Mayo

I detest mayonnaise.  I hate the sight of it, the smell of it and the taste of it.  Put mayonnaise anywhere near me and I want to gag.

Perhaps you like the taste of mayonnaise.  Afterall, some people enjoy slathering that white greasy condiment on their sandwich. Perhaps you, like some others I know, enjoy a heaping spoonful of it plopped into your tuna, chicken, or potatoes to create a ‘salad’.

Which brings me to the topic of this blog . . . isn’t it interesting that the identical food tastes so differently to you and to me? The mayonnaise I refuse to eat is exactly the same mayonnaise that you enjoy. The exact same emulsion of eggs and oil, seasoned in exactly the same way, tastes very different to me than it tastes to you.  Objectively, our mayo is identical. We see, taste, and smell the same stuff. Subjectively, our experience of mayo is worlds apart.  What we eat is the same.  How it tastes is different.

Maybe we’re wired differently.  There may be a genetic component to our different tastes. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that my sister and my daughter hate mayonnaise almost as much as I.  Strangely, despite the potential for marital tension, each of us have spouses who enjoy mayonnaise. For mayo to be allowed in my house, the understanding is that it must be kept out of sight, in the back of the fridge.

If it’s true that you and I taste foods differently . . . and it is . . .  isn’t it just as likely that some of our other sensory experiences are different?  What we feel, what we hear, and what we see might be the same. But how we feel, how we see, and how we hear might be very different.

I happen not to like the feel of silk or silky fabrics. If I snag a nail or piece of dry skin on silk, I get the heebie-jeebies. However, there are others who luxuriate in the feel of silk.  I’m oblivious to the presence of tags and labels in my clothes, but there are some who can’t stand that sensation. Even though objectively what we touch, or are touched by, is exactly the same, subjectively how we experience it is quite different.

Not only genetics but learning and experience determines how we perceive.  You and I and a trained musician may listen to the same piece of music, but I’ll bet that how we hear the music is quite different. You and I and a poet may listen to the identical poem, read by the identical person, at the identical time, but how we hear the poem will not be the same.

Who knows if your red is the same as my red, your blue the same as mine?  And just like with the musician and the poet, I’m sure that if you and I and an artist looked at an identical picture, we would all see it in our own unique way.

I've studied psychology.  I've practiced psychiatry.  And yet, I barely understand what is it like to be you.

Progress

“Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?”  (Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, 1909—1966)

I recently read The Ancestors Tale, a book by the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins.  In it he likens progress, particularly evolutionary progress, to an arms race.  In the world of predator and prey, as predators improve their ability to hunt, prey must evolve in their ability to avoid getting eaten -- hide better, run faster, or taste nastier.  If they don’t, they become extinct.  As prey becomes more elusive, predators must, in turn, become more adept hunters, or they don’t eat. And so on and so forth in a cycle of either progress or perish.

Human progress has often been based in the imperative of progress or perish. From stones we progressed to bronze weapons.  From bronze weapons we progressed to iron. Weapons evolved becoming more lethal. Defenses evolved becoming more sophisticated. Progress or perish, thus we continually needed and got better guns, better planes, better bombs, better rockets, better technology.  But progress came at a price. The enormous resources allotted for the development of weaponry were resources not given to education, infrastructure, health, and environment.

The capitalistic marketplace is driven by ‘progress or perish.’  Companies are predators, competing with one another for their limited prey, the consumer. If one company’s product has an edge over its competitor’s product, thereby capturing a larger consumer share, the competitor must improve its product, or risk going out of business. If that company can improve its product, especially if they can do so with glamourous innovation, the other company must respond in kind, or perish. In the dog-eat-dog world, competition forces product development, and we call this progress.

Medicine has in-part been driven by ‘progress or perish’.  Our immune system evolved to combat viral and bacterial infections, but it was imperfect.  Once, not so long ago, it was common to die from infection. Then, we discovered antisepsis, followed by the discovery and development of the first antibiotics. People stopped dying so much from infection.  However, some bacteria mutated and developed resistance to the first generation of antibiotics, so we progressed to a new generation of antibiotics that could kill resistant bacteria.  However, bacteria continued to mutate and progressed into super-resistant bacteria.  Add to all this, that we are currently living in a world infected by a rapidly mutating virus. And so, we must continue to discover and develop new and more powerful tools for fighting infection, viral and bacterial, in an on-going evolving arms race.  Progress or perish.

Progress is not only about science and technology.  In my lifetime, there has been noteworthy legislative progress in civil rights, women’s rights, and legal protections for the LGBTQ community. But I am unsure that this legislative progress is necessarily a measure of moral and spiritual progress.  Given the climate of these times (no pun intended), I fear we are no closer to the 2500-year-old ideals ‘loving thy neighbor’ or ‘beating our swords into plowshares.’  We need moral and spiritual progress at least as much as we need technological progress.  I believe it’s a matter of progress or perish.

Books

“I can’t live without books.” (Thomas Jefferson--as quoted on a bookmark given to me from the Library of Congress gift shop)

Recently, as I prepared to move, I sorted through my collection of books; those I would move, those I would donate, and those I would sell.  The latter were taken to the used bookstore. Two boxes of books, all in excellent condition, were sold for a whopping $13.

I had several boxes of books I wanted to donate to my Temple, but no one at the Temple was sure they wanted them.  I called around to other congregations. None of them were in a hurry to accept my donation.

Way leads on to way and finally, in response to my offer to donate books, I was asked if I would be willing to volunteer and organize the newly renovated Temple library space.  In order to donate my books, my wife and I each donated a dozen or so hours of volunteer time, sorting and arranging books into some semblance of usable order.

As part of my new volunteer library duty, I was also asked to sort through approximately forty boxes of Temple books and documents that had been in storage for over 20-years. From that I salvaged two boxes of good books. The rest I couldn’t sell or give away, so they were tossed.

Having added the two boxes of salvaged books plus my books to the newly organized library, I looked around.  Unfortunately, I concluded that it was not much of a library.  It was just a big room surrounded by partially filled shelves. It was a graveyard, a resting place for old books, books that if discarded would never be missed.  

What’s happening to books?  What’s happening to libraries? Recently, I was in the local high school library.  I looked around and noticed that something was missing . . . books.  I saw no encyclopedias, no papers, no magazines. There were a few scattered books on the shelves, but only a few.  The library had been converted into a hi-tech study center.

What’s happening to bookstores?  All over, independent bookstores are struggling. My two favorite used bookstores have gone out of business.  I used to love Borders, and now all the Borders are closed.  Barnes and Noble remains open but how long until they succumb to their on-line competitors?

I love books, the feel and smell of books, real books with paper pages and binding.  I’ve tried reading eBooks.  I can’t do it.  Like it says on my bookmark,” I can’t live without books,” but it seems as though real books are becoming problematic.

I worry about what will happen someday to my collection of books. I don’t know who will appreciate them and give them a good home. Walking through an antique mall the other day I saw a bookdealers advertisement.  It said, “Let me solve your book problem,” and offered to haul away any unwanted books. I kept the phone number.