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Thoughts on the cooking of Roots
For most occasions there is an ancient Chinese proverb. The gem in
mind for his endeavor is: "Only those who can savor the most unpalatable of
vegetable roots know the meaning of life." The angle of the dangle to be
pursued focuses on the word "savor." The proverb can mean more than simply
eating life's turnips when dished, but enjoying them. (Indigenous turnip
lovers are encouraged to substitute their least favorite root.) Much
depends on the cooking. Cooking, if the metaphor is allowed to be expanded
on all sides, is that process which makes biological events human,
cultural, and to varying degrees personal. Some recipes are tastier than
others. The question becomes what is the best way to cook those
unpalatable roots? What spice might suffice?
Let us examine a particularly nasty root which is generally served only
two ways, with a garnish of barbed wire, or drowned and glazed in a thick
sweet syrup. The root is human nature. First of all, what is it before
cooking?
Biologically, what is the nature of a human being? A bipedal hairless
ground ape, large brain, long dependent infancy, dexterous hands, social.
Instincts? precious few. Infants seem to know how to suckle and are wired
to learn walking and language. Good? Bad? Kind? Cruel? These are not
biological questions. Can it be asked if a lion is cruel, or a honeybee
is kind, or an hippopotamus is good?
The answer if given would depend not on the nature of the beast, but on
the cultural sauce with which it is served. Is the chicken Kiev, or
Caccitore? The answer tells nothing about chicken nature, which is okay in
the context of deciding whether or not to attend an otherwise boring
banquet, but decisions based on a platter of prepared human nature root,
which will effect the content, spices, condiments, entrees and dessert of
the banquet of life, ought to be given a more rigorous and caring
examination.
One may begin with the most prevalent recipe in world cuisine and see
how this taste effects the entire meal. The main spice has various names,
one of the old favorites being original sin.
This bitter herb flavors everything with a sharp flaw. Human beings are
by nature sinful greedy competitive murderous self-indulgent lusting power
hungry lazy SOB's, who if not restrained by higher faculties and
institutions would soon destroy everyone and everything within their power.
To counter and mask this horrendous taste there are some marvelous and
ingenious sauces which depend interestingly enough on the awful underlying
taste for flavor and effectiveness. The sublime flavor of law would be
empty and tasteless without crime.
Human nature may be criminal (in this cuisine,) but law gets to decide
which behaviors in the available repertoire are crimes. The sauce in
effect defines and counterinvents the horrible flavor it seeks to mask and
control. This is not to argue that law causes crime but rather that the
two are insufferably linked in an overdetermined and self-stoking system.
That which we would now call crime has its historic roots in the
accidental unequal distribution of productive and reproductive resources,
the technology and talent to use those resources.
Although the current World culture has cooked up a stratified layer
cake in which those lucky enough to control resources also get to control
those who do not; this is not the only solution to maldistribution. There
have been and still are, societies whose definition of crime, of the
causes of conflict, was the person who tried to get ahead and control
resources and thereby kin and neighbors. "The horse is fat which eats by
night." Another Chinese proverb.
This is another barbed wire recipe often invoking sorcery instead of
law, and preventing the formation of capital. The point however is not
that it is better to be Dobuan or Mixtec, but that whichever way historic
maldistribution is treated, it counter-creates its justification in root
human nature, which in turn distorts distribution.
Example: The US bulges with surplus food. Farm commodity prices are
depressed. The US and the world have no severe shortage of hungry people.
Even if ownership payment transport and storage problems could be
surmounted; and food is in the hands of putatively benevolent
institutions, there are great culinary difficulties in distribution. Since
humans are, in this recipe, lazy and greedy; it is necessary to have some
filtering procedure to insure that no freeloaders get lunch. To achieve
this goal clerks, paper, and policies are necessary. Clerks can not be
allowed to make subjective judgements less they stuff their own and their
friends larders. Therefore there must be rigorous standards of
qualification: means tests, database searches for bank accounts in the
applicants name as well as the names of spouses and progeny. Does the
applicant own anything? If so, he or she must be decapitalized and the
funds used for subsistence before assistance can be made available, etc.
The resulting budget can be anywhere from thirty to ninety percent
administrative costs, and it is nonetheless predictable that some will
still manage to cheat the system, and far worse; many of the morally
entitled will not meet the rigid criteria for qualification.
The sticky sweet recipe for the big root appears more on the menu than
on the plate. The spice is Edenic and asserts that the species is by
nature good kind loving generous and redeemable. The noble savage,
corrupted by civilization, or knowledge, or Satan, or neurosis; can emerge
washed clean of mucky stench by some belief, the blood of the bull; or by
tinkering with governmental educational or economic institutions, or by
migration to space, or drugs sex and rock n' roll, or shamanism, or
communicating with dolphins, or psychotherapy, or some other praxis seeking
to empathize the eschaton and bring on the golden age.
The problem with these visions of humanity is that they are equally
untrue, and unlike the barbed wire cuisine they can not be cooked into a
consistent meal. The bitterness always sneaks in.
While afficionados of the beastly nature (a slander of the beasts) of
this planet's sentient beings can explain "good" behavior in a reduced
scenario of economics or inclusive fitness, ideologies of the divine or
pristine nature have difficulty explaining "bad" behavior without recourse
to corruption or weakness, which brings the barbed wire back into the soup.
A grope for a new Recipe
A combination of two old ideas. One from scholasticism, the other from
the Gita. The fist is the concept of natural law which when deburred of
the ecclesiastical, advances the proposition that ethics can be deduced
from the natural world. The second is an argument by Krishna to Arjuna
which proposes that an action must be performed and justified by its own
qualities and not by its intent or the hypothesized consequences of short
or long-term goals. First to natural law: The only overriding value in
biological systems is equilibrium. The greatest equilibrium is obtained by
buffering the basic energetic and chemical inputs to the system through
the largest possible diverse and flexible biomass. Not so much a "greatest
good for the greatest number," but rather the greatest complexity for the
greatest biomass; an attempt at running all the possible phenotypic
variations, fugues, figures, palindromes, and canons on the genetic themes
available, given the chemo-energetic budget. On the species level and on
the level of a sentient unit, the process is often served with the "nature
red in tooth and claw" sauce while on an ecological level it taste more
like a complex net of negotiated settlements. Stable ecological niches
are deals cut and ratified by and with the biological community; deals
which hold while variables remain within norms the system can equilibrate.
The greater the number and complexity of the deals, the better the system
can buffer and adjust to micro and macro changes.
The rain forests are fortunately a popular concern in these times. A
prime example of the above rule. A rain forest is so massive and complex
that it controls a large portion of its own chemo-energetic input. Given
sufficient sun, water, minerals, and beginning genetic base, a climax stage
rain forest not only controls its own water and nutrient cycle, but exports
nutrients, fresh water, and oxygen to the rest of the biosphere and serves
as a climatological buffer. Few things can bring a rain forest down. For
a new ice-age to do it, it would have to be a whopper. If equatorial zones
remain frost free, the reduction of sea level by water locked in glaciers
would permit forest expansion. A real bang-up nuclear winter might do it,
but the forests have suffered dinosaur bombs before and came back strong.
A different community to be sure, but the flexibility and diversity was in
place so that enough survived to put it back together. Perhaps the forest
will figure out a way to cut a deal with the chain saw and the bulldozer.
The prescription to attach not to the fruits of action from the Gita
ties systemically into biological values. Action, or inaction in the
biological sphere while being in accordance with physical law in terms of
mass and velocity and forces, are also messages and information in a vast
system in which component parts and subsystem have their own interpreting
coding and decoding priorities processes and history; their own hierarchy
of logical typing, and their own errors.
Few habitants of this our verdant globe have not had the experience of
having a message blow up; the offtimes small phrase or deed which while of
benevolent or innocent intent is interpreted by another as a cause for
major rhubarb, hurt feelings and retaliation. Information evaluation
processing and transmittal is a major portion of all living events, yet the
consequences of such events, especially new events for which deals are yet
to be cut, are often only marginally statistically predictable, if at all.
Needless to say, this causes great problems both within the human
community and within the biosphere at large. H. sapiens, with that
marvelous capacity for abstraction and projection, is forever setting goals
and making plans: the "of mice and men" phenomenon. The problem is that
the words and acts go one way and the goals and plans another. If you get
there at all, it is not where you wanted to be. Indeed the means, the
actions designed to attain the goal preclude the goal because the context
is not shared and means will be (I suspect correctly) interpreted by others
as ends in themselves and meanings modified according to particular
context. Anything which can be understood in one context, can be
misunderstood in another, and even given a shared goal and context; the
focus of action on an end dilutes the examination and evaluation of means
so that actions which could not pass ethical muster on their own, slip
expediently by, justified by the inflated context of the goal.
Of Gooses and Ganders
It can be hoped that the sauce with which you bathe the root, yours and
others; will be the sauce by which your root by others is bathed. In
formulating your recipe, endeavor to use those condiments which complixify
rather than simplify. The many complex deals of humanity with nature are
tastier than the war against nature. The war is an aberration, a temporary
failure of diplomacy. Peace can be made incrementally and completely with
small and particular spicings each delicious in and of itself while
eschewing grandiose prepackaged mixtures. Let every act be a spice, and if
the flavor seems wrong; if it reduces the flexibility and diversity of
life including human life, don't do it and don't use it. Keep in separate
bowls the refined and elaborate sauces and condiments by which intrahuman
niches are stir fried baked and stewed. Use most sparingly only if life's
flexibility and diversity would suffer without it.