🐰 Down The Rabbit Hole 🕳️

“People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.”

~ Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays

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Greetings...Happy New Year!

As we begin a new year, I wanted to send you warm wishes for many blessings in the year to come. Yes, there are many things that (rightfully) give us cause for concern. That said, while I spend a lot of time pointing out problems with the modern world, I am an incurable optimist and I believe that there are always even more things to be grateful for, and to be optimistic about. I believe that our story has a happy ending, even though it might not be the ending that we would have chosen. At the very end of this week's newsletter, I include a poem from Wendell Berry...I hope it will inspire and delight you as much as it does me. And...without further ado, here are my latest reflections on the work of Ivan Illich...

While the work of Ivan Illich offers remarkable and counterintuitive insights into a variety of aspects of the modern world, he is best known as a critic of both the modern educational system and the modern health system. In one of his most influential works, Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, The Expropriation of Health, he takes a serious look at the modern medical establishment and offers robust critiques of both its existential legitimacy as well as its practical results. Today’s quote provides a good place to consider his critique:

“A world of optimal and widespread health is obviously a world of minimal and only occasional medical intervention. Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet in an environment equally fit for birth, growth, work, healing, and dying; they are sustained by a culture that enhances the conscious acceptance of limits to population, of aging, of incomplete recovery and ever- imminent death. Healthy people need minimal bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition, and die.

Man's consciously lived fragility, individuality, and relatedness make the experience of pain, of sickness, and of death an integral part of his life. The ability to cope with this trio autonomously is fundamental to his health. As he becomes dependent on the management of his intimacy, he renounces his autonomy and his health must decline. The true miracle of modern medicine is diabolical. It consists in making not only individuals but whole populations survive on inhumanly low levels of personal health. Medical nemesis is the negative feedback of a social organization that set out to improve and equalize the opportunity for each man to cope in autonomy and ended by destroying it.”

- Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, The Expropriation of Health

Perhaps I have bitten off more than I can chew with this quote(!) There are so many things in this quote that we could consider, that’s it’s difficult to know where to begin. I’d like to focus on this part: “Man's consciously lived fragility, individuality, and relatedness make the experience of pain, of sickness, and of death an integral part of his life. The ability to cope with this trio autonomously is fundamental to his health. As he becomes dependent on the management of his intimacy, he renounces his autonomy and his health must decline.”

Central to Illich’s argument is that in order for humans to lead healthy and happy lives, we must be empowered to deal with the reality of our human frailty and mortality on our own, without the intervention of outside institutions. When we outsource these things, we give up our autonomy and control. In so doing, we find ourselves unable to properly address the most serious existential reality of our physical lives: that we are not invincible, and that we will eventually die.

The modern medical industrial complex destroys the communities of health that used to be baked into our social structures, it relieves us of individual responsibility for our own health, and does everything it can to address each person’s inevitable decline. Illich argues that in order for a person to be truly healthy, they must be empowered to accept the reality of their mortality, rather than ignoring it. The reality, of course, is that regardless of the progress science and medicine have made, human mortality is a fact of life, and because our culture doesn’t know how to process and live with this fact, we are stressed and deeply troubled by the reality that we’re trying to avoid.

Our culture’s avoidance of death is perhaps most visible in the way in which we deal with the elderly, the dying, and the dead. Traditional healthy cultures care for and honor the elderly, offering them a loving and dignified end to their life. In stark contrast to this, the modern world tries to hide the elderly out of its sight. We hire caregivers to care for them, and morticians to deal with their bodies (by “beautifying” them) after they die. It is no wonder that our culture experiences a deep unease when it comes to the topic of death and dying.

OK…that’s it for today! I hope you enjoyed this latest look at the work of Ivan Illich…as always, stay tuned, all the best…and I will see you soon!

Herman

PS: Here's the poem from Wendell Berry that I hope you will enjoy as we begin a new year, hopefully full of life, inspiration, and things more meaningful...

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something

that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free

republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion – put your ear

close, and hear the faint chattering

of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap

for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy

a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep

of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie down in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

~Wendell Berry