Category: Phil Ossify

A phrase popped into my head yesterday while I was thinking about something completely different, and I’d like to toss it at you: “challenge food.”

A challenge food is that stuff you’re expected to eat, not because it’s good, not because it’s something you would normally like, but to prove to your friends that you’re tough. Or daring. Or … willing to go along with the joke.

How many times have you heard people rave about chili hot enough to bring tears to your eyes? Or read some story about the search for the hottest-ever chili pepper?

There are other challenge foods. Raw oysters come to mind. Mountain oysters (bull calf testicles). Sheep’s eyeballs.

Considering where I came from, sushi was a challenge food for me. At least until I took my first bite, and discovered it was heavenly!

There are also plenty of challenge drinks. Everclear. Metaxa. Hell, even beer, if you’ve never had it before.

I bring all this up because challenge foods illustrate a line in human thinking, the line between “I should like this” and “This should be good.”

Or, more fully, the difference between

I should like this because everybody says it’s good.

… and …

If I’m going to like this, it has to be good.

Do you see the difference? The first one is a follow-along belief that says one’s judgment about what’s good should be based on what other people say is good. The second follows one’s own internal compass, saying that if something’s good TO YOU, you’ll like it, and not otherwise. In other words, the food is going to have to live up to you (your judgment), and not you live up to the food (in other people’s judgment).

I fell for the chili challenge oh-so-many times when I was growing up in Texas. Friends would make the burning hot stuff and gather to rave about how hot it was. “WOO!! That stuff just about burns the hair outta yuh nose, don’t it! Sweet Jesus, somebody git me a fahr hose! I think my eyeballs is meltin’! That chili’ll git the wax runnin’ outer yer ears!”

Until the day I said to myself “Dammit, I don’t want to FIGHT with my food. It’s either gonna be something I like, or I’m not going to eat the goddam stuff.” Ever since, I’ve enjoyed my own very-mildly-spiced recipe for chili, and none other.

I was surprised the first time I tasted champagne. I’d seen it in all the movies, you see, and people were sipping it and laughing, obviously enjoying it. I expected it to be sweet and light and fizzy. Instead it was this … bitter pisswater. I didn’t exactly spit it out, but I took two small sips – the second to be sure I’d been right about the first – and then put the glass down.

In fact, compared to my high school and cowboy buddies, I was very late in taking up drinking at all. I was 22 before I drank down an entire beer, or finished an entire mixed drink on my own. Beer simply didn’t taste very good to me. And even after I started drinking seriously (!) with my cowboy buddies in California, I divided mixed drinks into my own two private categories: Candy and Hair Tonic. Candy drinks – Tom Collins, Rum and Coke, etc. – I would drink. Hair tonic drinks – Martinis, etc. – I would not.

(Bear in mind this is all based on my much-younger sense of taste. Champagne no longer tastes like bitter pisswater, but it also doesn’t taste very GOOD. And still today, a six-pack of beer, which I do buy occasionally, will last me several months.)

Not to say that I wouldn’t try some of that stuff when I was out with the mule packers and had already had a few. I know what Metaxa tastes like, for instance (it probably rises into a third category – Paint Stripper, perhaps, or Human Rights Violation), but I would never, ever order it on my own.

Let’s look at those two mindsets again, though:

“I should like this” is hauled up from the deep, deep well of tribal solidarity:

This is justice because my neighbors say it is. This is right because the Pope says it’s right. This is a justified war because my countrymen say it is. This is good because everybody else seems to think it’s good. This is okay because it’s always been this way. This is the best way to do it because this is how my people do it. I should think this, and agree to this, and go along with this, because that’s what I’m supposed to do. This is real and true because the Bible says it is.

“This should be good” springs from the fountain of individual judgment:

Waitasec, is that right? Hmm, I don’t like this; is there something wrong with ME, or is it something wrong with THEM? Hell, I’m not going along with that. Jeez, I wonder why everybody thinks that’s okay? This tastes awful; I’m not eating/drinking/smoking it. I don’t like the way this is going; I’m outta here. No way am I going to put up with this. Well, shoot, that’s just silly; I didn’t sign on for this. Why is everybody standing around — can’t they see those people need help? Or even: What the fuck is up with you idiots? Can’t you see this is wrong?

I’m not knocking tribal solidarity, but there are limits. I’m pretty sure completely giving up your Self, vanishing totally into the herd, is just wrong. If you’re exactly like everybody else, you don’t really exist. I mean, you might still be walking around and breathing and stuff, but there’s no YOU in you. You become a nebbish, a puppet, a faceless, selfless nothing, pushed here and there by the tides of public opinion, or the will of corporate advertisers, or the driving whip of political manipulation.

If you default on the necessity of being an individual, you vanish in some way. You become a … thing.

But where do you draw the line between the two? On the one hand, there’s the risk you might become a non-entity. On the other, you face the danger of turning into something of an egotistical monster.

It’s not possible for me to really advise you on the thing, but several things come to mind in thinking about it:

First, the unspoken foundation of freethought is a willingness to take on the responsibility of making these kinds of choices. Once you become aware that there IS a choice, you’ll figure out where to draw your own line.

Which means, given the fact that this is the real world, and we’re only human, in the thousand SMALL decisions of daily living, a lot of it will involve the familiar “Go along to get along.” It’s just too tiring to do any different. As long as you realize there’s a small price you pay each time you go against your own values, and you judge either that the price is too small to bother with, or that the benefits outweigh the cost, you’re set.

Second, in the BIG decisions of your life — the health and welfare, life and death of you and your dependent loved ones – it has to be you making the decision. Every time.

Third, if the choice involves another person – a friend or relative, for instance – be sure it’s your decision to make. If it’s them paying the price of the choice, I would suggest it’s not your place to make that choice.

Finally, there is one decision-making arena where you can ALWAYS reliably default to your own personal judgment: Anytime you’re expected to follow along completely, to obey without questioning, that’s the time you must not follow along. The time when you have to back out, call a halt, and take the time to exercise your own ability to investigate, evaluate, and judge.

Whether it’s pressure from peers, the danger of official sanctions, or just a context of unspoken expectations, if the situation suddenly turns your life into a cattle chute, you must — at least in your head — refuse to be a cow.

A good thing to remember the next time you’re asked to go along with a war. Or with a church.

_______________

By the way, do click on the photo to embiggen it. It’s one of mine, and of someone I know. The bridge is about 65 feet high, the young man is 19, and … dayyum. (Yes, he survived.)

I posted something on Facebook today, and got a question that sparked some of my philosophical thoughts about human nature. The thing I posted was a link to this, an article about a film project by a woman director that delves into a perceived social problem for men (and society), “toxic masculinity”:

The One Thing All Men Feel, But Never Admit

… with the accompanying remark:

There’s some good stuff here, and this is a project worth doing. It will get more conversation going on some things that need to be talked about, re “toxic masculinity.”

In addition, though, if a hunter makes a film about bears, you end up with very different conclusions than those a biologist might reach on the same subject. Likewise, if a man made a film about the true inner nature of women, or about “toxic femininity,” there would be room to suspect a certain amount of subjective bias.

I would most definitely want to see this. But I wouldn’t swallow it whole until I’d thought about it at length.

… and the followup remark:

BTW: Don’t think I’m discounting the likelihood that we NEED a fresh viewpoint on the nature and needs of men.

Facebook Friend Lydia Allen had a good question:

Why do men have a ‘nature’ (or an ‘essence’)? Aren’t men individuals who differ from person to person, just as women are?

… which sparked a volley of thoughts on the subject of men and women, and our underlying humanness:

Lydia, I see all living things as pyramids. The tiny capstone of each pyramid is your own individual self, but the lower levels, which occupy a much larger part of us, are NOT specifically you. They’re all this older stuff with which evolution has gifted us.

For instance, your elbow, which you think of as human and YOU, is nothing of the sort. It’s an elbow so old that chimpanzees have it, raccoons have it, alligators have it, salamanders have it. Ditto for so much else of us. The fact that we share more than 98 percent of our genes with chimps implies that there is very little of us that is specifically our individual selves, or even specifically human.

I separate our traits into “humany” traits and “beasty” (not “beastLY”) traits, and it seems to me self-evident that most of us is beasty.

For the most part, we are beasts. It’s only a little bit of us that’s human. Which would mean, if you expressed the idea in terms of gender, that all men DO share certain common traits that undergird their own specific individual natures. Men are, literally, beasts (the same would be true of women), with most of our livingness, our selfness, run by equipment and software arising out of a billion-year-plus development program.

Of course I think we should strive not to act solely like beasts. Otherwise we cheat ourselves out of discovering the full range of our natures. We create a beasty civilization and relationships rather than something more fully human.

My conjecture about the whole thing is this: To be fully human, you have to occupy and indulge both your beasty nature AND your humany nature.

Humany traits include such things as reason, speech, creativity, imagination and compassion. A VERY humany trait is the desire to be an individual.

Beasty traits include things such as reproduction and fighting, eating and sleeping – not to mention wallowing in all our mad passions. A VERY beasty trait is the desire to find your place in the herd, to follow and be ruled or to lead and dominate.

You have to read, and think, and make music, and build things, and learn to give love to others, in order to express your humany self. But you have to run and climb, eat and fight and fuck and wallow, in order to express your beasty self.

There’s a balance between the two. Given that we are humans, that balance should ideally come down on the humany side. To me, being as humany as possible seems highly desirable. The problem is that beasty stuff comes automatically to us, humany stuff with much greater difficulty.

It’s much easier to pick a fight, or to run from one, than it is to argue with another person in calm and objective reason. It’s easier to rape than to love, easier to bully than to protect, or to create a relationship of equals. Easier to give orders, or to take them, than to think about what will result if those orders are followed without question.

Soldiering is a beasty profession, teaching and helping is a humany profession. It’s easier to join the military and march around threatening people with weapons than it is to do the hard work it takes to revive a neighborhood, or to rescue people from poverty, or teach children to read. (Whoever came up with the term “humanitarian” or “humanism” knew this implicitly.)

I suspect it’s why soldiers and cops, prison guards and airport security types – but also lawyers and elected officials – are rarely highly intelligent, compassionate, creative and  philosophical types. The professions select automatically for thugs and bullies and alphas, and a special effort has to be made to filter out the more dangerous of those seeking the jobs.

It’s also why kings and emperors have outnumbered democratically elected leaders throughout human history, and why third world countries more easily transition into dictatorships than into democracies. Democracy, that very human invention, takes forbearance and EFFORT.

And again, it’s also why there are scores of huge monuments to war and death in Washington DC, but not one single memorial to conscience or whistle-blowing or principled resistance. We have difficulty even recognizing that conscience and resistance is heroic, or that it can be harder than following along and killing or dying.

Finally, a subtle consequence of all this, important to we atheists:

Science, that rational and creative and questing adventure of the mind, is almost purely humany.

Religion, that practice of leading and following, ordering and threatening, harvesting and control of others, accompanied by as little questioning and thought as possible, is almost purely beasty.