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<h1>What Does it Mean to be Healthy?</h1>
<p>From Why Hope? (John Zerzan)<br>
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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.<br>
<p>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]</p>
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]<br>
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.<br>
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?<br>
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]<br>
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]<br>
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.<br>
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]<br>
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]<br>
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]<br>
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.<br>
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]<br>
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]<br>
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.<br>
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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.<br>
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]<br>
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.<br>
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!<br>
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<p>(ENDNOTES)</p>
1 Fabien Freyenhagen, Adorno’s Practical Philosophy: Living Life
Less Wrongly (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 5.<br>
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).<br>
3 Jack Healy, “The Age of School Shootings,” New York Times, January
16, 2014.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
6 Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity (Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1999). The current culture is
“drenched with anxiety,” p. 25.<br>
7 Philip Larkin, “Afternoon,” in Collected Poems (New York: The
Noonday Press, 1989), p. 121.<br>
8 Bauman, op.cit., p. 156.<br>
9 Dalton Conley, Elsewhere, U.S.A. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009),
p. 9.<br>
10 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life
(New York: Verso, 1974), Thesis 36, p. 58.<br>
11 Norman Mailer, An American Dream (New York: The Dial Press,
1965), p. 13.<br>
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.<br>
13 Connie Cass, “In God We Trust, Maybe, But Not in Each Other,”
Associated Press, November 30, 2013.<br>
14 Ami Rokach, ed., Loneliness Updated (New York: Routledge, 2013).<br>
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.<br>
16 Quoted in Ulrich Beck, Ecological Enlightenment, translated by
Mark A. Ritter (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), p.
88.<br>
17 Quoted in Fisher, op.cit., p. 15.<br>
18 Gilles Lipovetsky with Sébastien Charles, Hyper-Modern Times (New
York: Polity, 2005), p. 85.<br>
19 Ward Churchill, public talk, Eugene, Oregon. June 18, 2000.<br>
20 Brandon H. Hidaka, “Depression as a Disease of Modernity:
Explanations for Increased Prevalence,” Journal of Affective
Disorders 140:3 (November 2012).<br>
21 Ibid., p. 205.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
26 See my “The Way We Used to Be,” in Future Primitive Revisited
(Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2012), p. 113.<br>
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).<br>
28 Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), pp. 166-169.<br>
29 Ibid., p. 167.<br>
30 Joanne Garde-Hansen and Kristyn Gorton: Emotion Online:
Theorizing Affect on the Internet (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013), p. 139.<br>
31 Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in Hal Foster,
ed., The Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), p.
133.<br>
32 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (New York: Grove Press,
1988), p. 25.<br>
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.<br>
34 William Powers, Hamlet’s Blackberry (New York: HarperCollins,
2010), p. 53.<br>
35 John David Ebert, The New Media Invasion (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland & Company, 2011), p. 59.<br>
36 Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber and Faber,
1964), p. 46.<br>
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