I loved Casey Luskin’s discussion today of an article at Aeon, with author Charudatta Navare urging against the familiar metaphor of the living cell as a “factory.” I’m in sympathy with Navare’s point. Dr. Navare, both a science writer and an enthusiast of Feminist Science Studies, plausibly makes a scientific case against seeing the cell as a hierarchical entity and casts it more as a “collaborative,” nurturing, non-patriarchal one, as “Cellular organelles sense each other’s needs and take ‘care’ of each other.”
The science sounds right, but as Dr. Luskin notes, the language, including the buzzword “mutual aid” (Google it), has a more than vaguely, er, socialist ring. “If we fail to imagine society without a centralised authority,” Navare reminds us, “we will find it difficult to understand or empower the oppressed.”
Is the cell an “autonomous collective,” or an “anarcho-syndicalist commune”? Maybe! The latter phrases are from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). It’s not the first time, by any means, that I’ve found Python to be prophetic of things to come, decades ahead. See the relevant scene here (sadly, it won’t embed), where King Arthur is lectured by peasant activist and political theorist Dennis, and I think you will laugh. “Come see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help, I’m being repressed!”