries of Christian religious discourse and life that have made me itchy: prayer, scripture, miracles, sainthood, souls, afterlife, sacraments, communion... I get more and more convinced that I at least as a non-theist need to come to terms with as much of this as I can manage, and understand them from my own points of view. I've been taking baby steps here for a year or so, and I think this new place I've dropped into makes that more possible, if only because I have a sense of a larger entity I actually believe in.

The ill-fittingness of "non-theism": this term makes me itchy too—as I've said before— because it frames my sense-of-things as the shadow cast by the figure of theism. It's a negative space, a figure-ground problem, and I just don't see my path in these matters as shadowy or reactionary. I really try not to make them reactionary. So the question is, what is the figure, the positive space, that occupies the space that others call "non-theist"? Does it in fact matter what it's called, and if it does matter, why does it?

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Anyway, this is my 100th post on the blog, and I think I need to take a little break and explore the landscape I seem to have dropped in on. Nothing definite in terms of length; I'll almost certainly be back by spring. Maybe a lot sooner. I just need to get my feet a little more under me before I can write coherently.

I also am finding my looming regular-life schedule for December through March daunting at best, and need to focus on that for a while.

Feel free to drop me a line at "nat dot case at mindspring dot kom" (except spell "kom" as it should be spelled and replace the "at" and "dot" with the appropriate stuff).

Thanks for reading... talk with you again soon!

We have met them, and they are us

Say you identify with a condition or a characteristic. You are blond, or left-handed, or have Schadenfreude's disease. This identity wasn't gathered lightly, and since you claimed it as your own, it has given you difficulty—plain old ostracism and nasty looks at the bus stop; doctors saying it's not a disease, it's a feature; grandparents saying left-handed people are the devil's spawn and making a big red X through your name in their wills and pointedly disinviting you to Thanksgiving. And sometimes worse.

But, you also feel a relief at knowing that this quality is really you and not a construct you've erected for the benefit of others. Just being able to say, "there's a word for what I am: blond" gives you a deep feeling of groundedness and, well, reality.

So, eventually you find a group who is accepting of you as you are, mostly. They believe you have Schadenfreude's disease. They think it's natural to be left-handed. A bunch of them have blond friends. Thank God, you think. I'm home.

It turns out this group has its own pre-existing culture. You adapt to it. You can live with this. In fact, after a while of living with this, you see just how much sense this culture makes. All decently-structured, several-generations-deep cultures make sense when you live with them for a while, and this one is no exception.

And there are a bunch of folks in this community with a similar sense to yours. Half the group is blond, actually; there's a Schadenfreude support group; community rituals have been adapted so the left-handed can participate equally. Mostly.

But there's a couple members of the old guard who, in fact, don't believe Schadenfreude's disease exists. One of them doesn't like blonds—a blond killed his red-head uncle in the war. One has real issues about the scriptural implications of left-handedness. They are willing to welcome you and your kind in, but with some hope and prayer for change...

Are these people the enemy? No, they are part of the community—in fact, they were members of the community before you were born. They are deeply learned in the heritage of this community—your community... Or is it your community? What makes it your community? Are they wrong? Are you wrong?

So you feel unsure. You want the group to say "Yes, blond people, left-handed people, even people with SD, all are welcome!" And there's resistance. Weird, surprising resistance. What the hey?

In a nutshell, the group welcomed you (and folks in your condition), but this is not a group for people like you. The group identity isn't the same as this identity you bring forward. That was never the community's purpose. You are welcome, but you do not speak for the group.

Ouch.

And that, Friends, is where a lot of liberal Quakers find themselves on a variety of fronts. Our meeting has, anyway. All are welcome, but that doesn't mean we're going to follow your lead. And it doesn't guarantee that all of us are going to like you as you are. Except that there are enough of us who have made the journey I described above, that it has in fact become part of who we are.

And if that in fact becomes a core of the meeting, being a refuge for the excluded and exiled, then doesn't it exclude those who haven't made that journey? The straight, Anglo, middle-class, raised-as-church-going folk?

As someone who feels somewhat like an outsider who found refuge (as a deeply agnostic rationalist with a strong, ornery taste for magical fiction), but also someone who inherited a fair amount of being-part-of-the-establishment, I am torn.

The New Champion

I have a new winner in the Best Book About Maps category. It's called The Map Addict (you can also view a preview of the book from that link). It is written by Mike Parker, and it is very very good.

Mike Parker is English, and his personal obsession is Ordnance Survey mapping, but the way he describes life inside a map works just as well for those of us who grew up in America. He begins with the kind of obsessive map-travel many of us practised as children, wending our way through road and street maps. In Parker's case, it was the 1:50,000 Landranger Series, but I was picturing an 11-year-old me with my family's Hagstrom and Texaco road maps and a Goode's World Atlas. Parker was obsessed enough to shoplift nearly a complete set of Landrangers in his teens, and he acted as the family's (heck, the neighborhood's) navigator for his young adult life.

The book includes the requisite descriptions of recent cartographic history—the origins of the Ordnance Survey, Bartholomew's, and the A-Z maps—but it all comes back to what it is like to be a map person. He carefully takes down the old canard about men, women and maps ("men read maps, women follow along"). He takes on the dangers of satellite navigation with great good humor. And in the end he turns on his own map addiction, describing what it is like as a map obsessive to wander without a map, to be freed of knowing ahead of time exactly where you are.

A description of the book sounds like a random collection of interesting waypoints: the solar alignment of Milton Keynes, the most boring sheet of Ordnance Survey mapping, the sensuousness of raised-relief mapping, but throughout it, Mike inserts himself and reflects on how his relationship with maps informed and changed his relationship with the world as a whole. As a gay, pagan travel writer and TV commentator, many conventional Englishmen and women would see him as weird, but his relationship with maps is tied to a quite normal English domestic way of being: Enid Blyton stories and a nice cup of tea, and the world laid out comfortably surveyed. All adventures contained.

He talks about how a mappy way of thinking about the world can and does lead to a kind of cranky, even dangerous, sense of normality. Many of his heroes turned into cranks in their old age, and he alludes to a kind of proto-fascist mentality lurking in any well-settled society.

The book is witty, and it reminded me how important humor is in discussing the things I like to talk about here. Humor is a way of pointing sideways to uncomfortable things, and Parker does it so well, you may not even recognize the discomforts he is talking about. We would all do well to pay attention to that.

Practice Practice Practice

In the carto-theory discussions there has been a lot of sturm und drang around the questions "what is a map?" and "what are cartographers?" — way more than I've seen in any other part of cartographic discourse. As soon as you start stating what cartography is and what cartographers are, you get yelps of indignation from folks who don't think that's what they do. This is especially true when you push the argument further, discussing what cartographers ought to do.

It's not that different in the liberal Quaker circles I'm involved in. We all gather in Meeting for Worship, and we have well-established frameworks for conducting our business. We even share a common gestalt sense, laid out in the Quaker testimonies, but just try telling a Quaker what he or she is...

I visit prisoners through Prisoner Visitation and Support (PVS). We are an organization which, while supported by a range of religious groups, does not have an evangelical or prosletyzing thrust. Our common work involves visiting prisoners, and talking with them. That's it. Now, many people do visit out of religious impulses (Jesus said, "visit the prisoners" and there are a significant number of visitors who work from this dictum). But I have been mightily impressed by how irrelevant to the common purpose that theological diversity seems at our training workshops. Practice trumps the specifics of faith.

So it's easy to come to the conclusion that we should all just ignore theory and theology and stick to practice. A lot of us do ignore it, but it is so centrally important to many individuals in their work, it makes it frankly dishonest to "leave out" of the discussion. And so we get tangled messes sometimes.

I'm thinking of situations where discord has invaded each of three three communities, and looking for a common thread in these discords. Can we get some perspective that works in general to resolve this kind of conflict on a structural level?

At PVS training sessions, people often give "personal stories" of why and how they joined PVS. I think because they are framed as personal, they are received in the spirit of personal testimonies, and I have never felt a sense of offense from the group. The only real offense I have seen taken at a PVS event was in an after-hours entertainment some years ago.

There was a recitation, clearly framed by the performer as one of her favorite poems, which involved racial stereotypes and issues of Native American suffering. It was explosive. Offense was taken. When the PVS board tried to distance itself from the performance and say it would not have allowed it had it known what the content would be, there was further irateness: some people felt that in distancing itself, the organization had betrayed the ability to speak one's mind. The whole event ended on a sour note, which is really weird for PVS. I think it shocked a lot of us, because it is normally such a "we're all in this toghether" kind of group.

What happened?

PVS does not advocate. It staunchly does not advocate. If you want to work for change in the federal prison system through advocacy or action, you need to join another group. PVS does what it does, and it is permitted access to federal prisoners because it so strictly restricts itself to this set of actions. One of the results of this non-advocacy is that the organization does not in any way link its actions to any specific theoretical or theological viewpoint. That is left solely to individuals.

Those who took offense felt that the performance violated that code. It was a statement framed not as a personal testimony, but as a performance. What caused the initial offense, I gather, was that it was seen as potentially a statement sanctioned by the organization, and there were those who strongly objected to its contents and wanted no part of such a statement. And the subsequent conflict was essentially between people who saw the performance (and perhaps performances in general) as representing the group vs those who saw it is solely personal.

In our Friends meeting, we've been wrestling for some time with a statement on theological diversity. Basically a way of saying, "the specifics of your faith are irrelevant to your being welcomed." An earlier statement was sent back, with a request to also address what it is that binds us together. A pretty broad statement was proposed this winter, and this was met with strong feelings, in large part around its deliberately non-Christian language.

The thing is, while issues of identity surrounding our Christian roots vs our non-Christian members have been brewing and percolating for some time, the meeting as a whole is steaming along. We are still a community. No real schisms. A few interest groups within meeting, and a worship group that budded off, but as far as I can tell no lasting ill-will. But the statement in question was (unintentionally) divisive. And I think the degree of passion in that divisiveness surprised most if not all.

Again, I think it was the idea that this was a statement of the whole that set things ablaze. We're used to individual statements, and have learned to frame them as such, so we can learn from them. And we do make collective statements, especially in the face of public injustice (I'm thinking here about GLBT issues, or issues around peace).

Here's what I think the difference is: We can make true collective statements if they are grounded in our collective experience. We can't make them if they are grounded in our separate experiences, even if those separate experiences seem to converge. Collective statements grounded in separate experience will be weak compromises.

The PVS performance was, I believe, not intended by the performer to somehow pressure us in to agreeing with her. I know her a little, and that's not her style. But something about the frame in which it was presented made it seem like a call to collective statement to some in the group, and I can see that standpoint too.

Likewise, the statement in meeting came out of the strongly felt sense by some members of the group which simply isn't felt by others. The group hadn't felt itself under the weight of collective experience, and so was divided on the statement.

Which brings me to cartography.

Cartography is a scattered practice. We each do our own thing, or we work within a small workgroup that does its own thing. We have common tools, mostly, and a recognizable "mappy" product, but how and why we get there are not as common collectively as we might think. And why we map is absolutely all over the board. We have assumed that there must be some commonality, but we have not really shared much specific experience as a group. And so any collective statement we made will be suspect and weak. And a proposed statement made by one of our number (or worse, someone who is not a practicing cartographer), attempting to speak for the whole, feels presumptuous.

I'm cogitating on this. Maybe hidden in this common practice are a variety of theoretical/theological types of personal bases to this practice. Maybe it would be helpful to open up the "whys" of cartographers in the same way that the "personal perspectives" pieces at PVS trainings and spoken ministry in Friends meeting can open up understanding. Maybe that would lead to a better sort of collective statement.

Or maybe it would lead to an understanding that at some level the only collective statement we can make is the practice itself.

Quaker Ontology

What it boils down to is, what does it mean to be a Quaker?

Mark quite rightly called me on name-calling. I said "But here I am, gettin' pissed off. And not against small-minded, homophobic, hate-filled, cling-to-guns-and-bibles, fire-and-brimstone Christians." My intent was to say I was not getting angry at our typical liberal strawman, the evangelical. And I should point out that I was not saying "Christians are small-minded, homophobic, filled with hate, cling to guns and bibles, and spout fire and brimstone." I'd say none of my self-identifying Christian friends exhibit any of these qualities.

So why was that name-calling? Because I was conjuring up a sub group of Christians, identifying them, and then smearing them. I was doing the same thing the Outgoing Occupant has done in defining our countries' enemies as "terrorists." I was simultaneously creating an identity group and tarring it wholesale.

"Name-calling" is a weird phrase. I call all kinds of things by name, not all of them names they had before (I've been reading Roald Dahl's The BFG to our son and am greatly enjoying the BFG's wholesale creation of new words for things like snozzcumbers). But calling something by name is different than name-calling. Or is it?

When I decided to request membership the Society of Friends, I was asking to be recognized with a name, Quaker. I was accepting that I was growing into being part of an identity group. Membership is a formal process, but it usually reflects a longer informal process of becoming. The question is, though, what are we becoming? That's where a lot of the current sturm and drang comes from, I think. At least that's the root of my sturm and drang.

I don't believe I am becoming a Christian. I am in an environment, both in my marriage and in meeting, where I am in communion with Christians, but I do not identify as one and am uninterested in being identified as one. Now, I have absorbed much of the story, the teachings and the example of Jesus, but I have absorbed a lot of other stories, and I do not wish to privelege Jesus's stories above others I find meaningful, nor his life, nor his teachings.

And I do not like feeling I must define myself as a "non-Christian Quaker," any more than I like being labeled a "non-theist." Which is about as much as a Christian Quaker would like to be defined as a "non-secularist" or a "non-humanist" or a "non-snozzwangler." No one likes to be defined by a negative, at root. And yet here we are, Protestant (protesting against the Roman church), non-theist/a-theist, secularist (not sacred) type people. I like being able to say I am a Quaker. I plan to keep saying it.

Well, probably I plan to. Here's the problem for me: by naming myself part of this identity group, I risk making membership in the group more important than truth. I think this is a risk in any group, and indeed any naming: we name something, or measure something, and then we apply the name or measurement back onto the thing itself. It's a basic human trait, certainly not particular to Friends, but it's one that especially in other conversations on this blog I am growing to recognize as inherently destructive of perceiving truth.

In this instance, we are Quakers because we say we are Quakers. We come together. But then we try to ferret out what exactly we have in common as Quakers. Once we have decided that, what happens when one of our number, or we ourselves, deviate from that definition? We are forced (or force ourselves) to get back in line, or are shown (or show ourselves) the back door.

And why is this? What makes this happen? I think it is, simply, human nature. We form groups. We want to reassure ourselves, through formalizing, that these groups have some basis in meaning, that they have definition. And once we are assured of this, we don't want to let it go. I've certainly seen, in myself and others in meeting, a deep anxiety over not maintaining some sort of definition. Just letting it be, letting just anybody (or any idea) in makes the experience of our community and its work somehow paler and less interesting. Emptier.

I hold this up. I've got no answer. It's a Quandary and a Query. It warrants more sitting with, I think.

Gettin' ticked off for mysterious reasons

I've been involved in several conversations over the last few weeks around religious identity that end up with me full of bile. I don't think of myself as bigoted. But here I am, gettin' pissed off. And not against small-minded, homophobic, hate-filled, cling-to-guns-and-bibles, fire-and-brimstone Christians. I got into a pretty seriously angry argument with my wife, who like me is a basically happy member of a liberal Quaker meeting.

What the hey? Where on earth is this bitter anger coming from? No one's really stomped on my religious liberties lately. If anything, my respect for and understanding of honest, deeply felt personal religious faith has grown a lot over the last few years.

But when the question turns to whether we as a community identify as Christian, my dander mysteriously rises like hair on the back of a dog in the seconds before an earthquake.

What on earth?

A clue: in my argument with my wife, she felt the same feeling of personal threat, only in her eyes it was me telling her she wasn't allowed to express her beliefs. So it's not simply a matter of feeling trapped by the patriarchal hegemonizing colonialist bully-boy politics of evangelical theology. (Did I get all the key words in there? I feel like I've forgotten one. Oh, right, I forgot to weave the word "power" in there somewhere.) It's personal, not institutional.

Another clue: What struck me initially as I really try to get hold of this anger is how much it feels like not being picked for the middle-school softball team. Now, some of the language some religionists use to discuss matters of group identity are explicitly about "you're on the team bound for heaven; they're didn't make the cut and are going to hell," but that is not the case here. In fact, in all the discussions in my family, in Friends meeting, among friends, there is an explicit statement like "we're all on the same team here, and we don't believe in Hell, and the afterlife is an open question, and we love and support each other." But somehow following this up with a question like "What's our team song?" sets off some weird stuff.

Yesterday, Ingrid mentioned what to me felt like a sharp wedge cracking into what's going on: she was observing how, from a kind-of-Buddhist sensibility, we all hang on to our sufferings. If someone has done us wrong, we remember it, tenaciously. We make it part of ourselves.

Now, I was not raised oppressed. No secret churches under threat from the secret police for me, no razzing at school for wearing religious paraphernalia (not sure what paraphernalia I would have worn anyway—gold question mark on a chain?). My parents tsked and winced at televangelists and crazed imams, but we were not the Madalyn Murray O'Hair family in any sense. Secular, but not crazy. Heck, my parents met at a Unitarian church and were happy at my getting some sort of religious background at my high school.

So what kind of suffering am I remembering? And what am I getting so mad at now?

I think it has to do with trust.

Here's the thing: the biggest freak-outs I can remember having have to do with physical trust exercises: the kind where you stand up on a platform and fall backwards into the rest of the team's outstretched arms. Or where you have to get the team members up and over a tree limb. The last time I tried one of these was back in high school. Freshman orientation, actually, so I was 14. And I just freaked. I lost it. I don't remember all what happened, but there were tears, and as I recall, I was the only one who really freaked this way.

I am lousy at situations where I can't put my feet on the floor, metaphorically or literally speaking. I hate swimming in over-my-head water. I hate being on the edge of a roof. And apparently, I need to keep my own feet under me religiously as well.

I absolutely see that being able to off-load your troubles/trespasses/moral compass to another is very helpful. I visit in prison, and have seen repeatedly how getting religion helps ground folks, gives them a sense of not being out there on their own. I think Jesse Ventura was profoundly messed up when he talked about religion as a crutch and preached the gospel of self-sufficiency. None of us are self-sufficient, but some of us are better than others about giving credit for being held up.

But there's a point at which, to me and a lot of other folks, there's such a thing as too much faith, too much off-loading of responsibility. The Ben Franklin mantra, "God helps those who help themselves" comes to mind. Or the joke about the man who trusted in God to help him win the lottery, only to be dressed down from above for not actually buying a ticket.

So what the heck has this to do with me being pissed off at Christians? Or my wife being pissed off at secularists?

Simple. We don't trust others to hold our spirit up. We don't want to put much of our weight onto a foreign spiritual language, or a foreign set of stories and theologies. We my love our neighbor, our fellow member of Meeting, our spouse even, but we need to feel our own feet planted under us.

When someone asks us to name their religious basis as our own, they're in essence asking us to do that trust exercise where everyone sits on everyone else's laps, in a circle. Except that it feels to each of us like everyone else is sitting on some pretty unstable ground. When we're being Universalist about it, we can shrug and be philosophical about other people: you stand on your self, I'll stand on mine, and we'll each take our chances and love each other just the same.

But when it comes right down to it, we like our own foundations, and we're not interested in jumping off them. Which is what making a statement about universalism feels like to some, about Christianity feels like to others.

No answers to this one, folks. Just a survey of the landscape.

The Power of Place

Harm de Blij’s new book The Power of Place is one half of an argument that I already agreed with at the first paragraph. As such, it didn’t do much for me in terms of changing my view of the world. It is essentially a challenge to the view that globalization has made the world “flat.” (as in Thomas Friedman’s best-selling The World is Flat, a title Friedman acknowledges as hyperboly).

De Blij is a professor at Michigan State and a public advocate for geography—his previous book was Why Geography Matters... Not someting I like I needed to be persuaded of, but I gather there are a fair number of people who really do think geography really doesn’t matter, so good for him.

I was attracted, honestly, by the title, and I was disappointed to find that place itself and its power was not really described. There is no topography (in the old sense) here, no “sense of place.”

What this book is about is the importance of location. De Blij’s point is that regional variations in health, religion, language, exposure to natural hazards, etc. are huge determinants in your economic and physical well-being—quality of life. Well, to coin a phrase, duhhhh.

The piece that stuck out for me the most was his approach to religion. De Blij is not a religionist, and he picks out religious conservatism, especially conservative Islam, for particular critique. Now, I’m no fan of Wahhabi ideology (or of the fiery fundamentalism of any faith), but that this sticks so especially in his craw I think relates to of the weakness of the whole book: a limit in scale to his view. In cartographic terms, he never gets closer in than 1:100,000, and mostly he’s hovering above 1:1,000,000 (the scale of a US state road map). When he does zoom in, it’s for a few peculiarly impersonal snapshots, in particular a view of his native Netherlands from below sea level.

De Blij sees local conditions as trapping people, keeping them out of the benefits of a global marketplace. He fails to address seriously the appeal of localism: the way a close relationship with a place can yield an understanding and an attachment whose richness can more then counterbalance the economic benefits of mobility.

The appeal of religion is in the experience, the day-to-day living it. Same thing with place: the appeal is getting to know the place, learning to see it not as a ground to put your feet on, but as ground that supports you, as a thing itself. “Religion” itself is an “outside” word, as I think I’ve noted before.In the sense we and de Blij use it, it is a name for a system, like a state. When you live within it, it usually is not the state you are paying most attention to, it’s the places within that state. And it’s the visceral love for those places that politicians use to translate into love of country.

Religion has much the same dynamic as place: when it develops deep roots (and de Blij advocates keeping children from being “indoctrinated” until they are old enough to develop judgment), it ties people to itself with roots of habit, knowledge, and comfort. This becomes a “trap” only if the basis of the person’s attachment is a lie (e.g. a prophet who it turns out is a shyster who runs off to the Bahamas with all your money). The same imbalance holds when a person’s attachment to place is physically unsustainable—the heartbreak of resource-extraction economies forcing families to move once the resource is tapped out.

Where people are seemingly traped by their geography or religion, it is not the place or the spiritual life itself that is the problem usually, it is the socal construct built up around it. And unless we learn to respect the deep connections at the core of that construct, we will be approaching issues of global culture and its effect in as dark an ignorance as a madrassa student approaching a Western university or a hick visiting New York.

Soon I Will Be Invincible... and all alone

I finished Soon I Will Be Invincible, by Austin Grossman, last night. It's the first time in quite a while I've been hooked by a book jacket, but it turned out to be a fun read. It's essentially Wicked, but with the world of comic-book superheroes instead of the world of the Wizard of Oz.

Grossman's take on the whole thing is centered on Dr. Impossible, a beat-up-as-a-kid, misunderstood-genius, superiority-complex/inferiority-complex supervillain...the characters are all familiar, but vaguely familiar. Grossman has done a bang-up job of creating a parallel superhero-infested universe to D.C. and Marvel's trademarked and copyrighted realms.

Anyway, putting it down I was reminded of a pretty much universal theme of modern fiction, how we are all alone. Alienation. Overindividuation. Separation. And so on. It's honestly been a while since I even thought much about it. It's old hat, this alienation thing. It's so, like, 1960.

But, ya know, just be cause it's a cliché doesn't mean it isn't true. Superheroes, or Wicked's witch, just weren't on the cultural radar when Baum's original Wizard of Oz came out. Not that people weren't desperately lonely 100 years ago, but as a cultural theme, it kind of took World War I and the Lost Generation to make alienation interesting. Or normal.

It feels to me like there's a bunch of themes I've been carrying around for long time, some of them for decades even, that come together oddly in the Grossman novel. It's odd to me because, honestly, I've never gotten the appeal of superhero comics. I'm an arty-comic kind of person. Neil Gaiman all the way.

• DIY alienation: I think I've mentioned this before on the blog, how it drives me crazy when people figure they have to "do it themselves" if they are to feel justified in the world. People make fun of Academy Award winners who go on and on thanking everyone, but really they're being realistic. No-one does it alone, and anyone who starts to believe the publicity saying he or she does, is setting themselves for a repeat of Lightning McQueen's situation in Cars. But, of course, we are set up to look at single operators. Soloists are heroes, orchestras are like cabals or gangs. Superheroes are like that false value, magnified.
• Alienation and scale: Superheroes are urban. So are most of us who read this kind of blog-stuff. We have a peer group made up of people "like us" in some respect, rather than family or neighborhood. I know my neighbors, but not well. We don't hang out. My family lives in Maine and New Jersey; my wife's in Colorado and Utah. You get a different story when the characters all have lived in the same town for a long time (you get Garrison Keillor or Louise Erdrich), or if family is what they know and do mainly. And even these non-urban writers can't help but write from a viewpoint where most of the world is urban.
• Alienation, science and universalism: Look, what I'm seeing from where I sit is: there are people for whom God is a person. An all-knowing, all-powerful person, like superheroes are imitations of. And there are others (I'm on this side of the argument), for whom God, or the idea of God, is a map-maker, looking down equally at all points. This point of view does not lend itself to a cozy relationship to the divine, because it includes necessarily the idea that God didn't choose you; you aren't on the "cool" side of God's red velvet rope, because there is no rope. God doesn't choose anyone.

Up up and away. Or something.

Stray bit: In looking at others' comments tot he book, I really like burritoboy's notes on supervillians as stand-ins for Hitler. Makes a ton of sense; as in so many things, most of the second half of the 20th century is backwash from The War.

identity grid

I was walking around our building's First Thursday open studio, and in the back of my mind, as I chatted with artists of all stripes, was the question, "How and why do they call themselves artists?" Not in an insulting way, but honestly what makes them different? And the best answer I could come up with, is marketing. People generally buy art from artists, so if you want to make your living drrawing, painting, sculpting, ceramicizing, etc., then you need to call yourself an artist.

I think it's interesting how in the world of people who make things for money, you can divide their self-definitions two ways: definition by what sort of subject-matter they choose, and definition by what sort of medium they work in. In the arts, this means you're a portraitist or a painter; in graphic design it means you're a cartographer or a book designer; in writing it means you're a financial writer or a journalist.

In any of these examples, there are conventions, there is a sense of commonality of language and understanding when two or more people of like self-identity meet. The narrower the common self-definition (financial ceramicisists working in terracotta mergers and acquisitions), the more they will share a network of shared experience and understanding. And the closer they get to having the same experiences in their work, the better the chance that their conversation will move from "isn't that interesting what you're doing over there" to "don't poach my turf." When two people interested in the same things realize they're fighting for work the same clients. Or the same tenure committee. When one or both of them decide the town ain't big enough for both of them.

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I'm trying out the thesis developed in the discussion over the Grid (in cartographic terms), that the problem isn't in the gridding per se, its in the reimposition of that grid back on the subject. Does that apply to identity? I'm thinking of ongoing discussions in meeting about Quaker identity, but I think it applies to all identity groups: Is the problem less with the identity group and more with when the code which binds us is then reimposed back on us?

We human beings come up with structures, codes, grids, networks, any numbers of systems we lay our understandings of the world over the top of. Saying we shouldn't do that because systems end up dividing us is like saying we should stop using language because we'll be misunderstood.

We also like to form community (or better yet find community, because its easier) around identity, to be able to say "these are my people." And it seems sensible then to put these two together, and to codify what it is that brings us together. Maybe it's a hierarchy (I'm with you because of a feudal system, or because we're part of this family tree). Maybe it's a creed (I agree with enough of the planks in your platform, I'm in). Maybe it's just cultural clues (You like chicken? I like chicken!). Maybe it's a bunch of people who all know the same songs (I know I'm not the only one who had a near-religious experience at a Pete Seeger concert).

But...

The problem arises (I would submit) when we then look at the "official" set of common-identity markers, and judge ourselves (or worse, allow others in the group to judge us) based on our adherence to those markers. To make the Grid the marker of value, not the thing itself.

Qualified

Further to my last post, the thread on James Fee's blog took an interesting turn in which John from Jerzee complained against unqualified people creeping into GIS (especially in management), I responded noting that I had only three classes in grad school and a studio art degree and have built a successful career on that, and John responded (in part):

Nat: I find your post irritating to say the least. Your example is based on getting an entry level job you were never qualified for then learning on the job and taking a higher position you should’ve never been qualiifed for either.
My argument is based on people like yourself who think you can pick up every detail on the job. Unfortunately, you can not and that is why formal training is neccesary. All my cartographic skills were developed in training and college. I applied them in my job but I never gained more cartgraphic training at work.
On the job training teaches us how to make cost effective maps not cartographically correct maps.

Not surprisingly, I take umbrage at the idea I am unqualified for my job. But the whole exchange sets up for me a fundamental divide not just between GIS and cartography, but between people whose job it is to manage and operate a complex system, and people whose job it is to make something or perform a service. For the former, training is essential; for the latter, seat-of-the-pants can work, especially if the system is not too complex.

There was an article last year in the New Yorker by Atul Gawande about checklists in medicine. A doctor named Peter Pronovost has found that using checklists for procedures (such as intubation) where every step is essential can save lives, because in the heat of the moment even the best nurses or doctors can have a momentary lapse. In a relatively simple system, like driving a car, one can readjust, but at some point that is a recipe for disaster.

The classic example, and the origin of Pronovost's idea, is the 1935 crash of the prototype Boeing airplane later called the "flying fortress." The plane crashed not for mechanical reasons, but because the plane had gotten too complex to fly by the seat of the pants. So:

...the Army purchased a few aircraft from Boeing as test planes, and some insiders remained convinced that the aircraft was flyable. So a group of test pilots got together and considered what to do.
They could have required Model 299 pilots to undergo more training. But it was hard to imagine having more experience and expertise than Major Hill, who had been the U.S. Army Air Corps’ chief of flight testing. Instead, they came up with an ingeniously simple approach: they created a pilot’s checklist, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing. Its mere existence indicated how far aeronautics had advanced. In the early years of flight, getting an aircraft into the air might have been nerve-racking, but it was hardly complex. Using a checklist for takeoff would no more have occurred to a pilot than to a driver backing a car out of the garage. But this new plane was too complicated to be left to the memory of any pilot, however expert.

So what does all this have to do with cartography and GIS?

A GIS is a very complex suite of software. It takes all one's expertise and attention to make sure it does what it needs to do, and it can do an enormous amount. But because of this, GIS experts tend to be very focused on the system.

Cartographers (or at least the graphic-designy ones I identify with) tend to have a less intensive approach to the tool(s), and spend more time on the product as an organic whole. The cartographer will be working back and forth between comparatively simple adjustments of the map elements and stepping back and judging how it is working from the point of view of a user.

All extremely generalized, but as I think about the difference between liberal arts types and technical types—and how they approach the nature of a job—it makes a lot of sense. Most of us find ourselves having to meld the two approaches: the generalist has to learn some very specific tool-based skills (and yes, training of one sort or another is usually necessary), and the specialist has to learn some basic "liberal arts" skills like business writing and customer service (often on the job).

[updated 2-17-13 with new links]

Don't forget the primates

Just back from a week visiting my folks and my high school reunion. Nice bunch of people.

I spent a bunch of the day on Monday with my friend Nathan who was in my class in second and fifth grades and in high school and whose parents then moved to New Hampshire near where I lived for seven years. So we've kept in touch. He's doing interesting work in forestry now, and our conversation turned to his interest in restoring old-growth forests through management. This sounds utterly counter-intuitive if we're used to a wilderness-based way of thinking, but it echoes some other interesting reads recently.

My favorite book from last year is Charles Mann's 1491. And its most controversial claim seems to be that much of the Americas that we grew up thinking of as wilderness was in fact managed, just using very different techniques than Old-World-style agriculture. I gather it's controversial in part because some environmentalists think of this as an excuse to bulldoze the Amazon, and because it challenges the ideal of a human-free wilderness.

Nathan says he has a line he uses to try and get past the human/wilderness mind-block: "Don't forget the primates." Think of us as a species who has been an integral part of the ecosystem. Don't assume that the best way to restore a functioning ecosystem is to remove the homo sapiens. Seems obvious to me, but so much of our basic thinking about the environment in the modern western world is bifurcated: here's the boundary of the park, and on this side is people's land, on the other side is not-people's land (on this side of the line is the Euro-American land, and on that side (until my brother bilks you out of it) is the Amero-American land).

And so I go off on a variant riff of the "grid" conversation of a couple months ago. As I was arguing then, the trouble is not with the grid as a measure, or as a way of organizing information. The trouble is when the grid is used to impose lines back onto the land. This reimposed grid is a symptom of the same sort of disassociation with the landscape that posits "non-human" wilderness.

Livery

I posted this in CartoTalk, but I thought it appropriate to post here too. It's a response to a posting in Speak Up:


It's funny, because I've been wondering lately about the limitations of our company calling itself a "map company", let alone calling myself a "cartographer.” It's certainly a name with a certain amount of cachet in the right circles, but it does mean often that my work (and the work my company is hired to do) stops at the neatline (actually my business card has always said "Head of Production").

So I am to some extent in line with what the article laments. Here's what I think is a crucial mistake he makes: he looks at renaming as solely an effort to sound like everyone else. I think the object is to point out what you can do better, and to redefine your way out of obsolescence.

An example from a hoary metaphor: livery manufacturers after World War I. Those who persisted in specializing in harnesses and bridlewhips were mostly out of business by the crash of 1929. However, I'l wager good money that some of them got into the fittings and construction business for the auto indutry. Instead of "livery" makers they became "manufacturers of leather fittings." Or something similar.

Professional writers didn't disappear after people started learning how to write their own letters. But "scribes" became "secretaries" or "authors." There are still professional photographers, but the bulk of them work for the media, while portrait photographers, where the real money was 120 years ago, got in large part replaced by amateurs and by big-box operations.

My point is, some of the things that set cartographers and graphic designers apart in the old days (you know how to do the process, you know how to use the arcane tools) have not become irrelevant, but they're heading away from (I'll be blunt) the real money.

When I started, we could think about drawing a street map from scratch, because that was how you got consistent linework without jaggies. And we field-checked everything because the base data was so unreliable. Now I look at GoogleMaps and 95% of the time I say, well, my work here is done. Or irrelevant. Or it will be eventually.

So the challenge is to look at what we do well (without using the word map—try it, it’s an interesting exercise), and find a way to frame that that doesn’t restrict us into livery-makers.