Hi Mike,
This is a very interesting post. I find it the most interesting in how
you are traversing the path of traditional Native American Plain's Myth in
your forms. The net for example is the traditional form of Spider Woman
and is considered essentially feminine in nature.
Amongst the Plains Peoples, powers are not hierarchical in the order sense
but singular centers of expertise given by the Great Mystery to
individuals. Otherwise everything is the same for everyone. Everyone is
a teacher, artist, hunter, planter etc. although there are certain areas
that relate to talent or gender because of the principle of parallel
images. i.e. if someone seems to embody more an external process then
common sense would seem to say that they have more potential expertise in
it. You have also defined the structure of war and art in Plains Indian
societies. Structures that have more to do with power and games in their
societies, than death and destruction. They are, like virtual AGILE
companies, temporary and task oriented.
Michael Spencer wrote:
> Steve Kurtz wrote:
>
> > I argue...that hierarchies...have always existed and will most likely
> > continue to do so despite any structural changes invented & applied.
>
> To which Victor Milne replied:
>
> > I don't see animal behaviour as being such a simple matter of
> > dominance and hierarchy as people are supposing.
>
> and Steve wrote again:
>
> > Who ever said anything about "simple" or "model"?
>
> Forget "simple". I think the issue is whether or not hierarchy is
> some kind of underlying principle that structures things as they are,
> more or less in the way that, say, electromagnetism is such a
> principle.
The wolf pack is and that is the reason that the Wolf was the dominant
focus for the form of a war party in almost all of our societies. It
is not something that you put on or take off easily. Amongst some more
urban organized societies the Wolf Clan is the war clan that takes over
when a war is imminent. I could make a case for Churchill being the Chief
of the War Clan in English WW II government. When the war came, the peace
government was replaced by the war one and when it was over Churchill was
unceremoniously defeated to get back to the peace government.
Amongst my people that was called the Red (war) and the White (peace)
governments and they existed simultaneously with one being out while the
other was in. Only a warrior woman could call the Red government into
being, but this is more specific then I should be and you probably are
interested in, but the parallels are interesting and may very well be
primal human in form and function.
> I don't think it is. Hierarchy is a way in which we structure
> artifacts -- things, such as computer programs or navies, that we
> create in order to simplify the management of them. It's also a way
> in which we structure or ideas about things, our intuitive or formal
> models, because it makes things easier to keep track of.
By this last statement are you referring to expertise or what is popularly
called "complexity theory" these days?
> There's an interesting 1945 paper by Warren McCulloch entitled "A
> Heterarchy of Values Determined by the Topology of Nervous Nets." It
> notes that there are experimental observations along this line:
> given A, B and C, if these are presented pairwise -- A&B, B&C, C&A --
> a subject will often choose A over B, B over C and C over A.
I don't understand this. Is the subject human? If so, does this not
relate to the original alphabetical pattern contained in the memory of the
subject? That would make the form subjective would it not? For
example: When Sequoia invented the Cherokee syllabury, being an Indian
scholar rather than a European, he included some European Alphabet symbols
in his system but gave them different sounds and orders. That meant that
any child learning the system would not relate it to a European
intellectual space but to a Cherokee cultural space. In their case I
doubt that the relationships WM described between A & B in a European
sense would be asserted in the Cherokee system.
It seems that the issue is learned order that is then related in the above
fashion. Do you see this differently?
> McCulloch, a polymath whose main interest was in trying to figure out
> how it is that a few pounds of neurons can engender mind, described
> how such heterarchical preference was immanent or implicit in neural
> structure.
Seems learned to me, unless he is saying that all knowledge is learned with
no genetic talent element. Even if so, I don't understand why he would say
something so obvious. He seems to be comparing the structure of mind to
the structure of a crystal, but a learned one in the human sense. i.e.
learning or education is the implicit "order" of the human neurons. I
would agree with that in both meanings of the word "order". Still seems
obvious although we do say that enlightenment is the meaning of all
traditional native existance.
> As our social world begins to approach the complexity of, say, the
> brain of a chicken or a shrew, it gets harder and harder to make
> a hierarchical model fit except by brute force.
100 years ago we would have thought this nonsense. As we grow more
sophisticated in the complexity of human interactions I suspect we will
find society to be as complex as our brains. Certainly language has
proven so. Just remember how everyone was sure that the computer could be
a universal translator within current computer forms. I'm still
waiting. I could sure use it to teach poetry to my students. But the
computer folks have succeeded not in translating great works of art but in
making language more resemble computer baby talk, dumbing down the whole
structure of human interaction.
> We're going to have
> to begin to understand and use more reticular -- net-like -- notions
> to cope constructively. Of course, a problem with this for many
> people is that, when all the elments are connected in a network
> instead of a hierarchy, it becomes difficult or impossible to say
> which is chief among them, who's in charge here, who gets preferential
> treatment or exactly who can be blamed for a failure.
Depends on how big the organization is. This is the formula for a Sioux
traveling band of 100 years ago. (Drucker would call it an orchestra
model.) Hierarchy being used only in war when it became a Wolf pack.
Chiefs were only chiefs because they were followed for a reason. If they
failed or that reason ceased then they were respected as one time leaders
but not followed. Inktomi, the spider trickster, was the primary form
for the ordered but flexible view of nature. Inktomi represented the "web
and connection trickster" while Coyote was chaos. Coyote being the most
like a European Fine Artist (doing things for their own sake irrespective
of the destruction) and the most coherent form that seems like the "Great
Mystery" itself.
Like today's silicone valley "geniuses" that Sioux form came about as a
result of a radical shift. In their case, the horse, and they became wild
roaming libertarians. Russell Means, the Lakota American Indian Movement
warrior and now movie actor, is claimed as a member of the Libertarian
Party here in the US. I suspect the silicone folks will have about as
short a ride as the Sioux did.
> I think there's a small but growing awareness of this. Some people
> are trying to ensure that the emerging structures embody the essential
> of human dignity, environmentals integrity and so on.
That's a tough one.
> Others are
> frantically trying to understand the concepts well enough to, so to
> speak, outsmart the system and ensure that they or their employers can
> remain "in charge here."
This is more easy and more usual IMHO.
> Hierarchy is a fine analytical tool, like geometry. But it isn't a
> structuring principle of the biological world and is one for the
> social world only to the extent that we have chosen and continue to
> choose to make it so.
I would say yes and no for the above reasons. As well as the success
that William H. McNeill mentions in his book* on marching and the
development of the modern army through hierarchical muscular rhythmic
bonding.
> I'm no more an ethologist than Victor and I
> can't argue in detail just how we should treat things like dominance
> relations in wolf packs but I can argue that the wolf pack is neither
> the most basic nor the best model for building human affairs.
If you are speaking of all affairs I would agree. That way lies fascism.
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Chamber Opera, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*"Keeping Together in Time, Dance and Drill in Human History." William H.
McNeill, Harvard Univ.
