Now, of course, one could argue that, just as Plato went a step too far in condemning mimesis to court, we can use digital communications in a modified fashion, exercising control and intention in what we occupy our minds with and when and why. The trick is to be always mindful of not giving free …
Last week, conservative commentator Matt Walsh attracted attention by ridiculing those who drink raw, unpasteurized milk.
“We live in a first world civilized society and people are actively choosing to consume milk riddled with E. coli and listeria”, he said. Pasteurisation “is not some evil sorcery” for it “just kills the dangerous bacteria you morons”.
He was criticized by those he ridiculed, who argued that the pasteurization process removes valuable nutrients and countless probiotics, making raw milk by far the superior product. Raw milk enjoyers are among those who generally emphasize the benefits of a radically organic lifestyle. This usually involves beliefs about how the human metabolism is optimized to absorb unfiltered and natural animal products and how detrimental ultra-processed foods are by comparison.
In this there is said to be something of a Lindy Effect, a theorem itself named after a New York Delicatessen. The human metabolism has had millennia of adjustment to optimise the absorption of beneficial nutrients from naturally produced foodstuffs, but only a few years of consuming industrial chemicals like the canola oil, sulphates, nitrates and emulsifiers that are now ubiquitous in pre-packaged food.
There is a deep suspicion of big business and government at play here, of a sort of industrial-eat-bugs complex that grew around tobacco companies moving into factory food processing to replace lost cigarette revenue and the food industry’s cynical pivot to demonizing the consumption of fat in relation to high cholesterol to shield consumers from the dangers of excessive sugar.
Without rehashing debates about dietary regimens, it is interesting that Walsh accused raw milk enjoyers of magical thinking. “Evil sorcery” suggests there are hidden forces at work conspiring to bring about the ruin of souls through industrial-scale mechanized food production.
This brought with it some more serious accusations from others. Inferring from the fact that aficionados of the current dietary trends code right-wing, it was suggested there is some link to the racism inherent within it. In trying to deduce what such detractors might mean, one can presume they suspect a sort of fixation on biological purity at work, along with a certain physiological supremacism being apportioned to the pre-industrial Western European diet. I’m not convinced there’s anything inherent about this lifestyle trend and the darker forces being alleged to reside within it. This is not to say there isn’t an adjacent relation, but this is something accidental. What interests me is what the new nutritional purism might mean symbolically.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, even the most patently absurd conspiracy theories are hermeneutically valuable, being interpretations of the human world. Criticisms of online ‘disinformation’ thus wholly miss the point; in the same way, a philistine philologist misses the point by condemning the Book of Genesis or the Iliad for not being true. Mythical pictures explain aspects of reality within their symbolic idiom. There are aspects of reality explained by those blaming 5G for SARS-2 or those subscribing to Pizzagate or QAnon. Interpreted symbolically, such theories bespeak an intuitive sense that our cultural atmosphere is increasingly permeated with unsanitary and harmful things and that those in power are more culpable for this fact than they care to admit.
Plato comes to mind in this connection. In the Republic, we learn that most people simply won’t live according to logos, philosophical conclusions, and reasoned arguments, but they can and should be edified as appropriate by mythos. The myths could provide a narrative idiom for enabling the apprehension, ultimately, of goodness, truth, and beauty. Whether we can present a similarly generous hermeneutical approach to today’s widespread phenomenon of conspiratorial thinking remains to be seen – but it is clear enough that railing about ‘disinformation’ alone will not suffice because we’re not dealing here with information alone.
Now, the appreciation of raw milk and its lifestyle has much more logos than mythos – even Matt Walsh should admit some probiotic and nutritional deficit results from pasteurization. The honest debate surrounds whether this deficit outweighs the risk of consuming harmful bacteria and whether that which is lost can’t simply be replaced through other, safer means. Nonetheless, Walsh accused the pro-raw milk faction of succumbing to wrongheaded mythos in the shape of “evil sorcery”, mythos disassociated from the true.
That said, Walsh’s ridicule wasn’t entirely unjustified. Many of us will know someone who has taken it all a bit too far. I mean someone who, while enjoying a night out with friends, won’t eat anything in a particular restaurant because they cook with rapeseed oil. Or the guy who brings their pre-cooked-in-grassfed-cattle-butter ground beef to eat from a Tupperware box during the family’s Christmas dinner. There is, in extreme cases of any dietary purism, a move toward the sort of obsessive control around eating/not eating that would ordinarily be associated with eating disorders.
The fact that the element of control in such disorders is a form of transference is broadly accepted. Uncontrollable emotional trauma or personality defects are transferred into a different idiom of sorts, a realm of choice-making where a sometimes-deadly level of control is mercilessly adhered to. What might such traumas and defects be in the case of the latter-day nutritional purist? We’re back to that intuitive sense I mentioned above: that our cultural atmosphere is increasingly permeated with unsanitary and deleterious things and that government and big business are more culpable for this fact than they care to admit.
Unsavory cultural expressions are almost impossible to avoid in a digital age – and even when they can be avoided, the language and sentiments they express gradually filter into everyday interaction anyway. Culture is formed by contagion. The society we portray becomes the society portrayed. Like theories, consuming soy increases estrogen, which enters the water supply and ends up saturating everything – the good, the true, and the beautiful drowning in an onslaught of their opposites.
Plato’s Republic describes how unsanitary and deleterious cultural expressions harm those who encounter them. For Plato, that which is genuinely true is, of course, the Forms, which spring forth directly from the mind of the creator. The world of nature, which we perceive with our senses, is one step removed from the ideational reality and hence subject to myriad forms of unreliability. Objects formed by human beings are then even more ambiguous, being formed from nature they are thus two-steps removed from the realm of the true. Hence, human artifice is a dissident species of representation – of mimesis. This is a problem not only in terms of truth but also goodness and beauty, and thus ethics and aesthetics.
Hence Plato’s distrust of artists. The mimetic dissidence of art in relation to ultimate reality means the sort of character exhibited by those formed by human representative constructions – by art or poetry – will be mired in illusion, improper conduct, untruth, and relative ugliness. As he writes, a “low-grade mother like mimesis”, will “produce low-grade children”.
Yet it is not as simple as just opting instead for edifying representation, for manipulating mimesis for noble ends. In his more radical moments, Plato maintains that mimesis itself is inherently problematic. There is something about it that will always drag people down. We will be carried away by base feelings due to the intensity of artistic representation, as opposed to the calmer and more measured business of philosophical contemplation. And because, in stories, we’re beholding lives so far removed from our own, we can’t help but take a perverse delight in “the sight of the kind of person we’d regret and deplore being ourselves”. Moreover, because the artist or poet will always be in need of an audience, he will deliberately play to the “petulant and varied side of our characters” to evoke the most impassioned responses.
I’ve taught these elements from the Republic numerous times – and I’ve never fully agreed with him on this. I believe in the nobility and worth of art and poetry. But in recent years, certain passages from the Republic have developed a compelling sense of vindication. I wonder if there isn’t much in today’s world that is proving him right after all. Digital images mediated through internet technology inherently tend to be the lowest common denominator far more than any medium in prior history. One can point obviously to pornography, which accounts for an estimated 10% of internet traffic, but increasingly to the sheer slop of most social media content – particularly the short-form video bequeathed to us from TikTok, which is to the nurturing of attention what fentanyl is to wakeful consciousness. As put memorably by Mark Fisher, we live in a “superficial frenzy of newness, of perpetual movement,” a sort of permanent “recombinational delirium” constantly overrun by images that enact a dreadful “besieging of attention.” Algorithmic reasoning vividly demonstrates Plato’s concerns. The infuriating, appalling, tempting, lascivious, or just utterly stupid representations emerge triumphant from the fray by clocking millions upon millions of likes.
Now, of course, one could argue that, just as Plato went a step too far in condemning mimesis to court, we can use digital communications in a modified fashion, exercising control and intention in what we occupy our minds with and when and why. The trick is to be always mindful of not giving free reign to base emotion, or what Plato called “the petulant and varied side of our characters”. In some of my more reactionary moments, however, I’m not so sure. I sometimes wonder if there isn’t something inherently detrimental about photographic representation itself, mediated digitally, that constitutes a form of mimesis carrying its own “evil sorcery.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard discusses the original genesis of mechanical image reproduction in relation to the development of Renaissance art. He mentions how medieval art was shot through with human conception, not just perception. This is best demonstrated by the early medieval religious icon. Here, “depiction was routed through the human sphere, meaning the human being’s inner world of images, thoughts, feelings, notions, intuition and experience” was “transposed and objectified in the form of colours on a canvas”. This is shown by the formalized and decidedly non-representative tendencies of, say, a saint’s face or an angel’s body, with not a trace of the painter’s world present therein. This meant what was portrayed seemed not to belong “to any definitie moment” but rather “to all moments, to eternity”. During the Renaissance, artists increasingly prioritized earthly sight over transcendent conception.
It is precisely this trajectory that mechanical image reproduction emerges. Knausgaard writes that the “mechanization of the lens…liberates our attention from the soul”. It offers the promise of a “soulless eye” – a reality without the sort of principled goods that human souls ever bring to bear on that which they encounter, a glimpse of reality seen through the eyes of a ruined soul, a world purged of heaven, by freeze-framing a split-second moment or looping it through endless replay – a foundational condition for the development of human character is destroyed: temporality. In this sense, Geoff Dyer is right to call photography “the negation of chronology”. Digital communication brings with it a radical solitude in how such images are viewed, combined with a negation of space – you don’t need to go anywhere to see the image, and it is viewed by people everywhere more or less simultaneously.
Shorn of space, time, and interdependence limitations, the soulless eye takes over and mounts the throne of a pseudo-divine vantage point. People go out less; they lose hours at a time and increasingly spend their lives alone. On a journey in the Americas in 1924, D. H. Lawrence wrote about using his Kodak that photographers “see as the All-Seeing Eye sees” and that humanity could inhabit a non-human perspective and “see ourselves as the sun sees us.” But myths and legends are full of warnings about what this entails.
In this sense, the current age can sometimes seem inextricable from magic and sorcery – from the tale of Dr Faustus, from the fate of Prometheus, and also from Icarus. The solitary smartphone viewer losing hour after hour to short-form video is disappearing into what Shakespeare called “the vasty deep” from whence gruesome spirits are conjured, bringing about the ruin of souls. The great question of the age is, therefore, whether our consumption of these representations can sanitized by something like pasteurization, by the gentle heat of noble intentions and the pursuit of virtue. Or it might be that the reproductive process itself is so detrimental to natural goods that we’d do better to submit to Plato’s revenge and somehow try to begin again.
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