SPUDS, TATERS, POTATOES

“Spuds,”  “taters,” “Irish lumper,” “tuber,” ¨apple of the earth¨ (pomme de terre), the humble, or is it “noble,” potato can be  variously labelled. It also comes to the

table in various forms: baked, mashed, fried, scalloped, as tater tots, hash browns, rösti, chips, potato salad, poutine, raclette. In my native state of Maine, it even comes as a sweet chocolate concoction, a “needham” which blends coconut, chocolate and, yes, potato.  Overall, the tuber is a marvelous and versatile foodstuff, welcome just about anywhere in the world.

An unwanted interloper. Not bad for a plant originating in Peru.  Its spread was due to what is called the “Columbian Exchange,” the movement of plants and animals across the Atlantic as the result of European colonization of the Americas. Wheat and rice came west from Europe . Maize, tomatoes and potatoes went the other way.

Potatoes were not an immediate hit. It  took an intrepid French scientist, Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, to get the vegetable onto everyday tables.  Potatoes had been in Europe for some 200 years by the time of Parmentier’s birth, 1737. As is often the case the foreigners were shunned.  Potatoes were animal food, little else. Well, in Germany they were something else, prisoner food. That was where Parmentier first encountered them.  Once liberated, he sought to get potatoes into the human diet. His motivation (he was an agronomist with interests in nutrition and public health,) was reinforced by his showman’s panache for marketing..  He invented recipes, gave dinners at which luminaries like Benjamin Franklin were invited and was a relentless promoter.

Lesson to be learned: foreigners, outsiders, unfamiliar ones may occasion a negative reaction, but this reaction may be wrong.  The initial, unreflective reaction, needs to be complemented by intelligence, experience and good sense.  

Mr. Potato Head.  Does anyone remember this?  A bunch of facial attributes attached to stick pins. The point (so to speak)? Stick them onto potatoes, creating various faces. 

Lesson to be learned.  It’s possible to be overly pampered and spoiled.  Food has, for most of human history been scarce. To live at an epoch when food can be a toy is a statement about our time.  Does Mr. Potato head somehow condemn us as superficial and self-indulgent? Well, yes. Generalized, the “food is a toy” attitude could translate into a loss of appreciation for what food is, and what is involved prior to its arrival in a home.  Food becomes just another consumer good, something to be used and discarded. Its unique status, as a necessary staple, one that in certain situations, should not be commidified, tends to be overlooked if not forgotten entirely.

The Great Irish potato famine.  Sometimes food commodification  leads to a great human catastrophe.  According to once widely-accepted lore, the Irish peasantry had, in the 19th century, become too dependent on a particular potato strain. This strain was susceptible to infection by the mold Phytophthora infestans.  The received lore is straightforward and easy to grasp. It is also, by omitting important details, just plain wrong.  Ireland, it turns out, was producing plenty of food in the middle of the 19th century. Why was that food, food grown in Ireland, not used to feed Irish people?  Well,
colonization and immoral capitalism. Colonization meant that far-away British landlords controlled, politically and economically, what went on in Ireland. Immoral, unreflective capitalism meant that the landowners for whom successful crops meant profits, disregarded the sufferings and deaths of the people who grew the food which made them wealthy. Why?  They needed to make a profit. They needed to repay their bank loans. In their scale of values, these were more important than irish peasants dying from starvation. 

Lesson to be learned: One tendency, deep in the human psyche, against which we need to struggle: thinking that the suffering of fellow humans either does not matter, or is their fault; or maybe both does not matter and is their fault.  All we have to do is slip into another easy, immediate, gut feeling: think of them as “other” or ‘different.” Such a tendency is not just pervasive but can be reinforced by economic considerations. This happens often when the work of those considered “different,” is crucial to a system that keeps us wealthy and comfortable. Without a real effort at thoughtfulness and understanding, the temptation to detachment and indifference, to thinking the economic considerations are more important than humanitarian ones, is simply too strong to overcome.  

ANGELISM AS ANTI-REPUBLICANISM

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) could turn a phrase, e.g. Qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête. “Whoever  attempts to be an angel becomes a beast.”  it’s an apt social warning. Human communities are made up of, well,  humans with all their possibilities for good and for ill. James Madison

kept this in mind,  famously asserting that If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.“   

Madison is here echoing the ancient philosopher Aristotle.  In his political writings one theme is

dominant: humans are always humans. That is, they are biological, cultural, historical creatures.  There is no hint of an Angelic fantasy, nor of the tripartite pattern that is a regular accompaniment of that fantasy: (i) an idyllic initial condition,  (ii) loss of that condition because of a fatal flaw, (iii) the need to remove the flaw and return humans to their angelic state. 

For Aristotle, there is no imagined initial idyllic state, nor any fantasy about single flaws, which, once removed, would restore an aboriginal idealized state.  Instead, there is an empirical account of what the human situation is like. There is a realization that humans come into existence with a bundle of dispositions, impulses, possibilities.  History teaches that those possibilities can be channelled toward good and ill. What makes a difference? The proper identification of goods and ills, along with the work of cultivating habits associated with the better dispositions. Unlike the trinary pattern, there is no sense that a single act, removing the fatal flaw, will restore angelism. Rather the tension among possibilities for good and ill goes on continuously. The process of maximizing good habits is ongoing.  There are no shortcuts. 

The angelism/trinary pattern is pervasive, showing up even among friends of democracy.  (Rousseau comes to mind.) Nonetheless, the model is well suited for autocrats and tyrants.  Tyrants claim to hold the key to removing the fatal flaw. This provides justification for draconian measures to hunt down and eradicate whoever would keep the dangerous flaw alive.   Remove the king and the aristocrats, said the French revolutionaries, and all shall be well. Rid the world of capitalism, said the communists, and the ideal society will come into being. Do away with the Shah, impose a religion-guided polity, said the Ayatollah Khomeini, and all will be well.   Eliminate most of government say the libertarians, and a free, just society will result. 

Non-Utopians like Madison prefer the way of republics, the republican model: a political system without a single center; an order  in which power is distributed. It’s far from perfect, but it has one advantage: it’s an arrangement for humans, historical humans, neither angels, nor people whose ancestors resided in a paradisiacal initial state. Republicanism, i.e. working to establish successful republics, takes up the challenge of establishing a community that will best 

embody desirable political virtues like justice, freedom, harmony, equality, well-being. It will do so as an ongoing project, not as a fait accompli.

What the ‘fatal flaw’ crowd really seeks to circumvent is what Aristotle considered necessary and good: the art of politics.  For both Plato and Aristotle the greatest gift-givers to humanity were those who could write good constitutions. First lesson in such constitution writing and the art of politics: remember Madison and keep in mind that  humans are neither angels nor beasts. They are bundles of possibilities for good and ill. Good leadership involves maximizing one set of possibilities and minimizing others. It is not simply a matter of releasing the angelic by eliminating a fatal flaw. 

This offers a return to a more Aristotelian position, one rooted in the claim that humans are “political animals,”  they were by nature meant to live in communities. Conjoint, communal existence is not an unwelcome inconvenience. It does not represent  a falling away from some initially idyllic condition. It represents a call to responsibility. The important point: communities may exist by nature, but the proper political organizations do not.  They require effort, ongoing effort. In the beginning is a cluster of possibilities. The oversimplifications and short-cuts associated with the trinary fable will always be with us. But simplifications and short-cuts are temptations to be resisted. 

WHEN CONSERVATIVE MEANS LIBERAL

Despite polarization, one movement gathers bi-partisan support: “food freedom,” (loosening  regulations when sales are between local producers/ buyers.)    “Conservatives” resist regulatory overload, so they are on board.  “Liberals” support local farmers, so they are in.  

It could go otherwise. “Conservatives” tend to favor free markets, which, in practice, privilege big companies.  “Liberals” think kindly of regulations. Yet, when it comes to food freedom, conservatives side with the little guy and liberals willingly waive regulations.

Strange, especially if we only attend to journalistic shorthand. There, “conservative” and “liberal” become purified incompatibles.  Historically/philosophically, the labels are mongrels. 

One attempt to sort things out:

LIBERAL. The archetypes are the  “classical liberals¨ from 17th/18th centuries (prototypical: John Locke 1632-1704). They were (a) reformers; (b) their aim was emancipatory; (c) their notion of human nature was

individualistic; (d) they invented a story of an aboriginal condition (“state of nature”) in which humans were freedom-possessing individuals; (e) some of these freedoms had to be willingly given up because of life with others; (f)  rights were only given up within contracts entered into by rational, informed individuals. Outside of contracts there were no obligations. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) said it clearly: any obligation upon an individual arises, solely, “from some act of his own.” 

The major freedom-constricting agents in the 17th

century  were aristocrats. Liberal reform sought removal of artificial aristocratic constraints. That way, with a resultant minimal state, the  bourgeois (urban, business-oriented) class, could flourish. By the 19th century, classical liberalism (aka “free market capitalism”) had (1) been adopted by the commercial class; (2) this class was now on the ascendance; (3) it was creating a new underclass of

impoverished, overworked laborers; (4) publicly elected officials could not intervene in the economic sphere, a sphere that was part of liberalism’s pre-political realm outside the purview of legitimate state intervention 

At this point, the reformist  dimension of “liberalism” parted ways with its 18th century programmatic dimension. Emancipation remained the aim. The enemies of freedom had changed. “Liberal” still meant “reformer,” but now reform challenged the “laissez-faire” status quo the older liberalism had championed. The minimal state, once a liberal ideal, came to be seen as a  limit on the freedom of laborers.

The result is what we have today: “liberals” with roots in classical liberalism, but supporting policies at odds with the program of classical liberalism.

CONSERVATIVE.  20th century “liberal” reformers faced opposition.  Defenders of the status quo were “conservatives.” Ironically, what they sought to

conserve was classical liberalism. The result was a linguistic jumble:  those seeking to preserve liberalism were called “conservatives.” “Liberals," by contrast wished to overturn liberalism. It’s a lot less complicated in some European countries where “liberal” still means supporter of free market capitalism.

Things get even more convoluted.  “Conservatism" did not always mean “defender of free enterprise.”  Capitalism is a great engine of change. Preserving the ancient ways is not high on its priority list. It dismisses traditional virtues and imposes a single value: profit.  

A more old-fashioned conservatism predates classical liberalism. Some contrasts: (a) For liberals, humans are essentially individuals. For traditionalist conservatives, humans, as Aristotle long ago insisted, are social

animals. (b) Liberals tend to be rationalists. Conservatives  don’t dismiss intelligence, but rather insist on exercising it in conjunction with experience and tradition. (c) Liberals are reluctant to embrace substantive values, arguing that people should be free to live the lives they wish. Conservatives accept that some modes of living are simply more conducive to a fulfilling human life than others.  (d) Liberals, in their reformist zeal, consider human nature as infinitely malleable. Conservatives worry about “utopian” plans

conceived without concern for experience, customs, cultural practices, realities of the human condition. (e) Liberals only accept obligations that issue from contracts. Conservatives believe that our naturally embedded situatedness occasions responsibilities and obligations.   Infants, for example, cannot, by definition, be parties to a contract. Yet parents, without such a contract, can be said to have obligations to their children. The same can be said for animals and the natural world.   

America, born in the 18th century, was imprinted by classical liberal ideas.  That is why economic conservatism converges with the older liberalism. The philosophical challenge for the 21st century is that of articulating a more biologically and historically defensible understanding of the human condition. What would this mean? Moving beyond notions that became sedimented in the 19th century:  individualism, the state of nature fantasy, the notion that humans are, by nature, only selfish, that life is a struggle for existence. Within the new context, liberalism and conservatism would continue, but be redefined. What would not change, as we shall see in the next post--the constant temptation toward angelism.

"ASCETIC FEASTING"

Eid al Fitr is a feast, a communal celebration to mark the end of  Ramadan. Mardi Gras is a feast, a communal celebration. It precedes 40 days of restrained eating.  Feasting is religious because it celebrates a great yea-saying to creation. Fasting is religious  because it acknowledges how the great yea-and-amen saying includes an important ethical dimension: a yea-saying to responsibility. Responsibility means, as the ancient Greeks recognized, responding in a way that finds the right path, a path that typically avoids extremes and seeks balance.  Embodying the right balance in behavior means developing appropriate habits. Developing appropriate habits involves training, exercise and effort. Here is where fasting fits in. Fasting offers a ritualized opportunity to engage in such training.  

Philosophers, sadly, have missed the significance of feasting and fasting. Mind-fixated, they have tended to downplay feasting since it is associated with bodily appetites.  At the same time, they have tended to distort the importance of fasting, describing it in terms of self-discipline as a way to promote the renunciation of bodily desires. The exaggerated positions that result: On one side, all feasting considered as gluttony;  on the other, a need to suppress appetites.

In all of this, a perfectly good word was ruined.  The term

“ascetic” originally meant someone well trained or skilled.  A good athlete would serve as a typical example. So would an accomplished musician. Askein meant to train, i.e. to take natural dispositions and bring them to their proper fruition.  

With regard to virtuous behavior, “asceticism” did not initially mean suppressing or eliminating naturally occurring desires and dispositions. Vice, as excess with regard to desires and appetites, did represent a problem.  The virtuous way to avoid excess was not to suppress the appetite. Rather excesses were avoided by shaping habits, by training, by undertaking an ascesis. Such a training encouraged the development of habits that did not dismiss but rather properly channeled appetites, desires, dispositions. 

For the older, original, meaning of “ascetic” to remain, a particular philosophical position had to be dominant.  Humans had to be understood as continuous wholes, not as bifurcated entities. Once the bifurcation (mind vs body) took hold, once ex-carnation rather than in-carnation became the default understanding, then “ascetic” began to change its meaning.  Ultimately, it became the term we know today, the one that connotes self-deprivation, self-abnegation, self-denial. It is hard for us even to imagine how it once meant something quite different, how it emphasized the need for practices that would help us carry out activities which  brought dispositions to their proper culminations, how athletes and musicians would be good examples of “ascetics.”. 

The shift began with the ancient Stoics as the center of gravity moved from Athens to Rome. For the Stoics, ascesis began its movement toward a particular kind of exercise, one that aimed, not to refine, but to expunge, appetites.  The Stoic understanding, first absorbed and then spread by the Roman empire, eventually became the default position in Europe. 

Swept aside by all this was the pre-Stoic, Aristotelian understanding that emphasized not free exercise vs suppression, but rather behavior that, depending on which habits were cultivated, would become  virtuous or vicious. Virtue and vice did not map simplistically onto suppression or free reign or appetite. Rather virtuous behavior was associated with the proper channelling of appetites, desires, dispositions.   Vice, on the other hand, arose when the proper target has been missed, either by excess or privation. 

To articulate, as best as he could, what it meant to achieve the right target, , Aristotle famously spoke of the “mean.”   We

might translate the “mean” as the right blend at the right time in the right way. Appetites, desires, dispositions are multiple

and a hodge podge of good and bad.  Virtue dominates vice when the better dispositions are cultivated and, via the proper ascesis, well-educated (in the literal sense of drawing out what is already there, making real what initially is present only in the status of possibility).

Food offers a good and prevalent example. Gluttony (nothing but feasting) and anorexia (nothing but fasting) stand as excesses to be avoided.  Eating can be unbounded, careless, sloppy, enslaved by immediate gratification. Overreaction to such excesses can lead to rigid, narrow, schemes of suppression. 

Missing in this wild pendulum swing is the understanding of virtue as the bringing of appetites to their proper consummations. The path of responsibility, of ascesis, of virtue, of getting blends and culminations right in actual practice, is not easy.  But constantly working at getting that blend right is a way to live out the yea-and-amen attitude to the world in which we find ourselves.

PERSONALISM: "MORE" vs "NOTHING BUT"

Emmanuel Mounier, great exponent of personalism, starts his book with this reflection:

“Man is body in the same way as he is spirit, completely body and completely spirit.  Out of the most basic of instincts: eating, reproduction, he develops subtle arts; cuisine,  love.”

As we saw in the previous post, the movement known as "personalism" rejects bifurcations. It assumes human/world continuity.  What is specific to personalism is this: continuity means that humans and their characteristics are not oddballs, “supervening,” as some philosophers put it, on a neutral world of mere matter.  For personalism, it is not “matter,” but

“mattering” that is pervasive. “Mattering,” in turn, rebuffs “impersonalism.” “Impersonalism” connotes a general framework which is fundamentally neutral and indifferent. Personalism offers an alternative: it is difference rather than indifference that takes a central role.  Indeed “mattering” indicates a setting in which differences make a difference in light of activities geared toward what is good. 

Another way of identifying the contrast is to say that “impersonalism” embraces the “nothing but” attitude. 

Personalism, on the other hand embraces the “more” attitude. It resists simplifying entities and events as "nothing but" members of a certain class or category. Each entity, event or activity is always "more" than any interpretive grid or categorization that can be placed on it.  One of Mounier's examples is "modesty." This is not primarily a prudish, puritanical fear of sexuality. It is a statement that the person is more than the sum of physical traits.

Personalism and its emphasis on "more" admits a kind of omnipresent fecundity.  Such fecundity is rooted in a focus on possibilities. Reality is thought to be replete with them, even if many are yet to be recognized and others have yet to be brought to their proper culminations. 

Because of inherited philosophical ideas, we unreflectively assume a “nothing but” world. Such a world is  (a) composed of rudimentary units, discrete atoms, not of interactive systems; and (b) those elementary units follow mechanical rules, ones quite apart from considerations of optimal or preferred states.

Ecology is slowly chipping away at this “nothing but” (i.e. impersonal)  take on things. It emphasizes systems, interactions, and optimal, steady-states preserving themselves within a healthy range of balance. Such systems, we are also now learning, are not just bits of matter acted upon by mechanical rules.  Communication, an event which requires signalling and deciphering signals, is occurring all the time.

Take acacia trees. When giraffes begin to feed on their

leaves, the trees (1) produce a toxin, and (2) emit a gas. The toxin serves a particular function: discouraging further giraffe feeding.  The gas also serves a function, a signalling one. Neighboring trees, even if giraffes are not yet feeding on them, begin to produce a toxin.

What occurs in such a complex of interactions cannot be fully explained in “nothing but” terms. The physico-chemical processes and the end-directed function that occasions them, do not identify an either/or. A more comprehensive articulation will have little to do with the “nothing but” attitude, i.e. nothing but physico-chemical processes OR nothing but teleological signalling. The most fertile methods of inquiry will expect “more” rather than “nothing but.”

The “nothing but” world is not, as its friends will suggest, value-free.  It is associated with a particular value-laden project: manipulation and control.  At the

same time, the human condition is aggrandized. Humans come to be identified with “will.”   “Thus I willed it" becomes a guiding slogan. It's a slogan which situates humans in a superior position from which they can impose their patterns on the neutral “nothing but” stuff that makes up what is now known as the “external” world.  

Because impersonalism transforms the world into what Erazim Kohak called manipulanda (that which exists only to be manipulated), it minimizes any recognition of

surroundings as sacred. This, in turn, could help explain why most personalists have been religious. (A pope, John-Paul II, is probably the most famous example.).  

Quite apart from religiosity, personalism worries that the impersonal take on things actually falsifies the complexity of being in the world.  Whether personalism offers a vibrant enough, generally appealing enough, alternative, remains to be seen. Whatever direction is taken, the “more” dimension, one that recognizes a rich, overflowing fecundity all around, offers a fuller take on things than does the “nothing but” alternative.

ONTOLOGICAL PERSONALISM

In the late 1980s a laboratory experiment produced surprising results.  Bacteria which could not feed on lactose were placed in a lactose-only environment.  Surprisingly, general demise was not the outcome. Instead, the bacteria’s genes went into overdrive and it developed an ability to digest what had formerly been indigestible.  

This energetic, survival-directed dynamism offered a path for altering a long-standing philosophical presupposition: most of the material world proceeds by mechanistic rules. Take a spark plug.  If it is deprived of

a source for sparking, nothing happens. Similarly, if the plug has a crack in it, the crack will remain. Nothing in a mechanical device is self-replicating or self-repairing.

The mechanistic pattern typically hit a wall when it came to humans. The wall should have included the biological realm, but strenuous efforts were made to explain the biological via the mechanistic. One dominant notion, for example, was that although genetic changes (mutations) occurred, they were strictly random. Such random variations were then caught up in the mechanistic process whose laws proceeded by necessity, a position explained in a popular book, Chance and Necessity, by the Nobel-winning biologist Jacques Monod. With the biological realm thought to be explicable via mechanical processes, only the human was left as an exception. There resulted a major

bifurcation: the realm of humans and the realm of matter. Stated differently: on one side the personal, on the other, the impersonal.

So strong, though, was the pull of the machine model, that a serious attempt was made even to include humans within its boundaries.  This was the well-known movement of Behaviorism. It proclaimed proclaimed that (a) humans were not different from the natural world, and (b) this meant that what could not be found in the realm of atomic matter (i.e. the “objective” realm) should not be included in descriptions of what was going on in the human realm.   Behaviorism took a chainsaw approach to eliminate what it considered to be little more than

subjective illusions.

John B. Watson stated it clearly and bluntly: “ the Behaviorist must exclude from his scientific vocabulary all subjective terms such as sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose, and even thinking and emotion…”

Standing in sharp opposition to this objectivist, impersonal paradigm is the philosophical movement known as “personalism.” The name, which adopts the personal/impersonal bifurcation, is not that great. Still, the content is worthy of another look. That content, begins, perhaps surprisingly, by sharing a key starting point with behaviorism: the post-Darwinian realization that there is continuity, not a sharp rupture, between humans and the natural world.  What it does next, however, moves it in a different direction.   

The personalist twist: If  humans are indeed continuous with the natural realm, then we can learn something about the natural realm by paying attention to  human experience. That experience is not an alien, mysterious, supervenient irruption. It manifests operative natural processes. As such it can serve to provide indications of characteristics associated with the non-human world. 

“Indications” is an important term. There is no claim that traits associated with humans, say intelligence, purposeful activity, emotional attachment, language, will, in those exact forms, be widely distributed.   There is a middle ground: the old medieval recognition of traits as “analogous.” Traits like awareness, communication, habit, normativity, end-directed flexibility can now be recognized as ‘going all the way down,’ as being generically applicable to our worldd (which includes humans and non humans). The realm of the “impersonal,” far from being prototypical, is now seen as an outlier.  

“Personalism” recently got a big publicity boost: a piece

by David Brooks in the New York Times.  It was entitled: “Personalism: the philosophy we need.” The article did provide a great boost, but the personalism it defended was a truncated one. It highlighted human-human interactions: “Personalism is a philosophic tendency built on the infinite uniqueness and depth of each person.”  

This is good as far as it goes.  It is an understandable emphasis given the name “personalism.” At the same time, it misses the more comprehensive dimension of personalism: offering an ontological, not just an anthropological take on things. The Brooks’ perspective actually undermines the notion of continuity.  It preserves the human/nature discontinuity, a discontinuity which personalism seeks to overcome.   

For more on personalism, and its relationship to food, stay tuned for the next installment. 

For  introductions to personalism, some books offer a good starting place. Central among them:

• Emmanuel Mounier’ general introduction,  Personalism;
• Erazim Kohak’s lyrical The Embers and the Stars;
• and Martin Buber’s classic  I and Thou.