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.