Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Metaphysics of Slop

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Jan. 15, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

15:44

The Metaphysics of Slop

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	One of the most interesting emergent phenomena produced by social media has been the world's exposure to Indian street food.
	This has had quite a negative reaction and has been mocked by people of various cultures for being unhygienic and symptomatic of a view of what is and what is not fit for human consumption, not just regarding the safety of what is prepared, but the nature of how it's prepared and why.
	This created a wider discourse around the concept of slop, which is usually defined as food presented in a kind of viscous liquid form that would normally be fed to animals.
	Most people don't want to willingly eat something that they would regard as slob, and it's considered a derogatory term.
	But in actuality, people consume slop all day every day, and it is a completely normal aspect of modern life.
	Not only is the frankly disgusting lack of cleanliness a major reason why most people reacted in horror to this kind of street food in the first place, but there's something about it that seems to provoke a hostile reaction to the very nature of what is being presented, which seems to raise questions of human dignity rather than questions of nutrition or hygiene.
	It's easy to be distracted by the gross out factor of a man cutting food with his toenails and miss the forest for the trees on the slop question.
	We could take for example this dish being prepared by a mosque in India as possibly the apex example of the concept of slop, at least as applied to food.
	For the last 500 years, this giant cauldron has been used to cook five metric tons of slop to feed their congregation, probably as a charitable endeavour.
	Huge amounts of rice, flour, and various other ingredients are poured into the cauldron, along with gallons of water and unnamed spices, which are then mixed together for hours.
	When it's ready, barefoot men descend into the concoction on a ladder to scoop it out with buckets, whereupon it is unceremoniously dumped into large metal barrels ready to be served.
	As we can see from the end product, we are presented with a mass of unidentifiable organic material, mixed together and boiled for hours, to provide something that is presumably reasonably nutritious and will feed many thousands of people.
	There is a particular mindset that precedes this product, informs how it came into being and what its purpose is.
	It is designed merely to keep alive the people who will eat it, regardless of who they are.
	The manufacturers of the food have made no effort to differentiate between people and their preferences, and would obviously not even consider this as important in the process of production.
	The very concept is absurd in this context.
	The people who are to receive this are not present in the thoughts of the men producing it, nor could they be, given the volume of what needs to be produced.
	I realise I'm sounding terribly judgmental, but I want to stress that something being slop does not mean it doesn't have utilitarian merits, nor that it is unpopular.
	This saffron rice is probably actually quite nice tasting and good for you.
	It is also being made out of good intentions on the parts of the cooks, who are trying their best to feed a multitude of people and have doubtless actually done a good job towards this goal.
	Indeed, slop can be enjoyable.
	It does often taste good, has nutritional value and is popular.
	But these practical virtues do not, however, ameliorate the fact that what we are dealing with here is industrial scale slop production.
	If the five tonne cauldron is the apex of what slop can be, on the other end of the scale is what we could call artisanal food, meals which have been carefully and skillfully crafted to produce a specific kind of experience beyond mere sustenance.
	Japan furnishes us with a plethora of incredible examples of artisanal foods using ingredients I wouldn't touch if you put a gun to my head, composed with a level of care and dedication which verges on the preposterous.
	The sheer professional pride these men manifest as they delicately craft a particular dish for a specific customer to provide a curated culinary journey is remarkable to behold and fits naturally as the antonym of the mass produced slop.
	This method of food preparation is highly aesthetic in its form, a work of art designed to speak directly from the chef to the customer and tell them that they are the recipient of a lifetime of expertise that has been employed on their personal behalf to provide them with this experience.
	The primary distinction then between slop and artisanal foods is not just in the nature of the end product but also the method of production and the intention of the creator towards his expected customer.
	Who is this for and what does it say about the chef?
	Fundamentally, the distinction is between the concepts of individuation and homogenization, which reflect the effort and distinction of the food we are served.
	In the philosophical context, individuation means the concept of an entity as being distinct and separate from others of its kind.
	It is the way in which we conceive of each other as being unique and named individuals, separate from the mass of mankind and worthy of a level of dignity and recognition appropriate to this station.
	To be individuated is to be seen, recognised, considered and respected.
	It is to be valued and valid in the eyes of people who accept you as such.
	Artisanal food speaks specifically to this kind of individuation in which the person making the food and preparing it in such a way is doing it for you, tailored to your specific desires.
	Though the meal prepared may be in the same category of food, indeed it may even in all relevant ways be precisely the same meal, the method by which it was prepared marks it out as unique and individuated in a way that speaks to your dignity as a human being, which could never apply to anything made in the five tonne cauldron.
	Homogenization is the opposite of individuation and is the key metaphysical component that makes slop slop.
	The cauldron slop is produced by people who show no particular expertise in their craft and do not care excessively about any individual end result.
	It is to be loaded by the bucket into containers to be given to the masses.
	There is simply no conceptual way of differentiating one diner from another in this formulation because we cannot conceive of the uniqueness of the individuals in a crowd and therefore we are unable to consider their individual dignity.
	We are forced to conceive only of the category of person with whom we are dealing and so we have no choice but to deindividuate the people in order to even be able to describe to what we are referring as a consequence of scale.
	This is a mass produced product for the masses and as such there can be no time or care put into any individual dish for any named individual.
	You will get a scoop from the slop bucket, as does everyone else, and it will be in any relevant way exactly the same as everyone else is.
	We naturally have a bias in favour of the artisanal over the slop, which manifests in the very words themselves and how they ring in our ears, because they present us with very different philosophies regarding how the world ought to be ordered.
	One speaks to a universe which is differentiated, purposeful, deliberate, crafted, careful, organized, discrete, and proper.
	The other speaks to one which is indistinguishable, standardized, generic, uniform, and common.
	The individuated universe requires hard boundaries between things to create a hierarchy of quality, in which the products of skills and services become more advanced and, consequently, more rare.
	The homogenized universe requires the breaking down of boundaries, in which everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator and the products of skills and services become ubiquitous and universal.
	The issue with homogenization is the lack of speciality, gradiation, uniqueness, and dignity that it treats the objects of its intentions with.
	It doesn't matter who the recipient of the slop is.
	The recipient becomes part of the lowest common denominator by partaking in the slop.
	This lens can, of course, be applied to things other than food and be used to identify the metaphysical things that are lost to us when everything to which we have access is homogenized.
	The industrial revolution can be seen in the same way for various material necessities as the five-ton cauldron is for food.
	The hipster aversion to mass consumer products is an expression of anti-slop sentiments, and the attraction to small-scale production and artisanal goods springs from a desire to have things that are unique and not necessarily things that are good.
	Mass-produced goods do not have to be low-quality.
	Any high-tech electronics that are sold across the West are usually cutting-edge marvels, but they are the product of an impersonal industrial process by alienated labour to produce interchangeable goods to an undifferentiated audience.
	There is nothing special or unique about them, nor anything that sets them apart from their peers.
	One technological marvel is very much like the next.
	The industrial process has made the artisan obsolete in raising the general standard of goods produced.
	No longer is the function of the masterwork rare and therefore special and valuable.
	In ancient times, swords which were of a particularly high quality would be given names to mark them out in a mythological way, and we carry those names with us today.
	Everyone knows the name of King Arthur's sword because this masterwork tool carries a story.
	Industrial products, however, are the purest expression of positivist materialism.
	They have no metaphysics and no spiritual value beyond the basic value of the labour and materials required to produce them and can be replaced as easily as they were acquired.
	Herbert Marcuse laments the blender effect that technology has had on high culture.
	Though he was of course a communist, in one-dimensional man, he is forced to acknowledge that the transcendent elements of high culture are only possible because of their hierarchical separation from the common mass of the homogenous culture.
	And quote, the progress of technological rationality is liquidating the oppositional and transcending elements in the higher culture.
	That is to say, that the pre-modern civilizations in which we had lived had what he called two dimensions, that is, a higher and lower order of life, to which only some had access, which technology was in the process of obliterating to create a monodimensional society, in which the transcendent elements of the higher artisanal life are rendered inaccessible.
	To listen to Mozart in a concert hall is a privilege to which very few human beings had access, and it is only in this special particularity that the possibility of experiencing the transcendent aspect of Mozart's music can be experienced.
	It required a particular orchestra with particular skills in a particular time and in a particular place with a particular audience to create an effect which cannot be produced elsewhere.
	When Mozart's music is vulgarized by the industrial process and made common and available to all, then the transcendent aspect of it disappears into the ether.
	To hear it merely as elevator music while you are moving from one floor to the next renders it normal and outside of what could bring us to a higher plane of consciousness.
	On the cultural level too, slop has its utilitarian uses.
	Whether you enjoy soaps or pop music or whatever mass-produced consumer goods, the cultural slop has the effect of binding people together in a shared experience of society and makes them feel a kind of togetherness with one another.
	The Star Wars megafan who uncritically enjoys whatever is sluiced out of the Disney pipeline has his comrades and constituents, and they feel a kind of moral unity with one another and a shared civilizational sense of being.
	And it is this compressing of everything into the same homogenized cultural goop that is the unnoticed risk with AI.
	Though AI might appear to create individuated content, what it produces is in fact the illusion of creativity and individuality.
	It will produce en masse the same kind of content without particular expertise through its algorithmic powers.
	There is no artist behind the art, and so the effort required to pay homage to the dignity of the customer is absent, as is any message an artist would have intended to transmit to them.
	Instead, what we have is the mechanical facsimile of creativity, which can indeed be impressive enough to fool us into thinking that we have engaged with work of art.
	To conclude then, the problem with slop is not material.
	On the material level, slop is often highly functional and satisfies our animal nature with ease, which is why we feed it to animals.
	As our industrial processes advance and our productive power increases, whether we are talking about food, popular entertainment, electronic devices, AI, or whatever, the quality of the slop that we employ in our daily lives will doubtless outstrip the quality of the artisanal products that we use in purely utilitarian terms.
	However, I think it is important to remember that when we engage with slop in any realm, we are in some way sacrificing a small portion of our own personal dignity and uniqueness in allowing ourselves to become a mass consumer, which is metaphysically no different to the pig in the trough.
	And we should consider what that sacrifice means for our own sense of self-worth, self-respect, and our ability to hold ourselves to higher standards whenever we are given the choice.

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