Knowledge!)
I run everyday to shake the cobwebs out. Running is bad for you at a certain age like mine. I’m in my sixties. It’s hard on the joints. Running is apparently good for you. Counter-intuitively, it strengthens the joints over time. This little parting right here at the start is demonstrative of the whole human dilemma, and sort of what this book deals with: knowledge you need every day. How do we get it, what good is it, and do we have enough of it to suggest a proper way to live a life in a total sort of way, including diet, physical fitness, overall wellness, moral truth and social-political suitability for a creature with a precarious human nature? What has come to us in the last centuries from science, philosophy and modern common sense is that likely no active supernatural order exists to easily manifest itself and assure us which path for Homo sapiens is the right one with absolute assurance. If God knows, He’s keeping it close to His chest. It certainly seems so to me, and I’ve been keeping my ears pricked for evidence of it since childhood. Left on our own, we have to duke it out on the front lines of every issue. Sometimes, perhaps even often, it appears that there is no progress in modern knowledge in the sense of what path is right for human beings in their everyday lives. I mean, obviously I realize that there is advancement of the scientific sort, but I mean improvement in the area of what we should do given our uncertain situation on what’s right and wrong for us on a daily basis; hell, out there in ethereal wonderland, there are a thousand answers for every question. It’s complicated, every damn last issue. For instance, there are a thousand diets, and all of them at odds. I’m thirty reads into nutrition, diet, and food books, many which I review in the general bibliography. A hundred moral codes, and all of them appearing all against all. I spent my life immersed in these ethical alternatives. Dozens of versions of what the heck humans are, and no way to get a definitive answer on any front.
Here in the beginning of a contentious debate, many roads intersect. If you believe you have real choice and control over yourself, but you are overweight without an understanding of why– that is, against all your strenuous efforts, you are losing the squabble in the effort to stay slim– here is not only the intersection of free will and determinism, but also of modern cooking and primitive diets. If you think eating meat is wrong and that animal rights are viable, here then meets the fundamental concern of a self-aware omnivore. If you think the government and their licensed practitioners have got it wrong about our food consumption, and that more state action should be taken, you’re crisscrossing with the libertarian sentiment that suggests that if no action had been taken in the first place, than the event of our recent ineptitude around the contemporary diet wouldn’t have occurred. If you’ve listened to conflicting nutritional advice in the media and come away bewildered, you are facing the epistemological quandary of the 21st century: how much knowledge can reason and science produce, and what lengths are required of the individual to attain it? Still, this does not settle the most ancient of philosophic disputes: how can we know things, what can we know exactly and with how much conviction? And thus it takes us, I believe, to what may be the oldest, wiliest conspiracy ever produced in the Western World: why did all of the countless works of the great atomists, Democritus, Leucippus, Epicurus, and Lecretius, disappear, and almost the entirety of the decadent-mystic platonic library survive through the medieval times (including Plato, Plotinus, and Augustine)?
We suspect that it was all there in Democritus: the heliocentric universe, the atomic theory, the rational code of morality, and the beginnings of the theory of evolution. It wasn’t afforded back then what scientific rigor these days demands, but it was a 2500-year head start over Plato’s ugly view of Homo sapiens. If you wonder what the world has become, with runaway state-capitalism and vastly expanding and aggressive current governments, people exploding into obese caricature of themselves, the absolute loss of morals in economic transactions, the gross democide figures of the last 75 years, the current resurgence of irrationalism and belligerent religions, and the outright quarrelsomeness of the Left and autarchy throughout the world, you are here at the meeting point of many perplexities. We have more Platonists growling at our reason than you can make magic potions for, many whom can sweet-talk their way out of any intellectual chasm they’ve ever created. They can spray paint all the Coke signs and smash all the MacDonald’s windows that they want– they wouldn’t recognize the root cause of a problem if someone flew a jumbo-jet into it, or if someone built a gulag labor system with 14% of its population in it, or if there was a 1000 year devolution which they call the Middle Ages, or if they created unions to protect lazy unproductive workers and called it brotherly love. We will strip naked the above issues and let you decide whether you should start running with me, or rest those old (or young) weary joints of yours and go with the current as perhaps it was always destined to be. It is possible humankind was meant to trip and fall over the cliff, and that after the Big Bang, nothing could have altered that unavoidable outcome.
I don’t have to apologize for my ordinary life. I’ve damn near never suffered a day worth mentioning, just a divorce followed by a year of laying drunk in the sun and eating salads. I thought I should mention that; suffering brings out the Platonist in all of us, and I don’t have much of it in me left as any of my confidants will attest. I’m all about counsel, but on my watch you’re not going to hear, Go back scurrying to the cave in defeat!
or Get on your knees and pray!
I want you to understand that I don’t mean to prejudice the end results of this book, but I have to be honest upfront. I have children and they’re no trouble at all; indeed they’re splendid, as is my spouse; undeniably, it’s the old man– me– that’s often a headache. We’re gainfully employed, as are my friends; we have a good life, but not too good; I follow a whole whack of narrow but helpful rules on debt, eating, exercising, drinking, working, and other things which I will mention in passing as we move along (for instance, we use credit but allow ourselves no debt). I have a philosophy and it’s pretty comprehensive; however, it is important to understand that when I say I have lived an normal existence, I mean that I did not venture forward and come back from the abyss. I wasn’t in rehab; I didn’t get cancer, heart disease, or any other chronic illness. Sometime ago, I smoked and quit. I stopped exercising and started again. I reached a weigh of 180 pounds in my fifties and have recently returned to my teenage weight of 145 pounds, which I have maintained since. I drink, but less and less. I am no longer paunchy or skinny fat. I have muscle tone and a great deal of energy. If any of this appeals to you, keep reading.
As you will soon learn, I searched through a great array of diets and landed on the Paleo one. There’s no compelling evidence that I am a Paleo man; that’s almost a misnomer. I certainly don’t deserve any title, and I am worthy of the respect you might give to any man who has had the wonderful family, friends and opportunities that I have come across. Slap my face if I complain. Nonetheless, I am Paleo man and how I earned it was by choice and discipline. I will explain later why the old Greek bromide, Meden Agan [Nothing in excess] or ‘Everything in Moderation’ doesn’t really work anymore, and in fact is killing many of us. For instance, if you drink, you should be Greek, but if you smoke, you should be horsewhipped (figuratively speaking). Likewise, moderation in eating is not a formula for health but indeed is a slow silent assassin. For now, I also want to say that my life doesn’t have the stressors that most modern folks’ have. I haven’t worked full time since I was 28 years old, yet I was skilled and hard-working enough at what I did to find a part-time niche in retail management to get me out of house and into the real world (a very important thing if you’ve found success). I have a knack of coat-tailing managers who are real leaders and can inspire people (a definite finite minority in retail, as indeed in life overall). I have been writing all these enduring years in between, and collecting interesting people to hang with – loving every moment to the best of my abilities. It has gotten easier with experience, as do all things in life. I am a purist in many ways, but can laugh with the most vulgar of comics. Laughter is one of the most important anti–stressors in life, as is dancing– as long as you don’t have to earn money being funny or dancing. Then they’re exceedingly stressful. But anon.
The first issues we want to ponder are, what is a Homo sapiens and so what? I want to impress upon you that at every step there are issues, and we will be paralyzed if we don’t try to proceed. If I want to offer the proposition, for instance, that there is a definable human nature, and that natural selection has produced it and social biology studies it, then there’s a crowd of scientists lining up to dispute it– just as there is a huge procession of licensed medical doctors cueing up against the paleo way of life. Nonetheless, we must proceed with great caution about any claim to have a handle or hold on human nature. Heraclites was right that everything is constantly changing, but the change in human nature, in evolutionary speed, is so slow as not to count in our everyday lives. The reason that the theory of evolution is almost certainly true is its causal link from centuries-old theory to modern facts-on-the-ground (so to speak) from every branch of science. If there are apparent holes in the theory, they seem now only tiny perforations– if there are any at all. If you think there are, please read: Origins of Life, J.M. Smith & E. Szathmáry, A Universe from Nothing, L.M. Krauss, The Theory of Evolution, C. Mills, Darwinism Evolving, D. Depew and B. Weber, Why Evolution is True, J.A. Coyne, The Selfish Gene, R. Dawkins, and The Moral Animal, R. Wright. If you are on the religious side of this debate, you are probably not because of any rational or empirical data. This book will not deal with contentious religious or supernatural possibilities. If they exist, their probabilities match the existence of those of demons, fairies, angels, and banshees. Homo sapiens then firstly are evolved from primates, and our closest living relation is the chimpanzee, and it’s exceedingly unlikely that we have an immortal soul.
Universal human knowledge, such as the recognition of a tree
– as in every human agrees there are trees and knows how to identify them (to photograph and record them)– cannot be equated with There Is No God
. Seven billion people (or at least the vast majority of us, let's say 99.9%) will not often dispute that a tree is a tree, or for that matter the existence of the sun, moon, or stars (or even gravity). A belief that I am the happiest person in the world
cannot be taken at face value, even if I could list all the relevant facts to prove it. I want to make several claims about Homo sapiens, and what
and how
we can know on
