I stay with my household in Hong Kong. Our holidays we spend in Greece. Consuming in a restaurant couldn’t be extra completely different within the two locations.
However is there maybe extra to it than only a superficial distinction? May or not it’s that the way in which we order meals reveals us one thing deeper, extra elementary concerning the human situation? May or not it’s that our very dignity as human beings is mirrored in the way in which we discuss to a restaurant waiter? – Let me clarify.
Restaurant orders, dignity and freedom
In Greece, once you go to an area village restaurant, you’re typically taken to the kitchen to see the accessible dishes. Generally these can be ready-made and also you simply level at a pot and get that factor. However generally, additionally, you will simply see elements of meals: french fries, tomatoes, cucumbers, items of meat, numerous small fish, pasta or rice, meatballs, and an array of appetisers. If you already know the proprietor of the tavern effectively, he may produce extra dishes from the again of the kitchen, one of the best bits, saved just for his household and mates. And you’ll go searching, have a look at this and that, ask just a few questions on what’s contemporary and what’s just for the vacationers, and you then’d order: a little bit of this, however with the sauce from over there, a spoonful of that there, however on one plate with this, and the salad manufactured from this ingredient and that, however pass over the third factor and substitute it with one thing else that you simply fancy.
Later, once you exit and have a look at the opposite visitors’ tables, you will notice that everybody’s menu is as particular person as their fingerprint, reflecting not solely their tastes and dislikes but additionally their standing with the proprietor of the store and his household. Each assortment of dishes, each order of drinks is the results of a deeply private historical past, of a lot of decisions and constraints that decide the actual configuration of dishes on each desk.
It’s all very completely different in Hong Kong, and, I suppose, in most different capitals of the so-called developed world. Right here, you go right into a restaurant the place you might be saved as distant from the kitchen as attainable. The meals processing space is off-limits to the visitors. You order, not in keeping with your style, however following a inflexible menu. You need dish 13 or 28, and that’s it, so far as alternative is anxious. You’d like 28 however with the salad that goes with 13? Sorry, we don’t perceive that order, that’s not within the menu, it’s not within the laptop, and even when we may make it, in some way, we wouldn’t know the right way to cost you for it, or the right way to clarify it to the pc system that processes the orders and that manages the stock and provides. You may’t have this, and that’s the top of it.
The cheaper and extra in style the restaurant, the extra mechanised it’s, the extra outstanding the atomic decisions on the menu turn into, the much less freedom the client is permitted. A McDonalds order consists of simply pointing at images of the meals. There is no such thing as a area for even the selection of how fried the fries ought to be, or that one would love a bit roughly of that salad sauce. You get one pack of it and that’s it. Shut up, eat, and depart us alone.
What’s mechanised in these locations shouldn’t be solely the restaurant but additionally and primarily the buyer.
Human autonomy
For the thinker Immanuel Kant, the very essence of what makes us human is our <em>autonomy</em>. For Kant, this implies: our important freedom to decide on the right way to stay our lives. Of all issues in nature, of all animals, solely human beings have autonomy. Solely we’re capable of transcend our instincts, to tame our pure, built-in behaviour, and to behave as an alternative following our rationality and our personal decisions about what we contemplate invaluable and good.
This freedom is even stronger than our intuition to stay. Individuals have sacrificed their lives for a political trigger. Many have died in prisons on account of starvation strikes. A starvation strike is an affirmation of this very human, this important freedom that solely we now have: no hungry animal can refuse to eat and as an alternative choose to starve itself to loss of life. We will. For Kant, that is the premise of our dignity as human beings, of our distinctive, immeasurable worth.
For Kant, it’s the freedom of alternative that makes us human. Nothing else.
Again to the eating places. Once we settle for that our important, defining freedom is subordinate to some menu that somebody has made and that we now have to comply with; once we assent to provide away our autonomy to an establishment in alternate for a burger with fries; then we now have basically abandoned our humanity and our creativity, we now have turn into part of the machine, a bit of cog in that huge equipment that’s McDonalds or every other restaurant, each store, each establishment.
Even universities work like that, and that is tragic. Why can college students not research a bit of little bit of this and a bit of little bit of that? Why do we predict that the one invaluable schooling is that which inserts right into a pre-defined catalogue of menu decisions: physician, engineer, accountant? The most effective minds of the previous have all the time been those that weren’t restricted of their freedom. Docs who studied faith and philosophy, like Albert Schweitzer; artists who knew about engineering, like Leonardo da Vinci; philosophers who had been additionally physicists, like Archimedes; poets who turned presidents, like Vaclav Havel; architects who turned novelists, just like the German Nobel nominee Max Frisch.
What’s extra valuable than one’s entry to data, one’s important creativity, of which come up infinite advantages to society and the world? And we deal with this, these days, in the identical method as we prohibit the alternatives of a burger order at McDonalds.
Capitalism and the lack of autonomy
Why can we let society take away our human freedom? Why does it even need to?
Erich Fromm, psychologist and thinker, factors out that the capitalist system of manufacturing wants us to be suitable, standardised, interchangeable human models. In a manufacturing facility setting, it doesn’t matter if a employee can be a poet or a painter. In actual fact, it will be a distraction. The most effective employee is one who has no possibility however to work. One who can not flip away, who can not select one other life, as a result of he has by no means been provided one, and since he has not developed the abilities, the creativity and the autonomy that may make it attainable for him to decide on and to pursue a greater, richer, freer life. Our system of manufacturing wants us to be impoverished, to be people fulfilling the minimal normal of what’s required, in order that we will stand on the meeting line and help the machines that produce our items.
The identical is true of us as shoppers. The system of consumption that we now have put in in our societies needs us to have a uniform taste; as a result of solely a uniform style for items might be optimally happy by the mass manufacturing of products that our factories spit out. Think about if no person fell for the dictatorship of trend, if no person listened to advertisements, if no person desired to have the identical stuff because the influencers on Instagram or Fb: a lot of our capitalist system would collapse. This method shouldn’t be suitable with free, artistic, really particular person human beings, people who every have their very own values, ideas, preferences and style.
The system of low-cost items we now have created wants us to be senseless, standardised shoppers of simply these items.
One other world of dignity and freedom
So is there a method out of this? Can we reclaim our individuality, the divine spark of our creativity, our important uniqueness, our ethical autonomy and freedom?
There’s.
Richard Taylor (1919-2003), philosophy professor at Brown and Rochester, says that we should make an effort, day-after-day, to live our lives in the most creative way possible. Once you go to a restaurant, don’t comply with the menu. Don’t assent to being a remote-controlled slave of whoever wrote that blasted factor. Select your personal meals, and demand that or not it’s delivered to you. If this doesn’t work, order two dishes along with a pal and blend them up on the desk. Once you go for a vacation, don’t take the 5-countries-in-7-days package deal, photo-op on the pyramids included. Be taught the language, get a map, and do your personal travelling.
This has nothing to do with comfort however every thing with being, and defending, what is basically human: our freedom, our autonomy, the divine spark that was entrusted to us once we emerged on this planet as the one beings that might actually select the right way to stay their very own lives.
It’s a ethical obligation to honour one’s humanity.
And so, sure, that restaurant the place I can stroll into the kitchen and put my very own dishes collectively – it does have one thing to do with philosophy in spite of everything. Consuming is rarely simply consuming, and finding out is rarely simply finding out. With each alternative we make, we create a unique world for ourselves and our kids: Both one which respects our humanity, or one which seeks to abolish it.
It’s our alternative, nonetheless.
Your ad-blocker ate the shape? Simply click on here to subscribe!
Thanks for studying! Photograph by Igor Ovsyannykov from Pexels
Share this:
