Moon Poop

Do you realize there is poop on the moon—human feces, to be exact? Twelve American men walked on the moon. Each time a lunar module prepared to return to the orbiting ship, various instruments, the module bases, and human waste were left behind. This was done because the astronauts collected moon rocks, and an equivalent or larger weight had to be left on the moon so that the lunar module could successfully break free of moon gravity and rejoin the orbiting spaceship. So much for “Leave only footsteps, take only pictures”! I can't help but see this as a very telling metaphor for the environmental crises we face today. It didn't have to be this way, but extreme thoughtless littering seems to be part of human nature.

Do you also know that when a human egg is fertilized by a sperm, a sheet of cells develops, called the embryonic disc? A lot happens in this disc, but early on part of it folds into a tube, creating the basic gut or alimentary canal of the developing human being. This is called the archenteron, with what will be the anus at one end and the mouth at the other. It appears that the anus begins to form even before the mouth. In any case, this tube is one of the first constructions within the cells of the developing embryo, as is appropriate. All life depends on ingestion and expulsion. As human beings, we take in food and expel feces. We take in fluids and expel urine. We take in air and expel it in modified form. We females even take in sperm and expel a newborn human.

In some of the processes listed above, what we expel is dangerous to us. We expel what is left after we absorb all the nutrients our bodies can use. Urine may be sterile, but feces obviously can cause disease in human beings. The air that we expel would not sustain us if not replaced by “fresh” air. Thus, it is also a truism of life that we pollute our environments. Since we expel from our bodies that which can harm us, we cannot live amidst our excretions for any length of time without becoming diseased.

All animals have to devise ways to deal with this situation. When left to their own devices, most mammals will poop at some distance from the area they sleep and eat in. The original rest rooms for humans were apparently bushes, where feces could be deposited without contaminating living areas. Today, a well-maintained septic system in a rural backyard efficiently converts human waste to biological products that are harmless to humans and actually beneficial to vegetation.

Problems develop, especially for humans, with overpopulation. Human waste in urban environments has been known to cause cholera when it comes in contact with drinking water. The bigger the city, the more polluted will be the rivers and streams that run through it, without a large waste disposal system. And this only deals with body waste. Our garbage is buried in landfills, often destroying wetlands in the process, and dumped in rivers and lakes and oceans, polluting those water sources to different degrees. Or it is carted off to pollute other, less affluent lands.

When I was a child vacationing on the New Jersey shore, for a couple of years there were globs of tar floating in the ocean water and staining those of us who swam in it, because it was most convenient for an oil company to get rid of its waste by running a pipe under the shore and out into the ocean. Today not only are there huge islands of plastic in the ocean, it is actually raining micro-particles of plastic around the globe. We still have no safe way to handle the radioactive waste from nuclear power stations. And since nothing human is perfect, waste systems and nuclear power plants do fail.

We human beings are really, really bad at taking care of our own shit, and we are polluting our own environment, the whole earth, as a result. It's very interesting that a colloquial term for our material possessions is our shit. What we use and discard, whether in the body or outside it, is pollution because we do not manage it well. Certain paths up Mt. Everest are covered in human debris.

Humans spend a lot of time planning and planting and harvesting and preparing what we put into our mouths. But we spend relatively little time dealing with what comes out the other end. Donald Trump once remarked that one thing he most appreciated about this wife Melania was that after she used a bathroom, you couldn't even tell anyone had been in it. Some Japanese women use little music boxes to hide the sound of their eliminations in a public bathroom. We basically deny our eliminations; we deny a natural human process. We flush down our urine and feces and think no more about them, not about the people who do have to deal with human waste and not about where that waste ends up.

Given that the alimentary canal is the first major physical construct of the developing human form and that the anus develops before the mouth, we are blind to a lesson from the origin of our beings. The canal that runs lengthwise through our bodies is more fundamental in human development than the lungs that will eventually breathe or the heart that will eventually move blood. We have to take in nourishment AND get rid of waste before the rest of the body can thrive. Yet we choose to ignore as much as possible this most fundamental part of ourselves. Our waste stinks; it can cause disease; we don't want to deal with it on an individual basis. But because we choose not to deal with it, we are making our home planet uninhabitable—and not just by us.

Almost anything is more important to us than what we do with our shit. We have no qualms leaving human feces and human-made things on the moon because it is so obviously much more important to bring back moon rocks that we can analyze. The mind is of greater value than the environment. We live with such pollution as tar or plastics or toxic chemicals or other garbage in the ocean because human industry (in all senses of the term) is of greater value to us than aesthetics or even basic health. We care for little beyond our own desires.

Can you imagine people from a culture that saw the moon as the habitation of a goddess leaving human shit there? Can you imagine those people so freely and carelessly polluting the ocean if it were the home of Neptune? We mock and belittle pagans of old, but which in these terms is the saner society? We are our own gods, and all we do for ourselves diminishes the value of everything else. Take a look at William Wordsworth's “The World Is Too Much with Us.”

If we had larger minds, greater consciousness of ourselves, we would have to acknowledge that we need to put at least as much effort into managing our shit as we do into what we consume, in all senses. If we consume, we have to be responsible for what we expel. It's simply a slightly different way of being, a more responsible way of being that accords with our own physical development. If we tried, we could grow flowers in our shit. Instead, we wallow in it.

Small-Minded Government

A recent essay in the NY Times Opinion section by Jamelle Bouie included a link to FDR's first inaugural address.ⁱ This is perhaps the first time FDR used the phrase “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” He is speaking directly to the American people in the midst of the Great Depression, blaming the “money-changers” for the crisis and promising to put people back to work. What followed was what we remember as the New Deal, which did indeed put many people back to work and created safety nets for many more, including Social Security.

It is partly in reaction to FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society programs that modern Republicans have embraced the concept (what they think of as the ideal) of small government. One result is that we now have a President who forebears to use his powers to have American industries produce so many of the products we need in the present coronavirus crisis. The Republican party is clearly committed to removing all or some of the safety nets established earlier by FDR and LBJ.

I could never understand the meanness of the Republican party until I recently read an essay about Never-Trumpers: “You can’t have a successful limited government unless you have a population that itself is virtuous.”ⁱⁱ The problem is that Republicans start with the abstract idea of small government and work from there, rather than starting with the reality of how people live and their strengths and weaknesses. Republicans don't want to help people in general because that would challenge the ideal of small government. They want people to help themselves instead.

In other words, to reach the ideal of small government, the people must be virtuous. But how do we define virtue—according to whose values? This is why many conservatives want to preserve a white Christian country, so that all people hold the same values. We can, ideally, elect a fairly virtuous person to be President or to serve in Congress. But there is, of course, no way to create or sustain a virtuous population of many millions of people, even if they were all culturally alike—as we Americans certainly are not.

Idealists don't want to accept inconvenient realities, however. People have to become more virtuous, presumably also less sick and more wise, rather than need government to help them—just because it is important to have a small government.

When liberals become too extreme, the result can be disorganization, even chaos. But this tends not to last long, because we do have laws and ways to implement the laws. And crazy liberals do tend to grow into more moderate liberals, as a recent essay by Mark Rudd, one of the radical Weathermen of the late 1960s and early 1970s, demonstrates.ⁱⁱⁱ When conservatives become too extreme, however, the result is fascism or tyranny—the control of the many by the few. We seem to wander into this quagmire much more often than we wander into anything resembling chaos. And it is much more dangerous. Some degree of chaos would not randomly extinguish six million Jews.^iv

What we have to fear, really, is absolute ideology. If it is deemed absolutely necessary to have small government and if the people must be virtuous to attain that—or suffer the consequences of their natural human fallibilities, then again the few will be dominating the many and the many will suffer.

ihttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opinion/trump-coronavirus-new-deal.html

iihttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/opinion/nevertrump-conservatives.html?searchResultPosition=1

iiihttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/opinion/weathermen-greenwich-village-explosion.html?searchResultPosition=1

ivSome might argue that Stalin is an argument for the atrocities of an extreme left orientation, in this case Communism. But Russia did not stay communist for long, if it ever was. What began as a collective leadership (a liberal, communist idea) devolved into Stalin functioning as a dictator in a totalitarian government (an extreme conservative orientation). The deaths of millions of peasants in the famine and then the Great Purge of those who did not think right are clearly the actions of an extremist right point of view, an insistence of only one right way to think. The excesses of the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France might be a better example of extreme violence by the left. But, as Wikipedia puts it, “Robespierre was eventually undone by his obsession with the vision of an ideal republic and his indifference to the human costs of installing it.” This is quite different from the liberal ideal as quoted by Voltaire: “Every individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of his opinion, is a monster.”