There are no pure vegetarians. That’s just advertising, and it is time we called its bluff. A grammatical error cannot be a shortcut to salvation. One can, of course, be purely vegetarian or onlyvegetarian, but purity doesn’t enter into it. Yes, all cultures and religions have “purity laws” when it comes to food, but the panics that triggered them—epidemics? poisonings?—are lost to time. “Purity laws” did not make us human. Fish did.
Two million years ago, when Homo erectus (brain capacity 570 cc) decided life couldn’t be all fruit and nuts, she also opted for CERN, Shakespeare, and microvascular surgery. The shallows of some ancient river held the secret of our 1,250 cc brain. Fish have the stuff that comes closest to what it takes to grow a brain—long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids. It helped us become human and it also helps us stay human, as today it may be our best resource against dementia. A fact worth considering as the world population staggers toward the number of dementia sufferers predicted for 2050: 175.9 million.
It is a scary figure. Will it stop us from sneering at our neighbour’s lunchbox? Will it stop us from shuddering at an egg?
Possibly not, because somewhere, a few thousand years ago, we undid the truths of the long hard climb to the top of the food chain, and decided to invent an entirely different extra-corporeal, out-of-body evolution.
That’s right. We invented a kind of evolution that entirely bypassed the body. This new pattern circumvented our blindspot, the one and only intolerable human experience: death.
Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, a 1768 oil-on-canvas by Joseph Wright of Derby. The painting shows a natural philosopher recreating one of Robert Boyle’s air pump experiments, in which a bird dies when deprived of oxygen. Such experiments struck at the theory of the body's divine origin by showing that it is composed of chemicals and sustained by their processes. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons
Centuries of human wisdom have not alleviated the dread of death. How can something as vital as life simply—stop? Faced with a motionless, inert body, the question is torn out of the onlooker: where did you go? Add to this the anguish of separation, for nothing is more human than emotion, and our bafflement is beyond endurance. Add also, in a few hours, the shaming, degrading, spectacle of decay. The human compulsion is to console the inconsolable with the only possible consolation: afterlife. The body is a stinky mess, but the beloved has escaped to a happier place. Survivors could take hope in this kindly vision.
Religion and the Internet
Millennia later, as organised religion took root, conditions applied, and leaving the body was not much of an escape. Still, the main hurdle had been overcome: the body, so fragile and vulnerable, was acknowledged as a burden. It was no longer the vehicle of life. Life itself was merely a transit lounge between the shadowed mystery of birth to the revelations beyond. The best hope was to escape it with distractions.
None of this was practical while life was delightful, so in came rules, laws, beliefs to constrain its delights; and as reward, afterlife was pure bliss.
Our extracorporeal out-of-body evolution quarreled with all of humanity’s defining traits. Societies fragmented. Rituals controlled the rhythms of life. Basic biological imperatives—food, movement and most particularly, sex—were all controlled by this extracorporeal evolution for millennia, until at the end of the 20thcentury a new evolution usurped the body: the Internet.
Cyberspace had all the seductions of religion without its snark. Here was immortality and omniscience all in one, and, no, conditions did not apply. Everybody was welcome. This was liberating and also labour saving. Within a decade the body had less work to do in moving, getting, giving, perceiving. The Internet did all that for us. Better still, it offered us the Universal Body, the shining ideal the mirror at home must contain. All bodily experience was transferred to this Universal Body, and each of us had to try to match it.
For the first time in human experience, the body had to achieve a mysterious but attainable state called “wellness.” This hoax is a $6 trillion industry today. With so many people going broke trying to achieve wellness how do you explain our adult mortality rate of 150 per 1,000?
It does explain why disease is such a popular talking point.
With so many people going broke trying to achieve wellness how do you explain our adult mortality rate of 150 per 1,000? | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStock
As I thread my way through the athletic young, the inspirational 40s, the inspired 50s, the committed 60s, and the earnest 70s all broadcasting their lives on their phones, my morning walk has begun to resemble a madcap convention of medical specialists swapping case notes. Gossip is almost entirely pure pathology and it is all happening not in some body but in a blood report or MRI somewhere.
This screams for a counter revolution. COVID-19 began it, but it is still gathering momentum. This extracorporeal revolution is truly out-of-body, totally laboratory-based. The body fragmented down to its sub-cellular elements is now performance art.
Meanwhile, what of the body we live in? It has been fun touring it with you, with metaphor just a hiccup away.
Who knows, unless I hit the wall running, our paths might cross again someday and perhaps the next time you reach for a Bandaid you might, for auld lang syne, pause long enough to notice your fingertip.
To end with Douglas Adams, literally this time, So long, and thanks for all the fish.
This is the final instalment of Kalpish Ratna’s “Hello, Fingertip” column. Their new novel Twice in Nalanda is now in bookstores everywhere.
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