The Making of Names

We've been doing agriculture for some time now.   So long that we've forgotten what it is.  We think it's just one form of business rather than the mother of all businesses, social endeavors, and civilizational achievements.  Agriculture is there invisibly undergirding art and software engineering, fashion and nanotechnology, every big and little thing about civilization. And agriculture is short hand for the enslavement of animals and plants by humans.  That's the cold hard truth of it.

One of the first rules of agriculture is: if you intend to eat it, do not give it a name. Naming something creates a personal relationship. Responsibility.  Ethical quandaries.  Emotional complexities. The opposite of naming something is quantifying it.  This erases the personal relationship.  Thing becomes number, an abstraction, a percentage, a ratio.   Agriculture, as a form of science and technology, is all about quantification.  Big Data is what we're all supposed to be worshipping these days.

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Oregon I crashed a graduate seminar in the Comparative Literature department on Critical Theory.  I immediately got outed as an interloper when the professor had everyone introduce themselves and all the grad students had something marvelously intricate to say except for me, who had no idea what Critical Theory was, at all.   But the professor was welcoming and amused at my enthusiasm.  He proceeded to give a talk about names and naming in a way that made my hair stand on end in sheer intellectual excitement.  He talked about how a name is not just a label that you put on things but that there is a story behind and within the name, a field of meanings and emotions, desires, politics, histories, loves and pains.  (For instance, if you have a brother or a childhood friend named John, you'll never meet anyone named John without  some traces of predetermined feelings.)

This is where I have an argument with agriculture and science and technology. I want to name the world rather than quantify it. And I don't mean the scientific name, which is just another way of quantifying.  What I am interested is the name that you use with another person like "John" or "Amy," or the name that you give your dog or cat that binds the two of you together or the name of a place where you have lived and evokes an entire period of your life that is gone forever and yet latent in you as your history and memory.  I am interested in names that are filled with some tenderness and regard, names that doesn't even pretend to be objective.  These are the kinds of names that structure our lives even though we, for the most part, are unconscious of their subtle shaping.

The kind of agriculture that I am interested in makes names rather numbers.  Which is to say I'm not going to make a very good businesswoman.  My attention tends to wander. I can barely rationalize what I do for a living; it is at best the most honest way to make a living that I know of.  It is a seeking.  I try to enact an emotionally complex agriculture that takes the risk of naming the world.

Can we name a corn-field as well as a city?  Can we name a steer that we know we will kill, and honor it as a being with a name?  Could we bear that pain?  Can we name each individual chicken, each row of broccoli?  The wild tree, the landscaping shrubs? Could we respect every living thing as if it had a name? Probably not.  But it would do us good to try.   It would make us better people - more honest, more humble, more heedful.