There are numerous other things we could boil it down to but one of the ideas that strike me is that the current mechanistic and linear system has as its roots the Enlightenment and Post Enlightenment philosophy of Hobbes..with his meditations on Materialism and Social Contract, Locke with his conception of property as a manifestation of labor and both of these vulcanized to the linear mechanisms of Cartesian thought in order to produce a kind of Idiots Guide to the Enlightenment in 2009. It’s Close But No Cigar Time. Commercialism has picked through and chosen those thoughts that payed and jettisoned any of the less categorical spiritual beliefs as largely impractical or impediments toward progress. This , of course, saved a lot of time in the blazing of a trail from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from 1492 to the present day. Oddly enough a runt spiritual urge survives.

When the European Enlightenment and its Judeo-Christian antecedent strode ashore on the North American continent, or Asia, or Australia , or Africa…..it met long established cultures with a so-called “primitive” mien that were neither linear in their concept of time and progress nor particularly enamored of western ideas of discrete property ownership based upon individual labor…..Native empires notwithstanding. These so called “heathens” possessed a rich spiritual life of , in the case of the Aborigines, 50,000 years of Dreamtime and in the case of the Americas, at least 10,000 years of an abiding interplay with the land and the life upon it. Ceremony of deeply held beliefs accompanied each labor and a strong sense of individual place presided. I am not descending here to Rousseau’s Noble Savage…there was much brutality afoot with murderous actions and no small display of warfare but nobody can deny the largely germ-obliterated primitives their spiritual host. Sure, we can point to cannibalism and the untoward frequency of skull fractures in female aborigine skeletons and all manner of atrocity but that is not the point. This is not a comparison of betters.

Crawford calls for the most basic of human pleasures , a love of endeavor and a camaraderie in effort that encourages human intelligence in all its forms: intellectual, kinetic, individual and group. This is something we have largely marginalized in the modern age in our embrace of a kind of HeeHaw Cartesian Orgy of Categorization in Service to Materialism. Those we credit with our cultural growth would not wholly abide us in our present state.

I am not advocating some kind of sentimental notion of a new age Goretex clad Hunter Gatherer, I’m asserting that it just might be time to explore an authentic New World in which spirit, non-linearity and the embrace of life can temper the Cartesian Institutional excesses which have become so voraciously consumptive and thoroughly deracinating as to start what appears to be a short course in social entropy. Not to be too Romantic but I’d call it a Jaguar Dance on the Rocket Gantry. Maybe Peyote really does work better when benefited by a zip lock plastic bag. Metaphorically speaking of course.

Call me Neo Primitive. I Yawp, therefore I is. Craft is a finely tuned loving response to the benefaction of Nature and it is, if nothing else, a bit of poetry offered up to God, sometimes dirty, sometimes spare and elegant but always deeply abiding. That “Continental Mind” that I believe Stegner suggested in us perhaps overlooked something in the mad rush from coast to coast. It’s time to pause a bit and pull out the caliper and measure our output with hand, mind and heart. Take your time, it aint as linear as we think it is. Personally, the copy of “Caritas in Veritate ” I have been returning to has dirty fingerprints all over it and it remains profoundly beautiful in my hands…. illuminated by the light of Helios. Confusing? Youbetcha!