World's Largest MazeThere's a way the presence of Dole in the Hawaiian Islands, the plantations and what it took, what it takes, to make and run them, is morally no different than the transportation of native ancestral specimens by natives in pre-Columbian South America.
The Pineapple Garden Maze at Dole Plantation
Covering an area of more than two acres with a path length of 1.7 miles, it is made of 11,400 colorful Hawaii plants...
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Native to southern Brazil and Paraguay (perhaps especially the Parana-Paraguay River) area where wild relatives occur, the pineapple was apparently domesticated by the Indians and carried by them up through South and Central America to Mexico and the West Indies long before the arrival of Europeans. Christopher Columbus and his shipmates saw the pineapple for the first time on the island of Guadeloupe in 1493 and then again in Panama in 1502. Caribbean Indians placed pineapples or pineapple crowns outside the entrances to their dwellings as symbols of friendship and hospitality. Europeans adopted the motif and the fruit was represented in carvings over doorways in Spain, England, and later in New England for many years. The plant has become naturalized in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and Trinidad but the fruits of wild plants are hardly edible.
Spaniards introduced the pineapple into the Philippines and may have taken it to Hawaii and Guam early in the 16th Century. The first sizeable plantation 5 acres (2 ha)—was established in Oahu in 1885. Portuguese traders are said to have taken seeds to India from the Moluccas in 1548, and they also introduced the pineapple to the east and west coasts of Africa. The plant was growing in China in 1594 and in South Africa about 1655. It reached Europe in 1650 and fruits were being produced in Holland in 1686 but trials in England were not success ful until 1712. Greenhouse culture flourished in England and France in the late 1700's. Captain Cook planted pineapples on the Society Islands, Friendly Islands and elsewhere in the South Pacific in 1777.
Julia Morton, Purdue
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And there's a way it's absolutely different, and morally repugnant. It requires a location - you have to be somewhere to see it, and these days the moral viewpoint's been removed to abstract space, a-local space, or the attempt's been made to move it there.
It's why these questions lose their urgency when the scalpels and magnifying lenses come out. It's how men like Mendel and B.F. Skinner and their progeny and heirs can function with intact personalities. The dissolution of moral reference; there's no true compass once you take everything apart, no moral alignment that isn't subjective; but it depends entirely on that removal of locus, it can only work if moral distinctions are made in an abstract landscape.
In the world, the real one, this one, it's aesthetic, and that's where I'm taking my toys now - I don't give a shit about the moral equivalences, and the relativism and pragmatism. It's ugly what they've done, and that's all I need.
Aesthetics are completely subjective, relative, and momentary. So what?
They work. This other stuff doesn't.
It's wrong because it's ugly - and there's no underlying rule, no blanket coverage, no universal application, just aesthetic disharmony. End of story.
It means the eventual collapse of the rule of law, but hey, that's coming anyway.
Spengler, a columnist at Asia Times, is prissily fussing at the edges of this issue:
Power over nature is good, but it is not the good, for evil men can use this power for evil purposes; the case comes to mind of the physicist Werner Heisenberg attempting to build a nuclear weapon for Hitler. In some fashion music also involves a power over nature, or at least knowledge of nature's potential in the form of harmonies. I am not a scientist, but I am prepared to believe Einstein's claim that the beauty of nature reveals itself in harmony. In music, the capacity to move men by evoking their pre-conscious powers is good, but it is not the good.Einstein for all his kindness gave the atomic bomb and its exponentially more Satanic offspring to whoever has it now. But the assumption is there's some universal good that's got Heisenberg and Hitler outside the gates, and Einstein and whoever Spengler thinks is the opposite of Hitler inside them.
The overall theme here is getting past the subjectivity of that, the biology of it. And Spengler sort of gets near it with "harmony" as he means it. Though "power over nature" is nowhere close, and "knowledge of nature's potential in the form of harmonies" is gibberish.
The conflict isn't moral, it's aesthetic, and its outcome rests on the architecture of reality, not subjective reality but the complete whole entire thing this is happening within.
It's impossible to know now but it's likely enough that the transport of the earliest pineapples from the places of their origin was done with a more accurate recognition of the harmonic, the larger vibratory pattern of existence, than the establishment and maintenance and expansion of the Dole empire in the Hawaiian islands. The facile attempt to reduce the issue to extractable, quantifiable universal principles is what I'm rejecting.
It's music, the rightness of one tone against alongside through and with another, a series of notes leading to absolute freedom, and out of that freedom a chosen note that was inevitable.
Rules won't work there. Blues was a fundamental rejection of musical rule-making at the same time it transcended the snares of anarchy, because it raised the magnitude of order. Rules won't work there in theory. An aesthetic response will.
The real laws of harmony have to be lived, they die in the abstract.
What you do isn't ugly because it's wrong, it's wrong because it's ugly.
