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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