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Beta Culture: Earthman’s Journey – Part 5 of 8

[ Part 1 — 2 — 3— 4 — 5 — 6 – 7 — 8 ]

Molly (cont.)

This kind of thought wasn’t completely new for me – I confess I’d dwelt many times on the fortunes of other men, wistful and envious of the assets they enjoyed.

“What would it be like to be him?” I had asked myself, him way up there with all that money, with a daddy who provides private airplanes and the family’s own airport, with new trucks and horses and jet skis and scuba diving lessons there for the asking.

“What would it be like to be him?” … riding high, the life of the party, the totally unselfconscious, self-assured fellow who plays pool like a master, drives cars like a professional racer, rides horses and ropes calves like a rodeo champion.

“What would it be like to be him?” … towering above toads like me, with that tall muscular body, with such good looks and so many women hot after him that he callously brushes the discards out of his life every few months.

This, though, was the first time the question had ever been aimed in the other direction, asking “What would it be like to be her?” … not UP there above me, but DOWN there, below me. Down there with all that loneliness.

I shifted in that illuminated second from my one-down perspective, that blunt yearning known so well by the poor, the uncool, the disadvantaged, to a one-up view, the sudden knowledge that I had unintended power over this small creature. It was the same type of thought, but painted now in the colors of sympathy rather than those of envy.

I stood and considered the consequences of this new idea. How would it feel, I wondered from this new perspective, to care about what her life was like? How would it feel to do something about it?

I called her back over, and she came, very reluctantly. Suspiciously. Worriedly.

I stroked her head and neck tentatively and she cringed under my hand. I petted her some more, telling her what a good dog she was. She relaxed a fraction. I scratched behind her ears, and stroked along the length of her back. She leaned against me, snuggling up close. I dug my fingers gently into her fur, roughing it up and scratching down her side. She flopped down in the grass. I slapped her shoulder a couple of times, stroked the side of her face. She rolled over onto her back. I patted her chest and scratched her belly. She closed her eyes and sighed blissfully.

As I rested there on my knees gently stroking the fur under her chin, reflecting on how little this cost me and yet how it had never occurred to me to do it, she lay there absorbing the touch as if she was a sponge as big as a house, a desert a thousand miles square, and I was the first drop of water she’d felt in a year.

Yet rather than happy I had made the discovery of this new way to look at Molly, I was deeply bothered that I had only now noticed.

I was doubly bothered that this lesson was not in any of my schoolbooks, not in anything my parents had ever told me, not in anything I learned from my friends. In fact, it was just about 180 degrees opposite of anything I got from any of those sources.

To us, animals could be disposable entertainment devices or rare meat walking around on four legs, but they were never anything more. I myself had treated animals as targets, and even found pleasure in it.

I was a hunter once, sort of. My Wicked Stepfather took me up into deer blinds for East Texas’ frigid fall deer season in my teens. I grew up with coon-hunting friends and a peer group of friendly killers to whom hunting of any sort was a threshold of manhood. Later there was an adopted Dad in California who took me out on pack trips into the wilderness and infused me with his deep love of the mountains, and who regaled me with great stories from a lifetime of hunting exploits – of bringing down bear and deer and other difficult and worthwhile game. I had a Ruger .30-06 rifle that I was so proud of – though I no longer own it, I can still picture the matte beauty of its walnut stock, and the shiny perfection of its barrel.

It only happened to me once, but I can tell you what’s it like to see a big muley buck on a hillside across a canyon, and to raise such a rifle to a position firm against your shoulder and cool against your cheek. I can tell you that there is a feral joy in getting that animal in your sights, and I can describe the leap that a hunter’s heart makes at the thought of having that deer. Of owning its life, bringing it down with a shot through the chest. I can tell you what it’s like to visualize bringing it home bloody and gutted, hunter triumphant, full grown Man.

We humans really do have such things in us. A cat readying to pounce on a mouse, all feral intent, teeth and claws ready for the kill, could feel nothing more intense.

But fortunately or unfortunately, I can’t tell you what it’s like to actually do those things, because I missed the shot. I never got my deer. I never got my bear. Instead, in this luminous moment with Molly, I found this doorway…

— CONTINUED —

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Beta Culture: Earthman’s Journey – Part 4 of 8

[ Part 1 — 2 — 3— 4 — 5 — 6 – 7 — 8 ]

Molly

For eight years in my 20s and 30s, I was a draft horse teamster at a resort-town ranch, driving a two-up hitch of massive blond Belgians or coal-black Percherons, on a huge hay wagon for mid-summer meadow rides, or on big sleighs that would glide over the high-mountain snow on moonlit winter nights.

Molly was one of the ranch dogs. She was no particular color – a little black, a little brown, a little gray, all mixed up in a dark grizzle. Like most cowdog breeds, she was a sturdy little thing, weighing forty pounds at most and standing about 18 inches high.

She was no great spark in the personality field. Poor Molly was a bit of a slinker – one of those quiet, careful dogs who skirts around the edges of action, waiting to see if it’s safe to be noticed.

And it seemed that “notice,” for Molly, frequently came in the negative form.

Let me say right here that the people who owned the place took very good care of their animals. They were about as good as they could be to their livestock without actually inviting them into the house. Even that rule was suspended for their numerous bobcat-sized Siamese and Manx cats, and a succession of lucky dogs.

But businesses mean employees, and they were not always as enlightened. Molly probably heard “Molly, get out!” and “Molly, get away!” a thousand times. There may even have been a clod of dirt pegged her way at times.

I didn’t have a lot of patience for her myself. She’d seldom come out to meet me in the morning. Never wanted to go along on an adventure. Never wanted to come play, like some of the other dogs. Molly just wasn’t much fun.

But late one day, as I was coming up to the main ranch house from the bunkhouse, Molly somehow connected with me.

She happened to be lying across the trail as I came down it. She nervously thumped her tail on the ground at my approach, but I was in too much of a hurry to bother with her and I said “Look out, dog!” She instantly jumped up and skittered off to the side.

I glanced back at her, though, and saw her trudging slowly away with her whole body a message of dejection. I stopped, suddenly struck by the thought, “What must it be like for her?”

Left out. Never played with. Seldom petted.

Mixed in with all the random moments of your life that pass unremarked and unremembered, there are those sometimes-surprising few that stick with you for a long, long time. Through accident of time and life and human nature, these moments of happiness, or tragedy, or sudden understanding, become the axles around which the rest of your life turns.

Perspectives shift. Things change. Doors open.

Though I had a close friendship with my own canine buddy, Ranger, I was completely unimpressed with Molly. If I had ever cared to think about it, I might have known that there was something missing in her life. I might have said well, from her point of view, if there was such a thing, it would seem that she gets only occasional crumbs of affection. Tiny tag ends of attention, second thoughts, unconscious pats. Half-loves.

But I didn’t care enough to think of that. She was just another… well, dog.

Now, though, slow-motion flashbulbs went off in my head and freeze-framed me where I stood. For the first time ever, I wondered “What would it be like to be Molly?”

— CONTINUED —

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Beta Culture: Earthman’s Journey – Part 3 of 8

[ Part 1 — 2 — 3— 4 — 5 — 6 – 7 — 8 ]

Cutter

After seasons of proving myself at many of the other chores of branding, on this day, I’m in charge of castrations. After the calf slides to a stop and both the heel rope and the top man are firmly in place, I step forward and kneel down by the calf’s belly. I stretch out the scrotum and slice across the lower third of it with a sharp knife. The testicles usually pop out on their own, but sometimes you have to fish around, pressing here and there, to get them to come free. Pulled out several inches, they’re still connected by silvery-blue cords that have to be either carefully scraped through with a knife or cut through with a pliers-like tool that simultaneously severs and crushes them. Skill comes into play here to prevent excessive bleeding. The scraping technique causes the arteries to spasm and close down and takes considerable care to do right; on the other hand the cutting-crushing tool, an emasculatome, is more foolproof, sealing the arteries by intense pressure, and can be used in full confidence by just about anyone with a bit of grip strength.

The bags are sometimes tossed into a pile for counting, sometimes simply thrown away. The testicles go into a separate bucket of water. Depending on whether somebody wants to go the trouble, they’ll be cleaned and frozen later – and yep, people really do eat them.

Needless to say, your hands get bloody right off in this kind of work. The blood dries and sticks to your hands, coats your pantlegs. The testicles are sticky, sometimes adhering to your fingers so that you have to sling your hand vigorously to get them to drop into the collection bucket. Keeping the knife sharp is a constant battle, but as about half the calves are heifers, there’s usually time to keep up with it.

Castration and ear marking is skilled work for two reasons. One is that you want to do the work accurately, and get the calf through it with a minimum of blood and stress. Second is that you are holding a naked razor-sharp blade and a lot of people with other matters taking their full attention want someone they can trust.

The hot hours pass. A dozen or so at a time, we work our way through half the calves.

We break for lunch, shutting down the noisy blast of the propane branding iron furnace, and trooping out to sit on a grassy spot next to a loading chute. Roping horses have their girths loosened, and stand hipshot in the shade of a long trailer. Ranch dogs show up and beg for pieces of our sandwiches, or prospect for edible bits out in the branding corral. We talk horses and heifers (the two-legged kind), old friends and old dogs.

Finally we pry ourselves up from our resting places and go back to the corral, where we rope, drag, tussle, stick, slice, burn. The calves match us move for move with panicked determination – they struggle, buck, squirm, kick, quiver and bawl. We respond by overcoming, enduring or ignoring them.

At the end of the day, all of them are turned out to their still-waiting mothers, and the lot of them are herded off to a distant pasture to rest, graze and recuperate. The rest of us mosey up to the ranch house where dinner’s ready.

I sit down with my plate in a low, loose chair, and am so bone-deep tired that when I discover I don’t have a fork, it’s a good five minutes before I manage to muster the energy to heave myself up and get one.

As I break bread with my friends, again the feeling of kinship – of shared work, of difficult tasks done well, of eating and talking and joking together – washes over me. After a childhood of divorce and moving, a series of different schools and strange new faces, and an eternity with the Stepfather from Hell, here I am in the company of the people who took me in, who allowed me to prove myself. These are people who like and respect me, who value me for my contributions and my company, and who put up with my peccadilloes. Surely no Bar Mitzvah, no tribal rite of manhood in New Guinea or Africa or South America, could do any better job of making a boy feel accepted, validated, even loved.

I am exhausted, but it doesn’t matter. I rest in the comfort of knowing that these are my People, and this is where I belong.

Except …

I have wrestled with more than calves today.

Something has nagged at me off and on for many hours. Time after time throughout the waning day, the picture of a little dog named Molly has come into my mind. I’ve drifted back, over and over, to something I learned from her recently, and I’m no longer sure I can justify enjoying the things I’ve done today.

Thanks to Molly, I’m seeing today in a different light. Something has changed in me, some new channel has opened up, and in through it are trickling new thoughts, things I never knew I never knew.

— CONTINUED —

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Beta Culture: Earthman’s Journey – Part 2 of 8

[ Part 1 — 2 — 3— 4 — 5 — 6 – 7 — 8 ]

Cowboyin’

The early end of the beef industry involves a lot of labor at identifying and altering young bovines from their original, mint-condition wholeness to something more in line with human designs, as they make their first transition from free beasties to hamburger-on-the-hoof. The work can be done in sheer industrial efficiency, with metal chutes and shock prods and unconcerned hourly workers, or it can be done by working cowboys, in tune with a romantic but very real vision of the American West.

On this day, with this herd of calves, I’m one of those cowboys. And though I don’t know it quite yet, I myself am undergoing a transition: I’m on the threshold of a new and grander phase of my life. My hand is on the doorknob and here and now is the moment in which I begin to turn it.

As I start the day, I feel deep western pride on the one hand, the heartfelt assertion that the people around me – the men and women in cowboy hats and spurs and chaps, working shoulder to shoulder with me and joking with each other in the solid, friendly voices of the west – are my people, and the things we do are a part of my native culture, a  culture of Texas and points west.

The men and women I work with are close friends, and we’re teamed up in a difficult, dirty and physically demanding job. We work side by side in blood and the smell of burning hair, and every hour of such work under the beating western sun is a rite of passage, a bringing-together as profound as any formal ceremony of brotherhood. This is a job, yes, but it is also a way to become one with each other.

Along with that pride, though, is another feeling, something darker. I have yet to identify it, but it ebbs and flows within me throughout the day, the beginning of a quiet guilt, a murky disturbance at doing what I’m doing.

The cattle, by contrast with the many-become-one social consolidation we humans experience on this day, journey in the opposite direction – from oneness to separation. Forcibly parted from the safety and comfort of their herd, a couple of hundred calves are trapped at one end of a large wire holding pen. With their four-legged moms just outside the corral making continuous loud protests, they mill around in confusion.

Ropin’

The kid in the blue cap? Me.

A cowboy on a horse cuts small groups of them out, to drive a dozen or so at a time into the main corral. Separated now at two removes from the main herd, this small group huddles together even more closely.

Two ropers on horseback work the branding corral. They take turns tossing ropes at calf heels, hopefully snagging both back feet of one specific calf, then instantly dallying up and spurring away to trip the calf onto its side and drag it through the soft arena dirt to the branding fire. There one cowboy jumps on top to hold it down, while several others come forward with syringes, knives and branding iron to inject, inoculate, earmark, de-horn, castrate and brand the little beast.

Every pen of calves has a different pair of ropers working it. Horses and cowboys tire and have to rotate out, to have their places taken by a new team.

It’s not the epitome of efficiency, operating this way. Not every cowpoke on horseback is at the peak of western form. For most of them, this is practice as much as it is work. They only get to do it a couple of times a year, some of them, and it takes a while to work through each pen of calves. The ground helpers spend a certain amount of their time just standing around, waiting patiently as the ropers miss repeatedly. Still, there’s a quiet recognition that everybody has to learn sometime, and a certain amount of friendly joshing helps to pass the time.

Here are the various jobs that must be done and the qualifications it takes to be accepted to do them:

Roping is the most demanding. You’re usually expected to have at least some experience in the sport. Since the object of all this is to get the calves processed with the least stress on them and the least strain on the crew, the quicker the better is the plan. The ideal is a quick toss just in front of a moving calf’s hind legs, so the little critter more or less steps into the open loop himself, then a snapping tug that snugs the rope around both ankles, with a simultaneous dally around the saddlehorn so the roper can spur his horse away with a captured calf dragging at the end of the rope.

Ropers can be older hands who are experts, second- or third-generation youngsters who grew up in the culture but are just learning the craft, western wives or girlfriends who want to try their hand, or rodeo-cowboy friends there to keep in touch with the roots of their arena skills. On days short of manpower it can be friendly neighbors who are drawn by the camaraderie, romance and dust.

Wrasslin’ and pokin’

Wrestling calves is the least demanding of skill, the most demanding of muscle, and kids and neighbors and wanna-bes all get their turn at this. It’s a kind of unspoken testing ground for the newcomers. This is where I got my own start, “throwing” roping calves in practice pens with cowboy buddies back in Texas.

If a dragged calf comes right to you already on its side, all you really have to do is put one knee on its neck, grab the uppermost foreleg and pull it back and up, and hope that the heel rope holds so that flailing back hooves don’t come slashing up at you. A bit of weight helps here, but if you have the technique down, a lightweight like me can do just fine.

If the calf is still on its feet – maybe the rope only caught one back leg – there’s a little cowboy judo thing you can do: snatch the near foreleg below the knee as the calf passes by, whirl the leg back backward and outward, and the calf falls almost magically onto its far side, allowing you to step over its body with the leg still in hand and proceed to the same knee-on-neck posture. Otherwise, there’s a more difficult reach you have to do, more or less enveloping the calf with your arms and body from the top, then picking it up and rotating it in the air so it falls onto its side.

Once you get it on the ground and secured, inoculations come next. A spritz of biological armor goes into both the calf’s nostrils, a human-engineered defense against various respiratory ailments. The spritzer has to have a fresh plastic nozzle for every calf, to keep from inadvertently spreading bugs from one animal to another, so if two efficient ropers are working the pen, the guy doing it can be kept hopping. Still, it’s not very tough work. Getting the plastic nozzle into a struggling calf’s nose is the only tricky part, and an agile young’un can do it.

A complex of bio-active goop – several different kinds of protective and growth-enhancing antibiotics – goes into another shot, this one into muscle on the calf’s shoulder or rump. Yet another shot will contain vitamins, or trace elements missing in the range on which the calf will spend most of his growing time, to be injected under loose skin such as that between the elbow and chest.

Shots take a bit more skill, as the person wielding the needle-gun has to be careful to poke it into the calf at the correct angle and the right place, making sure the full measured dose of medicine goes in, and at the same time missing the rumps and elbows of the four or five other people busily working the calf over. The syringes also have to be kept full of the appropriate stuff. A solid cowpoke or dependable ranch wife usually takes charge of the needlework.

Burnin’ and cuttin’

Branding is another task only allowed to experts. The iron, heated either electrically or in a propane furnace, has to be the right temperature – hot enough to scorch down to the skin, not so hot it burns holes in it, exposing the flesh underneath. It has to be applied at the right angle, to get the whole brand image onto the calf, and held for the right length of time to do the job right. The brander wears heavy leather gloves, and takes care to warn everybody “Hot iron!” before stepping up to the calf. The sharp, thick odor of burning hair coats everything and everybody by the end of the day, but the first choking stench of it disappears into the background after only a short while.

Dehorning takes a tubular tool that fits down over the horn buds one at a time, providing a circular cutting edge for scooping the buds right off the calf’s skull, leaving a little pit that will heal in time into a hornless scar. Dehorning can take up to three people working together to get it done quickly and right. The cowboy on the neck of the prone calf leans out of the way while the top horn bud is popped out, then grabs under the calf’s nose and bends its head back so the dehorner can get to the bottom one. The third person is usually standing by with a spray can of disinfectant for the dehorning wounds.

The last chore, knifework, also falls only to trusted hands. There are a variety of cuts that can be made on a calf’s front end, but the ones most often used on ranches where I worked were either ear-marking, which requires a large triangular slice to be taken out of a calf’s ear, or ear-tagging, which is basically ear-piercing scaled up to cattle-size: a bright plastic tag is slotted onto an instrument that cuts a slit in the ear and inserts it, the big tag on one surface of the ear, a round plug on the other.

As for cuts on the back end, heifer calves (females) will grow up to be breeding or milking stock and need no trimming of any kind. In one of the many ouchy realities of both beef and dairy cattle commerce, however, only a tiny percentage of purebred males are saved for breeding. Since most bull calves will grow up to be meat, they do not need the essential tackle of reproduction.

— CONTINUED —

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Beta Culture: Earthman’s Journey – Part 1 of 8

[ Part 1 — 2 — 3— 4 — 5 — 6 – 7 — 8 ]

Somewhere above all this, all the roiling newness of the growing atheist and progressive community, there’s an overview. I’ve tried very hard to see it.

It may be that there are plenty of people smarter than me, more educated, innately broader of understanding, who already know what it is we’re all working towards. But I have yet to read their books or hear their talks.

I look out and see … pieces. A chopped salad of efforts and understanding that forms no coherent whole.

I don’t feel TOO bad about that. I mean ‘feel bad’ in the sense that there are churchy luddites who oppose positive changes, and we have to be a lot better if we want to win this thing. Because they are chopped up even worse than we are. And though they’ve had power over us for thousands of years, it was the power of bullying and cowardice and lies, rather than some sort of coherent strategy or vision or real knowledge, and that power – in the face of real advances on our side – is waning.

I sometimes wish I had a formal grounding in philosophy, so I could have more tools in my head to deal with all this. Yet other times I’m glad I’m an uneducated doofus, philosophically speaking, because the journey I want to make is my own journey, and the tools I do manage to work out on my own … well, they seem to work better – for me, anyway – than the stuff I’ve garnered from more formal philosophy.

I get little glimpses of the Big Picture, from time to time. And it’s not just us in the frame. It’s us and … Earth. The life around us. The way we can fit into it, and cherish it and, well, live with it. I see us coming into a real sense of our own immense power, and finding ways to curb our excesses to create a truly sustainable relationship with Earth (which we do not have and have never yet had) and each other.

Atheism is very much a part of it.

There’s a book I want to someday write that will explain it all. I’ll figure out all the basic pieces, and how they fit together, and will at last understand something of what this is all about.

And yet, when I consider writing that book, I worry.

First that I might need about a hundred more years (and a hundred more IQ points!) to get it.

Second that I’m … well, just wrong. That there is not only no Big Picture, but no Big Picture is possible. Not for human intelligence to figure out, anyway. Which means we’ll never have it, and will never be able to live well on Planet Earth. And will probably wreck most of it, and kill ourselves along the way.

Third is a bit of a sidebar to the second worry. When I first thought of it, it actually scared me, because I was afraid it was a fatal hit at the heart of atheist philosophy.

Are you familiar with “follow-through”? If you’ve ever done any kind of sport, I know you are. Follow-through is the part of the swing AFTER the bat or the golf club strikes the ball. The arm and body motion AFTER the baseball leaves the pitcher’s hand or the bowling ball leaves the bowler’s.

Every Little Leaguer knows that if you swing AT the ball, you get one result, and not a very good one. But if you swing THROUGH the ball, you get both more control of where the ball goes and more power to get it there.

In baseball or golf, the ball is in your control for only a split second, and it is only in that instant that you can direct it onto a path that you deliberately choose. The thing is, you can’t see that path if you’re focused solely on the ball. You have to look beyond — aim beyond, swing beyond — your contact point with the ball, in order to properly send it onto some optimal path.

The thing that I worried about was that Christians had this larger vision for human life, a goal that passed beyond merely human concerns, and that goal supplied the follow-through for living a good human life.

If you swung for Heaven, in other words, you’d hit ordinary human life out of the park. But if you aimed only at your own selfish life, you’d fall short and end in some sort of inward-aimed and lesser life.

I actually worried about that for a good 3 years before I started to figure out why religion was the wrong follow-through, that it couldn’t work. Which is: There’s nothing there. Christians only appear to be aiming beyond their own lives. In reality, they’re aiming in no direction. Or, considering the thousands of religions or personal interpretations of religions, in a thousand different directions. Their aim, if they have one, is disconnected from anyplace in the real world that you can get to.

Besides which, there are a LOT of larger things to care about. Every one of us can find our own larger aims and follow-through to build good lives for ourselves.

What follows is a multi-part essay, a little bit about follow-through and a little bit about that Big Picture. Maybe it’s a prologue to the larger quest.

There’s a place in it – and it comes early – where you’re not going to like me very much. But bear in mind that this is about a journey, not a stopping point, and that we all have to come FROM somewhere in order to get TO somewhere. We change in our lives, hopefully for the better, and that change has to be arrived at along a human path, not a miraculous one.

In the same way you wouldn’t hold a grudge against a recovered alcoholic for getting falling-down drunk on a day 30 years past, I hope you’ll withhold judgment long enough to read to the end and see where I’m going with it.

.

About 1980

It’s a beautiful spring morning in California’s Eastern Sierra mountains.

The sky is that impossible blue of high altitude places. The normally grayish-green high-desert valley is sprouting the rich shades of spring down toward the sparkling vastness of Crowley Lake, and an azure sea of wild iris, punctuated by dots of golden Mariposa tulips, sweeps out from the near view to vanish into the distance.

A red-tailed hawk circles overhead in the vivid air. Though I can’t see them, I know that off to the west, at the base of the rising mountains, migrating mule deer are cutting dusty tracks through the manzanita-covered foothills, browsing their way along as they trail lazily toward the passes which have yet to thaw enough to let them into the backcountry wilderness.

Fed by pure melting snow, crystal streams chuckle out of those mountains, running down in rocky leaps and bounds. Ice-cold trout lurk in their deep pools, visible from the surface as they dart about after insects and larvae and, to the joy of blissful streamside flycasters later in the season, the occasional artificial fly.

All in all, this must be the best place on earth in which to live, and the best of all possible times in which to be here.

And here I am in the glorious middle of it, covered in blood and dirt, working the spring branding at a local ranch … cutting the balls off bull calves.

— CONTINUED —

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Shoving Orphans Away From the Table

How many times have you seen it? Someone convenes a panel of talking heads to discuss morals, justice, or any of the other “goodness” issues, and the speaker’s table is filled with a priest, a minister and a rabbi (and here lately, to prove our generous and inclusionary nature, an imam).

As far as the organizer is concerned, and large swaths of the audience, atheists don’t exist. Because we don’t know anything about morals, you see, or deep human convictions, or even feelings. We can’t speak with any authority.

Such an event just happened. It was last Thursday’s Interfaith Memorial Service to honor the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings, held at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.

Grief Beyond Belief on Facebook brought it to my attention, but the subject is all over the atheist blogosphere.

Hemant Mehta
JT Eberhard
James Croft
Ophelia Benson
Boston Atheists
Harvard Atheists

The Harvard Humanist Community was shocked Thursday when their members were, in the carefully-chosen words of New York Times best-selling author Greg M. Epstein, “blown off” and excluded from an inter-faith memorial ceremony for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing.

“We have friends and family who are in the hospital in critical condition, who nearly died,” he told Raw Story. “It wouldn’t have been so difficult for those who organized the vigil today to make some kind of nod to us, and that’s all we would have wanted.”

The Harvard humanist chaplain and author of “Good Without God” explained that the exclusion of non-religious Bostonians was particularly shocking because someone dear to the Harvard Humanist Community was gravely wounded in the bombings.

Celeste Corcoran, who was caught in the blast with her daughter and subsequently lost both of her legs to amputation, was a volunteer for the Harvard Humanist Community, Epstein said. She was also something of an “aunt” to Sarah Chandonnet, the group’s outreach and development manager and “second senior-most member,” he added.

It even made it into Psychology Today.

This event, the bombing in Boston, is one of those bring-us-together events that helps us understand the fragility and brevity of life. The response SHOULD be a grand coming-together to make the point that … well, that we are all in this together, that the greatest safety lies in understanding the power of unity.

And for many Americans, I suppose that happened.

Unbelievers, though, were made to feel like the fat kid at the prom.

The request to be included, which WAS made, was ignored. Nope, can’t have atheists standing in front of the cameras in front of God and everybody.

Besides, this is about faith. You atheists don’t have any. Why, it’s almost like you’re not real Americans. Buzz off.

Zachary Bos and the SCA of Massachusetts put out a statement about efforts made before the event:

“It won’t be for lack of trying that we aren’t represented in the collective response to this tragedy,” said Zachary Bos, co-chair of the Secular Coalition for Massachusetts, and State Director for American Atheists. “We know that historically it’s been a easier to engage with people who are religiously-identifying and more likely to be organized. That is why we’ve been pro-active in calling elected officials and reaching out to religious colleagues, to find a way to be involved. If anything, the events of the past week tell us that we should be cultivating these relationships anyway, so that when tragedy does strike we are ready to respond immediately, a community of different philosophies united in common cause.”

We still have a way to go.

 

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Beta Culture: Bonsai Civilization and the Future of Humanity


Initial conditions show up in the final product.

I’ve often thought about bonsai trees in relation to child-rearing.

In my own case, there were many brighter possible futures I might have enjoyed. In my few years of college, I was a genetics major, aimed at medical or veterinary school. But I ended up, here and now, as a sort of junior-grade bus driver.

I was wounded from an early age by … well, call it less-than-optimal parenting. By the time I reached my senior year in high school, I was skipping about one day a week to drive around with friends, play pool, etc. This after years and years of 4.0 grades and honor student status. Continue reading “Beta Culture: Bonsai Civilization and the Future of Humanity”

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Beta Culture: A Community Nexus

One of the problems I have with writing about Beta Culture is that I want it to make sense to people, but that it’s in my head as a growing gestalt – a huge, block consisting of many, many pieces (and hundreds of pages of notes) –  becoming progressively more complex and exciting the longer I consider it.

I want to write about it in a way that carefully explains it – it’s a new idea to most people, after all, and things like that are always difficult to wrap your head around – and that means I probably need to start at A with the easy parts first and move on from there to B, C, D and so forth, the more advanced bits, so the people reading all this end up in the same place. Or at least somewhere on the same road.

But there are exciting bits that pop up all the time, connections that happen in my head the more I think about it, and they’re difficult to resist.

So to hell with it. I’m going to write about it in a jumbled mess, and hope it eventually makes sense. Besides, a lot of this is included here as the pieces of a book which I hope will be the REAL introduction of the idea.

So let’s talk about a 10-steps-down-the-road thing.

Take a look at this:

It’s a former New York State “Developmental Facility” (whatever that is – some sort of government-funded residential site for the mentally handicapped? A posh resort for bureaucrats funded with taxpayer money?) that consists of six buildings on 48 landscaped acres in Syracuse, New York (not far from the Canada-U.S. border, about 20 miles from the Great Lake’s Lake Ontario, about 100 miles from Niagara Falls).

The thing features interconnected buildings with 10-foot-wide hallways, including a full-sized gymnasium with locker rooms, an Olympic-sized swimming pool and even its own bowling alley. Plus cafes, lounges and common areas scattered throughout. Not to mention 600-space parking, and this sweet, sweet, feature: a full-sized commercial kitchen with industrial-sized ovens, which just screams on-site restaurant and bakery!

Tell me that doesn’t sound like the ultimate headquarters of an evil genius bent on world domination. Or, you know, the central nexus of a growing, worldwide social organization aimed at making the world a better place for everybody living on it.

Assessed at $4.25 million, it was recently sold at auction. The minimum bid was $1.2 million; no word on what it sold for.

But, oh, wouldn’t it be nice to someday have a place like that for international delegates to gather and talk about Beta Culture strategy on atheism, feminism, environmentalism, social justice, Occupy-type action — and especially the Beta Culture Official Big Funny Hat — that Beta will encompass.

Give us 10 or 20 years.

[ Hat tip to Mona Albano for telling me about this place. ]

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Beta Culture: Patheos Intro, Part 4

[ See Beta Culture Intro Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]

Futures Big and Small

Say there’s this future out there. And it’s … some way.

I mean, some real things are in it, and some real things are happening in it, and there are preceding real things – objects and events and people – that cause those things to be there, doing what they’ll do.

There are two futures we’re talking about. Or, really, one future viewed at two very different scales.

There’s the sort of private-life future that we ourselves plan and work and hope for. We go to college to brighten it, save money to cushion it, we eat right, exercise, all the stuff we know we have to do to get some sort of positive end result. Or we smoke, spend time on Facebook, blow the paycheck each week, but, again, get a future that, even if we hate it, is something we know we sort-of earned.

It’s that larger scale I really want to talk about, the larger public future shaped by greater forces than our small individual lives, and that takes place on a stage the size of the world. Unless you’re Abraham Lincoln or Bill Gates, affecting this future is pretty much out of your reach. As merely you-yourself and me-myself, we can neither change nor deny what’s coming. We can worry about it in vague terms, carp about it to friends, but mainly we just hang on for the ride.

The vital fact is that all our small private futures will take place in the shadow of the big public one. We will live our lives, every aspect  of them, on that larger stage where the future of the world, or of humanity, plays out.

What we do in our own lives matters to that larger future only in a statistical way. We’re like individual molecules of air and moisture in the vast pattern of history’s weather. We blow to and fro, millions of us together, and wind happens, rain happens, tornadoes happen, ethnic migrations and wars and the rise and fall of empires happen.

But then again, there are larger forces at work in creating history’s weather. Humans can band together in certain ways to become large-scale social entities, and those social entities become massively more powerful on the stage of history. The things you and I do might vanish in the social noise, but these larger players will pretty much create the future.

Glorious vs. Ugly

Let me break for a moment to tell you some of what we might well be facing, futureward.

First, a couple of my Wise Old Sayings I Just Made Up:

Bad things happen automatically, but good stuff you have to work at.

Every new roommate will automatically assume someone else is in charge of housework.

Though phrased for the individual, both statements have statistical implications. Listen:

In an after-hours bar conversation with a climatologist several years back, I jokingly asked him “Tell me the truth; are we fucked?” There was a silent moment in which he stared at me in complete seriousness, before he quietly answered “Yeah. We’re fucked.” I’d already concluded something of the same thing, but it was still spooky to hear it.

We’re not fucked because anybody planned it or worked toward it, we’re fucked as a side effect of us living our lives, doing what we do, in all our billions.

Bad things happen automatically. Not just global warming, but Peak Oil, world economic shifts, resource depletion, oceans being fished out, fracking and groundwater contamination, growing numbers of endangered species, vanishing forests, mysteriously dying bees, human population continuing to increase (even if at a less-accelerated rate), increasing varieties of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, on and on.

And it’s all happening – right now in your own lifetime – not because somebody’s deliberately DOING it, but because nobody’s deliberately STOPPING it.

Like new roommates, we all assume someone else is dealing with it. We say “Hell, we’ve been hearing these gloom and doom predictions for all of history. Scientists will do something, discover something, invent something, to fix it. They always do.”

But for reasoning people, such simple optimism is misplaced. From a rational viewpoint, optimistically saying “scientists” or “the government” or “people of good will” will fix things is only a slight paraphrasing – and an exact conceptual match –  to what godders say: “Hell, we couldn’t damage God’s creation. And even if we did, God could just fix it with a wave of his hand.”

It’s not just wishful thinking, it’s a blithe dismissal of the serious discussion that SHOULD take place. It shunts us away from the real understanding and real effort that might help fix things, if we only employed it.

So: Bad things are coming. And someone has to stop them, divert them, shift them onto some better path. Who?

The Big Three

Let’s get back to those “social entities.” Who are these larger players I spoke of? You could start to list them and never run out of list, but they fall into three main categories, it seems to me, and I list them as Government, Business and Religion.

Government is all of government, everything from the local city council, water board and school district to governments the size of nations. It’s building departments, prisons, highway paving crews, city and state parks, everything that government does or has jurisdiction over. Conceptually at least, government is there to provide services and protection, but in fact it also aims at considerable amounts of control and oversight of our private individual lives.

Business, these days, mean corporations – extra-national organizations aimed at profit.

Religion is the massed aggregate of churches, faiths, religious groups and even religious-activist individuals, ostensibly aimed at comfort and community, but really – from an atheist viewpoint – more aimed at coercion, control and profit, with reason-killing passions such as fear and hate as some of its prime tools.

All three of them also have this other main goal – continuity. Survival. Prosperity. Growth. Considering that there’s only so much to go around of what makes them up – money, power, allegiance, belief, cooperation – they work to leech more and more of the stuff out of the rest of us.

Government assumes greater power, creates new fields of regulation, runs our law enforcement and courts, starts wars, spies on private citizens and conceals information from us. Business (corporations) squeezes out more money or hours of our attention, sells us things, entertains and lies and manipulates us, seizes control of the food supply, runs our banks, keeps its secrets even when it’s in our interest to know what they know, penetrates our lives in ever deeper and broader ways. Religion pushes for greater social primacy, struggling for ways to subvert school boards, text books and classroom curricula, seeks influence over women’s intimate decisions, and works to control debates on social issues such as morality, freedom, and even science.

Think of the Big Three as vehicles into the future. They’re going there, each along their characteristic roadways, and we get to go along for the ride.

Or think of them as factories that crank out “future” in the same way auto-makers crank out cars and trucks.

So the Government Factory works to turn out a future tuned to Government needs, the Business Factory labors over a future based on Business needs and desires, and the Religion Factory turns out yet a third product aimed at Religion’s needs and mandates.

They produce futures reflecting their values and needs, and we end up living in them.

If you and I want a cure for Alzheimer’s, a city on the moon, or just a college degree for a son or daughter, we ride their vehicle, travel their road, look to their future-factory to produce the thing. Or we don’t get it.

I DO want a cure for Alzheimer’s. I DO want a city on the moon. I want a future-world where war is extinct, or just damned rare. I want radically-extended human lifespans (starting with mine!).

More modestly, I want a computer printer that can crank out a quarter of a million pages without breakdown, one that uses ink cartridges I can buy – for about two dollars per thousand pages – at any drug store or supermarket. Who’s going to create that for me? I mean, ever? Right, nobody.

The printer is technologically conceivable, therefore do-able. But I will never, ever, have one. Because the Big Three either have no interest in it, or a negative interest.

So we’ll face not only the looming disasters they ignore, but also the loss of all the good futures that might have been reached, but that they have no interest in. On the large public scale, we can have only those things that are accomplished – or unimpeded – by Government, Business, or Religion.

Also on this large public scale, there are some things I DON’T want, but will get anyway, because one or more of the Big Three have an interest, and because I can’t stop them. Unlabeled additives in my food, for instance, but also growing restrictions on women’s health resources and reproductive rights. Growing prison populations. Fascist-level police presences anytime you want to disagree in numbers with “your” government. Economic meddling. And never-ending efforts to shove religion into schools, textbooks, legislation, political rhetoric, every aspect of our lives.

The Lifeboat

As things stand, the future is in their hands. Almost every path into it will be controlled by these three entities. Which means … whatever future WE dream of, or hope for, or work toward, will be mediated – with controlling yes or no power – by THEM. We’ll all get to some sort of future, but we’ll get there in their boats, with them as captains charting the course.

I’m proposing something to put it at least partly back into ours: A fourth entity, a fourth road, into the future – a consciously created, crowd-sourced culture, a motivated aggregate of humans who not only direct their own future, but command the social room in which to do it.

This proposed fourth entity is the lifeboat from those others, our best hope for getting to some sort of future WE want to live in.

This is what I call Beta Culture.

I can’t see how it could hurt. I can see a lot of ways it could help.

And in fact, I think we desperately need it.

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Beta Culture: Patheos Intro, Part 3

[ See Beta Culture Intro Part 1, Part 2 ]

So if we’re talking about culture, let’s talk about culture. From Wikipedia:

“In the 20th century, ‘culture’ emerged as a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of human phenomena that cannot be attributed to genetic inheritance. Specifically, the term ‘culture’ in American anthropology had two meanings: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. Hoebel describes culture as an integrated system of learned behavior patterns which are characteristic of the members of a society and which are not a result of biological inheritance.

Distinctions are currently made between the physical artifacts created by a society, its so-called material culture and everything else, the intangibles such as language, customs, etc. that are the main referent of the term ‘culture.’

What the hell does that mean? Just this:

Culture is what people do. What they wear. What they eat, what they say and the language in which they say it, how they cut their hair, the teams they cheer in their chosen sport, how they act toward each other, and toward outsiders. The books they read … if they read books. How they marry, how they have children, and what they teach those children. How they deal with death. Sometimes it includes such obscure things as where they vacation, and what they do there – or even the underclothes they wear, the sexual positions they allow each other!

And by the way, there’s an important point here: Religion itself is a subset of culture. If culture is the things people do and the way they do them, and religion is one of the things they do, religion is contained within culture. For most of us, religion is only a part of – by no means all of – our culture.

But culture is also the people themselves. It’s how they think of themselves, how they define themselves AS a people in the act of doing all their distinctive cultural things.

In a circular and self-referential way, the people within a specific culture are defined as a People by the culture they inhabit, and their culture is defined by the fact that they are within it, doing what they do.

Every New Yorker can recognize a Hasidic Jew (the ones with the long, curly side-locks). Hasidic Jews are the people who look and act like Hasidic Jews. But also, Hasidic Judaism is created by the acts of the people within it doing the things – dressing and acting and thinking certain ways – that Hasidic Jews do in order to identify themselves.

Likewise the Amish culture both defines and is defined by its people. Amish is not just Amish people, it’s what Amish people think and say and DO to be Amish.

Cultural stuff need not be written down. But it is passed along from person to person with a certain conservative definiteness. Culture preserves and propagates itself, or it passes out of existence. Hasidic Jews teach their children to be Hasidic Jews, Amish people teach their children to be Amish, and even, apparently, White Southern Ignoramuses teach their children to be White Southern Ignoramuses (here in the U.S., that is; and don’t go sniping at me about bringing them into this — I grew up among them, and I still know a few).

Here’s an example from my own life of both cultural propagation and the obvious benefit of culture:

I grew up in an East Texas rodeo cowboy culture, and I could have recognized one of “my people” in a crowd a hundred yards away. There’d be the hat, the jeans, the belt buckle, the boots, the shirt, the way the man (or woman) carried him-(her)-self. Somewhere nearby would be a mud-spattered pickup truck with a gun rack, possibly a horse trailer with a horse inside. Get closer to the guy and you’d pick up certain attitudes, certain specific interests, political and religious convictions, the way he sounded when he talked, and so much more.

There were the places we lived, what we did on Friday and Saturday nights (went to the Circle 8 Rodeo Arena, or one of a half dozen other rodeo grounds within a couple of hours’ drive) the stuff we talked about, the way men and men, and women and women, related to each other. The way men related to women, and vice versa (with a considerable amount of unabashed magnetic vigor on both sides, undeterred by literally skin-tight jeans). The things we ate and drank, and the things we didn’t (even today, don’t even try to suggest sushi to one of my people).

There were even the things we allowed – or didn’t allow – each other to do: I rolled up at a friend’s house one day in some soft comfortable shoes I’d just bought. I wasn’t out of my truck for two seconds before he looked incredulously down at my feet and asked “Where’d yew git them pimpy shoes?” In my culture of cowboy-boot wearers, I was not allowed to wear those shoes … not without a certain amount of unspoken threat of social ouster. I could be an accepted member of my cowboy culture, or I could wear those shoes, but not both.

As to the benefits of culture: By walking the walk and talking the talk – and wearing the right footwear! – I could be guaranteed a certain measure of instant acceptance anywhere in the country my people live. And so I was, in Texas, California, Nevada, Arizona, and even to some extent here in New York. Moreover, by being emphatically ourselves, my cowboy culture people have an undeniable place in the world.

That bit about acceptance — both among ourselves and in the larger world — is one of the many things I want with Beta Culture. I envision a worldwide family of atheists and rationalists, looking out for our own interests by growing a safe, friendly place for people like us to live, to work, to learn, to socialize, to enjoy the freedom to be ourselves.

Most especially, I want our own avenue into the future – a future we have some say in creating, and in which we have an undeniable place.

One of the first questions that probably comes up in your mind is “Why do we need this Beta Culture thing? As far as having our own place in the world, aren’t we already there, or at least getting there?”

After all, we’re making progress, we’re free to be atheists in public now, right? There are all sorts of books on the subject, sold right out in the open, and we even have conventions now, too many to go to, in North America and Europe. These days, nobody has to listen to the Pope, or go to church. And from all reports, people are flocking from organized religion in droves.

But let me tell you what I think we’re facing: A future that looks especially dark, with no real social mechanism for stopping it.

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[ Continued in Beta Culture Intro Part 4 ]