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Exercising Morality

In response to Emrys Westacott’s “Does Surveillance Make Us Morally Better?”

My research on shoes and chairs suggests that dreams of being perfectly relaxed and fully supported are wild goose chases that lead to atrophied muscles and malformed body parts so weak they need ever more support just to exist without pain. By analogy, “the discomfort of moral tension” may be that tautness of honed muscle that is that is more capable and better at working under its own strength. If people rely on surveillance to keep themselves in check, then they will need increasing amounts of it as their weakening senses of morality lead them to cause disputes at smaller and smaller levels.

There is no State of Nature in which everyone drives as fast as they can and steals from their grandmother: where there are no governmental laws, people still form regular patterns of behavior. Yet if people are constantly hemmed in by Big Brother, the moment they find an opening, I bet it will look a lot like an unguarded cookie jar. Without any sense of why endless cookies are bad for them, they would greedily empty the whole thing (and drive as fast as they can and steal from their grandmothers). Replace cookies with the Forbidden Fruit, too. What’s more, like some salaried boring-as-hill day job, both risks and rewards have been eliminated… leaving the employee with no motivation and no enthusiasm for justice and human goodness. Or refilling the printer ink. So I predict, anyway.

Life will find a way. Complex systems such as human societies are full of fractalesque holes and exceptions that can’t be covered by a finite set of rules. That’s why I don’t believe 1984 could happen: language is too complex to be completely white-washed. Likewise, there will always be situations which strain a moral code to the breaking point. That’s why we need strong moral muscles. We should be able to use neighbors, not cameras, for checking in on what’s really important. The BP folks cared more about the government regulations than about the poisoning of fish and children those regulations were supposed to prevent.

We need to exercise our empathy, too, because morality is fundamentally connected to it. That we shut ourselves off from, say, animals cough proselytize cough — but also human suffering abroad, in other strata of society, and desensitizing ourselves to violence in video games and the media — can only weaken our abilities to connect with the world around us in meaningful ways. Yes, it’s sometimes painful, but with sensitive feet and minds, nerves ablaze, I think our experiences will be richer for it and we’ll stop and do the right thing when it needs doing. That’s why Probity is so much more awesome than Scrutiny: the surveillance is integrated into the social network as we ask each other to be good people. We get rewarded with respect and friends and support rather than punished by an electronic eyeball. And we care enough to strive for our ideals.

From up here on my soapbox, you all look like ants! I hope my two cents won’t smoosh you from this height.

2010 07 14 Comments (0)

Ecosystems and Secret Gardens

Last Thursday, Doug Tallamy came to the Cambridge Public Library as part of his book tour. His book, Bringing Nature Home, is about the importance of using native plants in our gardens, and he was introduced by the founder of the local Grow Native Cambridge group, Claudia Thompson. I mention Ms. Thompson because I actually got to meet her at the Secret Gardens of Cambridge yesterday — hers was my last stop on the open-garden tour (at which point I had been walking straight from 10 in the morning to 3:30 in the afternoon, with only a couple of handfuls of almondy native juneberries as fuel and still an hour from little Lee Street).

It was surprising to see how different her meandering backyard garden looked both from native-minded Pacific Northwest gardens, which go in for the grasses and smaller-leafed shrubbery, and from the lawn-with-a-border types in the old colonial estates. In terms of design, I much prefer the ones with a canopy layer that blocks the view somewhat, encouraging you to go in further and explore — gardens that indeed feel “secret”, as the title of the tour suggests, and perhaps a little wild. Mount Auburn Cemetery a great example, with its hills and trees creating myriad pockets of peaceful contemplation. In fact, it was the first cemetery in the US to be designed by a landscape architect, the first to follow in the European Rural Cemetery Movement that substituted wilderness-like parks for constricted church graveyards. This tradition continued to gain popularity and became the inspiration for the National Parks. The values here were to preserve nature as a space shared by humans, other animals, and plants, and a space that benefited us as much as them.

This was the sort of thing that Tallamy discussed in his talk: the need to bring back these shared spaces, and even more importantly, our desire to have them. Currently the National Parks are just too small and disconnected to protect most species, and the vast swathes of urban and agricultural “desert” lead many to become “functionally extinct” — no longer participating in their local ecosystems. Tallamy said that a third of all bird species are “imperiled”, in danger of becoming functionally extinct. Already many species are undergoing local extinctions due to habitat loss, something that is nostalgically captured in the book Ceremonial Time. Ecosystem collapse is a huge problem that directly impacts humans because we depend on many “ecosystem services” that we import into our cities and suburban sprawls, things like oxygen and the pollination of food crops. Instead of living off the interest, Tallamy says, we are dipping into the principle, which in this case is the carrying capacity of our landscapes.

He says sustainability is like pregnancy: you can’t be a little pregnant, and you can’t be more sustainable. The carrying capacity of a landscape is how many species and individuals it is able to sustain indefinitely. Biodiversity increases the carrying capacity, creating more habitat and food opportunities, and weaving a redundant food web that can better adapt to change. Front and back yards take up a tremendous amount of real estate, and so have a tremendous capacity increase a region’s biodiversity, but all too often these end up as wasted space. Empty swathes of grass. Carefully pruned rose bushes. Imported fancy-pants plants. Landscapers and horticulturalists are trained as “painters”, not as systems thinkers. They’re not trained to care.

There’s no better example of this than the fact that most people want insect-free gardens. Now this is crazy, as Tallamy explains, because insects are the basis for most food webs, since they make up a large portion of the diets of everything from birds to bears. So we spray everything and pull out the natives that serve as bug habitat, and then bemoan the loss of birds and butterflies. Yet even the bugs themselves aren’t necessarily ugly — Tallamy put up some slides of caterpillars crawling around in his backyard that looked like exotic sea slugs! The trick is to attract enough insects to attract their predators. He showed data showing that native plant gardens had the same or less aesthetic damage than those with conventional non-natives. And they certainly attracted way more birds — Tallamy said that while some people go on bird walks to spot the great plumage on display, he just has to go look out his bathroom window.

Tallamy’s audience already cared about plants and animals. After all, they were garden enthusiasts. But the problem is that most people nowadays don’t experience the outdoors — and so they don’t develop an emotional relationship with it. One of the things I see a lot, whether in discussing veganism or politics or philosophy, is a lack of empathy. Empathy is a muscle that gets bigger with exercise, but I suspect many people neglect to do so because it hurts. Extending empathy means feeling more of other people’s pain, other animals’ pain, and the pain of entire ecosystems collapsing around us. Yet it’s worth practicing empathy because otherwise we harden ourselves to the things we really ought to care about — and as it becomes a large-scale phenomenon, we find that we ourselves join the suffering because no one cares about us anymore, either. And although ecosystems don’t form emotional attachments to us, they do care for us in some pretty fundamental ways.

While I dream about tearing up roads and putting in a network of high-speed railways and replacing agricultural pastureland and monocultures with food forests, building thriving habitats in our yards is a much more realistic goal — and judging by the beauty of the native-focused gardens I saw around Cambridge yesterday and the abundance of wildlife I saw in Tallamy’s photographs, I predict no one will want to be left out of (what he calls) the new Suburban National Park. He ended with an anonymous quote that I immediately took to heart: “Gardening is a way of showing that you believe in tomorrow.”

2010 06 14 Life Comments (0)

Enough with the Gender Essentialism

Gender essentialism is a pet peeve of mine. You know, when one woman will confide in another a secret about how “men think”? How Psychology Today and Cosmopolitan are constantly headlining the essential differences between men and women, and how to make relationships between the two function (and lead more often to sex)? How even the scientific literature is strewn with studies that try to assign any disparity between the genders directly to simple hormone fluctuations and our apparently simple-minded hunter-gatherer ancestors? *

An article in Scientific American Mind, May/June 2010, caught my attention with its title, “The Truth About Boys and Girls”. They introduce the topic thusly: “Brain differences are indisputably bioloical, but they are not necessarily hardwired. The crucial, often overlooked fact is that experience itself changes brian structure and function… Most sex differences start out small — as mere biases in temperment and play style — but are amplified as children’s pink- or blue-tinted brains meet our gender-infused culture.” There follows much useful information, despite the rest of the magazine being about as bad as Psychology Today, and despite the fact that they kept referring to “sex difference” when they mean “gender difference”.

This begs the question, though: When does “sex difference” become “gender difference”? If gender is in the mind, then it comes into play as soon as an infant engages the gendered world outside the womb. Even though very young children are not aware of their assigned gender, most other people in their lives are. Do baby girls make more eye contact, or do we engage their eyes more?

Research into the ability to mentally rotate objects, a measure of spatial reasoning, shows that while the average man can outperform 80 percent of women, the average four-year-old boy outperforms only 60 percent of four-year-old girls. The article suggests that “sporting gear, vehicles, and building toys tend to exercise physical and spatial skills, whereas dolls, coloring books, and dress-up clothes tend to stimulate verbal, social, and fine-motor circuits”, leading to a greater gender dichotomy later in life.

When psychologists Karin Frey and Diane Ruble studied peer influence, they found that “elementary school-age boys and girls both opted for a less desirable toy (a kaleidoscope) over a slick Fisher-Price movie viewer after watching a commercial of a same-sex child choosing the kaleidoscope and an opposite-sex child choosing the movie viewer”. As children form their identities, their cultural personas, they define themselves in socially understandable ways and glom onto activities that those “like them” care about. We all try to simplify the complex world through generalizations and categories (sound like my thesis yet?), including ideas about ourselves. If my identity is Girl, and the category Girl is constantly lumped together with Pink and Plastic Baby Dolls, then those become part of my identity, too.

Physical fitness is something we think of as definitively testosterone-driven, but a meta-analysis by Warren Eaton and his colleagues showed that “the average boy is more active than about 69 percent of girls”, leaving “31 percent of girls who are more active than the average boy”. That’s not a statistic I would go betting on. “The sex [sic] difference in physical activity continues to widen during childhood, despite the fact that sex hormone levels do not differ between boys and girls from six months of age to puberty.” The article blames parenting for this growing disparity, but there are many other, more subtle cues that kids pick up on, such as the aforementioned gender-specific advertising.

This widening of the gender divide through socialization can also be seen in the oft-overstated case of empathy:

The sex [sic] difference in empathy is smaller than most people realize and also strongly dependent on how it is measured. When men and women are asked to self-report their empathic tendencies, women are much likelier to endorse statements such as ‘I am good at knowing how others feel’… When tested using more objective measures, however, such as recognizing the emotions in a series of photographed faces, the difference between men and women is much smaller… [and] the average woman is more accurate than just 66 percent of men. In children, the difference is tinier still, less than half that found in adults, reported psychologist Erin McClure.

The real difference is not in our hormones, but in how we think of ourselves and how we shape others through our expectations. What little sex difference there is at birth is amplified and suppressed and endlessly molded by society. Gender difference, a product of history, is the more accurate subject of psychological and sociological study.

The distinction between “sex” and “gender” is an important one to make because we view culture as mutable and biology as unchangeable. For us, genes are fate, allowing us to all-too-easily stereotype and give up on thinking critically about why the world is as it is and how we want it to be. Genetic fate and gendered statistics feed the pop psychology that ships men off to Mars and women to Venus and leaves the two halves of humanity puzzling over each other instead of acting like fellow human beings.

  • The evo-psych explanations of gendered behavior are also problematic because they assume in advance that these behaviors are genetically coded, and that they increased our ancestor’s fitness in an environment we really know little about. One theory of human evolution, that we evolved to run long distances, suggests that gender differences diminished our species as men and women, young and old, traveled together. Modern ultrarunning put women and the elderly, even nursing mothers, on equal footing with the usual athletic young men (McDougall, Born to Run). Contemporary hunter-gatherers, too, show less gender dichotomy than agricultural and industrial societies. Once again, gender is more informed sociohistorical movements than biological differences.
2010 06 05 Comments (0)

The Chicken in the Box

It is likely that we evolved a moral sense to keep our communities functioning, to allow us to bond and share and coordinate. But the factors driving morality’s evolution don’t determine how we can and should think about it as modern individuals and societies, if no other reason than our still-limited understanding of psychological evolution. For example, just because we evolved to mate for the success of our offspring doesn’t mean we can’t love whom we fall for, or grow old without children of our own. That we can feel empathy for members of other species may be an accident, but the feelings are real nonetheless.

Anyone who takes the time to observe an animal commits the sin of anthropomorphism — finding enough about the animal intelligible enough to ascribe emotions and motivations to it, emotions and motivations that can only be experienced first-hand by ourselves. We should really call this sin “automorphism,” because we make this same leap of faith when interacting with other humans — we assume, based on the evidence, that others have feelings and lines of reasoning analogous to our own. (Analogous but not identical, which is why we have such trouble communicating with each other.)

Claiming species privilege, if not species superiority, denies the continuity of evolution and the blurriness of groups. Humans are not the end of the line in evolutionary history, and while we have amazing abilities, we have no right to use our abilities and points of view as the standard measure against which all other species fall short. Besides which, there are many humans who are not smart or even conscious most of the time, who function without opposable thumbs, who live with no more technology than a chimp or a crow or a fish. My facetious friends, declaring their intellectual machismo, claim they would eat starving children from Africa if it was socially acceptable. But I think they play the devil’s advocate so often they become the part, and deny the validity of their basic sympathy for beings similar to themselves. No one really wants to say that the young, the senile, and the handicapped should be treated as morally irrelevant. Even non-humans care for their sick and injured!

The other problem is where one would draw the line for “appropriate” empathy. It’s true that we fail to empathize with those we don’t interact with, but this is true no matter who the out-group is. Historically and presently, it has included people with different appearances, different languages, different practices, different genitalia. These are members of the same species, but with genetic material or cultural ideas considered inferior and worthy of less consideration than those of the in-group.

As one friend of mine suggested, we could solve this problem by putting our chickens in boxes where we cannot see them — where we cannot empathize with them. But why would we want to blind our moral sense, desensitize ourselves to cruelty? By the same logic we should sear off our nerves so that we wouldn’t have to feel pain. The truth is, we still have to put the chicken in the box. We couldn’t see the chicken everyday and not care. We have to tell myths about those we eat, convince ourselves it’s normal or even important, and ultimately forget about the animals themselves as we lick them off our lips.

2010 01 28 Comments (0)

Eating Animals Response

I just finished Eating Animals, which is not only an excellent introduction to the issues surrounding meat-eating, from factory farms to family dinners, but also thought-provoking for an already-educated eater like myself. I think it will definitely accomplish the author’s goal of starting conversations — conversations already in progress, I’m sure, since the ethics and impact of veganism has been mentioned recently on Oprah, Martha Stewart, Ellen, The View, and other mainstream media sources. Here are some of the provoked thoughts I had as I was devouring the text…

Factory farming is just plain wrong. Only by ignoring the fact that animals can feel pain and experience suffering can you support it was a clear mind and a clear heart. But family farms are trickier, because everyone has the image of happy cows grazing on green grass. They get the chance to live good, full lives, and are protected from the stress of the wilderness. Often people justify eating meat with this image falsely fixed in their imagination, but even if that image were real, I doubt its moral integrity. Bill Niman, a small-farm rancher, is quoted in Eating Animals:

“I vividly remember lying awake the night after we’d slaughtered our first pig. I agonized over whether I’d done the right thing. But in the weeks that followed, as we, our friends, and family ate the pork from that pig, I realized that the pig had died for an important purpose — to provide us with delicious, wholesome, and highly nutritious food. I decided that as long as I always endeavored to provide our animals good, natural lives, and deaths that were free from fear or pain, raising animals for food was morally acceptable to me.”

“The pig died for an important purpose.” There might be purposes important enough to die for, but food is not it. Bringing people together over the dinner table, through traditions passed on through generations, is commendable. But it is not the highest good. Traditions can and do change. I might choose to die myself if it would end a war or a family feud, if it would save lives or vastly improves the lives of many. Yet even here, does anyone have the right to make that decision for me? Things would have to be really bad to justify murder. Perhaps it is because I couldn’t kill Hitler or the Joker even if I knew, positively, that the world would be so much better for it. Perhaps that is why I choose not to kill (or pay someone else to kill) an animal for the joy and convenience of sharing its flesh and fluids with my loved ones.

And there is something especially disturbing about killing one sentient being with whom you have bonded in order to eat it with some other companions. Mr Niman, may I slaughter some of your friends and family — who, after all, have had a good and happy life — in order to feed my own?

Not so morally acceptable now.

At the end of this chapter, Foer says that the board of directors of Niman Ranch ousted Mr Niman because they wanted to pursue less ethical, more economical practices that he opposed. Niman himself won’t eat Niman Ranch meat anymore. Up to this point, Niman and his wife and their friends had almost almost convinced me that it was actually worthwhile to pursue better conditions for farmed animals than to the complete abolition of animal agriculture — welfare over rights. Until this unexpected and unfortunate fall from grace. Niman Ranch not yet a factory farm, to be sure, but its actions demonstrate that as long as animals are treated as property and producers of valuable commodities, their interests cannot be protected. Not even by the few ranchers who really do care.

2010 01 27 Comments (0)

Upright and Naked

I spent the Gordanier Christmas sitting cross-legged on a footstool, which had Jackie and a few other of Thomas’s relatives gaping and wondering “How can you do that?” My response was to mumble something about it being more comfortable. No, really! I’ve always loved my grandmother’s extra-firm cushions, and I’ve never slept so well as I did on Japanese floor-based futons. But it turns out that conventional notions of what makes a seat comfortable are actually quite bad for us — and, in the long run, uncomfortable.

I got this idea from Galen Cranz’s book, The Chair: “The assumption is that sitting at the edge of a seat upright, without support, is too tiring to sustain. But in other cultures, people sit upright by the hour. I wondered why we couldn’t do that. A radical thought kept surfacing: we can’t sit upright simply because we have grown accustomed to being supported by chairbacks. Because we lean against the backrest, the many layers of muscle that comprise the torso get weakened” (p. 95). This has far-reaching effects on our health: chair-sitting is a leading cause of back pain, as it puts pressure on the spinal disks and in turn stresses out the nerves and muscles of the lower back — even moreso than physical labor. The “C-shaped slump” that chairs force us into creates a hump in our spine as we lean backwards but stick out our necks, and it also compresses the diaphragm, squishes the organs, and reduces blood circulation, leading to acid reflux and varicose veins. Chairs seem so innocent that it’s almost amusing when we find out that “the head of a Norwegian furniture company has confessed that he felt guilty about making his living from producing chairs after he learned about the health problems they create” (p. 100). (You can read an interview with the author here.)

This all sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Walking and running barefoot is better for our posture, too. Less padding in both cases allows our bones, whether in our feet or the sit bones of our butt, to find a stable connection with a firm surface that supports us. Better than chair sitting is to perch on stools (especially tall ones), kneel, squat, recline, sit cross-legged, or stand. In fact, it’s even better to change your position every so often — walking or lying down (on your back with your knees up) is the best way to relieve back pain. Funny that these are also the sorts of recommendations for staying minimally fit, using your muscles throughout the day like we evolved to do?

So are we doomed to revert to the naked apes we are under all our culture and technology? Does nothing truly improve our lot in life, or are the improvements — like true medicines hidden in witchcraft — so tangled up that we can do nothing but futility oscillate between unhappy extremes? Chairs have been used since the Neolithic, but this does nothing to ensure they’re more “natural” for us to use. We may have to face the fact that our bodies are optimized for imperfection and change, and that there is no single optimum strategy for how to live. Which is a horrible thing for a perfectionist like me to realize.

Nonetheless, it looks like the jury is in on chairs, at least: they’re bad. So my New Year’s resolution is a strange one: don’t use them! I won’t lean back into their siren-song of comfort wherever I have the option of strengthening my autonomous sitting skills. Go forth and squat!

2010 01 02 Comments (0)

The Dangerous Appeal of Homesteading

I recently heard about a book, a memoir of a successful career woman turned homesteader. This is a popular story nowadays, people going back to the land — raising chickens in their backyards, cooking tomato sauce from scratch, sewing their own clothing. Its vaunted as a way to be self-sufficient and save the planet, and I was unabashedly excited by the idea myself. But then Amy pointed out that in the vast majority of the cases, the people participating in this DIY revolution are women. Urban or suburban homesteading is a big time commitment, and more often than not it is taken up by women who have the time or make the time. Women who think it’s important to do more with less, feed their families wholesome food without pesticides, preservatives, or petrol, and who find enjoyment in the art of craft. This would not be at all problematic except that these women are whole-heartedly embracing exactly the roles that were expected of their mothers, grandmothers, and so forth. And as soon as homesteading is expected of women, it becomes a job rather than a choice.

Blogs glamorize this modern housewife: expert in the kitchen and lover of homemade cleaning products, often with a trendy design job or a successful Etsy shop. Recipes are lauded when they please picky husbands and children, and crafts bring back trends from the era of the Feminine Mystique. Men such as Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman tell us that we should only eat food our grandmothers would recognize, bemoaning the loss of home-cooked meals our grandmothers slaved over. Microwaves and frozen dinners have freed women from kitchen drudgery as surely as they reduced our health and culinary competence. This is not to say there is not a happy compromise, for there are many quick and easy ways to prepare good meals from scratch, but these books and blogs make clear that the image of Woman as the one responsible for how a household is run is still pervasive. The change to more sustainable and healthful lifestyles, these independent media tell us, is in the hands of women.

I feel guilty when I am seduced by beautiful photographs of domesticity, wanting to run my own household with expensive white ceramic dishes, standing ready for visitors with a platter of perfect tea cakes. Yet I also want to design my household to be efficient and easy to use, Amish in its simplicity and Martha Stewart in its brightness, but not a place for canning and laborious scrubbing. I research permaculture so that I can grow my own food without paying much attention to it. I am interested in this stuff, and it just so happens that Thomas isn’t. Fine. Except that this plays into a larger pattern that is disturbing in its conventionality. What can Feminism do if women want to sweep floors and bake cakes and make little handmade cards for all their friends? This just wouldn’t be a problem if all the women who did such things did so with as much love and conviction that ones you see and read about. The problem is that there is pressure building on the one side by glamorous women who homestead and show off, and on the other side by guilt-trips over Our Nation’s Health and The Environment. One way or another, women are the targets of this tide towards homesteading. I worry that many will get involved with laborious domestic projects without questioning whether or not it is their true passion. We’re not in a post-feminist world yet, and traditional roles can easily become black holes to suck up independent minds everywhere.

2009 12 12 Comments (0)

Natural and Unnatural Toxicity

Finally, some sensible science on raw and cooked foods! Rachael sent me an excellent review of the various toxins, mutagens, carcinogens, and antinutrients found naturally in foods and created by cooking processes, as well the effects of heat and storage on vitamin, mineral, and nutrient content. The authors of the website are aggressively non-dogmatic — and refreshingly so. Their agenda appears to be to uncover uncomfortable truths about various “natural” diets, balancing out the often exaggerated health claims by the leaders of various food movements. My own agenda, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is to promote a healthy whole-foods plant-based lifestyle that does not require the enslavement, suffering, and death of animals. However, I get enthusiastic about strict rules — I’d make a good Benedictine — and so have had to step lightly when practicing my ideals lest I get stuck in a mire of evangelical dogma and raw food.

Heterocyclic amines are one example a toxin created by heating certain protein-rich foods. However, they also require creatine or creatinine to be present, which are mostly found in meats. What’s more, the kinds of heterocyclic amines produced by heating meat are hundreds of times more mutagenic than those produced by heating, say, soybeans. Higher temperatures create exponentially more of these guys, and they also build up over time, so beware the deep fryer that’s been re-using the same oil all day! On the other hand, HCA’s are less mutagenic on mammals than bacteria, and don’t become actually carcinogenic until they reach high concentrations — after all, we have a good set of DNA repair mechanisms, as well as general means for detoxifying ourselves. We have evolved to defend ourselves against a world that does not always want to be eaten!

No one type of toxin is going to be responsible for any given illness, and cancer is likely the result of many carcinogens acting in concert. Thus it still makes good sense to limit our exposure to nasty chemicals (like not eating charred meat and french fries every day), but not to go to such extreme levels that we miss out on important nutrients as well — our bodies can handle themselves if we don’t stress them overmuch. Stressing out over what we eat is probably just as much a risk factor as eating a few toxins. Much better to be excited about all the good things in our food, and get in as many different vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and phytonutrients as we possibly can! Most people truly do need to change their diet for optimal health, and get away from those myriad nasty things that combine to create disease, but I am myself learning to do so without freaking out. I just cross certain ingredients off the menu and never consider them food — animals and their excretions, hydrogenated oils, artificial sweeteners — and focus on what makes me feel happy and energetic. That includes things that taste delicious, even if they are not perfectly, 100% healthful. Nothings truly is. Solid data and scientific analysis makes me enjoy eating all the more!

2009 09 23 Comments (2)

Via Vata

This summer, as many people do, I turned to fresh, raw foods as the cornerstone of my diet. I also looked into the Raw Food Movement, composed of people who are trying to subsist on entirely raw diets. The principle that this is much healthier, certainly than the standard American diet, but also more than a healthy plant-based one. Cooking, even exposure to brief heat, destroys the digestive enzymes that come along with fruits and vegetables. These enzymes can supplement our own digestive enzymes to an extent, but raw foodists believe that this makes it easier for our bodies to get at the nutrients in raw foods. Ergo, we feel more energetic when eating them. Soaking, chopping, and pureeing are used instead of traditional cooking methods to dispose of anti-nutrients and break down tough cell walls that would normally make raw foods harder to digest effectively.

The only problem was that I was also feeling strangely lethargic on my mostly raw diet. I felt I had the potential to be bursting with energy, but I wasn’t. When I finally stepped on a scale, I the answer was obvious: I was underweight. What I clearly needed was a stereotyped Jewish mother shoveling food in my mouth, saying, “Eat! Eat! You’re so skinny!” It worked quite well enough to have hungry friends who made big meals together at the Cape, combined with a less aggressive exercise regime. Nothing like sitting on your butt all day reading Sherlock Holmes to gain a few needed pounds. And voila, I was happy and enthusiastic again, ready to jump off the couch and dance.

I also ran across an Ayurvedic cookbook today when visiting my friend, Sarah. She runs a business selling hand-made crafts from India, “a business with a social mission” as she calls it. Incidentally, I will be doing some work for her as a graphic designer in the next week or so, something to spend this new energy on! Anyway, the book has a questionnaire to help you determine your primary constitution, along with advice for what foods are best for keeping that constitution in balance. Surprisingly, kapha seems to be the one singled out in America, its grounded nature being especially susceptible to fats and sweets and couch-potatodom. Most diet advice is therefore targeted to those with a kapha nature, suggesting vigorous exercise and lots of light, raw foods. But I seem to be mostly with the vatas, who already have an active nature — they are characterized by the dry skin and creativity — and therefore should avoid excessive cold, raw foods. Warm foods are supposed to help balance a vata type because we have less digestive “fire” to work with. Weirdly enough, cabbage and apples are apparently particularly bad for us. I never said I bought into this completely!

It is, however, interesting to note how these abstract descriptions of people and foods can simplify the task of maintaining healthy digestion. Certainly it confirms my own discovery of needing to consume more cooked foods to feel at my best, and it gives me license to bake and roast and grill without feeling like I’m sucking the life out of my food. But because I still love a good fresh salsa on a hot, hot day, I introduce you to my first cooking video ever:

2009 08 20 Comments (1)

A Little Theory of Animate Things

I have a theory: I think sentience might be a necessary outcome of animacy, and sapience a result of sociality. An animal who ventures out into the world must be able to make sense of a complex environment, which a sessile being can safely ignore until something bumps into it. The mobile creature must be able to filter through a barrage of information in order to pick out what’s relevant for its life, both now and in the foreseeable future. It must have heuristics to navigate the world and survive and multiply in it, which basically boils down to having emotions — those desires that tend to lead to optimal health and fecundity — and intentions — what must be done to satisfy those desires. Perception of pain and pleasure, and a basic understanding of the self as the source of movement and feeling and different from external things, seem to be fundamental to being mobile. Plants and fungi and algae and mollusks can get away with an entirely more simple set of inputs and outputs, since they let the world come to them.

Modeling the world is complex, indeed, but even more complex is the task of modeling other intentional beings. This is exactly what social creatures need to do in order to predict and interpret the actions of fellow sentient beings. Empathy, play, learning, coordination, and communication are all parts of the necessary toolset. Brain size is in fact correlated with sociality, and the pre-fontal cortex that grants us our awesome human abilities gets bigger in direct proportion to a species’ group size. Crows and chimps, for example, about the same brain-to-body ratio, which is much bigger than their less social relations and gives them to power to solve problems and impress scientists with their mental prowess. Selfhood also changes meaning for social animals, I believe, so that they understand themselves to be an individual within the group, with a personality and relationships to keep track of. It seems reasonable to suppose that they can mentally model themselves as well as they can model others, giving themselves not just a sentient interiority, but an awareness of that interiority — a rudimentary self-consciousness.

We treat self-consciousness and social-awareness as almost magical abilities that small children and animals only appear to possess due to slight of hand and misunderstanding. But I think sentience and sapience are the results of quite useful abstractions, which are surely much easier than trying to predict the chaotic behaviors of rocks moving past you and four-legged fuzz balls based on colors, smells, and movements that mean nothing and evoke no emotion. Much easier, once the refactoring happens, to categorically identify food, foe, and friend and feel attachments and revulsions, joy and fear, puzzlement when the world cannot be reconciled and satisfaction when everything makes sense again.

This theory is only half-baked, and it’s probably too generous in some areas while elsewhere being too limited in scope. Think on it with me!

2009 06 08 Comments (2)