The Blackberry Walk

Haven't written an essay since my victory of the previous blogging derby against my two valiant rivals. Plans for a new contest to begin soon, so, to my handful of readers, more articles will be on the way then. I must confess, I've noticed myself using a new euphemism lately. Before, if someone was interested in the provenance of some information I conferred, I'd say, "I was reading", "I found out the other day that", or some phrase to that effect. Such phrases, however, aren't fit for the AI age. In the AI age, we don't have to comb Wikipedia, let alone open a physical book: we simply inquire. Like how mine and likely your grandmother first used Google, you ask it a question and you get an answer. We don't 'read', instead we inquire and get given a computer-cooked Quora-like answer. And, if you want to go deeper to understand a topic more fully, you can keep inquiring with the AI asking more and more questions, as if it were a university tutor. In this AI age, then, "looked into" is the euphemism I've found myself using. So the other day I was 'looking into' fruit ripening, specifically with relation to the action of ethylene. Ethylene is a tiny, tiny molecule, written out CH₂=CH₂. Yet despite its size, it is an important plant hormone - the smallest hormone there is, I've heard it said. For a large number of fruiting plants, these plants being those designated with the category of 'climacteric', ethylene acts as their ripening hormone. The tomato plant, an example of a climacteric fruit, senses ethylene in the air, and the fruit begin to ripen, releasing more ethylene into the environment in a chain reaction to ripen its neighbouring fruit also. This is why bananas are harvested before they are ripe, transported, and ripened on site artificially in a chamber of ethylene in order to preserve freshness. This is also why a 'bad apple spoils the barrel', because an rotten apple continues producing excessive ethylene, decomposing further all the apples around it. The link between ripening and decomposition we'll circumambulate back to in a bit, so park this idea for the time being. The tomato plant is the easiest to visualise, and many readers may have seen tomatoes growing before, so we'll proceed using this example. When the tomato first fruits, they are green and bulbous and hard. Completely inedible. At this stage, though there are seeds inside, the fruit is little more than vegetable matter, like the kind of vegetable matter that would be found elsewhere on the plant, like a leaf. It's green from chlorophyll, since it's still photosynthesising to feed the plant; and in this green state, the tomato fruit reaches the fullest size it will ever achieve. And then an encounter with the ethylene hormone triggers the plant to ripen. Ripening is a kind of death. Metabolised, is the chlorophyll; broken down, are the starches into sugars; and hydrolysed, the proteins. The result of this most evidently is the colour. The chlorophyll-green gone, lycopene, a red carotenoid pigment similar to the beta-carotene which makes carrots orange, reddens the fruit to make it more attractive to be eaten. The fruit itself becomes softer, owing to the breakdown of starches into simple sugars, and of proteins into small amino acids. The sugars, as you could guess, give the tomato a sweetness; but the flavour effect of the breakdown of proteins is a little more subtle. What we taste from the protein breakdown is umami, that mystery fifth taste. As sugar is to sweetness, and salt is to saltiness, glutamate is to umami. Glutamate is found in it's purest form in MSG, monosodium glutamate, that maligned additive of the Chinese takeaway, but has a more common source in East Asian cooking in soy sauce. Soy sauce is made, after all, by fermenting soy bean protein to the point of it becoming a mush. The flavour, though associated strongly with the Orient, is also a quality sought out in the Western cuisine. Cheese, particularly hard strong cheese like cheddar and parmesan, are high in MSG; cured meets too are very high; sauces like Worcester sauce; and, notably for our study, sun-dried tomatoes. Sun-drying tomatoes are a way of concentrating the natural MSG in the tomato through evaporation and further protein hydrolysis. And what is glutamate? Glutamate is simply an amino acid unbound by the breakdown of proteins. I've never bitten down on an unripe tomato, but I can begin to imagine what it would taste like. It would be hard and crunchy, starchy and a little bitter. Obvious as it may be to state it, but what makes a tomato tasty, the sweetness and the umami, comes from this ripening process. The thing about ripening, though, is that there is no end point. Once the ethylene triggers the process, this transformation from green and crunchy to red and soft is a steam train without brakes, which will continue to chug along faster and faster until its demise. The demise of the tomato is rotting. The process which sets the tomato off from its hard, crunchy, green state, to its soft, red, delicious state is the same unstoppable journey which ends as a mushy puddle falling off the vine. Rotting isn't some evolutionary mechanism for a plant to fertilise itself with wasted fruit, but rather rot is destiny. Once a tomato begin to break down starches into sugars and proteins into amino acids, nothing can swerve its course; and once all the starches and proteins are digested, lost is all structural integrity to the fruit, and left is a puddle of tomato muck. That's the analogy de jour, then: unripe green tomato gets triggered to become red tomato but can't help but become rotten. This pattern is found everywhere, if you wish to look for it. But today I want point this lens upon civilisations. I've been reading some Spengler lately, and have been interested in civilisational cycles for some time. Not just because of my in-born pessimism and cynicism - though that no doubt fuels part of my interest - but because I see so much in England and the West on the whole declining and losing its vigour. Various thinkers on cyclical history have different models with which to explain the rise and fall of civilisations. Hesiod has his Ages of Man, which cycles from the Gold Age, to the Silver Age, to the Bronze Age, to the Heroic Age, and then to the current Iron Age (a cycle found in the Book of Daniel and maps very tightly to the Pentateuch also); and Spengler, writing two-and-a-half thousand years later, has his Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter of civilisation. As a lover of metaphors and models, I want to put my own spin on cyclical history, which I will bathetically call the 'Tomato Theory of History'. In the tomato theory of history, civilisation cycles map to the fruiting of a tomato plant. A civilisation begins small and green but hard also, as it begins to build for itself an identity. Its people aren't well off, and there isn't much in the way of leisure, but the people work hard, and there's a cohesiveness in society, a vision of the body politic, of a people all working towards the same national goal and direction. This fruit, should it continue to work hard and grow, will reach its full size, still green and hard. Then the ethylene hits, triggering a civilisational golden age. In time, the civilisation achieves full ripeness, where there will be an explosion in culture and art, and, though the civilisation will still work hard pushed forth with momentum behind it, there will finally be well-deserved prosperity for which the hardship of previous generations sweated. But the process which triggers the golden age is catabolic, just like the tomato, and is fuelled by a breakdown whether that be of starches and proteins for the tomato, or of morals and a cohesive, single-minded drive for the civilisation. And like the tomato, this drive will bring the civilisation to a time of civilisational decay and rot wherein the virtues which brought the civilisation greatness and strength have broken down into the sweetness of bread and the umami of the circus. My description, I know, apes Spengler's seasons quite a bit; but so too does Spengler ape the theorists of cyclical history who came before him. There is a natural pattern to the rise and fall of civilisations, a pattern which can be found all across nature. What I hope to accentuate with this model in contradistinction to Spengler and other forebears, is not just the inevitability of decay, but that the event which brings civilisation to its zenith - in this metaphor, ethylene - begins also the unstoppable steam train of civilisation to its decay and demise. I look in miniature to the example of the '60s - not a civilisation in of itself, of course, but a microcosm nonetheless. In the '60s, there was a great proliferation of experimental music, experimental culture: it looks in retrospect as if a new society was emerging. But there was a cost. The cost was the social fabric torn, and the breaking of the moral skeleton's bones. The ripeness of that cultural golden age - a golden age, at least, in the States - has led directly to the rot of today. The model presented today works on many layers of analysis. We see it at the individual level, the civilisational level, and everything in-between, in institutions and such. To conclude, I'll end on some questions. Which institutions today are strong, vital, and unripe? Which are ripe, brimming with flavour, and life? And which have a sense of decay and rot of a bygone age? As people, we can sniff out decay, our noses are attuned to it. Our task is to seek that which is unripe and build it up, so that we or our descendants may enjoy in the sweetness and spoils. The rot is an inevitability of the past sweetness; all that can be hoped for now is that the rot fertilises well whatever era comes next.