Thinking about life, death, the food chain, and social justice/control/cohesion

I wanted to offer some thoughts that came to mind while listening to a podcast by

Mike Oppenheim

who was interviewing

Jesse Hirsh

.

#219 - Futurist - Jesse Hirsh

Coffin talk explores how our relationship with death affects the way we live.

I grew up Christin within a Christian Country (Canada is Christian, despite claims of secularism), so there is some of what Christianity indoctrinated me with that will always be in the background of my thinking.

What happens after death?

I’ve not been comfortable with this question for much of my life, and only recently understood why. It relates to ongoing thinking about “self” and “individuality”.

I think of myself as my thoughts, contained within the brain. My brain is sustained and carried around by a “meat sack”.

When that meat sack “dies”, life will go on in other forms – maybe microbial and as food for plants, which will further be food for animals – some of which might be later generations of humans.

Life continues – but is it still “me”? Does that self, that individuality, matter?

When we eat an animal, do we incorporate the personality and memories of that animal within us? If you believe the personality of that animal doesn’t matter, then why does the personality of a human matter as life and its energy changes from one form to another?

Is there Anthropocentrism and Individualism built into the question of “what happens after death”?

Relationship with life, death and the food chain

Jesse’s early life was on a farm, then he lived in Toronto, and is later in life living on a farm again. He discussed how living on a farm creates a very different relationship with other animals, sometimes that you will eat. This induces a different way of looking at death and the food chain than someone who lives in an urban center, and who might not think about where their food comes from.

In my teens and early twenties, after moving to Ottawa from Sudbury, I thought about the whole question of meat as I met people who were vegetarians for political reasons.

I always wanted to know where my food came from. I didn’t grow up on a farm, but had been on one at a young age and knew meat came from animals.

It always bothered me how some people would block everything out of their minds, and think only that meat came from a grocery store. This felt disrespectful of the animal to me, but I never knew how to articulate that.

What I wished was there was a “meat license”, where someone needed to at least once go to a farm and kill an animal to eat, or at least catch a fish, clean it, and eat it. To this day I still prefer to purchase a whole fish and cut/clean myself before cooking, as it feels more respectful of the animal who is contributing to sustaining my life.

Other people’s relationship with human death

I experienced human death as a younger person with family friends, but the most emotional death was likely of my sister who died in 1989 at the age of 23 (I was 4 years younger).

My experience has not been a discomfort in my own thinking or talking about her death, but how other people react. People will ask if I have any brothers and sisters, and I tell them I have a younger brother and had (past tense) an older sister.

Immediately they often fall into this – Oh, I’m so sorry to hear. What can I do?

I then feel compelled to somehow console them for their emotions at trying to perform around my loss.

I really wish we were able to talk about the past, and have fond memories, without all this projection of how other people feel onto me. It might be because I’m Autistic that I think of death as a natural part of life, even though I’ve lived the city life my entire life, but I have found the inability to speak about people who are no longer with us to be confusing.

My parents have both died at this point, and I still find it confusing to try to deal with how other people get emotional about me talking about my own family members who are no longer alive.

Social control vs social cohesion (group cohesiveness)

The topic of social control came up, and I would love to hear more people exploring that theme.

Is there an objective way to separate the concepts of social control from social cohesion?

I recently read an article about American born expats, with a specific view about a specific ideological conditioning.

The Expat Delusion

Eventually I recognized that these ideas were the product of a very specific ideological conditioning. The rootless expat worldview was engineered in the wake of World War II, when the Western ruling class came to believe that strong national identities were dangerous precursors to conflict. The solution was to use education, media, and cultural institutions to unravel the oldest bonds common to people throughout history: ties to place, tradition, faith, and family. National pride was reframed as chauvinism, traditions became oppression, and connection to one’s own people was deemed bigotry to be replaced by an abstract commitment to humanity at large.

I see social engineering as what is enabling the on-going acceptance of settler-colonial institutions. I see it as its own concerted campaign by elites (maybe the same elites, maybe different ones?) to make people feel themselves only as individuals, with no connection to time or place, and with no sense of responsibility to others (other people, peoples, more-than-humans, etc).

Everything I read is put into conversation in my mind with everything else I have read, so I put this in the context of what Anishinaabe and Ukrainian writer Patty Krawec writes about, including in her book Becoming Kin.

The following is from a published excerpt, from the chapter “Creation: How We Got Here,” where the author explores how Christian and Indigenous origin stories diverge.

The history of the Christian West revolves around a different centre. Beginning with possibility, it ends in punishment as the first man and woman are cast from Eden. It reads itself into the captivity of the Hebrews in Egypt and their conquest of Canaan, a pattern of expulsion and conquest that would repeat when the church fled Jerusalem and became Rome and then left Europe and subjugated the Americas and the Pacific. It is a story of continual wandering and searching for a place to make a home, often through violence. This is a central theme in literature and movies; from Wagon Train to Star Trek, Americans admire this desire to boldly go and then bravely defend themselves from those who resent discovery. Discovery, after all, has never been good for those it has uncovered. It inevitably leads to exploitation and death.

Christians are unmoored, landless people. Maybe that disconnection from land is what has led to other disconnections.

Where one author referenced above sees the problem as what some might call Neoliberalism, and another as the Christian origin story (and worldviews grown from that), we seem to still be talking about social programming. If you agree with the programming you might call it “social cohesion”, and if you disagree with the programming you might call it “social control”.

In my own exploration of the programming I’ve grown up with and experience in “Canadian Culture”, I have come to want to see a major change in that programming.

As I continue to read books such as The Great Law of Peace- Kayanerenko:wa , and The Seven Generations and The Seven Grandfather Teachings, I feel those stories and ideas are a far better foundation upon which to build a society than the stories/ideas that grew out of the West (Western Asia, Mediterranean, Europe – primarily Western Europe, European settler-colonialism, Western exceptionalism, a large set of supremacist ideologies, ethic of interference, etc).

Does my strong preference for one set of “social programming” and origin stories over another mean I am an advocate for “social control”?

I suspect those who believe a connection to settler-colonial institutions such as Canada or the USA counts as “ties to place, tradition, faith” would consider what I suggest to be social control. They might consider these ideas to be an even worse form of control than the so-called “elites” they feel they are fighting against have proposed.

In my mind, my life formed on and was sustained by a specific region of this continent. I feel I owe respect to the history and life (peoples and more-than-human beings) of this continent.

I do not believe “Canada” is of this continent, so my growing desire in my latter years to have better “ties to place, tradition, faith” makes me feel less and less interested in ties to “Canada”, Europe, Christianity, or British North American settler-colonialism generally.