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I apologize from the start about the current
posts. If I am to talk at all I must simply write
extemporaneously. That means that I will spell check but not correct
problems that I usually attend to before I send out things. I am
extremely stressed at the moment with this Festival and yet I enjoy the list and
the list's participants. So I can't wait to see what you all have
written in the morning. But I can't take the day correcting my
posts. If that is a problem just pretend that I'm lurking and skip
what I write. If not then go with me on this journey and realize
that there are potholes and boulders that you may have to go around.
REH
I second Ed's thanks for your sharing your story
Harry. I agree that the issue of rent is one of the problems
and having been a renter all my life putting my money into the capital of my Art
I now approach the end of life with only my life experience and my intellectual
capital. (no complaint just a comment). As you
know from the past, my idea of land is a bit different from the "owner" idea
that is the current system in America. I can't change it so I
simply live within what is here.
I realize that people are tired of me bringing up
"Indians" but if you consider that my doing so is no different than their
talking from their own life experience and cultural perspective then I
could claim to be tired and bored to death with Western cultural "excuses and
culture bound descriptions of reality" but it wouldn't be true. I
love the Art and culture that I work within including the
Western. I argue that it is not a good thing to
continually refuse to leave one's own Island of thought but an even worse
thing to claim that your island is "reality." It isn't.
I believe that it is good to affirm your own place but to speak in other systems
and patterns. If that is not done then even one's close
neighbors become threats. Like the Jews in Europe and the Arab
that is very close to Judeo-Christian
culture intellectually but emotionally is the other side of the world
and as distant as Judeo-Christian culture is able
to imagine. I try to say this as kindly as possible but we
"others" out here do talk to one another and I am not alone in the
observation but evidently I am the only one telling you
all. The reason I say this is to once again open the door to
another possibility out of the double bind that European culture and thought
finds itself in as it enters the period of decline you all describe so
eloquently. My argument is that your decline does not mean the world
will end.
I would argue that the flaw in your rent/owner
paradigm has to do with sustainability. The system isn't
sustainable. Without some form of central planning to conserve
resources your system simply runs down and today it is running out of
energy. And yet central planning is anathema to your concept of
freedom, whether personally or in markets.
I would argue that it was done differently from the
European models, here in pre-Columbian America and that those systems
still exists as shards that have been collected and tried in Europe to a mixed
success. I would argue that the mixed success is not a problem
if the shard but of the system that it is meant to hold up. In short
it is a cultural issue.
For example the child rearing practices
introduced to the New World by Rousseau and borrowed from us said that children
were children not little adults. As such it was inhumane to
treat children in the work force except as education and as education it
had its own costs and requirements that were and are not the least bit
productive. Rousseau's introduction and challenge to the child
slavery foundling system of Europe also created the challenge to
the criminal child laws and brought about the end of hangings of
children. Mike Hollinshead has written an unpublished
manuscript on the whole story.
Rousseau borrowed his system from
the America's but he didn't borrow the relational
underpinnings. William Blake, John Locke and others were influenced
in their imaginings by the art and ideas coming from
here. Although Blake tried not to, most simply
grafted our ideas onto the old Judeo-Christian graft onto the deep pagan
roots of Europe. In those roots
there are some parallels but Christianity and the "Cradle of your
Civilization, the Middle East" severely changed those deep
roots. To return to those roots in the 17th and 18 centuries in
the "Noble Savage" was a "pipe-dream" that didn't and doesn't
work.
As all humans go through similar problems but solve
them in different manners in the Pre-Columbian system there were fundamentalists
just as there are in Europe. People who turned metaphorical
stories about sacrifice into "first fruit" rituals and created genocide just as
in Europe. And those first fruit stories (grounded in the
gratefulness of Agriculturalists for the gift of life through food and the
lessons of growth that became the pedagogy for our childrearing practices)
are an integral part of our cultures. But a literal approach to
sacrifice was an illness in our societies. "Too much of
anything does not a good stew make" and was in conflict with the basic truth
that "all of life as a lesson taught for the challenges of the "After
World". (if there is one) So our systems of technology,
agriculture, aesthetics and economics were built not on fragmentary systems at
war with one another but upon the way all of them fit together and worked as a
team. Our image was and is the human body and the way that the
various systems work together to form a whole. Illness, whether in
the body or the society, is a lack of balance or metaphorically one part
going to war with another, as in cancer.
So what does this have to do with European children
in total darkness being used as intelligent mules or being used to crawl under
the needles of the loom because an adult would be killed in the small spaces?
(there were large foundling children graveyards next to those Arkwright
factories)
I argue that the idea of value that comes from the
deepest bowels of Europe has a problem. Until the European and
especially the "old" rhotic Europeans here in the Americas, give up their
cultural attitudes as to superiority and examine other models as
real change, rather than as simply grafting new growth on an old rotten
trunk, then nothing will work. There is a problem with the
language and its staleness. The machine industrial
utilitarian models are out of date and don't work for
"organics." If you want to make the social systems work
then you have to remove them from the mechanization of 19th century economic and
18th century religious deist models about "automatic" systems that never existed
in the first place.
Admit that the only system that is definitely
there is "change". And change is cyclic and has
four parts. It begins, it grows, it matures and it
declines. We call that the Four Directions. I contend
that the European system does not take time into account except as a singular
stream. Christianity tried to stop it in the "sacrifice of Jesus"
where they use the same words of "stopping time" but it is not really time
but "linear" time that Jesus is supposed to have stopped.
Unfortunately Christianity made its peace with that and birthed modern science
with the same linear flaw. That flaw permeates their science and
reduces singular action keyhole views of reality to "laws" about the whole
that work occasionally but not enough to sustain the whole. The
truth is that all stories are lies. In Judaism, to raise that
story to truth is to commit idolatry since the whole cannot be known or even
spoken. There is no one story but many stories and they are
all a lie. But strung together they indicate the
truth. Harry's system, the economist's system and all of
the European professional systems do not constitute the answer to
humanity but are one valuable view of the problem.
Ed, you said that it was a shame that the
American Indian view of the world had disappeared. Actually, as
an artist, I tried to make it clear why 1. that was inaccurate and 2. that it
was important for the soul of the world that "ab-origin" be
established. I would add to that a third which is
this. We could call it the Three
Grandfathers. 1. Truth 2. Identity and 3.
Comprehension. Comprehension means that you understand the
system within which the process you are using evolved.
You wouldn't put a carburetor from one automobile
into another simply because both use carburetors. You have to know
the system of the make of car that the carburetor serves and how that
works. One carburetor run off of a computer could be totally
useless and even damaging to another engine even if it did limp
along. Socialism as defined by Europe and equalitarian
capitalism are primal units of pre-Columbian social and political
systems. They are grounded in the culture, aesthetics and
spirituality of the system and those processes serve everything through the
process that we call "relationship." We say, "we are all
relatives." O mitake yuwasin. Along with those primal
elements we had some forms of patronage similar to those found in European
Feudalism but the em-PHA-sis was definitely on a different
sy-LLAH-ble.
I would argue that the problems that you have both
with equality (you used the term tyranny in conjunction with the word) and with
social planning relate to the ancient feudal system and that simply changing the
land ownership is not enough. You have to understand the entire
ethos and its problems and develop not a new Europe or a new Native America but
here in America, at least, a new system that includes the values of the old but
is built logically on the new realities. 19th century theories
don't fit because this is the 21st century. Knowing history is
important because it means you know systems and you had better know systems if
you are constructing a system in the present. Understanding the
systems that we carry within our psycho-physical-cultural makeup is crucial if
we are to be wise about our assumptions that we bring to that system that we are
building. Certain assumptions can completely destroy simply because
they are "out of time" and in the wrong place.
The ancient philosophy of this place is practical
and built upon observation. The first lesson taught to the
beginning shaman priest is "observe everything" and "know
yourself". Everything progresses from those two
realities. We are building something new because it is a
new world. We must respect that past but as Voltaire said "we
owe it to the past to tell the truth." Only in telling
the truth can we respect the present and construct a humane reality.
Only in giving credit for the lessons can we learn the integration in
the system and only in comprehending and mastering the values and goals of
the system as a whole can we succeed. I do not put this
forward as the answer but as a mode of discovery for the search to the
answers to the problems that we all are so good at observing on this
list. That Voltaire quote went something like this. "You
must respect the present if you are to survive and the greatest honor to the
dead is to tell the truth." Thanks for the
journey.
Ray Evans Harrell
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- [Futurework] Re: Free Trade Again (was Re: My last contr... Ed Weick
- Ray Evans Harrell
