Monday November 15, 2004 - Restaurant As Metaphor for Civilization

Monday November 15, 2004 - Restaurant As Metaphor for Civilization

It’s nearly 4:00 PM on Monday afternoon in a small bed & breakfast with an ocean view on Moonstone Drive in Cambria, California. We arrived back at our room just after 2:00 PM and the view out our window was gloomy. There was a shroud of fog covering everything and we despaired of a second lovely sunset to match the lingering one we watched on Sunday evening. Now, only a couple of hours later, the fog has completely burned away and the sun is a bright ball in the western sky drawing a wide line of blazing white in the undulating ocean from the horizon all the way to the shore. That same sun waning along the western edge of the Americas is already awakening the denizens of the Pacific Islands and the mainland of Asia.

Sitting in this serene and beautiful place, you can ponder the place of humanity in this larger world. The sun that is illuminating Cambria and Tokyo concurrently has hung in that same sky for millions of years doing today the exact same thing it has done for millennia before. If the dinosaur is an approximate analogy to humans—they roamed this earth for many more years than mammals, then will our legacy be as theirs: a species that existed much as any other life form on this planet or any other planet until it expired through natural calamity as did the dinosaur or through an exhaustion of will—the gene pool gave out and ceased producing life forms able to cope with the changing conditions of the planet?

Last night I sat watching a popular restaurant next door to the place we’re staying. At 5:00 PM, the place was empty and cleaned the night before. Every table had been set with fresh tablecloths and clean silverware and cloth napkins adorned each dining room table. The bar, the most popular attraction in the place, was likewise cleaned and well ordered. Partially filled bottles of liquor and wine were poised for the day’s rush of eager patrons. The bar tables were likewise wiped down, the floor cleaned and scrubbed to remove the last reminders of the previous night’s trade. Outside, a line was forming of expectant clientele—the place does not take reservations, a great marketing ploy.

As soon as the doors open, the line entered the bar and took their seat for the evening. Most have come to drink first—since as long as you’re drinking you’ve a right to your place at the bar—and later to have bar food in lieu of a proper evening meal. These hearty souls have gathered to celebrate the end of the day and last night they were treated to a lingering sunset pink that dipped slowly into the western horizon, seemingly sinking into the waters of the pacific. Most of the patrons—caught up in conversations—probably caught only fleeting glimpses of the dying rays of the sun, more intent on the celebration rather than its cause.

As the evening progressed from my upstairs window looking into the many windows along the side of the restaurant, I’m struck by the continuous activity I’m seeing. There is a steady stream of waiters and waitresses moving back and forth from the kitchen to the bar in the front of the building and from the kitchen to the restaurant in the rear of the building. As one group of bar goers and restaurant patrons leave, another group arrives to take their place. What makes the empty building alive is the living beings serving and consuming the alcohol and sustenance the restaurant produces.

The restaurant is a living entity as a result. It subsists off the steady stream of revenue produced from the thirsty and hungry patrons. And just as any living creature, it must cope with the tendency toward disorder and chaos that plagues anything that is alive. In the case of the restaurant it’s the disorder produced by the production and consumption of food and drink. Each day, that mess has to be cleaned up and made ready to repeat the process: kitchen, dining room, and bar scrubbed and sanitized to stave off the insect and animal gleaners. As with any system, the effort toward order is never 100 percent complete thus each effort falls some small percent behind the previous effort. The cumulative effect eventually destroys the entity, which survives by being completely rebuilt or replaced.

Civilization is the great restaurant of humanity. It is continuously being driving toward disorder only to be pushed back into order at enormous expense by those benefiting from this order. If civilizations of the past are any indication, the lifetime of a culture, the Roman for example, is a few hundred years as their creative energy enabled order to prevail over disorder and for the culture to expand and grow. Once those few hundred years past, then disorder slowly began to win out and the civilization gradually fell into chaos. Modern culture seems to follow the same pattern if the colonial empires of the 19th century are any indication. If the pattern follows true, then the hegemony of capitalism may be racing pell-mell toward its epoch, if it hasn’t already achieved it.

With my half-century on this earth, I can look back over the history of the civilization I call my own and marvel at what has transpired. My grandfather born before the turn of the 20th Century was the product of the First World War. My father was the product of the Second World War and the Korean Conflict. I was the product of the Viet Nam War and the information revolution. My children and grand children will only know a world that is instantly connected and always on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You could reason that such progress would break the cycle of order giving way to disorder. I hope so, for my progeny’s sake, I really hope so.