SOUP, GOOD, EVIL

“Duck soup,” “soup’s on,”  “primordial soup,” “pea soup.”  None of these expressions is literally about liquid food. O.k. “pea soup” can refer to an actual heated broth-and-vegetable concoction. But, where I live, on the coast of Maine, it mostly refers to an especially thick fog. Similarly,“duck soup” indicates something is easy, “soup’s on” means there is food (not specifically soup) on the table, and “primordial soup” is a scientific expression for the mixture out of which came all life.

As far as the liquid food goes, its prominence translated into a

widespread folk tale, “stone soup.”  Hungry strangers set up a pot over a fire and place a stone in it. Curious villagers are told that a soup, ample enough for sharing, is being prepared.  It is, however, lacking in ingredients. The villagers then add vegetables and seasoning. The result: a hearty product enjoyed by both hungry travellers and villagers.

Soup’s prominence alse played a role in the development of restaurants.  Sold on the streets, it was marketed as a “restoratif,” that which would restore

 tired bodies. Eventually, sit-down places adopted the name. They became places for energy restoration, “restaurants.”

Under a New England name, “chowder,” soup made its way into Moby Dick. Hungry Ahab and Queequeg enter an inn. The owner utters only two words: clam,

cod.  They are codes for the meal choices, chowder with clams or chowder with cod. The inn was an all-chowder-all-the-time kind of place:  “chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish bones coming through your clothes.”

The word ‘chowder,’ from chaudière, heat-allowing pot,  signals an important aspect of soups. They are “needy,”  i.e, they can’t exist without mixtures, combinations inventions.  It’s not just a recipe's mingling of ingredients. Without technology, initially pottery, there can be no soup.

Anthropologists, whose name means ¨those who speak intelligently about human beings,” have come to realize that speaking intelligently about humans is impossible if humans, alone, are the focus of attention.  Something like “ontological anthropology,” dealing with humans in interaction with their surroundings, is needed. Intelligent speaking about humans, for example, should include discussions of clay, fire and the arts that led to pottery .  Once developed,some 20,000 years ago, pottery offered a great advantage: new ways prepare edibles.  Without cooking, as Richard Wrangham has reminded us, humans would have to spend most of their time, as our simian congeners do, eating.

We might also spend that time eating alone or, at best, side by side. This is not the same as the more typically human experiences of shared dining (formal name: “commensality.”) The pot of soup now signals another dimension neediness, positively understood, as interconnection.  What is inside the pot results from mixing and blending. The table, with its guests, is also a place of blending and mixing. The setting is like a little galaxy, with the pot serving as a solar center around which all else revolves.

Soup is important philosophically precisely because it exemplifies intermingling and interdependence. Without earth, fire, and the artisans who produced pottery, soup could not have come into being. Once it comes into being it requires, as “Stone Soup” indicates, combinations and mixtures.  Once those combinations come to fruition, the interminglings are those of hungry individuals congregating around the central food source.

Despite false dreams of isolation and autonomy, living is a matter of fostering interconnections. Creation and goodness depend on constructions that are fragile and easily endangered.  Evil, as anti-creation, moves toward what John Milton

appropriately called "pan-demonium." The demonic dimension is always that of dividing, breaking down, disrupting, in a word, de-creating.  

A good soup moves in a different direction. It gathers, brings together, combines elements in a tasty, nutritious way. That combination, in turn, can foster human connections, collaborations and harmonizations. In that regard a good bowl of soup is often  a bowl that fosters good.

Cheese and Ethics

Philosophers often talk about “the” good, as if it were a singular thing.  Sometimes that gets thinkers in trouble.  Plato and Aristotle did pretty well. Some kind of balance among multiple elements was always at work for them.  Plato thought in terms of a good society, one in which “good” was to be defined by the proper arrangement of the diverse elements.  Aristotle invented a word, “eudaimonia,” to indicate “happiness,” or human “flourishing.”   A flourishing life involves multiple elements: proper organization of dispositions, good habits, friends,  some luck as regards things like health and a stable society, along with a general reasonableness and attention to what is learned from experience. Eudaimonia, as a result, was always a complex affair.

After Aristotle, Epicurus defined “pleasure” as the content of goodness.  As a philosopher, he asked a complicating question: what is pleasure? It turned out to mean “ataraxia,” non-disturbedness. A life lived in equilibrium, with minimal disturbances, is the most pleasant life.  The Stoics, often contrasted with the Epicureans, had a similar ideal, “apatheia,” absence of powerful emotional upheavals.  

These post-Aristotelian moves marked a major change: an inward turn.  Things to be avoided, e.g. disturbances, emotional upheavals, upsets to a life lived in equilibrium--all of these arose from what was outside us.  The less we involved ourselves, the less we made ourselves vulnerable, the greater were the chances of achieving a pleasureable, minimally disturbed, life.  The older ethics assumed that a good/happy life was not possible unless there were people on whom we could depend. The newer one followed the trajectory sung by Whitney Houston : “And so I learned to depend on me.”

Religion added another ingredient.   This arrived via the teachings of a Persian sage called Mani. The internal/external distinction became a sharp good/evil split.  Manichaeism  described a world in which good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter were irreconcilable.   

Evil and good had physical manifestations.  Matter was evil, spirit was good. Within this context it made perfect sense for large numbers of men, aspiring to a good life, to withdraw from the world and become monks.  Also encouraged was a tendency as old as humanity: identifying scapegoats.  Women labelled witches felt this wrath, as did heretics.  Later writers traced political problems to “parasites”, either the idle rich (Lenin lambasted them) or poor folks (Ayn Rand lambasted them). The Nazis treated their enemies as parasites and germs, agents in need of eradication.

I thought of all this when recently visiting an artisanal cheese-making operation, the Kennebec Cheesery in the Belgrade lakes region of Maine. This particular place is homey.  It’s a farmhouse, with lots of  land, goats, sheep, a delivery of manure the day I was there (good fertilizer).  Also, plenty of bugs, some visible, others invisible, still others in refrigerated packets.  The invisible ones are mostly bacteria.  Within the Manichean disposition, bacteria fall under the “evil-to-be-exterminated” category.

Newspaper headlines about the notorious E-Coli do not help, especially when they fail to mention that most strains are harmless and even beneficial.  Eliminating them would be disastrous for our health.  Better to work with them. This is where the refrigerated packets come in handy.  The packets house bugs with names that can sound foreboding like streptococcus thermophilus, or lactobacillus casei. Others, have more recognizable labels,  penicillium roqueforti,  penicillium camemberti. Instead of aiming at elimination, cheese makers actually welcome these “germs.”  The results: healthy, tasty cheeses.

The post-Aristotelian dispensation in ethics, i.e. the inward turn, was doubly problematic.   (1) A good life was to be achieved by insulating ourselves from the vagaries of existence.  (2) The dispensation encouraged a combat mode, that is, not just withdrawal, but attempts at purification through eradication of what was considered unilaterally and unequivocally evil.

Cheesemaking offers another model: streptococcus,  lactobacillus,  penicillium, we can work together.  We could, of course, go the radical antibiotic route. But it is better to reject the Manichean, purificatory move.  Instead of defaulting to a position which is hostile, start with one that is hospitable.  Viruses?  Not eliminate, but Integrate. (We call this vaccination.)  Bacteria?  Avoid blanket condemnations. Admit a good/bad mix.  Then, welcome, integrate, harmonize, bring to helpful fruitions. Make cheese.  Mary Douglas an anthropologist with an interest in food wrote an important book about  the drive to purification. The book was called Purity and Danger.  The ethics lesson offered by cheesemakers would suggest, as a life guideline, a different title: Purity is Danger.