Knowing Anything

In all of the discussions I have had as a result of this blog and all of the other philosophical discussions I have had over the last few years there is one phrase which never fails to bug the hell out of me.

“Well, you can’t really know anything.”

People always feel very clever when they roll this one out. It is, they feel a knockout blow to any declarative statement, logical progression or even simple list of facts. “You can’t really know anything.” That’s it. They win.

This phrase, and other’s like it (“Everything is subjective.” “You can’t disprove the existence of God.” etc.) are not conversation starters but rather conversation enders.

Of course, on some level, they’re right.

Are we incredibly limited creatures who’s only ability to understand the world around us is through the conduit of our own narrow senses? Yes. Is it possible that those senses are lying to us? Yes. Are we subjective creatures who perceive reality through the filter of our background, desires and prejudices? Yes. Is it possible that our perception of reality is entirely manufactured? Yes.

We could be locked in a chemical coma with our brains hot-wired, as in The Matrix, or lying in a padded cell in a mental institution. It is even possible that we don’t exist at all.

In fact, once you start going down this road absolutely anything is possible.

And that’s the problem.

If you can’t really know anything, then the sun could rise in the north tomorrow. Pigs could fly and fire could freeze. How could we survive in a world where we can’t know anything?

I’m not saying that ideas like this should never be discussed. Any idea which forces us to rethink our perceptions and preconceptions is a useful tool. Asking the question “Can we really know anything?” is the beginning of a wonderful conversation. Although in my opinion a much more interesting conversation can be had by asking, as my friend, Mike Hoover, does, “How do we know what we know?” There is a lot of mileage and introspection to be got out of that one.

However stating that nothing can be known is in my opinion both irresponsible and even dangerous.

Here’s why:

1. It’s not scientific. Disprovability, is in many ways a more, important, scientific criteria than provability. People often say, “You can’t disprove the existence of God.” Which is true, but so what? As Bertrand Russell used to say. “You also can’t disprove the existence of a flying, invisible, spaghetti monster.” In fact, there are an infinite number of things which I cannot disprove. Science is interested in those things which could be disproved. I could disprove evolution right now. All I have to do is find a porcupine that gives birth to a cactus. However, there is no experiment on earth, or mathematical equation I can produce, or even logical argument I can create to disprove the existence of God or the spaghetti monsters or anything else. If the same statement can be used to argue for or against anything, it has no scientific value.

2. It’s Lazy. Anyone can say it, at any time. It requires no work, no education. There is no research involved or years of labor. It requires no intelligence or discipline. It is, in my opinion, the last argument of a lazy mind and represents, the desire to close, not only the eyes of the speaker, but the eyes of the world.

3. It isn’t useful. And this is really the big one. “You can’t really know anything.” Puts us back in the caves without even a fire to keep us warm.

Imagine two primitive men back in the ice age. One says, “I don’t know why those wooly mammoths come back to the same watering hole every year but I know that they do, so let’s set a trap.” The other says,”Well you can’t really know anything.” Which one of them is more likely to feed his family? Which one of them is more likely to learn why the mammoths return each year? Which one of them will pass that knowledge onto his children and, more importantly, the knowledge that you can, in fact, know some things? In short, which one of them will survive and grow and which one of them will remain stagnant and probably die?

Try saying “You can’t really know anything.” the next time you fly in airplane, drive across a bridge or go to the pharmacy to pick up your antibiotics. Those things, and many others were created by people who believed that knowledge was something that could be gained and used for the betterment of themselves and the rest of the human race.

“You can’t really know anything.” Has the wonderful advantage of sounding, smart, cynical, and superior all at once but it is, in my opinion, a very clever dead end. We can’t know everything. That’s true. The pursuit of knowledge, however, begins with the idea that we can know some things and that knowledge, itself, is worth pursuing.

Killing The Chicken

“Have you ever killed a chicken?” This is one of the questions that my good friend, Mike Hoover, likes to ask when someone is saying something particularly naive or insensitive. “Have you ever killed a chicken?”

On some level, Hoover divides the world up into, “Chicken killers.” and “non-Chicken Killers”, those who are connected to the world in all it’s brutal reality and those who are not.

Most people, in this country aren’t chicken killers. In fact, for most of us, the closest we get to killing is picking out our cuts at the local super-market. We don’t see the blood, or the suffering, all we see is a product, impersonally prepared and wrapped in cellophane.

I’ve never killed a chicken. My friend Jeff has and he said it was one of the hardest things he’s ever had to do.

So, why does Mike Hoover, a very, smart compassionate man, want all of us to start murdering birds? What’s the big deal?

There was a time when we weren’t removed from death. If we wanted meat we had to kill. So, does that mean we were more callous about killing then, more cruel?

No. The opposite was true.

If you look at hunter gatherer societies, the animals they hunted were not hated or vilified, they were given positions of great respect in the community. The plains Indians did not hate the buffalo, they honored it, not only because it provided much of the raw materials necessary for their way of life, but also because, through the difficult process of hunting, they had come to know the animal. The buffalo wasn’t simply a walking dinner, it was a living breathing creature with a soul and a value. To hunt it honorably, and kill it humanely was the nature of their relationship.

However, to kill the animal and not use every bit of him was considered the cruelest kind of waste. Imagine, the horror the native Americans felt when this animal they respected, who played a key roll in their spiritual life, was hunted, almost to extinction, by ruthless men who were only interested in their hides and left the rest of the animal to rot in the sun.

However, somewhere Back East there was a buyer for that buffalo fur who never had to look into the eyes of the animal that died for him and thus had no pang of conscious for paying for the slaughter. It was a business transaction, nothing more.

I’m reminded of a question in Jedediah Purdy's book, Being America He asks, “Which American slaveholder treated his slaves with greater cruelty, the rich plantation owner with a thousand slaves, or the small farmer with only one?” My first instinct was to say the rich plantation owner. After all, he can afford to be generous, while the poor farmer can barely survive himself. Of course, the opposite is true. The rich plantation owner never really sees his slaves. He lives in a big house with every luxury and has no understanding of how his workers live. The poor farmer, on the other hand, lives much closer to his slave. He works side by side with him in the field. He eats the same food and wears the same kind of clothes. This proximity makes cruelty, if not impossible, far less likely.

Today, we are much further from the animals we eat than in anytime in history and, like the big plantation owner, our distance, our ignorance of where our food comes from, has made us cruel. It is a cruelty which manifests itself not in how our animals die but rather in how they live. Cows, living their whole lives, packed into industrial feed lots knee deep in their own filth. Chickens squeezed into cages so small they cannot turn around. We have become masters of efficiency, experts in turning grain into meat and meat into dinner.

We have separated ourselves from the killing fields because we abhor cruelty but the greater the distance, has made us far crueler than the hunter who kills the buffalo with his bow, or the rancher who slits the neck of the chicken he has cared for all his life.

However, it is not only the animals we eat who have been damaged by this separation. We have been damaged. In my last blog, I outlined how our industrial food system, has left us obese, malnourished, and vulnerable to new strains of disease, but this separation from the natural world, has consequences far beyond diet.

One Hundred years ago, 85% of the worlds population lived on farms or in small villages. Today, 85% of our, much greater, population lives in cities and that number is growing at a breakneck pace. Cities are ecosystems all their own, however, the needs of the urban ecosystem are in almost direct opposition to the needs of the natural one. Success in the city means following the urban paradigm, which is that consumption is success and greed is good. This philosophy has a direct, devastating effect on the natural world but the city dweller does not see the consequences of their actions and so they do not care. That this disconnected relationship damages the natural world is without question, but I believe it is equally damaging to modern man. Are we healthier in our regulated, manufactured, commercialized, and heavily branded urban existence? Are we happier? Are we kinder? Or have we, in fact, become more isolated, overworked, stressed, depressed and unhealthy?

Disconnection is the danger and a disconnection from death is a disconnection from life.

The modern world fears death in all it’s forms. We refuse to see it and this denial of one of the most fundamental realities of life is intensely destructive. There was a time when we died in our own homes, surrounded by our families. Today, death occurs in the sterile, industrial hallways of the hospital with the only human contact permitted during proper visiting hours. There was a time when the greatest concern at the approach of death was our spiritual well being. Today, the focus is on a thousand incomprehensible, medical tests. There was a time, when the bodies of our dead were cleaned and dressed by their families. Today, our dead are locked away in cold storage before they can be attended to by a professional. Which system gives better care in our last moments? Which system better prepares us to say goodbye? We have endeavored to protect ourselves from the pain of death but our lives are no less painful.

Does choosing not to see death make us less cruel or more?

Is a nation that sees an endless stream of mutilated bodies more likely to an end a war than a nation that chooses not to see?

The first thing we must accept is that death in and of itself is not cruel. Death is inexorably connected to life. It is all around us. Every living thing on earth survives on death. It is not cruel when the lion kills it’s prey. It is merely the natural order of things. Cruelty is a uniquely human invention. A sociopath is cruel because he enjoys watching the suffering of others with open eyes but the majority of cruelties, the vast atrocities of our times, are committed with eyes closed. The more we disconnect, the crueler we become.

By separating ourselves from death we have separated ourselves from life. We have created a system in which we are at odds with the natural world and so, at odds with ourselves. Perhaps the only way to save the planet is to touch the planet and perhaps touching the planet is the only way to save ourselves.

Does that mean we should all run out and start killing our own chickens? Not necessarily. It simply means we should begin the long and, sometimes painful, process of opening our eyes.

It Hurts When I Do This

Here’s an old Joke.

Guy walks into a doctor’s office and says, “Dr. Dr. It hurts when I do this,.” The Doctor says, “Well, Don’t do that.”

Not a very good joke maybe, but for the last few weeks it’s been running around my head in an endless, irritating loop.

“It hurts when I do this.”

“Well, don’t do that.”

Can you imagine how angry it would make you to walk into doctor’s office with a serious medical condition and the only solace he offers is, “Well, don’t do that”? We want solutions when we go to the doctor. We want cures for our problems not limitations on our behavior.

But maybe that’s not the joke. I’m only assuming this guy has a serious medical concern. Maybe he’s a hypochondriac. Maybe the thing that hurts is his little toe when he bashes it repeatedly, with a mallet. Maybe “Don’t do that” is just what this guy needs to hear.

Every history class I ever took from grammar school to graduate school was a testament to progress; from tyranny to democracy, from the dark ages to the age of reason. And all of these transformations, according to my teachers, were evolutionary steps on the way to an ever improving world. Those old textbooks never mentioned that the 20th century is the bloodiest in history or that many of our, so called, steps forward have brought with them dangerous and sometimes, destructive steps back.

Still, whatever problems progress creates, our culture carries with it an underlying assumption that the solution is more progress.

But is forward really the only direction we can look for answers?

Like a lot of Americans, I struggle with my weight. In fact, we, as a nation, are among the fattest people in the world. Heart disease, high blood pressure, and adult on-set diabetes have reached epidemic proportions. There is no real mystery behind our rampant obesity. We simply eat too much and most of it isn’t very good for us. Portion size has grown almost %50 in the last 15 years. All of those 32 ounce sodas, super sized value meals and big plate restaurants didn’t exist a few decades ago. Our eating habits have grown so poor that in the inner cities there are children suffering from both obesity and malnutrition. Obesity from their extreme caloric intake and malnutrition from diets made up almost entirely of highly processed food. In Oakland California last year there were several documented cases of scurvy in the public school system. Fat kids with scurvy. It’s almost inconceivable, but its true.

The solution is obvious. “Well, don’t do that.” Simply reverse the behavior that got us here in the first place.

Eat less. Eat healthier. Exercise more.

But do we do this? No. Instead we turn to fad diets, pills and cutting edge surgeries. We go from Sugar free to low fat, to no carbs in a continuing desperate attempt to keep the pounds off and many of us, who struggle with our weight, dream of the day when a magic pill is invented which would allow us to eat whatever the hell we want in whatever quantities, and never gain an ounce. In short, we are willing to go to extreme lengths rather than deal with a problem which we ourselves created.

Dr. it hurts when I do this.

The main reason we eat so differently today is that agricultural production has gone through a radical transformation in the last 100 years. We have gone from a nation of small farmers, each producing a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, grain and meats, to a nation dominated by giant agro-business who have learned to turn fossil fuels into corn, and corn into profit. Obesity, disease, and widespread environmental destruction are merely a bi-product of our modern food system.

Here is a very simplified breakdown of the way things used to be. Small farmers grew a variety of crops rather than just one. Farmers kept animals on the farm, not only for milk, eggs and meat but because manure from the livestock acted as fertilizer for their crops. There was no rapid transportation, so meat and produce were sold locally and no refrigeration or chemical preservation, so only seasonal products were available. That means no tomatoes in the winter and no asparagus in the fall.

In many ways, our system today is far more productive. We no longer have to worry about seasonality and we can purchase a wide variety of frozen, processed, and prepared foods at a consistent quality and price. However, this transformation has not come without a cost.

Most family farms have been replaced by industrial agriculture which, rather than produce a wide variety of products concentrate on massive production on a few products such as corn and soy beans both of which are subsidized by the government. They no longer rotate crops. Instead, fields are super-fertilized using fossil fuel based chemical fertilizers. The result is not only huge yields but also huge environmental impact, the destruction of the family farm and a radical transformation of the American diet. A walk down any aisle in you local grocery store is enough to tell you how much the corn-based agricultural industry has effected what we eat. The vast majority of processed food, which makes up most of the modern American diet, contains corn (frequently as it’s main ingredient) in one form or another, corn syrup, corn starch and a hundred other unrecognizable chemical ingredients found their origins in the corn fields. Cheap corn, subsidized by the government and mass produced using highly polluting industrial practices, is one of the major reasons for our obesity epidemic but that doesn’t stop us from buying it.

It hurts when I do this.

And, if you think our corn problem ends with processed food then guess again. Almost every element of our industrial food chain is effected by corn.

That burger from Mcdonalds doesn’t just have corn in the bread, pickles, and special sauce but is also the main ingredient of that tasty meat. Corn fed beef has become synonymous with quality in this country, but the truth is cows aren’t supposed to eat corn. Feeding corn to cattle is like raising humans on a diet of snickers bars. It makes them fat, not healthy. Corn also has the advantage of being easier to transport and, as we’ve already seen, it’s heavily subsidized by the government.

Unfortunately, corn fed beef might taste good but it isn’t very good for us. With it’s high levels of saturated fat and low levels of omega three fatty acids corn fed beef is far worse for humans than grass fed beef. There is also a clear connection between cheap, subsidized corn, through cheap meat to those super-sized portions that are making America fat.

Well, don’t do that.

The disadvantages of our industrial agricultural system, however, go well beyond diet. There is a dead zone in the gulf Mexico which is now larger than Kansas, Iowa, Ohio and Illinois combined. It’s origins are in the chemical fertilizers which feed our nations farmland. Those chemicals leach off the land in the form of run off, and make their way down the Mississippi and into the gulf where they have strangled sea life and perhaps irrevocably transformed the ecosystem.

Another consequence is that corn fed cows are sick cows. They develop diseases ranging from infections to liver failure. Some of these diseases, such as E coli, are transmittable to humans. To keep their animals healthy, ranchers routinely pump their herds full of highly concentrated antibiotics. In fact, the vast majority of all antibiotics used in this country are used on cattle. In addition to going into the meat we eat, these antibiotics are found in the millions of tons of animal waste produced by the cattle industry each year.

In the past, that waste would have been used to fertilize our nation’s farms. However, since livestock has been moved away from farm country, natural waste is no longer cost effective as manure. Instead, the waste is left to rot in fetid pools, breeding grounds for new diseases which, because of the high concentrations of antibiotics, are resistant to our most powerful drugs. Similar problems result from raising chickens, and pigs under the industrial model. In order to combat these dangerous outbreaks of disease, the cattle industry has proposed another technological solution, radiation. Simply treat all food intended for human consumption with radiation, killing any bacteria which has grown there. This would, probably protect us from food borne disease but at what cost?

We trade cheap, consistent production for long term environmental and health consequences, rather than addressing the practices and technology that have created these problems.

Dr. it hurts when I do this.

This practice of holding on to self-destructive behaviors isn’t limited to the food industry. Think of global warming, air and water pollution, deforestation and the mass extinction of species.

It was a joke about a patient and a doctor that began this. Try to imagine that patient’s experience in today’s health care system.

A guy walks into a Doctor’s office and says, “Dr. it hurts when I do this.” The Dr. immediately fills out a prescription. The prescription works beautifully and the pain goes away. unfortunately, the drugs also makes the patient constipated so the doctor prescribes a laxative. The laxative is effective but now the guy can’t sleep. The doctor adds a sleeping pill to the man’s daily drugs but now the man feels groggy and unfocused so a stimulant is prescribed. Unfortunately, perhaps through s a side effect of one of the pills or the combination, the patient begins to grow depressed and is immediately put on anti-depressants.

This is not a joke. This is our medical profession.

The story of Frankenstein has been reproduced a hundred different ways in a hundred stories. The well intentioned scientist who’s work ends up threatening the world is so familiar, in fact, that it has become a cliche and yet in the real world we seem to blindly welcome all forms of technological progress regardless of the consequences. To make matters worse, by the time we realize the consequences of our behavior, as in global warming, the obesity epidemic or toxic chemicals in our food supply, we are too stuck on the behavior to change.

We don’t ask, “How can I stop eating Big Macs?” We ask, “How can I eat all the Big Macs I want and not get fat?”

Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of science and technology and I believe that technology does have the power to change our world for the better. But progress is not a panacea and ignoring the past in favor of an undiscovered future is almost surely a recipe for destruction. To survive, we need to learn to look not only forward but backward, to find answers not only in technology but in tradition and in nature.

And when the pain becomes to difficult to bear we must first consider that the best prescription just might be...

Well, don’t do that.

(Most of the information, which appears in this blog, on our industrial food system comes from Michael Pollan'samazing book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma I highly recommend it if you are interested in finding out more.)

The Blind Man

The Blind Man

The baby was born into a world of wonder, a world sparkling and new, tantalizing all the senses with a myriad of delights. Every color was a miracle. Every sound a symphony. Every experience a revelation. He wanted more than just to touch the world he wanted to smell it, to taste it. The baby drank in the universe and knew, without words to express it, that he could never drink his fill.

A few years later, the boy, now almost a man, sat across the family table and ate the food of his parent’s labors while he dreamt rapturously of the future he would have. Beside him, his father droned on about his tedious day, his tired feet and his hopeless, monotonous job, but all the boy could hear was the sound of his future glories. Wealth, power, fame and sex. These technicolor triumphs were so real to him that he failed to taste the food his mother cooked or notice how his little sister had grown or look into the eyes of his father who would not be with him for very much longer.

The night was young and bright and full of possibilities as the young man sat at the crowded bar drinking with his friends. “It could happen tonight, “ he thought, although he did not take the time to wonder what exactly “it” was. Something would happen. That much he knew. Something. He was owed some bit of magic, some alchemy to transform his unexceptional life into the extraordinary existence which must be waiting for him.

And as he sat, his body, through a magical alchemy all its own, transformed the poisons he was drinking into simpler compounds he could use. Breath, released with his laughter, floated out into the world, to be changed by plants and inhaled again, a thousand times, a million, in a never ending cycle of transformation. With each breath, the young man touched every living thing on earth, but his mind was too clouded by drink and dreams to see. It was long past last call, the lights were coming on and as he settled the bar tab on a credit card, whose bill he could not pay, he knew that it would not be tonight. Tonight he was just another drunk at a bar.

It had been a hard day at work and the man came home to his empty apartment with no expectations greater than a cold beer and TV. He sat eating plastic food from a plastic container and watched a plastic person rattling off the news with a plastic smile. “This was his life”, he thought, with growing disbelief, as gray as his father’s and just as hopeless. He did not pause to wonder where his meal had come from. He did not taste the land where it was grown or the animals that had died so that he might eat. He did not even sense the human hand that had chosen the ingredients or designed its packaging. And although the man knew, deep down, that he hated his drab, lifeless apartment and the vapid, repetitive squawking of the TV, he did not turn it off and go outside into the clean, unpredictable night. This was where he lived after all. This was his life.

The old man lay in his bed and looked back at his life. Not the life he had, but the life he had missed. He saw every road not taken, every experience denied. He saw the loves he never found and the person he never really was. He looked up at the cracked ceiling and knew, with a certainty born of a long, lonely life, that he was nothing. That his life had meant nothing and his death, now far closer than he could face, would also mean... nothing. He did not marvel at the medicines that were keeping him alive and the minds that had created them. He didn’t even see the the nurse who worked tirelessly at his side or the other patients sharing their deaths. While inside the man, on every inch of skin, coursing through every vein and inhabiting every organ, billions of tiny life forms lived in harmony with his dying body. Without them, he would die in seconds. Without him, they could not exist. But the wonder of that, and the million other wonders, that filled every moment of his life were lost on the old man, whose eyes were only open to a past that never was, and a world rendered into a lifeless monotone by the palate of his perception.

“Ashes to Ashes. Dust to Dust.” The words of the priest fall into the empty air like autumn leaves in a lonely forest. The old man, whose body he was putting in the ground, had not been religious but the priest felt that something should be said before they cover the coffin with earth. He had not believed in God or heaven. Only hell was real to the old man because it was of his own creation. For the old man, death was an end, nothing more. But the miracle of life, that neither ends nor begins, does not require his belief or even his permission and as his body is lowered into the living, breathing earth, he returns to what he never truly left and joins that from which he was never truly separated. The wonder, the beauty, the mystery of his life goes on long past his ability to see it.