“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”
--Plutarch, Theseus
The Paradox of Theseus’ Ship is a timeless exemplar of the French notion “plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose” – the more that things change, the more they stay the same. However, in spite of finding reminders in every culture and during every epoch of history that change is the only real constant in human endeavors, people still have difficulty accepting it.
Worse still for many people is the uncomfortable implication in the theme of this paradox -- that identity is not so simple a question as we reducibly wish it to be. “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” Practical minded folk don’t ask themselves these questions, in part because they do not want these questions to be asked at all, by anyone.
However, as rapidly as the world is changing, as we are overcome by events such as climate change, economic globalization, peak oil consumption, peak minerals consumption, genetically modified crops propagation, we may have reached a point at which not asking deeply philosophical questions may be less practical than emulating the ivory-tower eggheads who are unafraid of asking such questions. It may be time to put down the hoe for just a second and put our heads in the clouds long enough to decide which way is up and which way is down.
Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an excellent example of an attempt to conceptualize modern food consumption. Pollan’s request is that we attempt a new degree of intentionality in our eating habits by stopping to consider how four different meals make their way to our plates. This model is an intriguing starting point, but perhaps the most impressive part of this journey is that Pollan started at all. He represents a practical point of view which is too rare; all too often, even those who recognize that something must be done simply inject a prefabricated answer and go merrily about their lives having assured themselves that prejudice is an adquate replacement for investigation.
Socrates’ injunction that “the unexamined life is not worth living” has never been so apropos as it is now, not only for those frustrated by increasing workloads rewarded by diminishing returns, but also by those who would throw out the baby of technical innovation with the bathwater of post-industrial dehumanization and oppression. A claim that we have become “something less” is easily enough made; just scrawl a few angry lines and get printed in The Fifth Estate. Substantiating such claims and then doing something productive as a consequence is an entirely different proposition.
As a point of reference, modern Anarcho-Primitivists like John Zerzan and Theodore Kaczynski (yes, that Theodore Kaczynski) take an unfounded assumption that hunter-gatherers have/had idyllic lives (supposedly having more leisure time than their civilized peers) and turn it into a philosophy/political agenda wherein anything humans have managed to accomplish since the advent of the bone scraper or flaked hand axe is the natural cause of all suffering, war, oppression, sexism, and possibly even flatulence.
The fundamental problem, of course, is that a rejection of all society or social institutions in response to the current slew of human crises, many if not most of which are self-inflicted, fails to recognize that whether maladaptive or not, our behaviors as a species have all evolved for a variety of reasons which will not simply go away just because we wish them to, or if we all go to live in shacks in the wood, or drink enough shots of wheatgrass juice while babbling back and forth at each other in highly technical jargon that has nothing to do with real survival, either of our species, or of our fellow species, or even of individuals, except perhaps individual proprietors of organic wheatgrass juice distributorships.
We have, in short, become something because we chose to respond to circumstances long ago. Those choices led to other choices until our collective behavior, much like that of the caretakers of Theseus’ ship, has led to a complete replacement of our group persona. Our identity is subsumed by the same paradox – are we still “human” in the same way that the people living in the Fertile Crescent just prior to the domestication of the fig and rye some 11,000 years ago were “human”?
Some cultures do not even view this as a paradox. Taoists and Buddhists consider the idea of a thing to be its formal identity; this is very much in keeping with Aristotle’s division of four separate qualities of identity – the “is”ness of a thing differs with the slightest change in emphasis. Getting bogged down in particulars misses the point, precisely because the particulars will never stay the same. Theseus’ ship has different planks than it did when it was first built, but no matter.
The very cells in Theseus’ body were different by the time he died than they were when he built the ship – did that make him no longer Theseus? Of course not! Western materialists and substantialists may not be able to make that philosophical leap, but there is really nothing mystical about it. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it isn’t a Kaczynski.
And being social creatures living in an unsustainable economy does not make us less human, either. Instead, we are still very much human, but we have large problems with difficult solutions. Whining that the solutions are impossible accomplishes nothing other than to make the solutions appear even more intractable than they really are.
Rather than chucking the whole enterprise, we ought to emulate those like Pollan or Barbara Kingsolver or a host of their contemporaries who, instead of asking “When does the Revolution start?” have chosen to ask “What’s for dinner?” Theseus’ ship was not replaced by an exact duplicate; it was retrofitted a single plank at a time until every plank was new. In a similar vein, humanity did not come to our current pass via one colossal social, economic or political decision. We got here one decision at a time – how to get to work, what to wear, and what to eat.
All we can do is stop and think about what we are doing, and be a little more intentional about everything from getting dressed in the morning, to choosing how we entertain ourselves, to choosing what we eat. After all, some ancient ancestral hominid risked his neck testing out that brand new spear he’d invented to scare off a saber-tooth, which gave us, his lucky descendants, some time to think and act. Don’t we owe him our best efforts at getting it right? And getting it right means replacing the ship one plank at a time.
Happy farming!
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