The Impact of Culture and Change: Interconnectedness in Community
Regardless of whether the Greeks vote “yes” or “no” today, for or against continuing as members of the “Eurozone,” it seems as if fate will reward the citizens who live in the cradle of western civilization with a special version of tragic suffering. Whether prime minister Alexis Tsipras and his party, Syriza win or lose the vote, the pensioners and unemployed will pay the price for utopian “interconnected” banking schemes in Europe. As in classical Greek tragedy, the “double-bind” applies: you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, given the austerity that will ensue, whether under the domination of the Eurodollar or reintroduction of the Greek “drachma.” While the hoi polloi scrape by on scraps and leftovers, the masters look down from boardroom suites or take their leisure on exotic beaches and in fancy hotel rooms far from the madding crowd. The highwaymen today wield pens, not guns, when they hold up folks for money.
The Greek “double-bind” reminds one of the virtual online classroom blitzkrieg, regarding higher education in America. Students go into debt in an effort to improve their opportunities and the quality of life but a baccalaureate or graduate degree comes with a pile of debt; wages drop and the gap between the 1% of the 1% continues to expand. The increasing focus on courses delivered online, serves up systemic “information” but has less to do with knowledge and the critical thinking skills associated with maintaining democracy or the enduring pleasures of a rich cultural life. Students are increasingly members of a class of “indentured servants,” bondsmen and bondswomen trapped in the austere roles dictated by corporate/state creditors.
The corporate/institutional paradigm, whether in Europe or America capitalizes on the weakness of human nature and the immediate gratification of appetite. Tempt the borrower with easy credit and then demand re-payment after the consumer has dined on a pig in the poke. In the Republic, Plato suggests the tripartite soul should make an alliance between passions and thoughts in order to rule over the appetites. But the moderns, whether in Greece or America, have ignored this ancient lesson and re-entered the Cave, where illusion of immediate gratification rules over long-term reality.
While considering the coup engineered by the elites and the subsequent demise of democracy and representative government, a form of government, which continues to exist in name only, I am reminded, even reassured by my reading of scholar Severin Fowles’s “An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the Study of Pueblo Religion” (Santa Fe, School of Advanced Research Press, 2013), an analysis of Taos Pueblo’s roots and seeming mysteries. The “doings,” a commonly descriptive term, refers to practices and patterns, derived over more than 1000 years and a non-modern concept that does not fit neatly into modern notions or disciplines referred to as sociology, anthropology, or archaeology.
In summary, Fowles comments on the “anti-Chacoan winter people,” who lived here in pit houses, resisting, you might say, the hierarchy of the Chaco bunch (not unlike “hippies”) though they were later over-run by the post-Chacoan diaspora of “summer people.” During the ensuing post-violent more peaceful era of 1200 CE or so, the two groups (including their own sub-cultures) came together to form “Taitona” or the Pot Creek pueblo, and later relocated to Taos Pueblo while some went up to form Picuris Pueblo. (I’m about halfway through the book.)
The book is a fascinating story, buttressed as it is by archaeological evidence, oral Pueblo tales, and informed academic speculation, while offering new ways of thinking about a culture and people historically integrated with and interdependent on the cycles of nature as well as its own society. Much of the way we moderns think, due to the “magic” of numbers or categorical fallacies and subsequent (mis) interpretations, due to language, needs to be reconceived as “interconnectedness” or “interdependence” and becomes a more interesting way to think about the Pueblo people. When we think of the term “Doings,” we move away from imposing monocultural western concepts, which separate religion and politics, economics and power into compartmentalized categories. Rather Fowles suggests we look at the actual practices more holistically from the point of view of the ones who actually practice the “doings.”
For me, studying the Ancient Greek philosophers has given me some understanding of the fundamentals of Western European and American Civilization in terms of the moderns. However, here in Taos, experiencing and studying what little I have of Taos Pueblo and their relations with the Hispanic incursion and Anglo occupation have given me another fundamental lesson in how the “nonmodern” (Fowles’s useful term) influences the complex interaction of the moderns in Taos County.
More than once I have intuitively surmised that the local grass roots customs and political “doings” could be seen more clearly in the fundamental examples made clear by the responses of Taos Pueblo “doings.” The history of violence and virtue among the Natives long preceded by hundreds, if not thousands of years the advent of Kit Carson and Padre Martinez in the 19th Century or the top-down notions of “class” and “economics” so often referred to in the 21st, whether directly or indirectly, by elected and influential community leaders.
The mysteries some of us collectively refer to as the “forces” or the “karma” associated with the “Sacred Mountain” may seem ambiguous but when we feel and think that way we may be more in alignment with the “doings.”
Fowles reports on Carl Jung’s visit to Taos Pueblo in 1925. The famed progenitor of the “collective unconscious” sat with a Pueblo Elder on a roof while the blazing sun rose higher and higher. The Elder said, pointing to the sun, “Is not he who moves there our father? How can anyone say differently: How can there be another god? Nothing can be without the sun…The sun is God. Everyone can see that.” Fowles goes on to say that “the sun is nothing without the assistance of the human community. It is the relationship of mutual dependency that is significant.”
I was reminded of Plato’s Symposium, when Zeus and the gods met in council to consider the misbehaving human race but realized they couldn’t kill them off with thunderbolts. If the gods killed the human beings, they would no longer receive the worship and sacrifices, implying that then the gods would no longer exist. So they devised another test for the errant humans.
We’re all doing this thing together.