Cosmicomics

Surreal. That's just really the best word to describe Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, a book of short stories that ask you to suspend not just disbelief, but also your instinct for internal logic. Most fiction, however fanciful, follows whatever laws its created for its own world. Cosmicomics does not subject itself to such constraints. The stories explore what it might have been like to witness various eras in the history of the universe, from the very beginning, when there was absolutely nothing (so how could there have been a witness, the narrator?), to the social embarassment of having an uncle who hadn't yet evolved from fish to land-animal, to being the last dinosaur in the emerging era of mammals (and catching a train out of town). The stories are dreamy in that sense. Non sequitors abound and yet, for the duration of the story, make perfect sense, just as in dreams. There is also a great deal of semiotics woven in through the stories--for some of them the relationships between sign, idea, meaning, dissemination really form the backbone of the story. The narrator, who is the same voice throughout the eras, is obsessed with the representation of himself. He wants others, of course, to think well fo him. He wants them to see him the version of him that he imagines as his best self. But representations, signs, are tricky things, and his efforts often backfire as the sign moves beyond him and begins to behave, to be interpreted, in ways other than what he intended. And what can you do then, except make yet another sign and hope it comes closer to your perceived truth?

Lost Christianities

I wonder how different my spiritual life might have been had I come across this book when I was about 12. Lost Christianities is a fascinating overview of the many varieties of Christianities that existed in the first several hundred years following Jesus' life. All these belief systems held in common that Jesus was a Messiah, but otherwise vary tremendously. Several of them creatively (and with reasonable logic) resolve some of the contradictions that I found irreconcilable when I first read the Bible as a kid. For example: the god of the Old Testament and the god of the New Testament are not the same god. The god of the Old Testament is vengeful, prone to spiteful rages, and the only god for the Jews (not the only god in existence). The god of the New Testament is merciful, loving, a god for everyone, Jew or not. How is this the same god? Some said it wasn't. The Old Testament god of the Jews was an inferior god. A god, who, frankly, screwed up occasionally. (Hence rainbows). The New Testament god is overrules that one. So throw out the Old Testament and stick to the New. Great. Problem solved. Then there's the whole Trinity thing, which is a pretty confusing way to solve the problem of "one god + Jesus" issue. Another group solved that one by saying that Jesus was never anything but a human. The Christ was the holy spirit who basically borrowed Jesus' body until his crucifixation, at which point it hightailed it back to heaven (hence the "oh, god, why have you forsaken me?") Also reasonable logic.

So what happened to these and all the other alternative explanations? This is the central question that Ehrman seeks to answer. His final answer is that the belief system that eventually won out and became what we identify as Christianity today was the system that happened to be most prevalent in Rome, where there was power, wealth, and lots of practice with beauracratic organization and people management. That system won, largely by discrediting other texts that were floating around as scripture, selectively editing others, and possibly forging others (certainly known forgeries were eventually included in the New Testament). And then, of course, in later times, other belief systems were squashed as heresies. And so we have Christianity today, which, despite all the many sects, essentially believe the same thing. I wonder how many Christians actually know the history of their sacred text?

Fast Food Nation

Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser, is a book that should be handed out with every smiley Walmart grocery bag. Its argument is nothing earth-shattering: the fast food industry is bad for your health, the environment, free-market competition, labor, and small-town economics. We all know this, in that ethical, big-picture bit of our brain that gets lost under the waves of immediate gratification advertising. What Schlosser does is dig an ever-widening tunnel through all that residue of selfishness that our culture encourages, fish-hooks our sensible side, and shoves it into the sunlight.

FFN is a series of journalistic vignettes highlighting the various parts of the vast web that makes up the fast food industry. Of particular interest to me were the analyses of the power relationship between the major fast food companies (notably McDonald's) and the agricultural industry. Really, it's a one-way power relationship: what McDonald's says, the agriculture giants do. The big agricultural companies--ConAgra, Archer Daniel Midlands, IBP, and the like--are extraordinarily powerful, but not as powerful as McDonald's. Schlosser gives a fascinating example of this, showing, in fact that not only is McDonald's more powerful than the agricultural giants, it's also more powerful than the FDA.

In the late 1990s, the FDA finally bowed to consumer pressure and tried to institute a ban on feeding animal protein to "food animals" to prevent mad cow disease. (Why, incidentally, does it take fear of a human disease to make people question the wisdom of forcing cannibalism on herbivores?) The meat industry kicked up such a fuss that the ban was reduced: "Dead sheep, goats, cattle, deer, mink, elk, dogs, and cats could no longer be fed to cattle." But they could still eat "dead horses, pigs, and poultry; cattle blood, gelatin, and tallow; and plate waste collected from restaurants." A year later, the FDA found that nobody was paying much attention to the laws, and that cattle were still being fed other dead cattle. Enter McDonald's. Worried that their sales might drop in the U.S. as they had in Europe, McDonald's announced that it would no longer buy meat from supplies who couldn't document that they'd been following FDA regulations and whose cattle had never been fed forbidden material. Bam. Done. The companies complied without a fuss. Why? Because McDonald's is the single biggest consumer of ground beef in the world. That's not a customer they can afford to lose. Market power at work.

The story of McDonald's enforcing FDA regulations is perhaps the most important story that Schlosser tells because it leaves the reader with some optimism. Schlosser doesn't argue that we shouldn't eat fast food. He does argue that we should pay attention to the vast structures that lie beneath the shiny facade of the actual restaurant and think about all the other things we're supporting by buying paper-wrapped burgers and re-fried potatoes. And not just think, but speak. As he says somewhere, if consumers demand organic, free-range beef in their fast food burgers, eventually that's what they'll get. If they never let the companies know that they disapprove of their labor practices, environmental attitudes, hygiene, etc., it won't change. And it's the companies, perhaps sadly, that consumers need to talk to, not the government, especially the FDA, which is practically useless.

I'm babbling.

Read the book.

A Clockwork Orange

Taking my cue from my sig. o., who took his cue from a friend of his, I'm trying out this blog thing as a way to discipline myself to actually write responses to my wanderings (into both textual and actual realms). So, as a first entry, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.

A Clockwork Orange is NOT the sort of book I typically care to read. But it's a book about which I have heard a lot, and it's been sitting on the sig.o.'s bookshelf, lewdly winking at me, so I read it. As quickly as possible. Really, it's the first part that's the most difficult to read. It's in the first part that we are introduced to Alex's preferred way of life--violence for enjoyment. The violence that's described is horrible, but it isn't the violence that makes this part so hard to read. What makes it hard is that it's all written in the first-person. So as a reader, you don't have any distance from the character or the actions. You are there, as Alex, doing these things. And there's a part of your brain to which all of this makes sense. And that's what makes this section so horrid. It's the realization that there's a bit of this bloodlust buried in you too.

Which gets to the philsophical theme of the book. Where does morality come from? Although we talk about cultural influences on the details of morality, we also tend to assume a kind of base level 'good' and 'bad' that transcend culture. Randomly raping or beating a complete stranger is probably universally considered 'bad'. And when someone behaves this way, we are bewildered. We want to know why this person is so bad. And here's what Alex says,

"But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don't go into what is the cause of goodness, so why of the other shop? If lewdies are good that's because they like it ... "

Which leads to some interesting questions. Can we really take credit for being "good"? Might we not be good simply because we enjoy being good? If preferring to be good rather than bad is just something wired in our brains, like preferring green to red, or liking broccoli but hating mushrooms, then can we really blame anyone for preferring to be bad? Wouldn't it be like judging someone for disliking mushrooms? This is an important question, because it's counter idea, that being good is a choice (and presumably being bad would be more fun, but we choose to be good because....empathy/religion/society/law/species survival/etc.), suggests very different things about how we respond to 'bad'.

Which leads in turn to the ethical theme of the book: what's the best social response to bad people? If being good is an active choice, then education, 'rehabilitation', the opportunity to make different choices all makes sense. But if being good isn't a choice, if it's just a broccoli-level preference, then those kinds of responses aren't going to have any effect at all. Instead, we might get something like what we see in A Clockwork Orange: Stuffing bad people into jails turns out to be an unsatisfactory response. The jails are overflowing, and people just go on being bad inside the jails instead of outside them. But what if you could rewire bad people so that being bad felt bad? Not that being good felt particularly good (which would be an interesting, albeit much more complex, alternative), but that being bad felt really awful. Alex is conditioned so that every time he even thinks about doing something violent, he is wracked with pain and nausea. So he stops doing bad things. But everything he does do is thus insincere, merely an effort to avoid that pain. No more freewill. No more choice. Fair? Appropriate? Depends on your assumptions. If you assume someone can choose to be good, then denying them that chance is, well, bad. But if you assume they can't ever choose to be good on their own, then forcing them into that role is not so bad. And keeps the jails clear.