agriculture can be fun...
I remember reading about the invention of paintball some time ago. If memory serves, it involved the convergence of a friendly disagreement in a conversation regarding the relative survival skills acquired in urban versus rural upbringings and the opportune discovery of an existing tool used by sheep ranchers for marking their stock. And I remember thinking that nothing leads to great leaps of civilization like disinterested intellectual discourse and Yankee problem-solving. In a Parisian café, for instance, such a disagreement would have remained a mere intellectual argument, possibly eventually resulting in deeply entrenched rival philosophies. Never in America: In America we resolve our disagreements through science and action. We are not satisfied with a web of untested hypotheses and stillborn ideas. Instead, Americans will devise an experiment to test the point in question in a free-market economy of ideas, in this case a few wooded acres of the New England countryside.
So I was visiting some friends the other day. They were recently blessed with the birth of their firstborn, a beautiful and quite a serious little boy. This was the first I had seen them since the birth, so when my friend said that he had to run an errand, I offered to join him, desiring to catch a bit of windshield time and see how he was holding up in the whirlwind of new fatherhood. As it turns out we were going to pick up a breast pump. Now, I have had a few accidental interactions with the electric breast pump, cleaning a nozzle among a sink full of dishes and that sort of thing. But this was my first time ever actually seeing the machine. It is an intriguing thing. The pump had the look of a piece of medical equipment, like something that you would see in a hospital, in the birthing unit, of course, as there were not enough lights or dials or buttons or tubes for it to be for the ICU or emergency room or anything. It is portable, compact, and yet not so small that you wouldn’t notice it sitting on an end table. But the medical nature was masked, mitigated visually by the fact that it had rounded edges, it was made of tough plastic, and it was the sort of color usually reserved for newborns’ toys. And reaching from it, the simplest clear plastic tube sat prepared to bridge the gap between machine and man (or in this case, decidedly woman). What a marvelously engineered device!
Picture a Renaissance painting of the Madonna and Child. There sits Mary, seated in her glory as a beautiful, new mother. And to her breast she holds… a plastic cup connected to a plastic tube and a brightly colored plastic box with a dial on it, the Child sitting elsewhere in the room. We have actually taken the most beautiful, innocent, intimate connection between a mother and child and MECHANIZED it.
So in my momentary passing glance at this breast pump, being an American and a man I found myself wondering aloud, which was invented first: the breast pump or the automatic cow milking machine, and whether one of the inventions led to the other or whether they were imagined separately. The Lady of the House immediately posited that likely the dairy version came first, as the need for the people version would only have been terribly useful after women began to join the workforce. This made good sense, but I decided to investigate the subject. As it turns out, she appears to have been correct. It seems that the earliest suction milking machines were being patented in the 1850’s. The breast pump, on the other hand, was invented in the 20th century by a chess player, a man named Edward Lasker. Mr. Lasker was a German-born American with degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering, and he played chess, contending even for the U.S. championship. Lasker also played go, and even helped found the American Go Association. A go player invented the breast pump! In many ways, chess is a beautiful game, logical, mathematical. Go is graceful. It is organic. It is a dance and it is war, life and death. And a go player invented the breast pump! Why is this significant?
I have seen two faces a great deal lately, both looking out my window and in the mirror. One shines upon nature and upon life, the organic. The other’s eyes brighten at technology, art, the created and the new, industry and organization. The faces look in different directions, and with distance from a point their paths diverge. Essentially the difference between what we call organic and what we call industrial is the agency of man. The fewer times we act upon something, the shallower we go toward the essential elements in our imposition of order, the more we call it natural, organic. But our words betray a friendly disagreement at this point. What is organic is characterized by life. Things alive are composed according to a separation of powers, a division of labor. Looking in ourselves we see different organs with different functions. And as we attempt to recreate the natural orders, mimic them, we act with craft and industry, essentially, we organize. We even create corporations in our own image, magnificent fictitious bodies that act with the power of thousands, imposing their own order on the natural world. And so the other face looks away, toward nature. We attempt to mitigate the agency of man, we place value on the organic. And yet we cannot exorcise the other face. To do so would be to eliminate the agency of man. It would be suicide.
So what does Yankee problem solving do with this friendly disagreement? That remains to be seen. Perhaps there are instruments already existing to resolve the question, a sheep marker or a milking machine, to be exercised on a few wooded acres in New England.
So I was visiting some friends the other day. They were recently blessed with the birth of their firstborn, a beautiful and quite a serious little boy. This was the first I had seen them since the birth, so when my friend said that he had to run an errand, I offered to join him, desiring to catch a bit of windshield time and see how he was holding up in the whirlwind of new fatherhood. As it turns out we were going to pick up a breast pump. Now, I have had a few accidental interactions with the electric breast pump, cleaning a nozzle among a sink full of dishes and that sort of thing. But this was my first time ever actually seeing the machine. It is an intriguing thing. The pump had the look of a piece of medical equipment, like something that you would see in a hospital, in the birthing unit, of course, as there were not enough lights or dials or buttons or tubes for it to be for the ICU or emergency room or anything. It is portable, compact, and yet not so small that you wouldn’t notice it sitting on an end table. But the medical nature was masked, mitigated visually by the fact that it had rounded edges, it was made of tough plastic, and it was the sort of color usually reserved for newborns’ toys. And reaching from it, the simplest clear plastic tube sat prepared to bridge the gap between machine and man (or in this case, decidedly woman). What a marvelously engineered device!
Picture a Renaissance painting of the Madonna and Child. There sits Mary, seated in her glory as a beautiful, new mother. And to her breast she holds… a plastic cup connected to a plastic tube and a brightly colored plastic box with a dial on it, the Child sitting elsewhere in the room. We have actually taken the most beautiful, innocent, intimate connection between a mother and child and MECHANIZED it.
So in my momentary passing glance at this breast pump, being an American and a man I found myself wondering aloud, which was invented first: the breast pump or the automatic cow milking machine, and whether one of the inventions led to the other or whether they were imagined separately. The Lady of the House immediately posited that likely the dairy version came first, as the need for the people version would only have been terribly useful after women began to join the workforce. This made good sense, but I decided to investigate the subject. As it turns out, she appears to have been correct. It seems that the earliest suction milking machines were being patented in the 1850’s. The breast pump, on the other hand, was invented in the 20th century by a chess player, a man named Edward Lasker. Mr. Lasker was a German-born American with degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering, and he played chess, contending even for the U.S. championship. Lasker also played go, and even helped found the American Go Association. A go player invented the breast pump! In many ways, chess is a beautiful game, logical, mathematical. Go is graceful. It is organic. It is a dance and it is war, life and death. And a go player invented the breast pump! Why is this significant?
I have seen two faces a great deal lately, both looking out my window and in the mirror. One shines upon nature and upon life, the organic. The other’s eyes brighten at technology, art, the created and the new, industry and organization. The faces look in different directions, and with distance from a point their paths diverge. Essentially the difference between what we call organic and what we call industrial is the agency of man. The fewer times we act upon something, the shallower we go toward the essential elements in our imposition of order, the more we call it natural, organic. But our words betray a friendly disagreement at this point. What is organic is characterized by life. Things alive are composed according to a separation of powers, a division of labor. Looking in ourselves we see different organs with different functions. And as we attempt to recreate the natural orders, mimic them, we act with craft and industry, essentially, we organize. We even create corporations in our own image, magnificent fictitious bodies that act with the power of thousands, imposing their own order on the natural world. And so the other face looks away, toward nature. We attempt to mitigate the agency of man, we place value on the organic. And yet we cannot exorcise the other face. To do so would be to eliminate the agency of man. It would be suicide.
So what does Yankee problem solving do with this friendly disagreement? That remains to be seen. Perhaps there are instruments already existing to resolve the question, a sheep marker or a milking machine, to be exercised on a few wooded acres in New England.
posted by yonderincarp at 15:28
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