Pro Commerce

Biological Commerce

I just finished reading Merlin Sheldrake’s book on mycelia.  I didn’t read it for months because my daughter (a PhD in biology) kept recommending it and I kept saying, “I knew him, I don’t need to read it.”  I was wrong.  I knew his father in hippy days as everyone did, Rupert Sheldrake.

The book is excellent and easy to read. Merlin, like his father, is a little grandiose and has a slight tendency to exaggerate.  I’m not complaining, I do it myself. Mycelium are terribly under appreciated.  

I am a mycelia fanatic.  I love an organism that was not recognized as its own phyla until I was 25 years old and still doesn’t fit into the Linnaean categories.  Like I love pointing out that medicine was mostly wives’ tales until I was born before WWII when penicillin was first used.  Penicillin comes from mycelia so the two issues are related.

Merlin Sheldrake likes to focus on many of the problems in our understanding and thinking about mycelia.  I enjoy that about his book.

The whole biological sphere has a problem.  Fungi can’t get energy directly from the sun, and green plants that do so through photosynthesis, can’t get many vital chemicals such as nitrogen and phosphorus from the air or the soil.  The relationship between mycelia and plants that allows the plants to get the vital chemicals to exist and the mycelia to get the energy (sugars) to exist has the wrong  name.  

The name for this exchange is generally called parasitism. But that is definitely wrong because there is a symbiosis, both giant categories need the other.  There is a mutually beneficial exchange that takes place. Sheldrake makes that clear; he also points out that biology is deficient in words to explain the mutual dependence that takes place.

This is where the word ‘commerce’ is needed.  What takes place between the mycelia and plants is a mutually beneficial exchange. The very definition of ‘commerce.’  It is biological commerce.

Commerce is the right word but most people don’t understand the common use of the word.  Commerce is always mutually beneficial.  One of the few human endeavors that is mutually beneficial. 

Commerce is 99.4% cooperation.  Go to any commercial establishment and see that it only works because everyone cooperates.  Not just everyone who is visible, but also the suppliers, the whole supply chain, the advisors, the consultants, the outside workers and the landlords.  The 0.6% consists of the government agencies that represent all the present and past hostile forces to the healthy thriving of the commerce and to some extent people who believe they are more suited to supply the clients, often called competitors.

When we truly understand the unique attributes of commerce, what it really is, we will appreciate this greatest of all god’s gifts and we will be able to apply it to biology.

The Problem of Public Transportation

I’ve stopped riding most public transportation.  

The reason I’ve stopped riding most public transportation in San Francisco is that the street people ride it often and their smell, in an enclosed space, can be unbearable to me.  I find many people have the same reaction as I.

Since I don’t expect the street people problem to be solved in the foreseeable future and I certainly don’t expect the smelly people on public transport problem to be resolved in the foreseeable future; I have a solution.

The law can ban unduly smelly people from entering public transport.  The problem with this solution is that leaving the decision of who smells too bad can not be left up to the vagaries of individual noses.

The solution is to use a meter at the entry point to buses and other transport.  The image of just such a meter is on the right.  This meter detects and measures ammonia. Ammonia is the main ingredient in the foul smell of all human beings.

I was unable to measure a sufficient large sample of foul-smelling people to get a reliable number to publish here.  

We have determined a reliable number for the alcohol breath test for drivers to measure drunkenness.  The same approach can be used for foul smelling street people.

Not Tokyo First

A friend took a tour of Japan with a prestigious tour company and the first stop, for a few days, was Tokyo.  I screamed in disbelief.  

I spent the first ten years studying Japan by visiting Kyoto. In the following three decades, I took all new friends with me to a small beach town for the first three or four days to acclimate to Japan.  Tokyo is probably the most complex modern city in the world and it is overwhelming. The streets are laid out based on rice paddy paths and old daimyo estates. It has 40 million residents.  Kyoto is wide boulevards laid out on a north/south grid and much slower. 

Japan was the first stop on a global trip where I first became aware of culture at age 33.  I was well educated and knew about culture from reading Benedict, Mead, Bateson, Boaz, Sapir, Whorf, Levi-Strauss, Geertz, Malinowski and others.  But I didn’t know what culture is.

I would guess Americans who know what culture is are less than one in a thousand.  A higher percentage are probably found in Europe.

Culture is the totality of a people’s life. People are a group that speak the same language and live most of their early life together.  Our perception of the world is created and that creation is done by the group of people who surround us and have a common experience.

At 33, I realized what culture was and decided to study it for the rest of my life.  I chose Japan as the object of my study because I liked the food, it was clean and I was comfortable in Japan. I could have chosen Switzerland but it was too similar to my own culture, making it more difficult.

Over the past 50 years I have gone to Japan for a month or more, every year, and visited most of the country.  Now I just sit in one high pedestrian traffic place for hours and watch life go by and lead as simple a life, the rest of the day, as I can.  I have about 25 close friends whom I have watched and visited annually for many decades. My friends range from a man who was homeless for a decade in a large Tokyo park to a woman who helped shape Japanese fashion and was recognized for her life’s work by the Emperor, last year.

To give you a taste of culture: When the Japanese look at a rainbow they see two colors of blue; we, as indicated by a rainbow flag, see one.  We have a Federal law that commercially sold hot tubs can not heat water to more than 104 degrees. A Japanese adult would consider any bath below 108 degrees as lukewarm.

Reconsidering Social Thought

In my early 40s I came to realize the nature of human thought.  Thanks to Mary Douglas for her book How Institutions Think. I created a half-hour national public radio interview program on that subject called Social Thought. The program ran for nine years and remains on the Internet.

Human beings organize their thoughts and lives hierarchically. The three overarching ideas that descend step by step to our everyday lives begin with God, power and money. 

For most of my life, the past 85 years, Americans believed in God among 60% of the population and the balance were 20% each for power and money as the driving forces.

Today we have woke. Woke is derived from an overarching belief in power.  My guess is that God has dropped to 45% in the U.S. and power has grown to 35% with money still at 20% of the population. Some people confuse power and money but nearly all depend much more on one than the other.

The dominant woke thinkers are derived from Michel Foucault and include Jurgen Habermas and Theodore Adorno. In America the influences include Herbert Marcuse. The core thesis is that power drives the world of humans.

When power is viewed as the dominant force in society the sub categories used for explanation of the world can easily include colonialism, white power, and the associated anti-black racism. Thrown into wokism are also anti-male views, anti-meritocracy and lately Jew hate.

Wokism is not going away. Marxism is right on its tail as a core explanatory thesis. God is not coming back.