The Yellowstone, Day I

Lower Falls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, from Artist’s Point.

Leaving Eden

I've just thoroughly enjoyed a 2018 book by an author new to me, "Against the Grain" by James C. Scott. The author challenges the assumption that the great civilizations that sprang up after the dawn of agriculture improved things for anyone. Without romanticizing the hunter-gatherer life, he reports solid evidence bearing on the severe disadvantages of sedentary agriculture, and explores the considerable changes (including genetic) it wrought on the human race. He argues that sedentary agriculture succeeded for millenia before agrarian states arose. He draws a parallel between tax-collecting states and the surrounding barbarian civilizations engaged in what must be recognized as a protection racket. Both treated the farmers essentially as domesticated livestock and extracted as much as possible of the excess food they produce via the momentous replacement of hunter-gathering with sedentary cultivation.

Scott's prose is a pleasure. There is no tiresome hectoring against colleagues who might dispute his revisionism. He organizes his thinking clearly and makes a sustained argument with solid evidence and logic--something that shouldn't be rare in academic literature but sadly is. I'm off to read some of his other books, including one on anarchy, a subject he obviously has grappled hard with. It's no easy thing to construct a society that restrains people from seizing the results of other people's labor by force, rather than requiring us all to proceed by some form of consent.

Tetonia

Two of the three businesses are bars. 

Prophecy versus Psychological Warfare in Dune 2

On the long flight out here, I had time to watch Dune Part II. It’s different from the book in a number of conceptual respects. Most of these are predictable refusals by contemporary writers to honor the vision of their ancestor (and benefactor) where it defies their own ideals. The young are shockingly alienated from all human history. 

One place where an interesting dialogue develops, though, is in the film’s criticism of the Bene Gesserit. It’s interesting that the current generation would criticize the Bene Gesserit, since it represents a successful feminine wrenching of power from the male structures: the Emperor is really mastered by them, and the Guild hates them because it recognizes their power over the mental magics of the Spice. They successfully prevent the generation of a male who can do and be what Paul is for generations by controlling reproduction, seduction, bloodlines. 

But they do commit one sin against the mode of the young, and that is colonialism. They wage sexual war against all men, the Guild, the Emperor, and the Great Houses: well enough. But they also tell stories to the Fremen, and others, to colonize their minds. That’s where the film really gets sideways with them: colonizing a third world minority group to establish psychic control over them. 

There’s a subplot unique to the film in which worldly Northerners (Fremen!) reject the superstitions and fundamentalist religious beliefs of the Southerners (still Fremen!). The Southerners are totally captured by these religious forces, which the Northerners doubt. The conquest of Paul and Jessica of the minds of the Fremen is treated as a kind of hostile, manipulative psychological war. 

Yet it is also a prophecy, one that comes true at important moments in ways not in human control. Yes, Paul ‘knows the ways of the desert’ because worldly feminist Chani teaches him (‘we are equals, male and female,’ she says while submitting to Fremen social roles that silence women in sacred places). But Paul really does summon the Grandfather Worm, and rides him; you can make up a story about that, and tell it for generations, but ultimately it is up to the worm if he comes. 

It ends up leaving a question about how much of these Bene Gesserit tales were psychological warfare and how much were true prophecy. That is the road by which the divine gets in: however much the stories were lies, were colonialist modes of control, were wiles aimed at mastery, somehow the truth got in. Somehow, in spite of all attempts at manipulation and mastery, the tales were true for the Fremen after all. 

Up the Teton Canyon

I really enjoyed this hike last year, and this year my wife was able to come along. It was a beautiful day and a fine hike — praise the day at evening— and we had a wonderful time together. 

Facing into the canyon from above, you can see the peaks that you will be slowly approaching.

A panoramic view of the canyon from the junction with the Alaska Basin trail.