The Blog

2021-

2021-11-26 h
LEGITIMIZING SUBSTITUTES
"Substitutism is becoming ubiquitous. A longer treatment could include driverless cars, artificial intelligence, online education, fiat currencies, unmanned space missions, DACA, ever-escalating costs of military hardware, and even globalism. In each case, a supplement has already been turned into a substitute or is on the verge of becoming one, to our detriment."

When Supplements Become Substitutes

A theory of nearly everything

In 2017, more than 64,000 people in America died from opioid overdoses. The New York Times has called it the “deadliest drug crisis in American history,” but it’s not the only overdose crisis that America faces. It is just one among others, in which modern American life gets the dosage wrong, so to speak.

The idea that a substance in one dose can save and in another dose can harm has an ancient pedigree. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates distinguishes between two kinds of doctors: those who administer a circumscribed dose of medicine to help their patients reestablish the health they enjoyed before falling ill; and those whose “cure” requires their patients to take medicine indefinitely because reestablishing a healthy, medicine-free condition is impossible. Proper use of medicine, Socrates maintains, is as a supplement taken to cure an ailment, after which patients regain their health. By contrast, as a substitute, medicine no longer cures because patients depend on a regular, and perhaps increasing, dose to stay alive. Here the medicine is a substitute, a stand-in, for their health. Patients live, but death is right around the corner, should they stop taking their medicine. They live a life of “lingering death,” Socrates says. The patient living on substitutes is always living on borrowed time.

An observation from Jean-Jacques Rousseau makes this problem of the substitute clearer. In his “First Discourse,” Rousseau compares ancient warriors, who have few weapons, with “modern scientifically trained soldiers.” The ancient soldiers, he writes, are courageous. The weapons they use, like prostheses, are the supplements to their courage. Modern soldiers have much more powerful weapons; but without courage, they will not know how to use their weapons well—and perhaps will be too frightened to use them at all. Modern soldiers think that they are superior to ancient warriors because their weapons are more powerful—and, in a quantitative sense, that is true. Rousseau’s important insight is that weapons can either be supplements to courage or substitutes for courage. If weapons become substitutes, modern soldiers live on borrowed time—eventually, warriors who know the right use of weapons will overwhelm them. Like Plato’s doctors, warriors must understand that they cannot turn supplements into substitutes without cost.

Thinkers have long wondered about the relationship between supplements and substitutes, but we have lost sight of the distinction in our own day. To bring it up to date, consider the everyday example of the meal and vitamins. We find our vitamins in the supplement section of the grocery store. When we buy vitamins, we buy them with a view to our meals and their occasional deficiencies. The meal is the important thing, to which vitamins must always refer if they are to be used effectively. When vitamins work as a supplement—making us stronger, more alert, or less fatigued—we are tempted to go further, to take more of them. We ponder, in light of their success, whether the source of our newfound powers is the supplement itself, independent of the meal. Why bother with the time-consuming task of becoming a good cook, making a meal, and sitting at the table when a few pills or powders will do the trick? These supplements, we convince ourselves, are the real source of our power. We think that we have miraculously bypassed the labor of making a meal. In fact, the results we get are possible only because our last meal is still with us, a referent to which the supplement is oriented, even if we have lost sight of it.

The strange but euphoric moment after the benefits of the supplement-turned-substitute have kicked in—but before our world collapses because “man cannot live by substitutes alone,” to twist a phrase—is our moment of greatest temptation. What is impossible seems miraculously possible. Lead has turned into gold. Eureka! In that moment, we fall victim to what I’ll call “substitutism.” The opioid addict, in this regard, is merely practicing a different kind of substitutism from Rousseau’s warrior: both are “high” on the prospect that they have cheated the natural order of things, whose fixed law is that when supplements are turned into substitutes, a price must be paid.

Substitutism is the great pathology of American life. Any number of social and cultural developments, all of which seem unrelated, fall within its purview. Nearly everywhere we look, we are living on an unsustainable high, on borrowed time.

Consider the following list of phenomena that catch our attention as curiosities, strike us as serious problems, or bring us inordinate joy. In each case, a supplement has been turned into a substitute. As such, the phenomenon is living on borrowed time. How long the euphoric high can last, no one can say. What we can say is that the substitute must change from gold back to lead, must return to being a mere supplement; and that this reverse alchemy can happen only when we first remember, and then return to, the original meal.

We will consume 500 billion plastic bottles of water per year by 2021. Most of those bottles will end up in landfills, burn in incinerators (if not in smoldering garbage piles), or float in our oceans for generations. Before bottled water, most of us got our water from the faucet, in our homes, without companies monetizing it. Where your water is, your home is, and vice versa. We left our homes on errands and trips, of course; and when we did, we occasionally brought along bottled water as a supplement, knowing that the meal, so to speak, was waiting for us at home. For some time, beverage companies have wanted us to get all the water we need from them, in bottled form. This goal would have been unachievable unless we already felt the temptation to turn supplements into substitutes. When supplements for the meal at home become substitutes, our attention shifts away from the home, and home life withers. Drinking water from a bottle is the substitutism befitting the homeless soul, the soul always “on the go,” euphoric and unbound—the soul that dreams of a tiny house on wheels or of van living (both rapidly developing movements in America, as YouTube confirms). This particular version of substitutism may yet give rise to a grave natural crisis. It seems like a trivial example, but it is sometimes in the trivial things that deeper problems reveal themselves.

We crave fast food, even as we grow more obese. Whereas plastic water-bottle substitutism produces pollution in the physical environment, fast-food substitutism produces the pollution in our bodies. Nothing so distinctly characterizes man than that his most important moments happen around the table. Without the liturgical recapitulation of the Lord’s Supper, what would have held together Christian churches through the ages? When tensions are high and things get serious, we come to the “bargaining table.” When we want the real scoop from our friends and family, we sit down for some table talk. For family to remain the basic unit of human life, without which civilization cannot survive, its members need to gather around the table for a meal.

Fast food is the supplement to that meal around the table. It holds us together while we are on the go, until we return home and resume the choreography of the meal—preparation, gathering, presentation (perhaps accompanied by prayer), conversation, concluding rituals, cleanup. This home-meal choreography is the referent for fast food, without which fast food cannot be the successful supplement that it is. When the supplement becomes the substitute, however, the choreography is lost from view, and fast food becomes just a mechanical mode of consumption, indulged excessively because the meal’s other associated satisfactions—close friends, family members, gratitude, humor, joy—are absent. When we do not know what will sate us, we will feed excessively. Plato saw this long ago. That is why no effort to count calories will save us from the indulgence we now wear around our bodies. Our hunger is not for calories; it is for the choreographed, liturgical splendor of the meal. Absent that, we grow fatter by the day and wonder why our hunger never retreats.

Marriages produce fewer babies, even as the permutations of having sex preoccupy our minds. From the vantage point of the question “What is necessary for civilization to survive?” sex with a view to childbirth in marriage is the referent, while having sex within the marriage is the supplement. For much of American history, this was the prevailing understanding.

The “high” of the sexual revolution involved turning the supplement of having sex within marriage into a substitute not requiring marriage. The lead weight of marriage, which linked sex to the labor of having and raising children, was turning into the gold of having sex, anywhere and with anyone, without cost and without regard to generation. Once this happened, and generative marriage was no longer the referent, there was no longer a compelling legal ground to confine having sex to men with women. Further, getting pregnant became the collateral damage of having sex, rather than its purpose, which invited not only the legality of abortion but also the subtle encouragement of it. Abortion is, in this view, merely a choice, rather than, say, a moral agony. These are the well-known consequences of the sexual revolution.

What if our fixed law that supplements cannot be turned into substitutes can, in fact, be violated? Wouldn’t that make having sex the new meal, so to speak? If so, wouldn’t we expect that supplements to that meal would soon make their appearance—ones whose referent is having sex with another man or woman but, like fast food, would provide something akin to it without the ordeal and preparation necessary for the meal? Pornography fits into this category, and soon, we’re told, we can expect robotic sex “partners”—the next vitamin for the meal of having sex.

If supplements can be turned into substitutes, why stop there, at the first transmutation that turns lead into gold? Might our substitutes themselves require supplements, which, in turn, become substitutes requiring additional supplements, ad infinitum? Having reached the limits of our imagination with respect to supplements involving fixed gender orientation, why not the supplement involving unfixed and ever-chosen (or never-chosen) gender orientations, which themselves then become the new substitute? Here we discover transgenderism, which would compel us to abandon the male and female pronouns that pertained to the original meal and its supplement, because that quaint arrangement has been wholly superseded.

If the fixed law remains intact that supplements cannot be turned into substitutes without exacting an immense price, then we are living on borrowed time, because generation and having sex within the confines of marriage are the meal and plausible supplement, from which we cannot long depart without dying of hunger. Substitutism in this matter would bring us to a civilizational dead end. Alternatively, if supplements can be turned into substitutes without cost, and these, in turn, invite new supplements, and so on, we should welcome the repudiation of the old meal that poisons us like lead and should live in the light of this new golden age. There is no intermediate alternative; either the fixed law remains intact, or it does not. That is the question lurking in the argument that we are having today about what having sex can legitimately mean. Meanwhile, marriages in the developed world—the region where substitutism is most pervasive—are producing fewer and fewer children. (read more)

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