The Spider Eaters

"Many historic lessons were obtained through tremendous sacrifice. Such as eating food – if something is poisonous, we all seem to know it. It is common sense. But in the past many people must have eaten this food and died so that now we know better. Therefore I think the first person who ate crabs was admirable. If not a hero, who would dare eat such creatures? Since someone ate crabs, others must have eaten spiders as well. However, they were not tasty. So afterwards people stopped eating them. These people also deserve our heartfelt gratitude."--Lu Xun

Can people learn from the mistakes of the past, avoid repeating them, even if they have no direct experience of the negative consequences that had originally resulted? Apparently, there are some who would say, "no". In particular, I refer to those who argue that the goal of abolishing high technology is futile, that the pursuit of high technology is an inborn human quality, inseparable from our natural curiosity, and that the advent of high technology (and civilization) has always been, and will always be, inevitable. Even should technology be somehow banished, it would just start back up again sooner or later, because that's supposedly what people do. Even Ted Kaczynski conceded that, even should his goal of abolishing organization-dependent technology succeed, the possibility of people one day resurrecting old or innovating new technology cannot be prevented. Many go so far as to state that this technological drive is precisely what defines us as human, distinguishes us from the lower animals, and separates us from nature. To these people, to arrest progress is to arrest our humanity. However, even some of those who see the fatal nature of our current technological trajectories believe that such destruction is inevitable. Humans may be destroying themselves and their planet with technology, but we simply can't help it, it's hardwired in, we're just too damn good with technology, and the planet is just too damn fragile to accommodate our highly evolved ways, and no matter how many chances you give people to start over, we will inevitably take up the pursuit of progress, again and again--so their thinking goes. One wonders if this line of thought is an effort at self-delusion, an attempt to abscond from responsibility, or merely resignation to the planet's seeming fate. Whatever it is, it is demonstrably absurd. 

All of our ancestors, including all our non-human kin, have had to learn from mistakes in order to persist. To take Lu Xun's example, some of our ancestors tried to eat crabs and were lucky, and to this day we eat crabs, not because each one of us has had to discover the edibility of these creatures on our own, but because that knowledge became part of our inherited culture, and everyone just knows that crabs are good eating. Likewise, there must have been some who attempted to eat spiders, but without the same degree of success; nevertheless, the discovery that spiders are not edible and should be avoided became an equally important piece of knowledge that contributed to human cultures and, as Lu Xun rightly points out, the unfortunate spider eaters should also be acknowledged for their contribution to our collective cultural legacies as much as the crab eaters--and in traditional myths and stories, they are, albeit in symbolic characterization. Because there were spider eaters hundreds of thousands of years ago, there don't have to be any today, thanks to cultural knowledge. We don't have to keep experiencing mistakes firsthand, but rather, we have the very human ability to benefit from received wisdom, coded in our cultures, regarding all aspects of life: food--its acquisition, preparation, distribution, consumption; relationships--to your family, your band, the water, the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, the plants, the myriad life forms, and the spirits; appearance--coif, bodily decoration, clothing, posture, and facial expressions; manufacturing tools and other items; and, just as importantly, taboos--the things you should not say, think, do, consume, touch, or feel. Of course, this information is not simply presented as a set of rules to people, who are expected to abide by them unquestioningly. At the same time, it is impractical to explain your entire culture by citing specific past events that illustrate why it is okay to eat crabs and not spiders, why you can sleep with someone from a different family but not your cousin, and so on. As one might expect, people developed storytelling to lend context to their customs, giving reasons for their particular culture's codes of behavior in a way that was simultaneously compact, digestible, memorizable, and, perhaps most importantly, entertaining. 

Back in industrial civilization, we have made for ourselves a veritable buffet of different cultures from which we are more or less free to pick: we can have our Yoga classes, Zen meditation, African dancing, Brazilian martial arts, Sichuanese cuisine, and whiskey from Scotland, consuming as much "culture" as we'd like--and yet, we are unable to incorporate very much of our samplings into anything resembling a cohesive, stable culture of our own. We are just vampires, hungry for the blood of living cultures. Western societies more or less consciously abandoned their ties to ancestral knowledge during the Great Enlightenment, when Europeans intentionally rejected what they considered superstition in favor of new, rational knowledge. In essence, they doubted the stories of the past and decided to try eating spiders for themselves. So it has gone, for over half a millennium, that we have stubbornly tried to eat spiders in contradiction with received knowledge, ignoring all the poison that has been building up as a result, just to prove to ourselves that we do not have to be bound by the ignorant traditions of our embarrassingly basic progenitors. We have become so estranged from culture in the true sense, have worked so conscientiously to jettison it, that we no longer understand what its original purpose was: to spare people, out of love for one's own future generations, the difficult sacrifices, risks, mistakes, and regrets that our predecessors had to make before their culture held the guidance needed to help them make better choices. For our own future generations, would it not be possible to teach them, as a part of their culture, as a part of their identity, that technology was a grave mistake not to ever be repeated, and to have this traditional knowledge passed on to their children, grandchildren, and so on, the same exact way that humans have done since time immemorial? Can our future cultures not proclaim boldly, "We are the people. We do not eat spiders. That is not our way."?

 

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

sustain ourselves when nature has given up

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The Tragedy of Achievement

Civilization is powered by insecurity. The key to the system's control is its manipulation not only of scarce resources, but of the very notion of scarcity itself. Our access to food, clean air and water, other people including family members, safety, physical spaces, and a dignified life in general is mediated in civilization by a system that leverages resource scarcity in order to generate a highly effective form of control based on people's desire for things that can now only be practically obtained by satisfying the system's demands, as unpalatable as they are. This is essentially the project of domestication: a brokering of once-free access to once-plentiful resources in order to master the behavior of once-wild dimensions for the sake of harnessing their power.

In addition to the physical restrictions we suffer borne out of our collective veneration of the scarce and rare, we also endure extensive psychological deprivations that begin in childhood schooling and that can persist until death. From childhood, we are taught that it is important to be the best, to stand out, to be a success. As a means to evaluate and assess children's performance and behavior, report cards and test scores supplant a child and her parents' ability to form opinions about the child's education and development independently--that is, based on their own feelings of personal contentment, interest, goals, and so on--by instead judging the child's performance according to a value system that is alien to a child's way of thinking against other children who likewise would normally take no interest in the performance of their "peers", who initially are really just strangers of the same age that just happen to be in the same room together. These classmates might become potential playmates, though, as mentioned previously, young children tend to be instinctively wary and shy of unfamiliar faces; therefore, a classroom full of new children can often stir up feelings of deep insecurity and discomfort that nevertheless, through mandatory attendance at the school, can be surmounted by enough children to make the practice somewhat feasible, though things are certainly going downhill quickly. However, the notion that the other children in a classroom, school, and eventually the country or world are to be competed against and ideally outperformed is completely foreign, has no antecedent in our ancestral forager roots toward which our biology still strongly cleaves, and must be instilled in our youth rather forcefully in order to produce the sort of competitive, self-interested personality that is our society's preferred fuel source. Children quickly realize that their own opinions about themselves based on the things they naturally value, like having fun, exploring the world, and being around family, are relatively worthless, and that even things like play or learning must be done in a certain way in order to gain the approval of adults and thus be valuable. Unable to comprehend the meaning, the logic underlying this arbitrary system of evaluating their actions and thoughts, children grow up deeply insecure about their standing in society, having to rely on external praise or criticism in order to form an identity and sense of self. Children lose the ability to see themselves as inherently good or valuable because they are explicitly taught, and treated accordingly, that goodness and value are actually pegged to their capacity to perform tasks according to a standard that can often be counter-intuitive or downright arbitrary. For example, a child's coloring outside the lines of a picture will only be tolerated up to a certain early age in school, after which point she is expected to color neatly and appropriately under penalty of a bad grade or some such demerit. Even though the child might have thoroughly enjoyed coloring the way she did, with wild colors streaking all across the page, she learns that her enjoyment means very little to the world, and that she must adapt her behavior and even her preferences to a standard that never truly existed in her own heart if she wants adults, often including her parents, to value her. What should be plentiful self-confidence based on an inborn capacity to simply enjoy coloring becomes a source of confusion, anxiety, shame, and frustration--incentives for the child to betray her own preferences for the sake of seeking approval, which now can only come from others, never herself.

Civilization celebrates and worships its rarest individuals as celebrities and heroes, exploiting the yen for external approval we acquire in childhood by reserving attention and accolade for only a fraction of the population, effectively turning self-esteem into a scarce and desired psychological resource for which we all vie, compromise, and sacrifice in a deeply misguided attempt to correct that early childhood deficiency. Even though it might have absolutely no impact on our actual daily lives, we accord great respect to the winners of Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, presidential medals of freedom, Purple Hearts, Oscars, Grammies, Tonies, Olympic medals, Tours de France, various sports cups and derbies, valedictorian ranking, down to spelling bees, science fairs, county fairs, even adult video awards and blind taste tests for vodka--virtually all aspects of civilized life is routinely turned into a competition, which means that every single dimension of life demands assessment and comparison against others before one knows where she stands with respect to the rest of the world and, to a disturbingly large degree, her own sense of worth.

The great irony and tragedy in all this is that this insecurity does not usually dissipate even after superlatives have been achieved. Often, the expectations placed on the individual who has achieved a high distinction are overwhelming, the resultant anxiety crippling, and the constant fear of falling from grace in the public eye can be intensely destructive. Chef Bernard Loiseau achieved his life goal of three Michelin stars with his restaurant, La Côte d'Or, only to fatally shoot himself in the head with a hunting rifle twelve years later when he learned that the Michelin Guide was preparing to take away one of his stars. Other top chefs choose to surrender their stars or even close their restaurants rather than endure the nerve-wracking pressure that being the best of the best entails. Nor is this kind of pressure unique to the world of haute cuisine, but can be found in the realms of corporate business ("In a cutthroat industry staffed by many of the world's sharpest minds, recruited from hypercompetitive business schools, it seems no surprise that the shame of failure is hard to take when an individual’s whole identity is built around success"), professional and non-professional sports ("Striving to please a parent, fearing a coach's wrath, chasing a college scholarship can make athletes uniquely vulnerable"), and, of course, higher education ("I just don't understand what's happening to these high-achieving kids...How did we get to this spot? The whole thing, for me, will never make any sense"), to name only a few specific categories, though civilization in any configuration, expressed in whatever variation it has been able to assume throughout history, takes it as standard operating procedure to torment all those it raises up in praise as cruelly as those who languish below its standards in ignominy. Taught to find meaning in life by striving for success, the domesticated individual comes to find that the impetus for a large majority of her life decisions arises from a nagging sense of insecurity, secret, desperate, and nihilistic to the core...

...Meanwhile, in Bolivia, among the remaining uncontacted Yuqui, one of the few remaining uncontacted tribes of hunter-gatherers on the planet, young children play, imitating the adults, while the older boys start catching small game and fish and the girls begin to learn the fine skill of gathering the food, fibers, dyes, and medicines around them. Skills are passed on to each generation virtually unchanged. These skills are inherently scaled for human beings, and everyone can learn how to do them, and do them well, even without direct teaching. The goals that the Yuqui pursue are finite, attainable, and satisfying to both attempt and achieve. They are goals that are inherently valuable independent of any external assessment--they result in full bellies, engaged intellects, healthy bodies, and harmonious lives. The families are sustained by the combined efforts of all the people, and by coordinating efforts, they increase the success of their hunts and foraging. When a boy catches a fish, or when a girl digs a root, he or she is not concerned with ranking the fish or root against the rest of the boys' or girls' efforts, because he or she does not gain or lose any status as a result of doing so. So long as the fish is good to eat, so long as the root treats the illness, it is good, and the young boy and the young girl gain confidence and in their hearts they have peace with themselves and the universe...