I was talking with a friend the other day and she said, ‘This is awful. We did this to ourselves. We caused this. Humanity created this virus and it’s killing us!’
She was referring not to the conspiracy theory of a leak – deliberate or otherwise – from some bio-chemical research facility but from the way in which new viruses can form as a result of animals being in close proximity in live food markets. A human created situation. And it’s not the first time. Avian flu started in a similar way and Swine flu is believed to have originated in a factory farm in America. The 2009 Swine flu epidemic killed between 150,000 and 575,000 people. I know – there’s a vast range of uncertainty in that figure but don’t blame me. I got the information from an otherwise excellent interview with the philosopher Peter Singer, discussing some of the moral implications of the coronavirus pandemic.
The recognition that we are killing ourselves, though, perhaps should come as little surprise. We humans, of course, also bear much of the responsibility for climate change (which Singer considers in the interview) and for the extinction of thousands of other species, whether through over-hunting or habitat destruction. The former issue suggests that we too could go extinct, the latter a reminder that no species is guaranteed disqualification from finitude.
It’s all very upsetting – and particularly so for those who have held faith in a concept of ‘progress’. For sure there have been dramatic and beneficial advances in science and technology. The eradication of smallpox and the development of antibiotics. We can have conference calls with people on the other side of the world and watch Netflix; we can fly to the moon and use Instagram. Brilliant! Anyone who’s read Steven Pinker is surely enthralled with humanity’s greatness and potential. We don’t murder and rape each other as much as we once did and we’re allowed to be gay and transgender and we’re not burned as a witch just because we’re atheistic middle aged women living alone with cats (for which I am truly grateful). When I read his Better Angels of Our Nature, I was utterly persuaded by his thesis. I might never have accepted that the Age of Aquarius was on the way, but I did believe that moral improvement was aligned with all the evidence based technological progress.
Thing is, then I came across the somewhat curmudgeonly philosopher John Gray. His Seven Types of Atheism was great, so I read Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals and The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths. All are eminently readable and quite short – I recommend them, if you have the time to read. Which you do. In both books, Gray strongly counters the notion of progress. Firstly, he claims that our technological advances offer us the greater ability to do evil as much as to do good. What’s more, advances in civilisation (say, better treatment of prisoners or enemy combatants) do not, like advances in science, increase step-by-step – they are subject to immediate collapse in times of stress (say, Abu Graibh of Guantanamo Bay). Progress is a religious myth which is realised only in an imagined afterlife or in the corrupted claims of Communism or Nazism. His argument is well put in this article - and it's worth a read. If you really don't have time for the books.
We live with who we are – and many of our steps forward bring costs as heavy as the benefits. The move to agriculture may have limited some of the threats of the hunter-gatherer life, and certainly allowed some the leisure time to make technological advances, but it brought an increased reliance on single crops (thus increased risk of famine and malnutrition). Humanity became shorter and less fit for generations as a result of both the hard labour and the poorer diet. The same argument can be put for every development – the industrial revolution and the current age.
At this point in human history, before Covid-19, we were killing ourselves with man-made diseases. Hypertension, heart attack, stroke, diabetes (type II), auto-immune conditions, some cancers, inflammation related diseases (like Alzheimer’s) and various mental health disorders (like anxiety and depression) can all be categorised as ‘mismatch’ diseases. Our species was not adapted for the lifestyles we now lead. Poor diets, poor sleep, too little exercise, too little social connection, too much chronic stress and too much time inside, sitting down on our own – all a recipe for ill health. And all possibly exacerbated by lockdown.
If you doubt this analysis, let me point you to Daniel Lieberman’s The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease, Vybarr Cregan-Reid’s Primate Change: How the world we made is remaking us and Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization, by John Ratey. I’ve read the first two and as for the third, I was listening to an interview with Ratey on my run today. I had read his earlier book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain – and that blew my mind.
Ratey is a psychiatrist and this book is not some guru, feel-good, unscientific clap-trap about running to become a better you. It’s evidence-based and dives deep into the hormonal and chemical impact of exercise. Thirty minutes of increased heart rate doesn’t just help reduce inflammation in the cortical mass; in addition, the fire-storm of chemical activity has profound effects in increasing mood, lowering anxiety, enhancing the ability to attend and focus, assisting memory formation, slowing age-related degeneration and increasing the healing after injury (concussion, say). It is incredible – but far from magical: humans were made to move, and we function best when that is part of our regime. Our evolution took millennia, it’s only in the past centuries that we’ve sat down most of the time eating cakes. We are killing ourselves daily.
Go Wild is a prescription for countering the many ill-effects of our cultural sickness. A straightforward prescription: exercise, eat well, sleep well, counter stress by being able to inhabit the moment rather than brooding on the past and fearing the future (Ratey suggests Mindfulness meditation) and enhance social connections. That we are social animals is a meme, but one we fail to take seriously. We all depend on community to be at our best, psychologically and physically. Those who say they don’t need others are lying, deluded or psychopaths. It’s in our DNA.
A key aspect of Ratey’s work is the interconnectedness of mind and body. We still fixate on dualism, regarding the mind and the muscle as two realms with no more than diplomatic relations connecting them. But Spark – and the other books I’ve mentioned - are full of both stories and data showing the dependence, connections and synergies between these two aspects of our beings. One notable example is that children struggling with ADHD are assisted by the way exercise, bodily movement, changes their brain. They can attend in classes and learn. They do better academically. PE becomes IQ. On the other hand, PGo Wild is a prescription for countering the many ill-effects of our cultural sickness. A straightforward prescription: exercise, eat well, sleep well, counter stress by being able to inhabit the moment rather than brooding on the past and fearing the future (Ratey suggests Mindfulness meditation) and enhance social connections. That we are social animals is a meme, but one we fail to understand. We all depend on community to be at our best, psychologically and physically. Those who say they don’t need others are lying, deluded or psychopaths. It’s in our DNA.
A key aspect of Ratey’s work is the interconnectedness of mind and body. We still fixate on dualism, regarding the mind and the muscle as two realms with no more than diplomatic relations connecting them. But Spark – and the other books I’ve mentioned - are full of both stories and data showing the dependence, connections and synergies between these two aspects of our beings. One notable example is that children struggling with ADHD are assisted by the way exercise, bodily movement, changes their brain function. They can attend in classes and learn. They do better academically. As for the reverse case, poor physical health can inhibit cortical functioning in certain ways. That ‘healthy mind in healthy body’ trope was right.
And right now, let’s face it, we need our bodies and minds to be at their best. Just as the stressed animals in wild food markets and factory farms are immune suppressed and thus more liable to contract viruses, so are we. We have to take control of what we can as far as our physical and psychological wellness is concerned. We have to combat not just this human-created virus but the human-created weaknesses in our individual systems.
Stress makes us less able to fight off disease. Both exercise and meditation have been shown to help with limiting the effects of stress. Plus, you can stop re-reading the Johns Hopkins stats and focus instead on something that will challenge your mind and help it grow. Just like muscles and lung capacity, memory and learning ability are enhanced by effort. So, put some in. Read something that challenges you. (Can I recommend John Gray?) If you struggle with your attention span, exercise and meditation will help with that, too. Poor sleep and poor diet? Easy fix for the latter, as for the former, meditation and exercise will, again, help, as will a fixed routine – and no iPhone in the bedroom.
Lockdown may take away some of our freedoms, but that’s why it is could be so empowering to assert our agency where we can. And in the ways outlined above, we can wrest some control away from everything that threatens our wellness.
NOTES
I wrote this post and then somehow managed to delete the whole thing, so I wrote it again. I think it was better the first time around. So, apologies for a decrease in standards here on Corona and the Crone.
Comments