This an article from Jay Walljasper in the latest issue of Ode Magazine. I think it has great relevance to the current business of wine.
Racism. Sexism. Terrorism. Fundamentalism. Totalitarianism.
Individualism. Ask people what’s wrong with the world and their answer
will likely focus on some sort of “ism.” Corporatism. Narcissism.
Commercialism. Cronyism. The list goes on and on.
But I would like
to bring up one more “ism,” which I view as a huge source of our
problems today: monoism. I don’t think it’s officially a word
(Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia and my dictionary say no, while
Google hints at some archaic religious meaning) yet I believe it’s a
powerful idea shaping and distorting modern society. Monoism, in my
definition, means “the reckless and wrong-headed reduction of the
intricate and often wondrous workings of the universe to a single
factor, cause or outcome.”
In other words, there’s just one answer
to any question. One solution to every problem. One happy ending for
all stories. One genius behind every new idea or invention.
The
pervasive power of monoistic thinking leads many people to believe that
the only point of business is profit. That the only purpose of
education is to prepare kids for jobs. The only true god is the one in
which they believe. Even those of us who naturally resist
oversimplifications like these are not free from the influence of
monoism. It’s been drilled into us since we were young—at home, in
school, all over the media. We’ve been trained to view the whole world
with the same pinpoint precision as a scientist conducting experiments
under carefully controlled conditions in a laboratory.
But a quick
glance at some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the past
century shows that, even in the clear-cut world of science, monoistic
explanations—a single sequence of events occurring in a measurable
progression—does not always describe how discoveries happen. Reality,
it turns out, is often a bit messy. Two research teams probing the
mystery of DNA both independently came up with the double helix idea at
nearly the same time. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues at the Los
Alamos lab barely beat Nazi scientists in developing the atomic bomb.
And, as everyone knows, neither Al Gore nor any other single individual
invented the Internet. (Though, to be fair, Gore never actually made
that claim.)
Monoism can be traced back at least as far as the Enlightenment of
the 18th Century, which instilled in the Western world the idea that
the universe functions like a machine. And it probably goes way back to
ancient times when monotheism first asserted there was only one god—
and anyone who thought otherwise was sinfully wicked.
Monoistic
thinking is destructive because it imposes an artificial
one-dimensional structure of reality upon us, promoting the
misconception that linear cause and effect can explain everything we
need to know.
Take cancer research as an example. For 50 years,
we’ve spent billions investigating what substances cause the disease,
testing them in isolation for their carcinogenic properties. Yet
there’s strong evidence that cancer often arises from a combination of
exposures, meaning the monoistic model of tracing the effects of one
chemical at a time is inadequate in protecting us from the disease. You
need only look to nitroglycerine, an explosive created by combining two
relatively harmless compounds, to see the fallacy of reducing things to
their smallest parts in order to understand their impact. Or ayahuasca,
a powerful hallucinogen used by Indians of the Amazon in religious
ceremonies that is made from the roots of two rainforest plants,
neither of which has much effect when ingested alone.
Indeed,
monoism can be found at the root of many other troublesome “isms”
haunting our world, like racism (the single-minded focus on race as an
indicator of human worth) or fundamentalism (a fixation on one set of
beliefs as the absolute truth). All of these “isms” offer a narrow
formulation of how the universe operates, blinding us to the diverse
and fascinating glory of the world in which we live.
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