O An Unbroken Continuum

The place where your sense of home and your sense of self are indistinguishable, like a Mayan worker stabilizing an ancient Mayan site so that modern tourists like me can catch a glimpse of that unbroken continuum.There may not be an unbroken continuum linking me to the ancient past of the Southwest, but I know I belong here, nonetheless.It reminds me whenever I start to forget.Chocolate would be my first guess.I emailed the company and asked.We’re getting there.Writers have extolled the benefits of going outside since at least the industrial revolution.I am devoted to learning, Plato said back in ancient Greece.Landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me. Roman philosophers like Lucretius were even more antagonistic of undeveloped nature, regarding it as nothing more than a nuisance to be avoided or a resource base to be subjugated and exploited.The revival of interest in Greek and Roman philosophy that came with the European Enlightenment, fused with the spread of scientific rationalism that challenged antiquated notions like goodness or spirits, yielded a widespread European perspective toward nature that saw it all as mere mechanism.But with the industrial revolution came contrary, even antagonistic viewpoints.Romanticism, coming as it did during a time when industrialization made the air all but unbreathable in places like London, was an open revolt against the notion of nature as mere automata to be disassembled and processed.The Romantics regarded aesthetics and personal experiences with nature to be just as important as quantitative scientific data, and they feared the former was suffering greatly because of fanatical devotion to the latter.Suspecting that modern industrial society corrupts people rather than cultivates them, romanticism also endorsed primitivism and the pursuit of frequent solitude in nature.That’s approximately how it all started.Understanding the role of this sort of thinking in the modern United States requires strolling through slightly different paths of historical philosophy.In a classic paper titled The Symbol without Meaning, a version of which appeared in the anthology The Flight of the Wild Gander, noted mythology researcher Joseph Campbell presented an intriguing interpretation of religious cosmologies throughout the world.But in this case, Campbell’s model has some real merit.In agrarian cultures, by contrast, we find stricture and orthodoxy, the priest as a role one plays, where beliefs and traditions are officialized rather than the learned particularities of unique individuals.This, Campbell concludes, has much to do with the differences of cultural organization.In agrarian cultures, where the focus of life is the crop, we find much more division of labor and careful attention to rigor.At its most basic, the symbol likely represents the seasons, which were/are important to foraging cultures for reasons of resource availability but are much more important to those who plant, tend, harvest, and then store their food.This is how the natural world appears to be ordered, in other words, and that idea took root in the agrarian psyche with what appears indeed to be universality.That panel, more than any other single phenomenon in Bears Ears material history, testifies to how that place truly was a backwoods but nonetheless important part of the cultural landscapes of various peoples from at least the early Holocene to the present.In fact, the mandala may be humanity’s most universal symbol, if we take symbol to mean an image more complicated than just a circle or a pair of crisscrossing lines on their own.Having taken root in such widespread examples of agrarian culture, as Campbell also points out, the division of social roles came to have approximately the same shape.In medieval Europe, it was the nobility, the church, the merchants or commoners, and the laborers.And the whole idea, the myth or propaganda of the thing, is that this quartering of the human sociocultural condition is the natural order of the world, much like how the mandala is a symbol for the natural order of the universe as a whole.A mandala, has in it, as it were, the general theme of integration.It is not unlike, for example, a stockade village or city.The enclosed, nice little, tight little world.A world in which we understand each other and our environment. Speaking of the hard partitioning of roles within that community, Campbell himself warns that the problem of existing as a mere fraction instead of as a whole imposes certain stresses on the psyche which no primitive hunter ever had to endure. Hence the need for myths or grand narratives to assure everyone that this is how it’s supposed to be.That’s all good and well just so long as everyone buys the myth.But what happens, Campbell asks, when the mandala breaks apart?When that nice little, tight little picture of the purportedly natural order of things breaks apart?Becoming unburdened from the accumulation of too much data.Meanwhile, history offers numerous examples of how the mandala might come to break apart in the first place.Campbell mentions the fifteenth century, the age of exploration and colonialism, which dealt a series of blows to the Ptolemaic picture of the world in which the whole of Christendom was reared.Western culture was cast into a state of confusion that included no small amount of people going, as it were, walkabout.In the ancient American Southwest, evidence from both archaeology and oral history contend that when the large and highly complex sociocultural system centered on Chaco Canyon broke apart, people ventured back into the hinterlands of the greater San Juan region, including Bears Ears.They ultimately reconvened in the large masonry villages of places like Hopi, Acoma, and Zuni, and life was plenty complex and civilized but without the intense hierarchy that characterized Chaco.Mayan archaeology and oral histories tell a similar story in Mesoamerica.But the Mayans themselves were doing just fine when Europeans showed up half a millennium later.The concept of fleeing into the wild also goes hand in hand with the concept of finding oneself This is the whole idea behind the sannyasin in Hindu tradition.This, too, is because breaking up of the mandala often engenders either individual or widespread identity crises.We’re not the center of the universe?We’re not the endpoint of evolution?Our country isn’t the greatest place on the planet?My impoverished struggle isn’t the natural order of things?!You can be a shoe, a cannon, a cowboy, a racecar, a thimble, a wheelbarrow, an iron, a hat, a dog, or a battleship in the game of cultural Monopoly, but if you show up as a unicorn they won’t let you play.Where, mere moments ago, people knew who they were and what their role was in a world whose shape they also knew, all is suddenly in doubt and disarray.When that happens, there is a desperate scramble for the security of identity.And people just kept coming, bringing additional sociocultural complexities with them.Whoever these new Americans were, they certainly weren’t European.They had just fought literal wars over that.Although that didn’t stop them from borrowing European ideas, especially those of the French Enlightenment and ancient Rome.And they certainly weren’t Native Americans, either, who were still regarded largely as dumb brutes and looked awfully different besides.Although, again, this did not stop them from borrowing ideas from Native American philosophies, especially those of the Iroquois federation.Americans were, in short, a hodgepodge.We remain a hodgepodge.