Monday, November 4, 2013

Commensality : closed , open --- and global

Hitler regarded German Aryans as family -  so they all got invited to eat at his table - but German Jews and German Romas did not - they might have once been Germans citizens but were not 'family'.

So, they got no meal invite but rather a whiff of  lethal gas instead.

Hitler practised what is technically called "closed" commensality : only inviting a select few to dine around the common table.

Jesus (and Martin Henry Dawson with penicillin) practised "open" commensality : all humanity was invited to the family dining table .

Practising closed or open commensality are voluntary decisions : acts of free volition.

But today, many people like myself don't believe one can "practise" global commensality --- we simply regard it as an established, inevitable -scientific - fact of life.

 All Life, small and big, willy-nilly, dines around the only dinner table that Life in the universe appears to have : lifeboat Earth.

Taking in each other's laundry in endless cycles of energy and matter use and re-use.

Dawson seemed to be working towards such a global view of commensality but died very young before his 49th birthday.

However, interestingly, his personal research interest over his short lifetime was in the robust commensality (shared on both sides) of microbes and humanity....

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