The meat of a matter, any matter, lies in what we decide truly counts.  Values adjust to the times, are updated, and we find ourselves living perpetually in a changing society.  Our inner psychological realm likewise morphs and evolves as we learn and grow; our brains are as permeable a membrane as an apple skin.  Keeping our questioning minds open in the face of certainties is a hallmark of an active learner.

There’s probably a catchy Latin phrase for this flow where our minds are compelled to go: “societus cum fluxxium perpetium” or something.  But either way, the flow and drizzle (not to mention drivel) of cultural change depends on one sure thing: that participants believe that they are involved in a best way forward; that is, on the right side of truth and history.  Our academic critical thinking skills aren’t just for show; at their best they ought to apply a sense of value to wide swathes of society and social life.

What is not as popular surfaces as the catch line in the multi-decade punk band Bad Religion’s song:

“Don’t tell me about the answer, ’cause then
Another one will come along soon
I don’t believe you have the answer
I’ve got ideas, too
But if you’ve got enough naivety
And you’ve got conviction
Then the answer is perfect for you”

Cynicism aside, it’s true as true can be that we humans will go to great lengths to ask and answer questions ordained by the powers that be.  Rewards await us in every segment of life if we appear to know useful things—and deploy them with efficacy.  Even the manner of inquiry is subject to control: unmotivated reasoning receives the mantle of power, whereas impassioned rhetoric (or, more properly, statements that fit the rubric of what counts—what carries weight—in a given setting as more rhetoric than reason) fills a subaltern role.  Emotion is supposed to take a back seat to reason but, as Blaise Pascal famously said, reasons have reasons and the heart indubitably bears reason that pure reason does not know.  Likewise, Immanuel Kant wrote a deep tome titled: The Critique of Pure Reason. 

Nevertheless, we’re each expected to have truth, reasoning, and justice in our pocket before we speak, and certainly before we pronounce our beliefs with certainty.  In the end, of course, there’s a tenuous epistemic link between absolution from ambiguity and perpetual immurement amidst the weeds of absolute relativism (itself perhaps the truest truth claim of all: that all truths are equally uncertain and thus attain a definite equality in their murkiness).

Clearly, the facts that count depend on the occasion.  Environmental discourse is one such occasion and a timely one in our lifetimes.  When the dust clears, and perhaps the smoke from a fire, we find ourselves in the 2020s involved in a definite consensus: climate change is a clear and present threat to life on this planet and our way of life.  Precarious though our bodily homeostasis be (at the best of times it’s quite a miracle, or the scientific equivalent that our hearts keep pumping blood based on a chemical-electrical reaction the likes of which we couldn’t easily duplicate in parallel if forced to fend for ourselves in a forest and needed a fire), that’s nothing compared to the purportedly-delicate balance of ecosystems in the hallowed cathedral of science: non-human nature.  Yet, we humans are part of nature and it’s definitely our nature to try to care for and manage our surroundings.  To this end, local communities seek to better retrieve hitherto-trashed organic garbage.  Many of us now face a recycling program that gets into the nitty-gritty of our health foods.  Apple cores, potato peels, and the like are to be collected separate from our run of the mill trash (typically that’s mostly mandatory packaging the grocery stores use to bag and wrap our products: meat trays and the like).  But a dilemma ensues when inorganic labels meet their organic raison d’etres: each fruit has a sticker conveying its type and origin, and, though derived from plant-based paper, these stickers are not, they tell us, recyclable.  They’re marinated in plastic.

Here Howard Becker’s conception of the moral entrepreneur rears its well-intentioned head: local youth, eschewing the usual recyclable bottle collection drive have sought in my town to collect every last fingertip-sized plastic sticker.  “For each participating school, the class with the most stickers collected per student wins a pizza party.  Plastic-lined fruit and vegetable stickers are extremely difficult to remove at compost sites.  They end up visibly contaminating in finished compost.”

And no one wants a sticker sullying their garden!

As a teen I was part of my fair share of door-to-door pickup missions and took flak from strangers for my long hippie-esque hair when I’d appear at their door.  It stuck with me, maybe in my craw a bit, that people are quite concerned with how others appear and present themselves—gardens included.  Currently, school kids are dispatched to collect each and every wayward sticker that’s been dutifully peeled off the fruit and saved for just that purpose.  The alternative, perish the thought, would be that all those 6 millimetre little stickers might end up, as we’ve read, “visibly contaminating” compost.  Not a good scene for aesthetic beauty—although less of an issue for climate protection, we might note.

Now, we don’t want to sound like negative nellies so much as impart a literal sense of wonder at what future generations might say about present environmental efforts.  Maybe those stickers so thoughtfully collected matter and maybe they don’t.  We might recall the Middle Ages (not to be confused with the ilargely-illiterate Dark Ages that ran from the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE to the rise of Charlemagne a few centuries later) where monks were eager to write and express themselves and do more than transcribe the theological tracts in rote, slow-mo, pre-industrial fashion.  All that vellum, calf skin, was lying in front of them as a sheet of paper and they felt that some issue, some matter, must be worth their attention.  So, for the monks, even the teensiest of concept grabbed their attention.  How many angels could dance on the head of a pin? Not a bad query, a little one to be sure but it’s the little things that make life special, and these small concepts became known to posterity as minutiae.  As one online pundit notes, the question attests to cosmic proportions: “is God bound by the physical laws of His universe (ie. a finite number of angels) or is He able to transcend his own laws and thereby fit an infinite number of angels on a pin?” We might, with tongues thrust deep into our cheek (like, just enough) ask the same question of those unsightly fruit stickers that would otherwise sully some pleasant natural compost.  There is something unsettling for we denizens of the middle class when we see inorganic or otherwise acculturated aspects of society entering our Edenic garden plenitude.  Just try dropping a foil gum wrapper along a friend’s walkway in front of them; no one is more keen to not be led down a garden path of pollution that the owner of the garden!

Hopefully the collection of all those tiny fruit label stickers carefully collected from articles of fruit and then dispatched to recycling containers, rather than trashed in an unseemly basket of deplorable waste, means something good in the larger shift to greener economies.  Maybe it all counts deeply as part of a paradigm shift in our time.  Perhaps we’re wise to recall that, to be effectual, we do well to lug with us a hearty sense of humor.  Just think of the kids who don’t want to eat their apple and now can say, with a knowing smile, that they wouldn’t want to risk littering that tiny sticker!

References

Arendt, J.  (2024).  ‘Summerland Launches Vegetable Sticker Challenge For Local Students’.  Black Press Media: Summerland Review.  Retrieved from https://www.summerlandreview.com/news/summerland-launches-vegetable-sticker-challenge-for-local-students-7342259

Mys, J.  (2011).  ‘Notes and Queries’.  The Guardian.  Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-2029,00.html

‘The Answer’.  (1992).  Bad Religion: Generator.  Retrieved from https://genius.com/Bad-religion-the-answer-lyrics