Muck and Mystery
   Loitering With Intent
blog - at - crumbtrail.org
April 30, 2008
Agro-perversion

A perhaps not so loosely related thought on the Agriculture of Tomorrow. [via Cosma, in an indirect way which involved some searching inspired by a tossed off comment that he probably could have given a citation for and saved me the work, but no, he speaks mostly to insiders who don't need to search it up. Their jokes may be numbered, to save them the time needed to tell them. ]

The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural. Consider so simple and time-honored a process as the milking of a cow. The milk which should have been an intimate and almost sacramental bond between mother and child is elicited by the deft fingers of a milk-maid, and drunk, cooked, or even allowed to rot into cheese. We have only to imagine ourselves as drinking any of its other secretions, in order to realise the radical indecency of our relation to the cow. {6}

No less disgusting a priori is the process of corruption which yields our wine and beer. But in actual fact the process of milking and of the making and drinking of beer appear to us profoundly natural; they have even tended to develop a ritual of their own whose infraction nowadays has a certain air of impropriety. There is something slightly disgusting in the idea of milking a cow electrically or drinking beer out of tea-cups. And all this of course applies much more strongly to the sexual act.

DAEDALUS: or Science and the Future
A paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on February 4th, 1923
by J. B. S. Haldane

Emphasis added by me.


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Comments

Izzat so?

Only an intellectual would be able to lump "setting a broken bone" and "creating a viable human-pig chimera" into the same ethical category.

Some folks need to get out into the fresh air and chat with the hewers of wood and bearers of water a little more often.

Posted by: Mike Anderson at April 30, 2008 01:24 PM

Hi Mike,

Almost no one accuses me of being an intellectual, so that must be directed at Haldane. Still, I see his point in a loose sort of mostly-ignorant-of-the-details way.

Posted by: back40 at April 30, 2008 01:51 PM

I'm tempted to spin something about how you wouldn't appreciate this half so much if you hadn't had to search for it, but the truth is the del.icio.us space limits make me unhelpfully gnomic. (If you could point me to the place where allusions to Daedalus are common currency, I'd appreciate it!)

Posted by: Cosma at May 3, 2008 12:55 PM

Gnomic. I like that. It suits you - at least the you that inhabits my mind, though your you may be entirely different. Or something.

Posted by: back40 at May 3, 2008 02:14 PM
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