Salmon are not as innocent as they seem. It is the same with other animals, like cuddly skunks, but the danger of salmon is not as obvious to everyone – or perhaps to anyone besides myself. They don’t bite people as far as I know, and they aren’t destroying the ecosystem in their natural habitat (this might not be true in the Great Lakes). Instead, they are an exceptionally tasty fish which, alas, is less common now that hydroelectricity has commandeered the rivers of the great Northwest. In fact, they mean nothing but goodness to the normal human on an average day – unless, that is, that person has been steeped in the history of the Northwest Coast Indians. It is then that the average guy learns to see the danger of them, not as fish, but in what they mirror back to us humans.
This wasn’t my first thought when I saw “Wild Northwest Coast” smoked fish on sale for only $6.99 a pound at our local supermarket. My first thought was of how good it would be either plain or on a Triscuit with cream cheese, and on how it would be all mine – mine! – because so many other people (wife, kid) can’t appreciate the finer things in life. It wasn’t my next thought either, or my next, but it hit me the following morning after I had stuffed myself on its smoky-fishy deliciousness the night before while watching the last chapters of the Amazon sci-fi series, The Expanse. In this tale, the “proto-molecule” had developed a tele-portal that humans could take to an estimated 1300 habitable planets, which was a really big deal for an Earth wallowing in the poverty and misery of grotesque overpopulation. But here’s the rub: regardless of the vast opportunities, the opening up of these new worlds created instant conflict among the factions for control of the portal and the resources of the new worlds. Whereas people were formally killing each other over meager resources, now they began to kill themselves over huge resources.
Of course, The Expanse is only fiction, but unfortunately it is fiction that is spot on in this case for human history. The discovery of the New World, for instance, which, after the demise of most native peoples from disease, became a true wilderness, did not bring peace to Europe, but rather expanded its theater of belligerence. And, lest we believe that conflict over an abundance of resources is only a Western capitalist thing, we can go to America’s Northwest Coast, where a great number of American Indians survived the initial bout of diseases to remain plentiful. They were able to do so because they could rebuild their population quickly and easily. They were able to maintain and rebuild so quickly not because of new medicine or the wonders of a damp climate, but because of – yes – the salmon.
Until the dams, the salmon of the Northwest made legendary runs of millions upon millions up river to spawn and die. Unlike other fish, salmon have real fat, fat that provides the necessary calories needed by mammals. Along with the other nutritional qualities, the salmon, preserved by smoke for the winter months, were able to nourish hundreds of thousands of humans without the need for agriculture or pastoralism. Such it was that the Indians of this area were able to create and maintain the only known high-density, complex cultural system without plant and animal domestication. Such it was, in other words, that the people in this part of the world had it made. They had all the food they needed without hard, continuous work. You couldn’t get more ‘Portland’ than that, even without the craft beer and high-end coffee.
Here’s the hard part, and why salmon are dangerous, at least to our self-image: with all that abundance both before and after the arrival of the Europeans, the Northwest coast Indians were in near-constant warfare. This was done for prestige and for slaves, which they did not really need except to display for more prestige. The slaves were not separated from the others by race, but rather by tribe and family. Snobbery of the bloodlines of nobility was carved into their totem poles, clearly giving us a “who’s who” of elite and commoners. Slaves were not high on the totem pole and did not have to be treated as fellow humans. Because they were not considered as full humans, they were often sacrificed to local gods or spirits for good luck or for medical cures, killings which were often purposefully slow and painful. In the Northwest, if one were a noble, life was good unless and until one died in warfare. For the rest, it was often humiliating or downright dangerous. All this death and misery, mind you, in the midst of over-abundance.
In the 18th century the educated classes of Europe argued about the nature of man, at last free of the Judeo-Christian notion that, after the sin of Adam and Eve, we were born to vice. Hobbes claimed that life was brutish and short, while Roseau insisted that we would be little angels if we were not raised in stratified societies. Most thinkers of the day favored Roseau (excluding America’s famously practical founders), and a century later, Marx continued with the notion, citing examples of utopic indigenous societies throughout the world. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas, an immigrant to the US, became a believer in utopia as well. He sent out his protégées to prove just this, including Margaret Mead, who wrote about the ideal life in her famous book, Coming of Age in Samoa. Here she concluded that before white influence, Samoans lived idyllic lives. Wrapped in the mandatory Freudian psychology of the day, Mead underscored their free and easy sex life, which took away the evil of sexual repression, the primary reason cited by Freud for conflict.
We can see from this how “free love” advocacy developed in the modern era. We can also see how wrong they were. The current batch of American youth are richer and safer than any other generation, yet are more addicted and more suicidal than at least the last four generations, if not all the past generations of Americans. A revisit to the field methods and literature in Samoa also showed a great amount of conflict, including rape, in the traditional society. Mead, apparently, had gone out to prove her professor right, regardless of the facts, as had many other researchers. Greater study has shown fairly conclusively that Utopia is only an idea and an ideal.
At our house, we have recently watched a series of sci-fi vignettes on Amazon Prime called Electric Dreams, adapted from Phillip Dick’s writings from the early 20th century. One featured a small community left over from an atomic holocaust that was trying to rebuild civilization in its small way, but was hampered by a production facility similar in delivery service to Amazon. What had happened was that the company’s factory had been completely automated for self-continuation, and continued to produce massive amounts of fairly useless items (ie, thousands of sneakers) after the war, now for only a handful of consumers. As we join the small community, we see that the company is destroying the world through its over-production, delivering boxes and boxes of its trinkets by drone to this and other remnant communities throughout the world. Our small group has decided it must destroy the factory. It is finally infiltrated by the community’s electronic genius, but she is captured by an android and strapped down for re-programming – not of brains, but of her computer chips. What we come to find is that all of humanity had been destroyed in the wars. Lacking customers, then, the factory had made artificial surrogates who would serve as humans in need.
However: the “mind” of the genius who is really a robot was built on the brain-waves of the real human genius. We find that she (the android genius) had already figured this all out before her capture, and had set in her own mind a virus that would destroy the factory when downloaded. To prove to herself initially that she was a robot, she had had to strip away not only her false flesh, but the illusion of her humanness by forcing herself to think through the programming that had made her blind to her own (otherwise obvious) android nature, as it had to everyone else in the community.
In the end, as the factory self-destructs, she goes back to the boy she had come to love, leaving all the others free to build their ideal society as they continue to live under the illusion of humanness.
And that is how we live, blind to who and what we are. And this is how the salmon can be dangerous to our continued “production” of reality: they can mirror back to us the blindness and outright wrongness of our conception of ourselves and nature; they can force us see that our needs and desires and goals are products of a shared illusion that causes us to always be in need no matter how much we have; they can show us that this need can make us jealous enough to kill, as was Cain, or make us as sexually insatiable as dirty old sultans, or as greedy as the legendary Midas and the real-life robber barons and merchants of goods and bodies of past and present. Without this special vision, we can peel back our skin all we want but still only see flesh and blood, just as the genius robot did until she forced herself to look beyond the illusion intended to make her an eternal consumer of excess goods.
We need to do the same. We need, I think, more than anything else to see through the illusion that tells us that we are only physical animals. The modern designers of utopia failed and continue to fail to see past this illusion, causing them to fail time and again in their endeavors. While it is true that the theologically- minded of the past could not make paradise on Earth either, they did understand that we lived under this illusion. They did understand that we were first and foremost spiritual beings who would suffer as long as we believed ourselves to be primarily of flesh and blood.
Someday we will not believe it. Unlike the androids, our flesh and blood will leave us someday as a part of the program, and our supernatural nature will be revealed. If we could see it in the here and now, no matter how dimly, it might go better for us. To do this and really believe it, however, is about as tough as turning the other cheek or giving away our last cloak.
Maybe the best most of us can do for now is to realize that we sometimes have more than enough salmon to go around, and that nobody but ourselves is that impressed when we have more than we need. Once that is out of the way, who knows what else we might find?
Salmon are not as innocent as they seem. It is the same with other animals, like cuddly skunks, but the danger of salmon is not as obvious to everyone – or perhaps to anyone besides myself. They don’t bite people as far as I know, and they aren’t destroying the ecosystem in their natural habitat (this might not be true in the Great Lakes). Instead, they are an exceptionally tasty fish which, alas, is less common now that hydroelectricity has commandeered the rivers of the great Northwest. In fact, they mean nothing but goodness to the normal human on an average day – unless, that is, that person has been steeped in the history of the Northwest Coast Indians. It is then that the average guy learns to see the danger of them, not as fish, but in what they mirror back to us humans.
This wasn’t my first thought when I saw “Wild Northwest Coast” smoked fish on sale for only $6.99 a pound at our local supermarket. My first thought was of how good it would be either plain or on a Triscuit with cream cheese, and on how it would be all mine – mine! – because so many other people (wife, kid) can’t appreciate the finer things in life. It wasn’t my next thought either, or my next, but it hit me the following morning after I had stuffed myself on its smoky-fishy deliciousness the night before while watching the last chapters of the Amazon sci-fi series, The Expanse. In this tale, the “proto-molecule” had developed a tele-portal that humans could take to an estimated 1300 habitable planets, which was a really big deal for an Earth wallowing in the poverty and misery of grotesque overpopulation. But here’s the rub: regardless of the vast opportunities, the opening up of these new worlds created instant conflict among the factions for control of the portal and the resources of the new worlds. Whereas people were formally killing each other over meager resources, now they began to kill themselves over huge resources.
Of course, The Expanse is only fiction, but unfortunately it is fiction that is spot on in this case for human history. The discovery of the New World, for instance, which, after the demise of most native peoples from disease, became a true wilderness, did not bring peace to Europe, but rather expanded its theater of belligerence. And, lest we believe that conflict over an abundance of resources is only a Western capitalist thing, we can go to America’s Northwest Coast, where a great number of American Indians survived the initial bout of diseases to remain plentiful. They were able to do so because they could rebuild their population quickly and easily. They were able to maintain and rebuild so quickly not because of new medicine or the wonders of a damp climate, but because of – yes – the salmon.
Until the dams, the salmon of the Northwest made legendary runs of millions upon millions up river to spawn and die. Unlike other fish, salmon have real fat, fat that provides the necessary calories needed by mammals. Along with the other nutritional qualities, the salmon, preserved by smoke for the winter months, were able to nourish hundreds of thousands of humans without the need for agriculture or pastoralism. Such it was that the Indians of this area were able to create and maintain the only known high-density, complex cultural system without plant and animal domestication. Such it was, in other words, that the people in this part of the world had it made. They had all the food they needed without hard, continuous work. You couldn’t get more ‘Portland’ than that, even without the craft beer and high-end coffee.
Here’s the hard part, and why salmon are dangerous, at least to our self-image: with all that abundance both before and after the arrival of the Europeans, the Northwest coast Indians were in near-constant warfare. This was done for prestige and for slaves, which they did not really need except to display for more prestige. The slaves were not separated from the others by race, but rather by tribe and family. Snobbery of the bloodlines of nobility was carved into their totem poles, clearly giving us a “who’s who” of elite and commoners. Slaves were not high on the totem pole and did not have to be treated as fellow humans. Because they were not considered as full humans, they were often sacrificed to local gods or spirits for good luck or for medical cures, killings which were often purposefully slow and painful. In the Northwest, if one were a noble, life was good unless and until one died in warfare. For the rest, it was often humiliating or downright dangerous. All this death and misery, mind you, in the midst of over-abundance.
In the 18th century the educated classes of Europe argued about the nature of man, at last free of the Judeo-Christian notion that, after the sin of Adam and Eve, we were born to vice. Hobbes claimed that life was brutish and short, while Roseau insisted that we would be little angels if we were not raised in stratified societies. Most thinkers of the day favored Roseau (excluding America’s famously practical founders), and a century later, Marx continued with the notion, citing examples of utopic indigenous societies throughout the world. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas, an immigrant to the US, became a believer in utopia as well. He sent out his protégées to prove just this, including Margaret Mead, who wrote about the ideal life in her famous book, Coming of Age in Samoa. Here she concluded that before white influence, Samoans lived idyllic lives. Wrapped in the mandatory Freudian psychology of the day, Mead underscored their free and easy sex life, which took away the evil of sexual repression, the primary reason cited by Freud for conflict.
We can see from this how “free love” advocacy developed in the modern era. We can also see how wrong they were. The current batch of American youth are richer and safer than any other generation, yet are more addicted and more suicidal than at least the last four generations, if not all the past generations of Americans. A revisit to the field methods and literature in Samoa also showed a great amount of conflict, including rape, in the traditional society. Mead, apparently, had gone out to prove her professor right, regardless of the facts, as had many other researchers. Greater study has shown fairly conclusively that Utopia is only an idea and an ideal.
At our house, we have recently watched a series of sci-fi vignettes on Amazon Prime called Electric Dreams, adapted from Phillip Dick’s writings from the early 20th century. One featured a small community left over from an atomic holocaust that was trying to rebuild civilization in its small way, but was hampered by a production facility similar in delivery service to Amazon. What had happened was that the company’s factory had been completely automated for self-continuation, and continued to produce massive amounts of fairly useless items (ie, thousands of sneakers) after the war, now for only a handful of consumers. As we join the small community, we see that the company is destroying the world through its over-production, delivering boxes and boxes of its trinkets by drone to this and other remnant communities throughout the world. Our small group has decided it must destroy the factory. It is finally infiltrated by the community’s electronic genius, but she is captured by an android and strapped down for re-programming – not of brains, but of her computer chips. What we come to find is that all of humanity had been destroyed in the wars. Lacking customers, then, the factory had made artificial surrogates who would serve as humans in need.
However: the “mind” of the genius who is really a robot was built on the brain-waves of the real human genius. We find that she (the android genius) had already figured this all out before her capture, and had set in her own mind a virus that would destroy the factory when downloaded. To prove to herself initially that she was a robot, she had had to strip away not only her false flesh, but the illusion of her humanness by forcing herself to think through the programming that had made her blind to her own (otherwise obvious) android nature, as it had to everyone else in the community.
In the end, as the factory self-destructs, she goes back to the boy she had come to love, leaving all the others free to build their ideal society as they continue to live under the illusion of humanness.
And that is how we live, blind to who and what we are. And this is how the salmon can be dangerous to our continued “production” of reality: they can mirror back to us the blindness and outright wrongness of our conception of ourselves and nature; they can force us see that our needs and desires and goals are products of a shared illusion that causes us to always be in need no matter how much we have; they can show us that this need can make us jealous enough to kill, as was Cain, or make us as sexually insatiable as dirty old sultans, or as greedy as the legendary Midas and the real-life robber barons and merchants of goods and bodies of past and present. Without this special vision, we can peel back our skin all we want but still only see flesh and blood, just as the genius robot did until she forced herself to look beyond the illusion intended to make her an eternal consumer of excess goods.
We need to do the same. We need, I think, more than anything else to see through the illusion that tells us that we are only physical animals. The modern designers of utopia failed and continue to fail to see past this illusion, causing them to fail time and again in their endeavors. While it is true that the theologically- minded of the past could not make paradise on Earth either, they did understand that we lived under this illusion. They did understand that we were first and foremost spiritual beings who would suffer as long as we believed ourselves to be primarily of flesh and blood.
Someday we will not believe it. Unlike the androids, our flesh and blood will leave us someday as a part of the program, and our supernatural nature will be revealed. If we could see it in the here and now, no matter how dimly, it might go better for us. To do this and really believe it, however, is about as tough as turning the other cheek or giving away our last cloak.
Maybe the best most of us can do for now is to realize that we sometimes have more than enough salmon to go around, and that nobody but ourselves is that impressed when we have more than we need. Once that is out of the way, who knows what else we might find?
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