On our way down from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap today, we stopped at a silk farm for lunch. The making of silk is one of those things that could convert me to Intelligent Design, if they had it for societies, and if the US Congress weren't such an obvious counterexample.
The way you make silk is this: you hatch yourself some silkworms by catching the butterflies. You carefully feed these worms mulberry leaves for a few weeks, which makes them huge. When the worms change color, you know they're ready to spin a cocoon, so you carefully stick them in a bunch of tree branches to do their stuff.
Okay, this much you could probably figure out by watching nature. But then:
You have to kill the silkworms before they hatch; otherwise, they'll bust the single continuous fiber, many meters long, that makes one strand of silk. So you boil them alive, or dry them on a hot metal sheet in the sun. Then you carefully unwind that single strand, and bundle it together with 40-50 other strands to make a single silk thread. This doesn't look or feel anything like silk; there's some kind of glue on it, so the intermediate product has the look and feel of a coarse fiber such as hemp or straw. You get rid of the glue by boiling the thread for two hours in a solution of soda ash. Then, and only then, do you have a single silk thread.
I don't know about you, but I would have given up somewhere before boiling the silkworms alive. Given how little value the stuff has at the intermediate stages, how did we ever get to the final product? I'm seriously befuddled by human ingenuity.
Before we invented worm factory farms - silk production used to work like this:
Yes - there was a time when we knew how to interact with nature without torture, without deformation, without incest, without hormones and antibiotics and chemicals, without treating animals as objects and the environment as blasphemy...
Once we had started treating animals as objects - it was a small step towards treating humans as objects (slaves, holocaust, females as property, etc). The two are so interlinked that you cannot free one without the other!
PS: My sister and mother have also arrived in Cambodia a few days ago and they love it.
Oh, for devil. First, as to Megan. I think the same thing about coffee. Who ever thought of taking these terrible beans, roasting them, grinding them, running hot water through them, drinking what came out, all to stay awake. Bizarre.
As to Hugo. Once we started treating animals as objects? When was that? 100,000 BC? 200,000 BC? Or do you mean we just started that post industrial revolution. Because that's when we started treating people as objects, correct? I mean, history of man kind's evilness is recent, correct, just within our lifetime?
Because there certainly wasn't slavery pre-1492, nor holocaust before 1939, nor treating women as property before 1900, was there?
Human history is full of all. What we've got here in the industrialized west is not something normal for the course of humans. Life was, and for many, continues to be short, nasty and brutish.
Always was. Usually was in much worse ways.
Where is it bad to be a woman or a minority today? I'd say Afghanistan is a good choice. Or the Sudan. Perhaps Pakistan. What I'd also say is that things do not change much. Life sucked in those places for women and minorities for just about all of recorded human history.
John B
As far as I am concerned - homo sapiens sapiens is at least 100,000 years old and we have had developed language for at least 60,000 years? Apparently Agriculture has started 10-15,000 years ago and is referred by the Greek creation myth as the beginning of Zeus punishment - we have to plow the field.
Once we controlled plants (what grows where and when) - we started controlling animals too. Then humans! We actually started believing that it is us who create and produce food and even animals and not nature - hence our naive creation myth?
We have to reverse this trend and it has already started:
* Free some men first (Solon stepps down as king and introduces democracy)
* Free all men and the market
* Free women (as in the 1930s in the US and in the 1970s in Switzerland to be equal again to men as with bonobo apes - our closest relatives. It is more natural than a few men with weapons controlling the masses)
* Free human slaves (as in the 1960s in the US)
* Free animal slaves (as in 2020? for environmental survival)
* Free plants from mono-agriculture and stop the weed and insect killings (organic perma-culture and natural farming like the native Americans had practiced it)
We can do it and it should be clear as to why? Anything else is not really aligned with nature, our biological evolution over millions of years - rather than our cultural mini/micro-revolution over mere thousands (or even hundreds of years).
What is good for our health is good for nature and is good for the economy. And this path is also the only ethical way on top! Bio-Ethics!
The question isn't when we started treating animals as objects, but when we started treating humans as more than objects...
Hugo: "organic perma-culture and natural farming like the native Americans had practiced it"?
These would be the same Native Americans that turned the Great Forest into the Great Plains via slash-and-burn and desertified a chunk of the Southwest by overgrazing?
Yes - there was a time when we knew how to interact with nature without torture, without deformation, without incest, without hormones and antibiotics and chemicals, without treating animals as objects and the environment as blasphemy.
A time when everyone lived on the brink of starvation, there were hardly any people in the world to live on the brink of starvation, war with the neighbours was almost continuous, prisoners were always killed because there was no way to control them and women were sometimes given to the other tribe to agree to such treaties as were made.
And so on.
I no longer recall the source, but someone once observed that enough "time spent contemplating how anyone ever figured out that dried catgut was a good thing to make music with is enough to make your mind flake out and curl up around the edges."
For what it's worth, I make the following, not unrelated, observations:
1. Old-time homo sap was just as smart as we modern examples.
2. Old-time homo sap didn't have TV, blogs and all of our other latter-day gimcracks as distractions.
Problem is Hugo doesn't go quite far enough. He envisions a day when we will no longer engage in the mass murder of weeds. But what of the mass murder of non-fruit-bearing vegetation? Spinach, broccoli, carrots? Why should they be accorded a status lower than even weeds? When will the horrors stop.
As that great prophet, GK Chesterton, wrote over a century ago (1904 to be exact): "... Tolstoy and the Humanitarians said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed (‘shedding,’ as he called it finely, ‘the green blood of the silent animals’), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called ‘Why should Salt suffer?’ and there was more trouble. ...."
There's a man who carries the idea to its logical conclusion. Something tells me that Mr. Pottisch lacks the fortitude of following his own reasoning to the same end. Or that he simply lacks the same skill at satire. Having trouble figuring out which... (Although it's always amazed me that good-old GK could have predicted in 1904, 1904!!! for goodness' sake, just how full of crackpots Oregon would become by the early 21st century, which is when the novel in which the above quote appears is set.)
2. Old-time homo sap(OTHS) didn't have TV, blogs and all of our other latter-day gimcracks as distractions.
And, for longest time OTHS believed that few among them were so much better than he that much of the time not spent with today's gimcracks were spent on inventing new curiosities, for the bemusement of his betters, in a vain attempt to curry favor...
Whistling past the grand experiment of,: "All men are created equal...Truths self-evident...", providing a broader marketplace for Man's ingenuity to serve multitudinous appetites, we seem to be, with aid of such 'gimcracks', backsliding toward, and once again, serving our Sun God2.0, the uber-Stadt.
Free human slaves (as in the 1960s in the US)
"in the 1960s"?
Free animal slaves (as in 2020? for environmental survival)
When do we free the computer slaves?
I do think we'll be factory-producing all our animal needs from cloned tissue within another few decades, though.
I had roast beef for dinner. Cow had been well-fattened, and seasoned with dried onion and herbs. Simmered all day in the crock pot. Once I got past 40,000 years or so of guilt, that roast was delicious.
I think I might be able to endure 90,000 years of guilt and then enjoy the fish tomorrow afternoon.
Megan: I don't know about you, but I would have given up somewhere before boiling the silkworms alive.
I don't see why; short, sticky bits of silk don't seem that different from the hairs of sheep, goats, etc. used to make other kinds of thread. Cleaning the fiber is a fairly obvious thing to do; killing the pupating insect before it can cut through the thread is much less so, but it doesn't seem like a stretch that somebody thought of it.
richao: Problem is Hugo doesn't go quite far enough. He envisions a day when we will no longer engage in the mass murder of weeds. But what of the mass murder of non-fruit-bearing vegetation?
A. Whitney Brown: "I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals — I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants."
Gee Bill,
I'm not so sure it would have been painfully obvious to me that those cocoons would be a fine source of fibers to spin.
here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqY9RM_6V-k
is a 1 min. clip of the beginning of cocoon boiling, seems like there are clips of further processes afterward..
Ad
I agree with you! The question is - why was all this happening and what has made it better? When have two democracies waged war with each other compared to two kings or dictators?
Was the liberation of the market not something that has empowered the economy and technology rather than weakened it (Persia vs Greece or UDSSR vs USA). Was the liberation of slaves not real progress for the economy too (away from micromanagement and plan-economics)?
No - every time we liberate something that we have corrupted or oppressed before - we benefit? What is wrong with continuing along this path?
Blacks still exist - despite that fact that there are no slaves anymore. Weeds still exists - despite the fact that we try to "kill them all on our fields", etc. Animals would still exist despite not being enslaved and tortured for life?
Tell me - what is wrong with liberating men, blacks, females, animals and nature from needless enslavement, suffering and destruction? Why would we have to give up peace on earth and ethics if we stopped torturing innocents - that part is not clear to me?
All the other posts after ad were really impressive as they really seem to have understood what this discussion is about?
anony-mouse
Did you know that you can have food on your table without slaves? And did you know that stating that you dare to eat the food prepared by slaves does not make you courageous or a hero. A toddler can already consume without producing anything... A toddler can destroy without protecting etc. Ok - I am impressed that you can do what a toddler can do - but only in your case!
No - the way that for example Clint Eastwood lives his life is impressive. He manages to produce amazing entertainment that teaches us a thing or two about (human) nature - without relaying on slave labor or environmental destruction.
When I look into the future - I would rather follow Clint's path than say that of an obese, dull, tyrant zombie slave owner?
I would rather protect the future of our children than to destroy it and eat/drink it away.
Let's make money, let us protect the environment, let us have good enjoyable sex, interesting and inspiring books and movies, sports and games, laughter with friends and family and other cultures, let us explore how the universe works, etc...
Let us concentrate on all that and let us stop to spend most of our time, energy and money on enslaving, torturing and destroying the future. Sex, movies, music, books, recreational drugs, etc is much more fun than needless torture of innocents??? Are there no parents among us here?
If progress means that it becomes cheaper to destroy and inflict pain on innocents - I do not call this progress. When more people are starving than have lived in total 200 years ago - that is not progress. When the total sum of suffering on the planet (including animals) is at its historic peak height - there ain't no progress.
The devil is unemployed these days because big, numb gluttons have stolen his job. In fact he is voting for Hillary in the hope that social security and welfare will be improved and he can stay on it for the rest of his life.
Imagine being able to bring Henry David Thoreau or Mark Twain to the present from the past - via a so called "time..machine". For 30 minutes or so they would marvel about all the technological progress. Computers, fast cars, airplanes - wow. But show them both the state of the planet, what is left of nature, and finally an average factory farm and I would imagine that they would immediately, politely yet firmly, insist on being send back in time so that they can at least prevent some of this "progress"???
cont.
The way we treat animals and nature - as if "it" were objects that we can create and destroy is like us trying to fly like Icarus. Not aligned with nature.
The word develop>/i> has apparently some celtic origins? It means un/dis-wrap? (French developper, from Old French desveloper : des-, dis- + voloper, to wrap - possibly of Celtic origin)
At the very very least - I ask you - how do you think that these intelligent, emotional beings who long for the expression of autonomy and free will - feel because of you. How do these beings feel because of you?
(You might also tell me what the worst form of suffering was that a human has every experienced during all of human history?!)
Hey Mr. Pretentious, a/k/a Hugo Pottisch,
Your use of multiple question marks, and your use of "?!" to end a sentence, reveals you to be a bad writer. Well, so does the rest of your writing, but this especially. Knock it off.
ed
the question marks are there because I am talking to you and not writing to you...
My bad command of the English language is related to the fact that I have started using it relatively late in my life. It is a 3rd language if you will? (ops – I did it again?!) In fact – I have been living without animal products and have been an environmentalist for longer than I have "attempted" English... (I hope the dots annoy you too.. it is a legacy of the internet boom..)
btw - i am a big fan of freedom of expression and even freedom of speech.. notice how i use the “-“s??? but given the context of this thread I am no longer interested in literary discussions here..
next time I add to the "who can make the most eloquent comment" thread we can continue..?
XXX LOL WTF IMHO what???
Yours James Joyce number 280957203567423504785
PS: How do these beings feel IYHO?
Hugo,
nice link, if only that played on an endless loop at the 'Shop 'n Drop' supermarket...
or, maybe better, that that 'inconvient truth' be shown in schools, instead of Gore's myth-filled tragi-comedy...
also, care not for ol' 'ed''s take, he's, obviously, a style over substance type...the type that can really sink his teeth into some good ol' fashioned Mad Ave. hype--a real mutual fund owner..
This has definitely been hijacked.
Back to the point, Coffee is easy: Merely eating coffee beans will give you a buzz.
Dried coffee beans would be the only way to transport and store them.
When something is hard and dried, grinding it and making it into a soup is an obvious step. Voila, you have invented coffee as we know it.
The silk worms probably does require more lateral steps. However the silk worm (and many other arthropods) does produce a clean, desirable thread when it is climbing around, before making the coocoon. So the end product was known when the humans started work on the process.
The one that stumps me is all those foods that are toxic until you cook them, mash them,leach out the poison, and then cook them again. Eg. cashews.
my comment must be "Nasty, brutish, and short"
The one I don't get is tobacco.
You find this sticky, strong-smelling plant, with soem dry leaves, so you throw them on the fire. OK, that part I get.
Next, you breathe the smoke, and it makes you vomit.
Now why, exactly, would you do this AGAIN?
Ingenuity, or need? I see the "hey, this stuff is soft!" as step 3, to the previous day's "I'm starving; I wonder if those bug-pod-things are edible?" and "I wonder if the pod shell becomes edible after cooking?" Cultivation and refinement of the production technique comes later.
I recall an old cartoon in which Ziggy sits down to a seafood dinner and reflects, “The first guy to eat a lobster must have been a really hungry guy.” (Ok, maybe not THAT old a cartoon; after all, in OLD cartoons Ziggy didn’t talk.)
But Jeff Mering has Ziggy beat. He challenged me to describe how the first person ate cheese. “Og, remember that milk we got a while back? Well, we didn’t drink it while it was fresh, and now it’s gotten kinda old, hard and smelly. Hey, here’s an idea – let’s eat it!”
It’s amazing any of our ancestors survived.
Beer was probably made from a similar accident: imagine if you've got a bunch of vats of honey and you are too lazy to clean them out all the way or can't get to the bottom stuff and want to soak them a while to get the last bits out. Forget about them for a couple of days in the sun and on the right day, you'll get some wild yeasts and fermentation. Pretty soon, you'll be trying to make mead and when you run out of honey, you'll see if you can do it out of mom's porridge, or whatever... pretty soon, that can evolve into beer and other good things.
* * *
Also, Hugo, if God didn't want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?