HEALTH IS
MEMBERSHIP (Extracts)
Wendell
Berry
Delivered as a speech at a conference, "Spirituality and Healing", at Louisville, Kentucky, on October 17, 1994. Available at: http://home.btconnect.com/tipiglen/berryhealth.html.
I believe
that health is wholeness. For many years I have returned again and again to the
work of the English agriculturist Sir Albert Howard, who said, in The Soil and
Health, that "the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man
[is] one great subject."
I am moreover a Luddite, in what I take to be
the true and appropriate sense. I am not "against technology" so much
as I am for community. When the choice is between the health of a community and
technological innovation, I choose the health of the community I would unhesitatingly
destroy a machine before I would allow the machine to destroy my community.
I believe
that the community-in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures-is the
smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated
individual is a contradiction in terms.
(…)
We are now pretty clearly involved in a crisis of health, one of the wonders of which is its immense profitability both to those who cause it and to those who propose to cure it. That the illness may prove incurable, except by catastrophe, is suggested by our economic dependence on it. Think, for example, of how readily our solutions become problems and our cures pollutants. To cure one disease, we need another. The causes, of course, are numerous and complicated, but all of them, I think, can be traced back to the old idea that our bodies are not very important except when they give us pleasure (usually, now, to somebody's profit) or when they hurt (now, almost invariably, to somebody's profit).
(…)
I wish it
were not the fate of this essay to be filled with questions, but questions now
seem the inescapable end of any line of thought about health and healing.
Here are several more:
1. Can our
present medical industry produce an adequate definition of health? My own guess
is that it cannot do so. Like industrial agriculture, industrial medicine has
depended increasingly on specialist methodology, mechanical technology, and
chemicals; thus, its point of reference has become more and more its own
technical prowess and less and less the health of creatures and habitats. I
don't expect this problem to be solved in the universities, which have never
addressed, much less solved, the problem of health in agriculture. And I don't
expect it to be solved by the government.
2. How can
cheapness be included in the criteria of medical experimentation and
performance? And why has it not been included before now? I believe that the
problem here is again that of the medical industry's fixation on
specialization, technology, and chemistry. As a result, the modern "health
care system" has become a way of marketing industrial products, exactly
like modern agriculture, impoverishing those who pay and enriching those who
are paid. It is, in other words, an industry such as industries have always
been.
3. Why is
it that medical strictures and recommendations so often work in favor of food
processors and against food producers? Why, for example, do we so strongly
favor the pasteurization of milk to health and cleanliness in milk production?
(Gene Logsdon correctly says that the motive here "is monopoly, not
consumer's health.")
4. Why do
we so strongly prefer a fat-free or gem-free diet to a chemical-free diet? Why
does the medicine industry strenuously oppose the use of tobacco, yet
complacently accept the massive use of antibiotics and other drugs in meat
animals and of poison on food crops? How much longer can it cling to the
superstition of bodily health in a polluted world?
5. How can
adequate medical and health care, including disease prevention, be included in
the structure and economy of a community? How, for example can a community and
its doctors be included in the same culture, the same knowledge and the same
fate, so that they will live as fellow citizens, sharers in the common wealth,
members of one another?
(…)
And yet
love obstinately answers that no loved one is standardized. A body, love
insists, is neither a spirit nor a machine; it is not a picture, a diagram, a
chart, a graph, an anatomy; it is not an explanation; it is not a law. It is
precisely and uniquely what it is. It belongs to the world of love, which is a
world of living creatures, natural orders and cycles, many small, fragile
lights in the dark.
(…)
Logically, in plenitude some things ought to be expendable. Industrial economics has always believed this: abundance justifies waste. This is one of the dominant superstitions of American history-and of the history of colonialism everywhere. Expendability is also an assumption of the world of efficiency, which is why that world deals so compulsively in percentages of efficacy and safety.
But
this sort of logic is absolutely alien to the world of love. To the claim that
a certain drug or procedure would save 99 percent of all cancer patients or
that a certain pollutant would be safe for 99 percent of a population, love,
unembarrassed, would respond, "What about the one percent?"
There is
nothing rational or perhaps even defensible about this, but it is nonetheless
one of the strongest strands of our religious tradition-it is probably the most
essential strand-according to which a shepherd, owning a hundred sheep and
having lost one, does not say, "I have saved 99 percent of my sheep,"
but rather, "I have lost one," and he goes and searches for the one.
And if the sheep in that parable may seem to be only a metaphor, then go on to
the Gospel of Luke, where the principle is flatly set forth again and where the
sparrows stand not for human beings but for all creatures: "Are not five
sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before
God?" And John Donne had in mind a sort of equation and not a mere metaphor
when he wrote, "If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of
thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me."
It is
reassuring to see ecology moving toward a similar idea of the order of things.
If an ecosystem loses one of its native species, we now know that we cannot
speak of it as itself minus one species. An ecosystem minus one species is a
different ecosystem. Just so, each of us is made by-or, one might better say,
made as-a set of unique associations with unique persons, places, and things.
The world of love does not admit the principle of the interchangeability of
parts.
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