Ranchers of the Soul

Cattle need management. For the pasture and the cattle to do well, they need to be bunched together and moved regularly. Otherwise, they will eat only the good stuff and the pasture will degrade. Eventually, so will the cattle. In the natural state, they are in trouble.

Of course, they aren’t in the natural state any more. They are in an unnatural state where the predators that would keep them bunched up have been killed. Practical wisdom would have been imposed on them by the wolves!

Humans are in a similar state. We have an abundance of food and no particular pressure. Yes, there are rich and poor, but the poor are pretty rich, historically speaking. Very few people in the USA are legitimately in danger of starving. We can graze as much as we want, as selectively as we want. We can eat only chocolate! We can binge on pop tarts, or subsist solely on Doritos and Red Bull.

Theologians call this Original Sin, the tendency of humans to go wrong, even when they know better. St. Paul talks about it, but so does Phaedra in Hippolytus. To know the good and choose the bad is a fact of human experience. Presented with abundance, we’ll choose the fun stuff, not the good stuff.

Researchers provided two groups of humans as much food as they wanted, one group with processed food (Doritos) and one group with unprocessed food. The first group ate 508 calories per day more than the unprocessed food group.

There are good reasons for our preference for high fat, energy-dense food–famine! If your food supply is uncertain, you had better eat as much as you can of the most caloric food you can find so that you can survive the hard times to come. But we have tamed famine for the most part, and these habits die hard, even though they are unhealthy to a human living in abundance.

A naturalist interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve could be that our remotest ancestors discovered the cultivation of food, and with it choice between good and bad alternatives. Only those with plentiful food could be expected not to eat ripe fruit from a tree! But this is mere speculation.

A rancher needs to be the intellect for his cattle. He needs to move them where they need to go, so that they will eat what they need to eat. It is too much to expect that Dolly the cow will be smart enough to eat all of the foliage when she could just eat the good stuff. This is why she needs a rancher with electric fence and a plan. Who will be the intellect for you?

How will you put constraints on yourself so that you lead a good and healthy life? Who will keep you away from the Doritos? You may need an external guide. In religion, this is the staretz or “spiritual father” who tells you what to do and helps you to do it. Or, if you don’t have a staretz, you follow the fasts and feasts of the liturgical year. A bishop of the Catholic Church has recently recommended the faithful recover mandatory fasting from meat on all Fridays. This is a good first step!

Otherwise you will have to do it for yourself. Nietzsche talks of ascetic Jesuits who turn their will to power back upon themselves. You need to do the same thing. Cultivate virtues. Acquire the habits of choosing well. If you don’t have these habits, it will be difficult, but it is not impossible.

I don’t want to suggest that you grit your teeth and white-knuckle your way through the culinary mine fields. There are ways to make it easier! For example, don’t go to the grocery store hungry. Don’t buy bad things. Keep them out of your house. Learn to cook, take pride in domesticity, and make your meals works of art and love.

Otherwise, you may need to find a rancher to take charge of you.