George Washington Carver

“George Washington Carver invented the peanut.” – That nugget of misinformation was what passed for Black History in my monochromatic 3rd grade classroom c. 1955.

Not exactly true (what was in 1955?), but Carver did have a lot to do with the development of the peanut as a cash crop (remember Jimmy Carter?) and with its use in crop rotation strategies; and he discovered more than 300 new uses for the nut and its by-products. His work significantly improved the economic prospects of poor farmers, particularly Black farmers in the post-Reconstruction South.

Carver believed he had discovered a classic win-win-win paradigm. Planting peanuts enabled farmers to (1) rejuvenate their soil, (2) bring a new cash crop to market, and (3) address a number of pressing social needs - nutritional, pharmaceutical, etc. Today, most of us would call such a convergence Serendipity; Carver called it Providence. 

The dominant paradigm of our time is mechanism. Progress is a function of probing, testing, and measuring the world. Carver’s relationship with the world might better be described as mutualism. Bridging Anaximander (6th century BCE) and John Bell (late 20th century CE), Carver believed that all being was being with.

He viewed his own life as an ongoing conversation with God, though he most often encountered God, not in seclusion via formal prayer, but in the process of interacting with Nature: "I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in."

Since the dawn of the great darkness (aka the Enlightenment), it has been our style to view Nature as insentient. In valid pursuit of knowledge we perform experiments on inanimate matter…but we don’t stop there. 

We subject organisms from all branches of life, including animals, mammals, even primates, and in some awful cases, human beings, to invasive procedures. Laplace, et al. desensitized the world, giving us a ‘00’ license to kill…and we’ve taken full advantage of it. 

We’ve even allowed the reification of Nature to include members of other ethnic groups and social classes, children and the elderly.  At the height of this barbarity, only propertied adult white men were deemed to merit the NFL’s ‘franchise tag’. In such a world, Carver was the counterculture! 

As kids, we’re taught that ‘life’ includes a hierarchy of values:

“It’s not ok to hit your sister but it is ok to squash ants on the sidewalk.”

“It is ok to slaughter birds to make chicken nuggets, but it is not ok to throw stones at birds on your front lawn or to knock down their nests.”

“It’s not ok to kick the dog but it is ok to chain it to a tree, lock it in a cage or board it in a kennel.”

“There are 8 billion people living on Planet Earth today. All of them are ‘created equal’ but they don’t all have the same social utility (aka value).” (Explain that one in 500 words or less, Mr. Jefferson.) 

This graded approach to ‘being’ gets us through the day, but it is profoundly unsatisfying at every level; it pleases no one. Molly wants to test a nuclear weapon on a newly discovered Pacific Island, but Jane is concerned with the wellbeing of any indigenous humans who might (or might not) be living on the island, and Billy is focused on the welfare of several endangered species known to inhabit this remote outpost. 

No compromise or meeting of the minds is possible because this is not a ‘difference of opinion’; it is not even a difference of perception…or ethics; it is a difference of ontology.

Simply put, Molly, Jane, and Bill are all good, well-intentioned people (even if their values are different from yours). They mean to do well. And when they look at ‘K-pop Atoll’ (as my grandniece calls the newly discovered island), they all see the same sand, unexplored caves, flora and fauna, but they understand what they see very differently.

Even conversation among them is impossible. They use the same words and they apply them similarly, but by those words they understand very different realities. Meaning does not reside in words or in the objects (or processes) to which they refer but rather in the interpretive framework (aka Mythology) that lies beneath these semantic layers.

To distinguish Carver’s ontology from that of Laplace or Marx, I mentioned Anaximander and John Bell but the notion that nature is animate and life a dialog pervades intellectual history globally.

For example, the apostle John calls Christ ‘o logos’, the Word. Whatever has come to be has come to be through that Word and that Word became flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. 

1500 years later Hasidic Judaism embraced a superstrong version of panentheism.  According to the Ba’al Shem Tov and others, God (Shekinah) is present as a spark in everything that is (animal, vegetable, or mineral). 

The human project is simply to facilitate the reunion of these sparks, and we do that by treating everything we encounter with respect, using it appropriately, granting it ‘reck’ (Anaximander & Heidegger).

I am reminded of Native Americans. They depended on the biosphere for their livelihood, but they never failed to express gratitude to the animals and plants that fed, housed, and clothed them. 

The intellectual history of the West may be understood as an effort to combine the material and spiritual into a single model. How’s that going? At the end of the day, there may be only two viable models of the World. Either (1) it is inanimate, insentient, unconscious, and accidental with no objective or transcendent values operative, or (2) it is organic, self-aware, intentional, and value driven. 

For better or worse, we live in the shadow of ‘the Valley of Death’, aka ‘the Enlightenment’, so inanimate materialism is the paradigm du jour. The 20th century, however, saw some important challenges to this world view: psychoanalysis, wave/particle duality, quantum indeterminacy, and non-locality stand out. Where we are headed now is anyone’s guess, but I am more than happy to set my sail on the course laid down by Dr. Carver.   

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 The 1944 oil painting of George Washington Carver by Irving Bacon depicts the scientist outdoors, holding a milkweed pod, symbolizing his pioneering agricultural research and deep connection to plants. The portrait captures Carver’s calm and thoughtful demeanor, highlighting both his scientific achievements and his gentle, contemplative character.