Conviviality and Commonality

It has made the name of a minor character in a novel by Herman Melville into a household word.  It inspired Johann Sebastian Bach to write a cantata.  The "it" is coffee, made from the berries of plants of the genus Coffea.

Career teachers inevitably accumulate props to enliven their teaching.  My middle-school Spanish teacher had one prop that particularly fascinated me.  It was a set of five small glass jars demonstrating coffee production, from bright red fruit (simulated) through green beans to ground coffee -- the last being the only form in which most people in the U.S. at that time knew coffee.  I was fascinated by the contents of those jars, wanting to know more than the Spanish words.  I think I looked at the set closely because I so much wanted to understand this world.

Although cultivated coffee dates back to the 15th century (the plant originating in Ethiopia), the coffeehouse did not develop until the 16th century in Turkey.  The first such business in the main part of Europe appeared in the mid 1600's, no more than a century after coffee was introduced there.  (Bach's 1735 "coffee cantata" was titled "Be Quiet, Stop Chattering.")  Today, half of the adults in the world drink coffee.  We of humankind are divided on so many issues, but half of us agree upon liking coffee.

Les Deux Magots
in Paris today

In centuries before democracy, coffeehouses could be hotbeds for political criticism.  After the rise of democracies in Europe, those social gathering places became more associated with intellectual and literary movements.  In the decades of disillusionment after World War I, Les Deux Magots in Paris became one center for existentialist writers such as Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.  Those literati tried to come to grips with "modern times," or Les Temps modernes, as their periodical was named.  I'm not sure what the chief mate named "Starbuck" in Melville's Moby Dick would think of his name being on thousands of coffee outlets today.  That the Starbucks company was wanting a literary reference for their establishments is underscored by their having first considered "Pequod," the ship's name in that novel.  ("Starbucks" is certainly easier to pronounce.)

Even before counter-cultural beatnik coffeehouses emerged in the 1950's (and even longer before today's widely mainstream Starbucks), there was the tradition of the coffee break:  A chance to pause from work.  And a chance perhaps to chat with one's co-workers.

To me, all those percolating pots, dripping coffee-makers, and hissing espresso machines speak a message about our Homo sapiens species.  They say that we do not live solely by bodily nutrition nor by work alone.  If those little red Coffea berries could tell the story of all the experiences they have been through, they would tell us that human beings need a rhythm of work and relaxation, and that we also need conviviality.  And to have our minds stimulated.

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Can you think of another plant whose life is intertwined with the lives of human beings?

(The photo of coffee beans is by Marcelo Corrêa

and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Green in Tooth and Claw

As my explorations of history become more detailed, I find our misconceptions about history most interesting.  Frequently, it seems to me, our misconceptions reveal as much about us as they reveal about the actual historical events.

Such is the case with the all so familiar phrase "red in tooth and claw."  Today it is often used to evoke a picture of a "Darwinian" world of a predatory "survival of the fittest."  So much so, that most people assume the phrase "red in tooth and claw" was inspired by Darwin's theory of evolution.  In fact, that blood-tipped phrase predates Origin of Species by nine years, having been penned by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his 1850 poem "In Memoriam."  Moreover, Tennyson's poetic lament was prompted not by the death of any dinosaurs, but by the death of one of Tennyson's closest human friends.

Regardless of the origins of the phrase, more significant is what it conveys about our perceptions of Nature -- especially as we try to relate Nature to our human spirituality.  Or as we aim to say whether we can discover a sacredness in the world of Nature.

Charles Darwin

A parallel misconception about history lies behind the phrase "survival of the fittest," which most people assume to have been introduced by Charles Darwin in Origin of Species.  In fact, what Darwin used in the first edition of his book was the phrase "struggle for existence," which does not sound as competitive.  Even that phrase was already in circulation -- but for describing human society.  In Britain during the first half of the 19th century, industrialization and migration to the cities had increased social strife.  Darwin employed that firsthand experience of a human "struggle for existence" in order to make his explanation for the evolution of other species of life more understandable.

(I do sometimes wonder what animals might think if they could know all the human projections we place upon them.)

bee covered with pollen
in hibiscus flower

Today, our vastly increasing knowledge from the science of ecology reveals how evolution has occurred not just through competition but also through all sorts of mutually beneficial relationships. True, there is an ambiguity in Nature, in that the death of the prey means life to the predator.  And it is also true that there is an element of chance in biological evolution (just as there is in human life). However, one teacher of biology tells me that because of all the ways birds and insects pollinate plants as they gather food, there are more cooperative relationships than there are competitive relationships in Nature.

Nature as a whole is strongly self-sustaining.  So much so that we might borrow the word "green" from the environmental movement to say that Nature is green in tooth and claw!

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Where do you see relationships in the non-human realm of Nature?

(The drawing of Darwin is in the public domain

in the U.S. because it is over 70 years old.)

(The flower photograph, by Luc Viatour, is used under terms of GNU Free Documentation License.)