monoculture and perfection II

Whatever is made must first be made up, somehow. Not every made-up thing is made real, for example imagining peace does not make peace. But preceding every artifact, even those which remain unmade, is an act of imagination.

Realizing, making-real, never fully displaces imagining, making-up. Imagining a thing that fits some need in a certain situation exactly, or for a certain purpose precisely, like for instance a perfect hamburger, is perhaps an exercise of mind which can never be fully concretized in an imperfect world. But the making real which follows an act of making-up is potentially an act of perfecting, of striving for, or becoming, perfect.

I use the term perfection here, like I did in the previous post in this thread, as meaning finished, a state of completion beyond which nothing of the kind could be better. Perfecting, making perfect, requires in this context some accompanying unmaking, discarding and eliminating. In the previous post I linked to ideas about inventory management called Just In Time. Those were developed by Toyota executives and implemented in capitalist enterprises worldwide because JIT inventory management consistently increases profitability in comparison to enterprises managed differently. JIT inventory management is an example of perfecting, of becoming perfect, by eliminating, discarding; an unmaking that accompanies making.

The unmaking intrinsic in acts of making a perfect hamburger served fifty million times a day in a hundred countries might involve the exclusion of superfluities of all kinds from all the organizations, people, technology, activities, information and resources involved. The perfect meat, for example, requires a perfect kind of animal raised and fed upon a perfect clover. All other clovers and cows are superfluous to the enterprise. With perfect lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, onions and buns baked from the perfect flour milled from a particular wheat, one perfect hamburger requires countless redundancies, fifty million an unimaginable amount.

It is perhaps equally as difficult to imagine fifty million hamburgers cooked and served fifty million ways. It is nearly as hard to imagine the diversity of lettuce, tomato, wheat, flour and bun that might be available in one hundred countries to make a hamburger with. Taste is possibly the most idiosyncratic sense of all, so it is easy to imagine just one, cooked and served just the way you like it. It gets much harder to imagine how one capitalist enterprise could possibly turn a profit from such unimaginable diversity.

Human beings may not be well served by those ancient ideas of perfection intrinsic in Western culture. No longer discussed as robustly as they were before Descartes and the Humanist perspective, ideas about perfection are driving the management of monocultures in the world almost without argument. I say almost, because of course the fledgling philosophy of ecosystems, ecosophy, makes an attempt to scope the problem in the first three platform principles of the Deep Ecology movement.

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.

2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realizations of these values and are also values in themselves.

3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital human needs.

If we are to unmake monoculture before it unmakes us a closer examination of some principles of universality rejected by Descartes are necessary. In a previous post I left the zealot Friar Savonarola in a fifteenth century Florentine piazza waiting to be struck dead. My next post in this thread will attempt to unpack some ideas about diversity, perfection and the problem of universals that Descartes abandoned altogether, but which plagued the Burghers of Florence at the Fifteenth Century's end.

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