![]() The stroke of genius from early farmers was to realize they could bypass the sexual dance and produce plants vegetatively instead, which is to say, without seeds. But it was inconvenient for long-ago humans who wanted to replicate a specific food they liked. The flowers find some form of sperm (i.e., pollen) from other plants. Edible plants tend to reproduce sexually. If domesticating crops was an earth-changing advance, figuring out how to reproduce them came a close second. Early civilizations in Asia and Africa yielded an incalculable bounty: rice, sugar, apples, soy, onions, bananas, wheat, citrus, coconuts, mangoes, and thousands more that endure today. But the list is quaint when compared to what the other side of the world was up to. Mexico and South America had a respectable collection, including corn, peppers, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, pineapples, and peanuts. “In the thousands of years before European colonists landed in the West, the area that would come to be occupied by the United States and Canada produced only a handful of lasting foods-strawberries, pecans, blueberries, and some squashes-that had the durability to survive millennia. From there onwards it’s turtles all the way down.” And that bigger turtle? The man snapped and said: ‘Don’t bother about it. And the turtle? On the back of an even bigger turtle. When asked what the elephant stands on, he replied “that it stands on the back of a large turtle. If the meaning of my life is to help the proletariat or the Polish nation, what exactly gives meaning to the proletariat or to the Polish nation? There is a story of a man who claimed that the world is kept in place by resting on the back of a huge elephant. But there is always a danger that I might start wondering what gives meaning to that ‘something bigger’. The story provides me with an identity and gives meaning to my life by embedding me within something bigger than myself. ![]() Second, whereas a good story need not extend to infinity, it must extend beyond my horizons. Like movie stars, humans like only those scripts that reserve an important role for them. A New Guinean tribesman is unlikely to believe in Zionism or in Serbian nationalism, because these stories don’t care at all about New Guinea and its people. To give meaning to my life, a story needs to satisfy just two conditions: first, it must give me some role to play. Yet in order to construct a viable identity for myself and give meaning to my life, I don’t really need a complete story devoid of blind spots and internal contradictions. ![]()
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January 2023
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