Babies, Bathwater, and Standing on Sound Principles

There are many different strategies undertaken politically. Most of us despise expediency, where principle doesn't matter and only power to win is considered, and rightly so. It is often noted that if we stoop to tactics that we oppose in order to win, we have really enabled our enemies to win, and just replaced the personnel. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

I am very interested in life, biology, and the natural world, so took the time to read an article on Methuselah, the oldest tree in the world. I was startled to read about it's older neighbor Prometheus, also a Bristlecone Pine, inadvertantly killed by Donal Rusk Currey while he was researching the matter. It's a stark warning to us all, and I recommend folks take a few minutes to understand how it happened, and how to make sure we ourselves don't kill what we love trying to protect it.

IMG source - Ancient-Origins.net

We all, if we are healthy people, love humanity and want our posterity to prosper. Too many of us have suffered indignities and injuries in youth that, as children that didn't know better, made decisions and dedicated ourselves to courses of action we have not since reconsidered. When I was 5 I learned that bigger, dumber kids than me in Kindergarten picked on smaller, smarter kids. I learned this by being bullied, which I didn't like. As a 5 year old I didn't know a lot of things that had bearing on the matter, so, like all 5 year old children, I made the best decisions I could. While I didn't know it then, I also depended on adults (like me, later in life) protecting me from stupid decisions I made as a child, and not just bullies.

In some rather convoluted and complex calculus, 5 year old me decided that schools and teachers would never be able to stop bullying, and that bullies picked on the smartest kids first. I decided that the smartest kids were all good at math, so all I had to do to prevent being bullied was to be bad at math. I could be good at the other subjects because the bullies focused on math nerds and didn't have time to get to history or spelling nerds. Clearly I was working with incorrect and incomplete information, because few are as bullied as spelling nerds, but that's beside the point.

I successfully pretended to be bad at math, and as time went on that became no longer a pretense. Fake it til you make it. I eventually realized I'd made an awful mistake, and set about fixing the problem, but it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. Our development happens in fits and starts, and sometime between 5 and 11 was the fit in which we develop our brain to be able to do math well. Having neglected to develop my brain at the appropriate time meant I had an uphill slog to gain mathematical competence, but that's how the cookie crumbled and realizing I'd been stupid as a 5 year old didn't change that fact.

We may not realize it, but we make a lot of decisions as very young children that affect us for the rest of our lives. I was fortunate to realize this one was a terrible mistake and later work to rectify the problem it caused. I remember being very proud of getting an A+ in Algebra one year, because it had taken so much work to achieve.

But decisions that similarly harm us that we do not remember making, and never realize we should fix, affect us all. These are called formative years for the very good reason that we form our worldview during our childhood. In many ways we accept the decisions we made as 5 year old children and never question them even as adults. This is why undertaking to dispel false beliefs is amongst the most difficult and harrowing things I've ever done.

We are designed to live in communities, and societies often have particular cultural practices that really don't make sense, but are vital to the society and the people in it, that they may not even realize is something they do. In a lot of small ways, we take certain actions, or take actions in a certain way, that stamps us with our cultural heritage. In America, using forks is one of those things, and it's something that most of us never even realize we do that sets us apart from all other countries and peoples of the world.

Everyone eats. In the American colonies it was the common practice to use cultery, a knife and fork, to eat with. Some of you might scoff at that, assuming everyone uses cutlery to eat, but that is not the case. Few of us eat fried chicken, pizza, or sandwiches with knife and fork. Why? It certainly can be done, which you can easily establish for yourself by doing it. You can cut a PBJ, that American staple, into bite size chunks you thrust down your gullet with a fork, instead of just holding the sandwich in your hand and biting chunks off.

During the Revolution, spies needed a way to tell loyalists from rebels, and they decided to switch their forks from hand to hand as they ate. Most Americans have no idea they eat differently from everyone else that uses cutlery, but when I sat to table in France as a child I was made aware of it by other kids teasing me for passing my fork back and forth as I ate.

The reason we mostly eat sandwiches without cutlery is simply cultural conditioning, and some cultures don't use cutlery to eat things that Americans do. I ate with a Mexican I was doing work for once and was surprised that there was no cutlery at the table. I noticed that they would use tortillas to sop up each bite of food, and eat the tortilla away, one bite at a time, until they needed a new tortilla. While it was a pleasant lesson, and we all had a hearty laugh (and meal) at it, it is an example of the kinds of cultural biases we all form as children that can cause us suffering later in life.

Many Americans see people eating without cutlery, say a family gathered around a meal, all dipping their tortillas or flatbread into the courses and automatically assume they are too poor to afford cutlery, or that they're filthy, dirty people, forming prejudices based on cultural biases that have nothing to do with wealth or hygiene. This can rise to the level of demonization and genocide if Machiavellian politicians exploit these biases, so the decisions we necessarily make as children can have enormous significance.

This is why I strongly advocate we examine our biases and learn what they are. Not because they're necessarily bad, but because if we don't know we have them they can be used by bad people to control us.

I am sure someone will comment to the affect that repeatedly dipping a chip or flatbread into a communal meal causes the spread of germs, that it's unhygienic and causes disease. While that's not necessarily wrong, in the context of families that eat, excrete, bathe, and all live in a family home, it's a silly concern, because there are simply so many ways that we are vectors for germs, and most of those germs don't cause disease at all, that dipping tortillas in sauce at the table doesn't make any difference at all in communal health. There are certainly other studies that can show that sharing good germs prevents bad ones that do cause disease from being able to compete with the good ones, for example. But some people will be so fixated on their hygienic concerns they will not be able to overcome their prejudices, their biases, at eating without cutlery. While it's difficult for people all along that spectrum to all be able to coexist, it has to happen, or some peoples' biases become dehumanizing and can rise to the level of hatred, even genocidal war.

That is clearly not the purpose of cutlery.

Throughout human history we see examples of competition, war, and genocide. Clearly many societies have had to deal with these things, and not all of them have survived to teach us the lessons they learned, because they learned them by being utterly wiped out. We see ruins all around us that should make that lesson obvious, but most of our biases and prejudices aren't obvious to us at all. People have many different instincts, and those that make us part of our communities, our cultural constructs, biases, and prejudices, are designed by evolution to be very robust and difficult to eliminate. Such cultural identities are vital to our survival, and that is the lesson of ruins at every hand.

There is a sound principle behind culture. It is necessary to humanity to belong to a culture. But that doesn't make every bias a good thing. When we sort our cultural contexts later in life, when we can apply understanding unavailable to 5 year olds, we really should rationally overcome them with sound reason and respect for our mutual humanity. However, not all people want to get along with everyone else. Some people, we can plainly see, want to profit from genocide, dehumanization, and cruel war, even rationalizing the murder of children so our people can 'win'.

When we clean our hearts and souls of prejudice we will be left with a lot of dirty bathwater we need to toss afterwards. Doing so is essential to becoming good people, becoming adults in societies that can mutually respect each other, and live justly and responsibly on the Earth we share. We CAN share Earth, with mutual respect and love for all our peoples. It is when we fail to do this and resort to barbarism that we set our own communities and cultures back, maybe even cause our ruin.

Today we are undergoing a transcendence of cultural biases that have killed millions, maybe billions of people, setting them upon each other for reasons that may make as little sense as whether they eat with a fork or not. We are transcending centralization. Before we had modern technology, two communities may have not been able to share a field, for both of them to be able to grow enough food using the crude and primitive technology we had available.

That's no longer an excuse today, but because we make many of these decisions as children, because we just absorb many world views from our cultural surroundings without giving them conscious thought, most of us don't even realize it. Most of us think that the only way to get food is by having a garden from which we eliminate all competing plants where we grow the crops necessary to our survival. That's just not true today.

I have seen aquaponics in use in which a 3 bd apartment was able to supply enough food for a whole neighborhood, without so much as a single pot of dirt. I'm not going to go into the detailed numbers of how much food they produced, but one family can live on the catfish you can grow in a 55 gallon drum and a hydroponic garden, and they had 3 2000 gallon tanks in which they grew fish. I'm not exaggerating one bit when I say that one 3 bd apartment could feed their whole neighborhood.

But these false cultural biases cause people to go to war today, to kill and genocide one another over memes that aren't true at all. Children are dying today in wars all over the world, in the Sudan, the Ukraine, Xinjiang, Serbia, Kentucky, and Venezuela, in little wars, gang wars, schoolyard bullies picking on math nerds. Wars big and small are barbarism. It's long past time we rose above them, to find reasonable ways to share Earth between all our peoples, all our children. We can just get along. You don't have to abandon your culture to do it. You can know your people are worthy of pride, know your people are the best people on Earth, as long as you grant all other people that same pride, and a place at the table.

We need to cleanse our minds and spirits of false biases that do harm. We don't need to abandon our cultures, but we do need to overcome prejudices with reason, because we can only be as human as we are humane. There can be no justification for murder and genocide because of cultural differences, over things as meaningless as whether we hold a fork or a tortilla in our hands at dinner.

When we dump out that filth and savagery, we need to make sure that we don't dump our children with that dirty water. All our children are worthy of all our love.