Another Year of Being Grateful for Abundance All Around Us

 

This essay follows up on the previous one about the French Revolutionary Calendar.

In the original calendar, as explained in this wikipedia entry, each day was named after something to be found in the world of an ordinary person. These days were named after ordinary things, not after kings or saints or presidents. It may have seemed difficult to find 360 things after which to name the dates of the calendar, but the world is so full of things about which we can be grateful that it was not difficult at all. In my daily journals from that time in my life, I named each day after a tree or other plant one year; in another, after people who had been important in my life.

In the original calendar, the first day of Vendémiaire was named after the grape (raisin), as you would expect in France. Many of the later dates were named after trees and other plants, many of which would escape the attention of all but the closest observers. These included the érable à sucre (sugar maple), colchique (autumn crocus), and belle de nuit (beauty of the night, otherwise known as the four-o’clock flower). One day was named for hemp (chanvre), which is the same species but not the same breed as marijuana. The French make distinctions that we often ignore in America, such as potiron (winter squash) and citrouille (pumpkin) for the purposes of making soup. The list was made after the Europeans had incorporated food plants from North America, such as pomme de terre (potato), piment (hot pepper), and tomate. Of course, they also included domesticated animals, including those one might not expect a day to be named after, such as âne (donkey), bouc (billy goat), and grillon (cricket). They had days named after fuels and other materials such as tourbe (peat), houille (coal), argile (clay), and even fumie (manure). Of great importance to ordinary people were the tools such as herse (harrow), hoyau (fork hoe), pelle (shovel), and of course the pressoir (wine press). One might not expect an environmentalist like me to be thankful for coal, but when used in moderation coal can be an essential part of a sustainable and healthy economy.

Salvatore Fresca made a series of engravings, one for each of the French Revolutionary months, each of them of voluptuous women scarcely clad. But only in the three summer months were the women bare-breasted.

By naming each day after something, I had my eyes opened not only to biodiversity but also to the diversity of little blessings that we all have but about which we, concentrating on our own problems and stresses, do not think about. I seem to remember in my journal (which now has over 13,000 entries) I had a day named after the pencil. How often have you thought about and been grateful for pencils? Today’s list could be so much longer than the 1792 French list, and would include telephones and computers and vaccines and antibiotics and…

Few have said it better than Robert Louis Stevenson: “The world is so full of a number of things/That I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” Not to mention the fact that few kings have been or are as happy as most of us ordinary people! Today, and this year, look around you and be grateful.

Happy New Year!

This is mostly a repeat of what I posted on my blogs on September 23, 2013, which I’ll bet few if any of you have read. I myself had forgotten it (Moi-même je l'avais oublié). I have written a new follow-up essay which I will post next time.

Happy New Year, everybody. At least, according to the French Revolutionary calendar that was adopted in France right after the Revolution. It was used from 1793 until 1805. Read more here. One purpose of the calendar was to produce a scientifically-based calendar system.

Part of the scientific basis is that it was modeled after nature, after the seasons and the phenomena associated with them, rather than arbitrary months invented by human governments. For example, March used to be the first month, but Roman emperors added January and February, apparently for purposes of tax revenue. Because the Romans stuck two months onto the beginning of the year, the names of the months now make no sense. “September” means seventh, “October” means eighth, “November” means ninth, and “December” means tenth. But the French Revolutionary Calendar begins very close to the Autumnal Equinox, which was actually yesterday. The seasons, and the movements of the Earth relative to the sun, dictate this calendar.

The French Revolutionary Calendar is also based on the moon. Each of the twelve months has thirty days, consistent with the phases of the moon. Twelve months therefore have 360 days; the remaining five days were special days added to the end of the year. Today is the first day of Vendémiaire, that is, the month of grape harvest.

The traditional religious calendar had feast days of the saints. The French Revolution swept religion aside and established non-theistic science as its basis. This is one of the reasons I like it so much: it takes its framework from nature, rather than foisting a religious framework upon nature. Their calendar named each day after (in most cases) plants, although many were named after animals or farm implements. For example, today is raisin, or grape. I guess the revolutionaries had their priorities straight, didn’t they: naming the first month after the grape harvest, and the first day after the grape.

The Revolutionary Calendar was just one way of rethinking the world. The scientists of the French Revolution also produced the metric system, which is not only still used but has been expanded. The metric system is based on nature. For example, they said the meter was one-ten-millionth the distance from the equator to the North Pole. (They were pretty close.) It was also based on powers of ten. Instead of 16 ounces in a pound and 2000 pounds in a ton, or 5280 feet in a mile, there were 10 millimeters in a centimeter, 100 centimeters in a meter, and 1000 meters in a kilometer. And it is based on water, also. A milliliter is one cubic centimeter (cc). A milliliter of water weighs one gram. A calorie is the amount of heat that can raise the temperature of 1 cc of water 1 degree Celsius. How nicely it all fits together. No wonder scientists have used the metric system for a long time. And every major country other than the United States uses the metric system. As scientists continue to explore the very large and very distant and very small and very brief, they have expanded the metric system to 24 orders of magnitude both ways from the base. There are a million million million million yoctoseconds in a second, and a million million million million meters in a yottameter. The French revolutionaries did not imagine this possibility. Now the metric system has spread around the world, while the Revolutionary Calendar has been largely forgotten.

The Revolutionary Calendar is certainly not the only one based on nature. The Jewish calendar begins with the Month of Nisan in spring.

The reason I like to observe the Revolutionary Calendar, in addition to the regular calendar, is that it helps to fit my thinking into the cycles of nature. It helps me realize that we are part of nature, rather than being masters over it. Just as we cannot force the sea to not rise (see my earlier blog entry), we cannot force January 1 to be the first day of the year in anything other than an artificial sense. We have to start thinking of ourselves as part of the mesh of nature, of evolution, of ecology.

So happy 1 Vendémiaire, everybody!

Darwin Meets Albert Schweitzer

It is likely that few of you in the newer generation have heard of Albert Schweitzer. He was famous in the middle of the twentieth century. He lived a long time in the city I now call home, Strasbourg, France. I just posted a video about him.

Schweitzer was most famous for doing what almost nobody does anymore. He was a polymath, that is, a genius expert in what seems to most of us like unrelated fields. His fields were:

• Music: He was an expert at playing and building organs.
• Philosophy.
• Theology: He wrote about the historical Jesus and the mystical Paul.
• Medicine.

Unlike many of us, who are certified in one field (mine is plant ecology) but who know a lot about other fields because we have read a lot about them, Schweitzer actually had degrees in music, philosophy, theology, and medicine. Some examples of people who have thought broadly about more than one area of inquiry are:

• Isaac Asimov, the biochemist who wrote about science in general and even about theology; he even had a joke book;
• René Dubos, the microbiologist who wrote about human nature;
• Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist who wrote about everything, even baseball;
• John Polkinghorne, the physicist turned priest.

Schweitzer felt called to be a medical missionary in Africa. He was criticized because his field hospital in what is now Gabon was not up to the medical standards even of the time. But in its first nine months the clinic had 2000 patients; some of them traveled for days and hundreds of kilometers to go there. Could somebody else have done a better job? Probably, but there was no one else.

He won the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize not just for these things but also for his activism against colonialism and nuclear proliferation.

Was there a theme that tied all of these things together? I think it was reverence for life. The aspects of music, philosophy, theology, and medicine that he emphasized were those that made life better for humanity, which he loved.

Today it is difficult or even impossible for a scientist to be an expert in more than one major field of human thought, because every field of thought has grown exponentially; at least, science has. He was not trying to get people to know more scientific facts, but to celebrate how science (in this case medicine) can improve people’s lives (this is my message to the science blog readers). Nor was he trying to get people to believe certain doctrinal points. He was an evangelist, but not of doctrine; rather, of a reverence for life—this is my message to the religion blog readers.