The only way is health
Two years ago I co-hosted a big conference on health at Bromley-by-Bow, with Nora Bateson and Russell Gundry. It was a wide-ranging exploration designed to open people’s thinking to what the real meanings of health might be. In the nature of these things, many attendees wanted the lessons of the day to be articulated and captured for posterity. They were not, and I am returning to the subject two years on to celebrate how my thinking has changed beyond all recognition.
What for instance is the connection between health and education? How is it, as we have rehearsed many times in these blogs, that medical knowledge and the education of medical professionals has become hostage to big pharma and big food in a thoroughly Stalinist and anti-educational way? How is it that the anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists have so easy a field day?[1]
What is the connection between health and law? I was deeply sceptical and blank about this on the day but it is now clear to me that as a health professional you can be sued for genuinely treating a patient using all the evidence and not sued if you have followed a standard practice that will kill the patient. As a GP in the UK you can be bribed to prescribe drugs such as statins or you can be in all sorts of trouble if you protest that it is not in the patient’s interest.
But this blog post is not about this pervasive sickness, it is about health. It is about a flourishing that leaves all that disgusting behaviour blithely in its wake. Health is indivisible and cannot be reduced to a series of criteria. Health is inseparable from a healthy ecosystem, and we have wrecked the only one we have. We flourish by our connections and the joy and inter-dependency they bring. There is no other way and the only way is health.
I am stepping into a new world where the mycorrhizal support for my fruit and nut trees is hugely more important than anything a GP might say, where the diversity of the plant and insect ecosystems supporting my chickens outweighs what a hospital consultant knows, where the micronutrients in the vegetables tell my taste buds that I can find a way to huge vitality. In that world the animals I eat are also indispensable partners in the flourishing of soil and plants.
Aseem Malhotra is very clear on his big public platform that there is no way to health via medicines and supplements. Many people now realise that food produced as a commodity down to a price does not support health either and pay extra for organic food. But organic as a label is defined by a series of negatives: no artificial fertilisers, no pesticides, whatever. Nourishing food comes only from a flourishing ecosystem such as the remaining wild or the practice of regenerative agriculture that works to restore the ecosystem, especially the soil.
A flourishing tree
One story that helped me shift my thinking was about fruit trees. Fruit trees can suffer from a wide range of pests. Michael Phillips, an apple grower using regenerative practices, in his book The Mycorrhizal Planet, describes how these pests target only trees whose health is weaker.[2] So rather than treat the pests he treats the tree health because that has huge multiple benefits. He makes sure that at the point of time of likely pest attacks, the trees are so flourishing in their health that there is not an issue, and they are not attacked.
There is a partial definition of health in this story. Health in a healthy ecosystem is such that the myriad potentially invasive viruses, bacteria, insects, worms, birds, whatever, are naturally self-limiting and self-balancing. It is not so much that infection of a million kinds does not occur, it is that it remains not a problem and in fact probably plays an important role is processes we do not understand. Remember how bad sterile environments are for babies.
Notice how the health of any organism in this incredibly complex ecosystem is dependent on the health of all the others. And it cannot be the case that the flourishing of a bacterium or a species of soil micro-organism that we cannot even see is any less important than keystone species than ourselves. To use a pesticide is to compromise our own health, rather more directly than anyone cares to acknowledge. The significance of Michael Phillips’ work is that question of working with what is, not against it. This is so easy to say and so difficult to understand in practice, but health is the dimension of existence that reveals its truth.
The complexity of natural systems is mind-boggling and is our way into understanding good practice. Although various sciences can get to understand mechanisms, they cannot understand the multiple overlapping and interpenetrating meanings that have become layered onto those mechanisms. This is the subject of our recent post on the Joy of Semiotics. We cannot, even in principle, isolate a set of properties of an ecosystem or a species within it and do scientifically rigorous work, because to isolate something is to remove it from its meaningful environment where it can live and thrive. We can add to our sense of the wonderful complexity, but to reduce it is to mislead ourselves.
Suppose we notice that a social context results in stress and sickness in the people who live and work in it. We can think all the way back to the classic study of the UK civil service perhaps, that showed that it was the people with lowly jobs within it that suffered more from stress than the supposedly stressful senior jobs. We can be absolutely sure that this social context is not only bad for the people that work in it, but that its work will be bad for wider social and political systems. The principle is that health is indivisible and more deeply interconnected than we will ever know. We can check that sweeping conclusion by looking at civil service interventions in our natural environment and see just how misguided and unthinking they are.
Education
The thinking practices that education values are on the wrong side of this line. What is taught is supposedly clear logical thought and a set of known facts about the world. What is taught is completely sterile, even in so-called creative subjects like art and music. What is taught stems from military discipline and the patriarchy. As I write, a bunch of male legislators in Alabama voted to make abortion illegal there. That is the natural outcome of what we think education is. It is not an aberration from the point of what educators think their job is: it is the necessary consequence of externalising the world, including all those inconvenient female people.[3]
What children and indeed adult learners need to is to see how to engage with the world. Not the world as someone else describes it, but the world that is the necessary ground of our existence. The real reason why food and nutrition feature so heavily in GentlySerious blogs is that it is an inescapable mode of engagement with the real world. If we can’t see what we need to eat, its characteristics and provenance, then we clearly can’t see the world at all. And remember Marshall McLuhan: every extension is also an amputation. We cannot access at a distance the food we eat without amputating our knowledge of what food actually is. Almost everything we are offered to eat is not actually food if we follow this train of thought.
I promised you only the positives. How can children learn to eat as part of being radiantly healthy? They need to be among food that they understand as part of the web of life. In Miraculous Abundance, Charles Perrine-Gruyer takes as his model a Guatemalan amazon tribe he lived with. There was no stored food, but every morning on awakening the family would take themselves in different directions and come back with aspects of breakfast. No stored food, complete food security (never any lack) and a thorough understanding of the place of the various animals, fish and plants played in their own worlds. Intuitive understanding of semiotics!
Anthropologists have studied the impact on this blossoming of health of the arrival of convenience food where none had been available before. I am thinking of a tribe of nomadic Siberian reindeer herders, who because of the presence of an oil drilling site has access to pot noodles. The visible health of the children declines almost as instantly as the noodles rehydrate, not because pot noodles are such a terrible food, but because the web is broken. Once the web is broken children’s sense of what they need to eat disappears. Not only can it not be replaced by “teaching food habits” but we know from bitter experience that any such teaching makes things much worse.
Oneness
There is a lot of faux-spiritual, new age mumbo-jumbo talked about the oneness of everything. Much of it is magical thinking and wish-fulfilment. I find it affects me emotionally much the same as exhortations to positive thinking or non-violent communication. It just doesn’t connect to the world I live in every day.
But when we look at health we start to see a much more edgy sort of oneness, where we get to learn the hard way that when we harm our ecosystem we simply get bitten in the bum in return. In fact it is worse than that: Bill McKibben has an iron law that the person who gets bitten on the bum is never the person who causes the problem. We hand out casual misery to others every day and we don’t even know.[4]
Indeed, the missing insight of almost all our education is that there is simply no way to understand local cause and effect: there is no local cause and effect that does not have such important side effects that the description of the mechanism is largely false, no matter how rigorous the scientific method used to determine it in the first place. When there are no reliable facts to be taught there is only the passion and skill to live the world we have largely wrecked.
I want to return to my friend and colleague Michael Jacobs. Michael mediates disputes and teaches mediation skills. His warning is this: the models and skills he teaches about what mediation is and how to do it well are a distraction. You cannot pay attention to how to mediate well and to the people you are mediating between. If you try to think through the former you will neglect the latter and the mediation will fail even though you think you are doing it right.
That is a wonderful metaphor for our lives. We absolutely must know some things we currently don’t know, or I would not be writing now. But our first priority is to be engaged. So I have to improve some grazing using some chickens, and I sort of need to know how to do that, but primarily I need to observe the regeneration of the soil and everything that depends on it. If biodiversity goes up dramatically on my smallholding I both live the “why” and have no idea about the impossibly complex interconnections that cause that to happen. Can you feel the betrayal of that spirit by everything in our education system?
So real oneness is not the sugar-coated hope for a future but the knowledge of where health comes from and how indivisible it is, no matter what anyone says about treating ill-health. Michael Marmot reported that in the Norwegian government everyone said that they were ministers of health as well as their more prosaic role: they knew that all policies inevitably affected the health of their own population and indeed of other populations outside their jurisdiction.
[1] You’re probably by now aware of the epidemic of measles and other previously controlled diseases that is sweeping North America.
[2] Not unlike how wolves and other predators target the weaker members of the herd. Sometimes this increases the health of the herd itself. In thinking, people often confuse the experience of an individual member with the experience of the whole. And the whole is bigger than you think.
[3] When things like this come to a vote, men shouldn’t get to have a voice.
[4] A comprehensible dramatic version of casually externalized misery can be found in An Inspector Calls
