[D66] What Does it Mean to be Healthy?

[R.O.]

  What Does it Mean to be Healthy?

 From Why Hope? (John Zerzan)


What does it mean to be healthy, when dis-ease is the fact of modern 
life? As we know, there’s no separating body and spirit, and here the 
main emphasis will be on the spirit. Paraphrasing Adorno, Fabian 
Freyenhagen offered this judgment: “In a wrong world, no one can be 
healthy, live well or even rightly.”[1] But if, amid the ruins, a wrong 
world consigns us to living wrong lives, at least we can resist our 
social world in both private and public spheres, and thus live less 
wrongly. The great impediment, of course, is that we really only attend 
to the private sphere. Billions are spent on various flavors of 
self-empowerment rhetoric, and the failure of this effort could not be 
more evident. If any of it worked, there wouldn’t be such a constant 
flood of “self-help” commodities and focus on supposed therapeutic 
expertise. The wrong world. The world of accumulated suffering and 
trauma.[2] “The Age of School Shootings;”[3] rising rates of suicide,[4] 
autism,[5] and obesity; the extinction of community. Widespread 
anxiety[6] and a kind of overall PTSD condition—and all so generally 
unthought, unexamined.

A passivity and a sense of doom have settled on modern industrial 
society, as we lose our connection to each other and the world. I 
noticed in the early 1980s that Gary Trudeau’s comic strip characters 
began to have dark bags under their eyes. Not too much later, today’s 
fashion models’ expressions are blank and/or sullen. Smiles are very 
rare. As Philip Larkin’s poem “Afternoons” concludes: Something is 
pushing them To the side of their own lives.[7]

Zygmunt Bauman goes so far as to assert that “we have indeed become, at 
least for the time being, ‘invalids watching from hospital windows’.”[8] 
We can at least identify with Dalton Conley’s query, “What has happened 
to leave so many of us dangling in uncertainty each morning as we rise 
from our beds…?”[9] Strength and health are not about staying where one 
is or regaining that stasis. If there could be a kind of psychoanalysis 
of today’s culture, Adorno decided, it would “show the sickness proper 
to the time to consist precisely in normality.”[10]
High-tech consumerism and the market feed on the unhappiness and 
withdrawal from life they generate. There is a fragmenting, assaultive, 
and numbing quality to contemporary developed societies that injures 
human interiority deeply. Norman Mailer saw cancer as a result of the 
wrong world internalized. The madness is imprisoned within, goes into 
the tissues and cells and causes a tension that results in a mad “revolt 
of the cells.”[11] This formulation seems plausible to me. The aggregate 
of pollutants certainly bears on the case of cancer, but so, too, does 
the force of massive estrangement.
The prevailing and invasive madness is a culture of nihilism, with such 
features as depression,[12] distrust,[13] loneliness,[14] and fear.[15] 
A restless inner emptiness is characteristic, especially since the 
1970s. The manipulation or control of emotional life is a goal 
everywhere advertised, but it is not working; it’s clearly incapable of 
producing joy or health. Franz Kafka captured the image of the victim 
“caught in the trap the world has turned into,” as Milan Kundera put 
it.[16] Graduates are still being told, echoing Shakespeare’s Polonius, 
“to thine own self be true”; but who thinks this relates to the world we 
endure?
How can we “feel and engage rather than become numbed and dulled by how 
much we face,” in Sarah Conn’s words.[17] At the same time, judging from 
the rise in mass “random” shootings, there are more “walking time bombs” 
out there. Lipovesky and Charles (among others) note “a worrying trend 
towards a greater fragility and emotional instability” among 
individuals.[18]
The meaning of health, the recovery of the art of healing, is to learn 
from our suffering, to see its sources. Ward Churchill, asked why he 
doesn’t speak about healing, replied that there’s no healing unless we 
stop the wounding.[19]
In the Journal of Affective Disorders, Brandon Hidaka discussed 
“Depression as a Disease of Modernity,” contrasting past human 
environments with modern living.[20] He saw present-day “overfed, 
malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, and 
socially isolated”[21] denizens of disenchanted, dysfunctional, 
domesticated mass society as inherently prone to ill health. A brief 
look at some features of its opposite, hunter-gatherer life, will throw 
this even more clearly into relief.
At one time, and for a very long time, we lived literally close to our 
mother Earth. Relatively recently, our beds—especially in the West—have 
risen, as have our tables. Just lately, with ever more sedentism, we 
learn that a lot of sitting on chairs can be fatal! [22]
Roland Barthes referred to our divorce from the Earth in his 
“Civilization of the Rectangle” remarks, pointing out a kind of 
“pollution effected by the rectangle, which very rarely occurs in 
nature.”[23] Land ownership, a function of domestication, is the firm 
basis of the separation of humans from the natural world. Landed 
property is the original enclosure of reproductive resources, the 
control of both land and women. Along these lines, the privatized 
domestic sphere is also the invention of domestic violence.[24]
There were choices thousands of generations earlier than these 
developments, based on an intelligence equal to ours. Paul Tacon is on 
good grounds to surmise that very early humans (e.g. Homo erectus) 
probably “questioned their position in the universe.”[25] They were far 
more robust than we are, and recent scholarship has significantly raised 
estimates of their longevity. Research has also confirmed very early 
cooking with fire: the appearance of small molars at 1.9 million years 
ago is evidence of cooked food, compared with the large molars of other 
primates who spend much more time chewing.[26] And it may not be amiss 
to bring in Montaigne’s sixteenth-century essay, Of the Custom of 
Wearing Clothes,[27] where he observes that people remain who wear none, 
“situated under much the same sky as ours [France’s]. Montaigne found it 
unhealthy, our practice of being so mediated against the elements, when 
we “are naturally equipped with sufficient covering….”[28]
Capabilities such as attention span, literacy, and depth of thinking are 
aspects of health. Too bad they’re being fast washed away by the 
all-encompassing momentum of technology. In March 2014 the Scholastic 
Aptitude Test for high schoolers was dumbed down, excising the once 
required essay portion and deleting words thought too difficult in 
today’s tweet and text world. In the lower grades the teaching of 
handwriting is being discontinued. That skill and aesthetic is no longer 
wanted for a life spent at keyboards, staring at screens.
We are told that we’re empowered by all the technology, that it puts us 
in charge, but in fact we’re swept along by it. We are free-floating 
subjects, more and more “bereft of any psychological traits or 
sociocultural specificity,” according to Joanne Garde-Hansen and Kristyn 
Gorton.[29] And we are increasingly reliant on technological prosthesis 
for companionship, entertainment, and so much else. Early on, Jean 
Baudrillard called this “the end of interiority and intimacy.”[30]
Milan Kundera once described the terrible elusiveness of living in the 
present moment: “All the sadness of life lies in that fact,” he 
judged.[31] How much does technology rob us of well-being by chasing us 
from the present, from being present in the moment? In fact, its 
accelerating movement into every sphere means that all experience is 
decreasingly real. Vital, first-hand experience is in full retreat. 
Human relations have been traded for relations via machines. A 2014 news 
story reported that traditional dances and proms at John Jay High School 
in Cross River, New York, ended in 2011.[32] They were discontinued 
because students overwhelmingly preferred going home to text and tweet 
rather than attend dances.[33] The digital dimension has become the 
destination for more of everything people do. Even as cyber culture 
becomes ever thinner and more homogeneous, distracted, and superficial. 
William Powers refers to “the rushed, careless quality of screen 
communication,”[34] and John David Ebert adds that “Facebook does not 
allow for the possibility of long conversations of any kind.”[35]
Can there exist a healthy autonomy from this pervasive and invasive 
medium? Considering the entire ensemble, how much free choice is there, 
given what is now required of us on an everyday functional level? We are 
personally diminished by our progressive de-skilling, which reduces our 
autonomy further, while elevating our dependence on specialists of all 
kinds.

There is a profound dissonance between our inner nature and the 
always-intruding technological environment. A disembodied, synthetic 
life-world means that we live less vigorously. Nietzsche saw plenitude 
as the key to health. Where is real plenty in the virtual? To be healthy 
means to live richly, challenging ourselves, becoming strong by 
stretching ourselves past accepted norms.
And who would deny that health has to do with love? Which is a way of 
seeing the world, or not seeing it. Nothing grounds and supports us more 
than love. Whatever warmth we share is our small splendor. In “An 
Arundel Tomb,” Philip Larkin concluded, “What will survive of us is 
love.”[36]
We also know that health, at base, only really exists within a just and 
humane society. It is healthful to resist unprecedented alienation and 
unfreedom. The alternative is not a healthy one.
We settle for so little as disaster closes in. We pretend that what 
forecloses our flourishing, impinges on how we could be healthy, isn’t 
somehow, oppressively, everywhere. What a howl—and more—could burst 
forth from the yawning want that constitutes our lives. Health!


(ENDNOTES)

1 Fabien Freyenhagen, Adorno’s Practical Philosophy: Living Life Less 
Wrongly (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 5.
2 When what is taken for granted can no longer be assumed to exist, a 
generalized, traumatic anxiety results. Jeffrey Kauffman, ed., Loss of 
the Assumptive World: A Theory of Traumatic Loss (New York: 
Brunner-Routledge, 2002).
3 Jack Healy, “The Age of School Shootings,” New York Times, January 16, 
2014.
4 David Brooks, “The Irony of Despair,” New York Times, December 6, 
2013. “Walter Benjamin said of modernity that it was born under the side 
of suicide,” Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernism and its Discontents (New 
York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 12.
5 Andy Fisher, Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life 
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013). “The dramatic rise 
in autism spectrum disorders,” p. 205.
6 Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity (Malden, MA: 
Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1999). The current culture is “drenched with 
anxiety,” p. 25.
7 Philip Larkin, “Afternoon,” in Collected Poems (New York: The Noonday 
Press, 1989), p. 121.
8 Bauman, op.cit., p. 156.
9 Dalton Conley, Elsewhere, U.S.A. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), p. 9.
10 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (New 
York: Verso, 1974), Thesis 36, p. 58.
11 Norman Mailer, An American Dream (New York: The Dial Press, 1965), p. 13.
12 Lennard J. Davis, The End of Normal (Ann Arbor: The University of 
Michigan Press, 2013). “Depression rates rise each year rather than 
diminish,” p. 53.
13 Connie Cass, “In God We Trust, Maybe, But Not in Each Other,” 
Associated Press, November 30, 2013.
14 Ami Rokach, ed., Loneliness Updated (New York: Routledge, 2013).
15 Michael A. Weinstein, Structure of Human Life: A Vitalist Ontology 
(New York: New York University Press, 1979). “The overwhelming motive 
that grounds our practical life is the desire to ward off fear,” p. 53.
16 Quoted in Ulrich Beck, Ecological Enlightenment, translated by Mark 
A. Ritter (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), p. 88.
17 Quoted in Fisher, op.cit., p. 15.
18 Gilles Lipovetsky with Sébastien Charles, Hyper-Modern Times (New 
York: Polity, 2005), p. 85.
19 Ward Churchill, public talk, Eugene, Oregon. June 18, 2000.
20 Brandon H. Hidaka, “Depression as a Disease of Modernity: 
Explanations for Increased Prevalence,” Journal of Affective Disorders 
140:3 (November 2012).
21 Ibid., p. 205.
22 Alexandra Sifferlin, “Why Prolonged Sitting is Bad for Your Health,” 
TIME, March 28, 2012. Many other studies and articles underlined this in 
2012 and 2013.
23 Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Notes for a Lecture Course and 
Seminar at the Collège de France (1976–1977) (New York: Columbia 
University Press, 2013), p. 114.
24 Victor Buchli, “Households and ‘Home Cultures’” in Dan Hicks and Mary 
C. Beaudry, eds., Material Culture Studies (New York: Oxford University 
Press, 2010), p. 502.
25 Paul S.C. Taçon, “Identifying Ancient Religious Thought and 
Iconography,” in Colin Renfrew and Iain Morley, eds., Becoming Human: 
Innovation in Prehistoric Material and Spiritual Culture (New York: 
Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 70.
26 See my “The Way We Used to Be,” in Future Primitive Revisited (Port 
Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2012), p. 113.
27 Organ, Nunn, et al., “Phylogenetic Shifts in Feeding Time during 
Evolution of Homo,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 108: 
35 (August 30, 2011).
28 Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne 
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), pp. 166-169.
29 Ibid., p. 167.
30 Joanne Garde-Hansen and Kristyn Gorton: Emotion Online: Theorizing 
Affect on the Internet (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 139.
31 Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in Hal Foster, ed., 
The Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), p. 133.
32 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (New York: Grove Press, 1988), p. 25.
33 Carolyn Moss, “My High School No Longer Holds Dances Because Students 
Would Rather Stay Home and Text Each Other,” Business Insider, March 10, 
2014.
34 William Powers, Hamlet’s Blackberry (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 
p. 53.
35 John David Ebert, The New Media Invasion (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & 
Company, 2011), p. 59.
36 Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 
p. 46.


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