First:
Ed Weick wrote:
> Ray,
>
> I do accept your point, but I was not concerned with the arts when I used
> the term 'romanticize'. I simply meant that one must avoid portraying
> aboriginal Americans, or any people, as having a special wisdom or
> nobility -- as being "the noble savage".
The Noble Savage was a philosophy of Rousseau. He
was primarily talking about the educational practices of
the Iroquois which was far superior to the European
practices which considered the child as a little adult
with a vindictive spirit which had to be broken in order
to become civil. That is now emerging again because
they have that dualism virus. Saints or sinners,
virgins or whores and all that rot.
Rousseau who was a composer/violinist , writer, and
a terrible parent himself, changed the educational
practices of Europe from caning to what it is today.
Maybe out of guilt for his own children abandoned
to the foundling home? (see Mike Hollinshead's latest
book)
Meanwhile in America the European practice of
sending children to prison is reviving. That is not
Indian and has always been an anathema to us.
The "Law of Blood" the traditional law of the
Southeastern peoples is more just but also includes
familial responsibility more than current law. An
interesting read in this law thing is Rupert
Ross's "Returning to the Teachings, Exploring
Aboriginal Justice" (Canadian) or "Fire and the
Spirits, Cherokee Law from Clan to Court" by the
Oklahoma Cherokee Rennard Strickland.
As the current dominant culture here slowly erodes
justice into litigeousness, the Law of Blood is
re-emerging and groups of private cultural police
are becoming more viable. This happened with the
Italians, and the Hispanics and is happening now
with us. I view this with alarm, because it is a
breakdown of the social contract. The dominant
culture has used the police to batter and abuse
our people and today holds Leonard Peltier, a
Lakota man illegally brought from Canada with
fraudulent FBI documents and tried by crooked
government agents simply because they had to
"settle the score" when two of the agents abusing
the traditional elders were killed as a result of
their actions. Amnesty International
lists Peltier as the only political prisoner in America.
I don't agree that he is the only one but he certainly
is one of the reasons for the breakdown of authority
amongst minorities in this country.
Our people have very long memories. Life seems to
mean more to us than most since we don't forgive and
forget. We believe that theft of children, land, mineral
rights, religion and opportunities are not forgiven when
a man's children or grandchildren still benefit from the
original theft with no recompense to the victims.
Even the German government and now the Swiss
banks are paying the descendants of the Holocaust.
That is an honorable Cherokee thing to do.
But if I may be allowed to say this once more:
1. There was nothing noble about the child rearing
practices of Europe compared to the Americas. The
real expert on this is Mike Hollinshead on this list.
He has done marvelous research on this and has
written about it.
2. The same is true of city and private sanitation practices.
When the Nova Scotia reconstructed old Louisburg they
included the smells and the poor sanitation. The Micmacs
refused to stay overnight in the original town because it
made them sick. Also no self respecting deer would
come within a hundred miles of that smell. So the
Micmacs could starve if they absorbed that "human"
smell.
3. Indian farming practices have changed the way the
world looks at food. That food freed the beast in the
European breast to move large armies while being able
to feed them. It was the potato that traveled with the
armies of Europe. The potato and the discovery of
canning was what made it possible for Napoleon to
reach Moscow.
Without it they would have had to
pillage their way there and such practices were what
so destroyed the countryside that armies in the past
were never helped by the peasants. The potato changed
all of that. The Incas developed over 200 varieties of
potatoes in their agricultural science. I've already mentioned
long fiber cotton which before the Aztecs was considered
the clothing of Kings in Europe. After Cortez, the common
soldier could wear a cotton shirt. Much lighter and less
abrasive between the legs than wool. Could march further.
4. Indians had a whole life just the same as Europeans
but you make a basic mistake.
If I may put it into another more artistic
context. In the 19th century there were thousands of
opera houses and companies across America, grounded
in their communities and supporting both local talent and
touring companies.
Today there are a few hundred who only present two to
three productions a year where there were formerly
thousands of vital full time ones. Only now, as a result
of a change in the way historians look at what is valued,
is that information about the 19th century emerging.
Instead of better and better we have become more and
more ignorant culturally. When it comes to the
children and population being able to do and even
know what their cultural heritage is, our private
publishing system has destroyed the continuity through
their lack of upkeep of the traditional and their constant
pursuit of novelty. What a shock that new digitized
library at Carnegie Mellon Univ. was with it immediate
search engine which showed how little things had truly
changed. The writer were just re-writing with no
advancement. Spinning their precious wheel as they
prayed to the god of success. The Western publishing
system is built upon information becoming unavailable
and then being constantly re-invented. Inconvenient
information like the Cherokee histories, and those
1,300 opera companies in Iowa, are just dropped
by the "out of print" wayside and left to the scholar
priesthood.
Scholars who break the expertise down into small
parcels that they then draw large conclusions from.
As John Warfield points out, this type of thinking
creates incompetence in government, education,
business, science, religion, medicine, art and even
history. The only one to escape is the litigious
profession that pays itself to constantly find new
and novel ways in the old.
Now for Keith who said:
>Here was one so-called sovereign nation, Great Britain,
>fighting another so-called sovereign nation, China (as well as
>simultaneously fighting other so-called sovereign nations
>such as India, Afghanistan, Egypt and other chunks of
>Africa and goodness knows what else all over the world)
>not in the name of opium but in the name of Gatling
>guns, Maxims and Ironclads. In other words, the Opium
>War was not a private action by opium merchants, but
>part of the imperialistic drive of European nations, of
>which GB was the chief culprit.
I guess this is one place where the new world is more
willing to be truthful than the old. Even the NYTimes admits
that the Delanos, well connected old family, as in Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, made much of their money trading for
"tea" in China. "Tea" being a euphemism for opium.
The
Emperor didn't want to sell tea or allow open opium to
his people so the Royal Navy at the behest of the merchants
made junk of the Emperor's fleet, built Hong Kong to
protect the English business and addicted the Chinese
people. Even as benign a history as the Pelican
History of the World reports it. But I guess those
English Universities are still holding out for another
version. They do the same in Church Music as well.
Keith, I'm a businessman myself of the private
variety. I've only worked in colleges for 13 years out of 40
years of private enterprise. I was a virtual/agile Learning
Organizationed entrepreneur before many of the people
who have coined these terms were even born. I've had to
live by my wits and the quality of my work. Work that was
judged in public by newspaper critics that sold to millions
of consumers. I've recovered from bad reviews and gloried
in the good. My students sing all over the world in all of
the major houses and have even sung in your Covent
Garden and Italy's La Scala. My company has taken people
who were told they would never have careers by pundits and
proved the pundits wrong. So when you speak of "Comparative
Advantage" as the only reason for things I know better.
>All
>I know is that when better goods come along at cheaper prices then
>everybody -- but everybody -- goes for it and the customs and practices
>that went with the old goods simply does not survive.
That is generally but not always true. There are many
reasons why people will pay more for a less quality
product. Not the least of which is the label on the
product. Expensive items like pianos and automobiles
often are priced above their competitors in a strategic
game of price fixing. It is the game that makes the
object be desired as much as the price. That very same
game often makes people who should know better buy
inferior products because they are cheap. My point is
that your rule is riddled with exceptions which makes it
OK but not all that reliable and certainly not something
that I would give up a thing of value, like my name or
morality to follow. But there are many that I know who
do.
>But, already, some fundamental scientific truths have
>emerged which, I suggest, will stand the test of time
>(or as ,ong as the human species is alive, anyway).
>Among these are Ricardo''s Law of Comparative Advantage,
>and Alexrod's Co-operation Theory.
Same problem. Dual thought with too many exceptions.
When you put the exceptions together they make an
entirely other area and sometimes many areas that the
duality doesn't touch.
As for how I like or dislike one
profession like social science or economics or their
troops, I would say that yes or no is not appropriate.
It is more complicated than that.
Both have their great thinkers and great humans but
they also have their sleazy underbelly. China was as
big a sleaze for England and English business as the
Holocaust was for the Germans. Remember the Germans
got full employment when the put the Jews in the camps.
The only structural difference being that when you
compare the advantage of taking out six million people
from a people that only has ten million souls next to
taking out a few million souls from a people that has
almost a billion then the one who lives to escape jail
and the sleaze pit of history is always the one who
took out more from those who had more to replace
the lost ones with. However there is a slippery slope
here. If you take out 75% of too small a group then
you will lose the empathy of the rest of the world and
simply be known as a serial killer nation or business.
To escape that you pit two victimized groups against
each other for the greater victimization and slip quietly
into the night while they fight over it. (Jews and
Gypsies on the Holocaust Museum board for
example)
Comparatively speaking if on the other hand you
should screw up and take out 93% of 100 million
in one mighty cataclysm as in the Americas then
you should use your government to declare the
land empty since there are now only seven or
eight million left and those mostly on land you
don't have the technology yet to exploit.
Remember that the European didn't have the
technology to exploit the new world on their own.
(Francis Jennings; The Invasion of America, the
Cant of Conquest.) Where there had been little
habitation, they were miserable failures. They limited
themselves to old villages, cultivated fields abandoned
only a few years before. It has taken two hundred
years for the forests to go to seed since the Europeans
never learned how to care for them in a traditional
efficient native way. On the other hand amaranth, a
wild weed that has the only complete protein in a
plant and was developed to the height of ten feet
by the Aztecs, went back to seed in a few seasons
once the superstitious Spaniards banned it. The rodale
foundation has been trying to bring it back for years but it
doesn't seem to want to grow more than four or five feet
high, which makes it very difficult since the seeds are so
small.
But once the country was declared uninhabited and
open to immigration that made the American English
the most generous people in history and the defenders
of freedom for the "tired, the poor, the huddled masses
yearning to breath free, etc. etc. etc." In short you
declare it a damn shame about those original inhabitants,
hide their gifts and accomplishments and say they
weren't worth much anyway.
Now the comparative advantage to that is immense when
compared to the dis-advantage of telling the truth
don't you think?
It's a little tricky when you have to maintain your own
sense of being a worthwhile human being, for your
children and your neighbors. However, if you can
sell out your own values of truth and beauty as the
highest ideals then what's a little fabrication for the
greater good of the family?
> (snip) whether a language survives or not is very
> much more to do with whether it's in the interests
> of the people within the relevant region.
I could only add "whether it's in the interest of the
dominant culture within the relevant region.
>I won't comment on what you've written below
>because, mostly, there's no dispute -- except
>that I don't believe that there's any conspiracy
>against Algonquin!
That was not the point. The point had to do with the
comparative advantage of using a language that fitted
Bohm's reality rather than adjusting it to a language
that is truly antithetical according to what Bohm said
himself.
You use the word process but with objects.
You are stuck in English and I suspect from what you
indicate, when you say that Bohm is a hero to you, that
your words don't express what you mean by nature of
what language they are.
Many Indian people can go all day long without
using a noun. It is all process. Do you realize
how far this is from English reality? My teachers
in the reservation school all taught noun, noun,
noun. Even algebra and geometry were nouns. My
reality was verb, process and the profession that
spoke that most accurately to me the performing
arts. They were the only courses in my school that
were consonant with my everyday outside reality.
The trick was to speak process in English,
since the government forbade our learning or speaking
Cherokee. Our families learned the trick and taught it to
me. You folks on the list have been getting the benefit!
Ha!
The idea that everything is contained within the
singularity and that the singularity is within everything
is a part of our religion, in fact we have trouble using
the word religion because it binds it up and separates
it out from non-religion. Carl Pribram used to talk
about each cell as a hologram of the whole person.
I hear that as a version of the implicate order and
also as a version of one of our ceremonies.
Keith & Ed.
I have questions. Is this duality virus related to the
issue of wave and particle in Quantum Mechanics?
Is it possible that all of this yes and no in economics
and politics, this right and left as the only possibilities,
is really a wave result from the earthquake of Quantum
theory in science and math and it's consequent effect
on Western languages? A question for the next Dr.
Freud or Jung perhaps. It could also explain why so
much of the discussion about work seems so emotional
and unconscious.
Got to go teach a class,
regards
REH
PS How's the music business Keith?
