All around daftar situs judi slot online terpercaya the world, at least in the English-speaking countries from situs slot online which I read news, shutdowns due to coronavirus inspired a small renaissance in sourdough bread baking. Non-essential workers found — and where I live in Melbourne, under the hardest lockdown we’ve had yet, still find — ourselves stuck at home, living a much-transformed daily routine. We’re not allowed outside unless going to essential work, providing care, taking our allotted one hour situs judi slot online resmi of outdoor exercise, or shopping for food, one person per household, for at most one hour each day. Otherwise, we stay home, under an 8pm–5am curfew.
Time at home provides the conditions sourdough needs to thrive. The process doesn’t take much labour, money, or fancy equipment, but it does require tending. And intermittent tending can help give shape to the days of people whose days are otherwise formless — which is not, of course, everyone, but some of us. The care that is required to maintain a sourdough starter (feedings at least once each day), the attention that is part of making a loaf (mixing, rising, waiting, shaping, rising, baking), and the satisfaction of eating something you cared for and tended to (the smell, the texture, the sharing with your family and neighbours) are experiences that can be hard to come by otherwise these days. These are small but meaningful pleasures in an otherwise quite terrifying world.
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The coronavirus lockdowns were the spark to a sourdough fire that had already been prepared, however. There was an ongoing reclamation of traditional bread-baking in process since at least the 1990s, such that the Los Angeles Times could report in 1991, “We’re living in a sourdough renaissance.” And that decades-long, ongoing reclamation meant that in 2020 anyone could find easy access to myriad instructions on how to make bread — hence the surge of bread baking among those stuck at home.
But it’s strange to claim a renaissance for a staple. And this isn’t the first time people have staged a return to bread-making during a world-wide crisis. M.F.K. Fisher was a food writer in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century, an essayist about whom the poet W.H. Auden said, “I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose.” During the Second World War, in 1942, she wrote a book about living well on rations, How to Cook a Wolf. It was a how-to guide and a cookbook, with a great deal of wit on the side and an earnest conviction that good food could make a good life. The book’s chapters had titles like, “How to Be Sage Without Hemlock” (a reference to Socrates), “How to Be Content with a Vegetable Love,” “How to Be a Wise Man,” and “How Drink to the Wolf.” It was a philosophical meditation on a difficult situation, including food shortages, through the everyday reality that we all have to eat and might as well eat as well as we can. She wrote, “War is a beastly business, it is true, but one proof that we are human is our ability to learn, even from it, how better to exist.”
In one of the chapters, “How to Rise Up Like New Bread,” Fisher suggested that the war might help people return to good bread. “Perhaps, situs judi slot online even, we will remember how to make good bread again.” She described the making of bread as a better treatment for “bad thoughts” than chiropractic therapy, yoga, or meditation. And she suggested that replacing industrial bread with bread you have made yourself could be a balm for a world gone mad:
Cut for yourself, if you will, a slice of bread that you have seen mysteriously rise and redouble and fall and fold under your hands. It will smell better, and taste better, than you remembered anything could possibly taste or smell, and it will make you feel, for a time at least, newborn into a better world than this one often seems.
She thought making bread could be a kind of religious ceremony, redeeming the time even through terrible experiences. She didn’t mention, but likely would have known, that she was echoing a parable from the Christian gospel of Luke, in which Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven “is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”
Fisher’s is a big, beautiful promise. Sometimes, however, it seems suspicious. Let me explain something about why.Ethical theory
Ethicists have often been tempted — perhaps under the influence of liberal moral philosophy — to focus their inquiry narrowly on individual decision-making. The classic case is the so-called “Trolley Problem.” Imagine, the ethicist will say, you are standing at a trolley switch. A trolley is headed down a set of tracks toward five people who, if you do nothing, will be hit by the trolley and die. But standing at the switch, you have the power to divert the trolley onto a second set of tracks, on which is trapped only one person. Should you pull the switch, killing the one and saving the five? Or should you refrain from killing, letting five die?
The hypothetical scenario is meant to exemplify the distinction between the two central moral theories on offer in the situs slot terpercaya last few hundred years of (mainly European and Anglophone) philosophical thought: consequentialism, as it is called, which focuses on outcomes (The greatest happiness for the greatest number! Save the five!); and deontology, a fancy word for doing your duty, and a theory that focuses on principles for action (Do not kill! Let the five die!).
The weird thing about the Trolley Problem, however, and about the prominence of hypothetical cases like it in moral theory, is that the trolley switch is so far removed from where most of us live every day. Difficult decisions like these certainly exist in the world; there are, in fact, people who need to make tough choices. The last few months have likely seen many more people in situations analogous to the Trolley Problem than usual, as health care workers have had to triage the sick and dying in hospitals. But for most of us, on most days, an answer to the Trolley Problem is far removed from our actual moral discernment. Should I kill one or let five die is not an everyday dilemma. More common questions might include: When should I be patient with my children and when do they need discipline? How can I do both — patience and discipline — well? When my colleague is making a mistake, how should I respond — for her good, my good, and the good of our shared enterprise? How should I prioritise the various needs in our household: mine for silence, yours for sociability, our roommate’s for very loud music? These are everyday forms of moral reasoning, and it takes some work to get from hard cases like the Trolley Problem to wisdom for living with questions like these.
Even these everyday examples I have offered, however, succumb to moral philosophy’s general focus on individual decision-making. This focus on questions about what I should do — all by myself, at just this moment — has sometimes led to forms of ethics that are inattentive to both broader character analyses of ethical actors and to moral evaluation of the systems in which they are embedded. When ethicists focus on individual decisions, they sometimes fail to see those decisions in the context of a person’s whole life. How I ought to respond to a colleague making a mistake may well be different from the way you ought to respond. You may have strengths I lack, and knowledge of our strengths and weaknesses should play some role in our discernment. In addition, how I ought to respond today may be different from how I ought to respond tomorrow. Circumstances change, and history matters.
Acknowledgement of this fact has led some contemporary ethicists, dissatisfied with the choice between consequentialism and deontology, back to an old tradition called virtue ethics, in which the most important ethical question in any situation is about how my actions contribute to my formation. Good living requires habits more than individual decisions, this tradition teaches, and I only form habits through practice, and so rather than thinking of my life as a series of moral dilemmas, I ought to think of it as an exercise in growing toward goodness.
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