Signs and Scapegoats: The Viral Vectors of Science and Society

 

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Signs and Scapegoats: The Viral Vectors of Science and Society

Introduction: The Broad Church of Science

“The struggle against death, which dominates the life-style of the rich, is translated by development agencies into a set of rules by which the poor of the earth shall be forced to conduct themselves”…“Through the medicalization of death, healthcare has become a monolithic world religion”.1

These words were written by the Catholic priest and philosopher Ivan Illich, published in his 1975 book Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health and later titled The Limits of Medicine. In this work, he subjects modern industrial medicine to a devastating critique as the new religion conquering the globe, a religion “whose tenets are taught in compulsory schools and whose ethical rules are applied to a bureaucratic restructuring of the environment”.2 

While the bureaucratic restructuring of the world has often been a topic of sociological study, Illich uniquely understood the importance medicine was coming to play as both ritual conditioning and ideological justification for the encroachment of this techno-bureaucratic paradigm into every corner of life. 

Even if secular academia has sometimes ventured into similar territory, their critiques have usually lacked the power of a positive value system that the priest Illich carried into his passionate rejection of most modern institutions.

The standard orientation of secular social science can analyze the structure and problems of society, but offering non-bureaucratic solutions usually involves sincerely siding with tradition or alternative cultural practices, something most academics are not prepared to do, especially when it comes to Illich’s two biggest targets, education and medicine.

His willingness to take a stand and argue for a different path than the one that—by the late 20th century—was attempting to market itself as the inevitable path of history, also gave him access to a wider audience than what is usually possible with sociological studies.

When Medical Nemesis was published in the mid-seventies it garnered wide acclaim and drew public attention to the problem of iatrogenesis—the harm and illness induced by medical practice itself. But Illich expanded the concept of medical harm beyond the now well-known statistics regarding medical errors and malpractice to the entire system of dependencies that a medicalized society engineers. He points out how:

advanced industrial society is [itself] sick-making because it disables people from coping with their environment and, when they break down, it substitutes a ‘clinical’ prosthesis for the broken relationships…People would rebel against such an environment if medicine did not explain their biological disorientation as a defect in their health, rather than as a defect in the way of life which is imposed on them or which they impose on themselves.3

Illich’s somewhat pessimistic view on modern society was not without its detractors, but his points are so well argued that even a New York Times reviewer calling him a “luddite”, found much to praise in the book.4 Another New York Times reviewer went further, lauding Medical Nemesis profusely, telling people to “read it and marvel at the light it sheds” on various controversies including “the debate over mass-vaccination” concerning the pandemic fears of that time.5 This was 1976. 

The marvel now is how far media discourse has come from an acknowledgment of sincere debate around the politics of science, let alone the New York Times publishing support of a critic of mass vaccination. Nowadays, a politicized person with a different interpretation of the popular media narrative on scientific issues, especially when medical crisis is invoked, could likely be considered equivalent to a terrorist, with any dissenting scientist dismissed with a bald “fact-check” against existing dogma.

A New York Times article from 2021 titled “Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole” goes as far as arguing against “critical thinking as we’re taught to do it” because it “isn’t helping in the fight against misinformation”.6 The article argues that “deep attention” and research is best left to experts, since the rest of us may be led into the murky depths of conspiracy theory and vaccine denialism. Instead, we are told to simply fact-check all claims against approved views. 

But then, what happens when an expert or scientist with institutional acceptance expresses the dissenting view? The same article tells us that someone having a perspective “outside consensus” is “a sign they were motivated by something other than science”. 

And since the image of science as an expert consensus on reality lends so well to an elite court of judgment on what counts as a rational belief, it naturally follows that any view that can be framed as differing from the opaque and changing consensus of contemporary experts is living in a fantasy world of irrationality. With the rules for what counts as crazy and what passes for acceptable thought so unclear and unstable, any sincere discussion is just one wrong move away from attracting the label of “conspiracy theorist” or a “denialist” of sane reality.

Even when such terms—with their connotations of mental illness and fascist politics—are not used explicitly, the claim that disagreeing with a majority perspective suggests some kind of questionable personal motive reveals what is really at stake: the possibility of anything but blind belief in the system. 

Even expert authorities cannot diverge much from the mass of the system’s lines of acceptable opinion, and especially not entertain thoughts on a field outside their appointed domain and its narrow range of perspectives and related paths of development, not without being accused of having an ulterior motive. They too have no power for independent thought. 

Challenging consensus is supposed to be part of science, and historically the role has often fallen to outsiders for obvious reasons. But now such things are apparently only done by ambitious hacks. What changed?

While it is true that challenging institutional boundaries or norms may take some kind of strong motivation, and while that motivation may be tied up with questions of politics and careerist ambition, isn’t it more often the other way around? Even before such strong political pressure arose around “trusting science”, challenging authority in a radical way has never been the easy path to fame unless one sincerely has the power of truth, or, shall we say, the power of an idea whose time has come. Even then, radical ideas are seldom rewarded in one’s lifetime—hardly the path of the political player. 

In contemporary science in particular, what pays in power and prestige are not challenging revolutions that upset or reveal the mistakes of the bureaucracy or the regressive futility of countless careers and positions, but new claims that promise revolution but challenge no one with real power. Just like in party politics, it is the branding revolutions that reward the careerist. 

These advertise attractive solutions or rename problems in ways that offer new markets and opportunities for those who invest in the system but only further obfuscate the issues, thus setting up further problems to be later “discovered” and exploited by others.

When there is strife within a power structure—that is, when a challenge has enough institutional investment despite threatening some faction of power, this can indeed be an opportunity for the ambitious power seeker. Yet, official stories will frame the rival faction as the bad guys or contaminating agents. “Official stories exist to protect officials”.7 Consequently, the dominant faction is inevitably and easily framed as the natural order arising from impersonal processes, upset by the personal ambitions of irrational agents.

Seldom is there acknowledgment that there are factions at all. Historical examples of scientific revolutions are presented with religious reverence, but this has only served to dogmatize the path taken and its trajectory, foreclosing any questions on fundamentals or alternative paths that science could have taken. What was decided before is “settled”, so the only acceptable debate is in the details of a developmental path whose options for radical change dwindle as the distance from fundamentals grows.

Serious challenges to the structure of truth and knowledge are never granted the prestige of being a legitimate debate over the possibilities of its evolution or even a contest in power, because power is considered a subjective contaminating force to the neutral democratic process of liberal politics and science and their inevitable direction of progress.

And so even when someone damages their career by challenging an official story, the story goes that they must be doing so because of contamination by a personal value into the purity of the universal system. It is indeed true that there is fame and a certain type of prestige to be had when breaking with the status quo and becoming a hero of the repressed truth (and admittedly the degree of truth and the level of its repression can sometimes be exaggerated by the culture war and those profiting from it). Yet, there aren’t many options for a renegade or even a radical innovator other than playing into the cultic milieu of the counterculture and fringe knowledge niches on the internet. 

There is seldom an in-between. You either have to be an egotist or conformist. The system ensures that only those with an attraction to infamy or at least a willingness to embrace the tasteless aesthetics of the profile and personality market are the ones whose “alternative truth” gets heard, while the careerist working the system as it appears has the preferred values of our culture—which is to say, they don’t have any, or just a passion for pushing the status quo further.

But this apparent lack of individuality is anything but a virtuous sacrifice to a neutral system uncontaminated by ambition, value, or power. A careerist or conformist’s actions further a feeling of prestige, and they undoubtedly further certain values and consequences for the world, just not ones that they care to evaluate or understand.

For within the ideology of modern science, those values are well hidden under the spell of naturalized happenstance—of a world of random appearances that we may be able to more or less collectively control or replicate with technology, but not meaningfully shape or creatively direct. 

This notably differs from the past when ideological values were explicitly cultural or religious; authority was centralized, so it needed relatable justification. Conformist values had to make meaningful sense to people, even when that sense was not broadly convincing. 

The expression of non-conformist values may have been frequently repressed. Still, one at least knew more or less what and who one was rebelling against since the reasons and representatives of authority were both characterized by explicit even if often insincere values. 

Reason itself—at least potentially accessible in some form to anyone with the inclination to think—was capable of empowering an individual to, if not “objectively” evaluate his culture’s ideology, then perhaps at least use the symbols and concepts of one’s time to think new or critical thoughts in their wake, or even at their frontier.

Modern society arose precisely when the critical wake of classical and Christian concepts became the new scientific frontier of modernity, and the old ideological justifications no longer made meaningful sense. However, it wasn’t long before modern knowledge could demonstrate enough pragmatic utility that the necessity of power and ideology to make meaningful sense became more or less dispensed with. 

Meaning, now divorced from truth, has become something like a personal indulgence. Evaluating truth has become so difficult that it once again is considered dangerous for anyone but the experts who decide the truth in the first place, very much a recapitulation of the situation in premodern times. 

The difference is that now the barriers to evaluation are not just intelligence (and when it came to sophisticated elite ideology perhaps an education), but a decentralized network of countless conformist authorities and technologically derived lines of “evidence” that no one person is capable of testing for themselves or challenging more than a small part even if they wanted to.

Justification for power—especially the power that makes a difference in the long run, the power of knowledge creation—becomes divorced from any possible scrutiny by reason since the reasons are invisible or beyond comprehension by or meaningful explanation to anyone, even those experts involved in the compartmentalized production of our incoherent edifice of knowledge.

Within the networks producing this edifice, new values—and therefore independent thought itself—become improbable, because to truly think is to think differently. While certain kinds of eccentric diversity are rewarded, they all must have the same functional value. Great minds, on the other hand, invert this arrangement. They may think alike, but seldom in the same terms, or more importantly, with the same functional value and implications. Genius abhors bare repetition. 

It is natural then that bureaucratic society attracts mediocre minds, justifying geneticist Steve Jones’ quip that “Science is a broad church full of narrow minds, trained to know ever more about even less.” 8 But we tend to think this is a good thing, a leveling out of ambition by the checks and balances inherent to the process of consensus formation. 

Individual thought is allowed just enough to spur innovation but not so much that it upsets the system, threatening chaos. However, the results are less growth in valuable knowledge and understanding than in bureaucratic structure and techniques. 

Developments in the Politics of Science

Modern society has been increasingly accumulating an incoherent structure of knowledge, reflecting more the sedimentation of contests in power than a model forged by the best evidence and arguments—and certainly not one evolving toward even better forms through some kind of natural selection of the best ideas. The idea of making this structure more cooperative, deliberate, and value-conscious does not even occur to a society long taught to distrust the idle musings of philosophers. 

Yet it was modern philosophy itself that gave ideological support to its own marginalization. Driven by doubt to find a ground for faith, each philosopher struggled to be the one to give the final ground to a system of knowledge that would no longer need other philosophers, or at least any further examination of fundamentals that would stall the momentum of progress with pesky questions. 

Faith in some spiritual or metaphysical authority was, for the most part, replaced by faith in an abstract impersonal system. It took a few centuries of debate but, increasingly, by the late 19th century, philosophy was naturally getting phased out of importance. One faction of natural philosophers aligned themselves with and helped market the “broad church” of technicians as the new expert class of bureaucratic priests—what we now with holy reverence call “scientists”. 

As the last great metaphysicians of the modern period like Rudolf Steiner, Henri Bergson, and others, tried to reconcile science with metaphysics, and even theology, well into the 20th century, skeptics like Martin Heidegger, witnessing the early rise of technocratic bureaucracy, saw an incompatibility between the kind of thinking done by authentic individuals and the structures of mass society. 

But in the twilight of late modern metaphysics, metaphysician and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead conceived the problem with science in pragmatic terms, as English-speaking philosophers often do. He said: 

“If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations.”9

Of course, it has not done that. So-called “continental” philosophy has indeed critiqued science’s foundations, but mostly in general terms, following Heidegger into a position too external to the specialized fields of science to make effective interventions. And in the English-speaking world, philosophy has become (in the academy) mostly another specialized bureaucratic field of technicians. 

What Whitehead imagined was not meant to be, for it would require scientists to become deeply philosophical, and the trend has been decisively the other way around. Even when philosophers do analyze science, they tend to focus on the past since this is unlikely to matter enough to anyone to upset careers. In Whitehead’s time, however, there were still important philosophical debates on the science issues of the time. 

Whether the debate was between the contrasting philosophies of physicists, like Einstein and Bohr, or between physicists and philosophers, like the Bergson/Einstein debate, there was still at the time a general climate of concern over the meaning of not only niche scientific issues but a general concern for a world without a metaphysical ground. There was recognition that the meaning of science held the fate of our rapidly industrializing and potentially dehumanizing society. 

But two world wars won by the English-speaking world decided things in favor of pragmatism over any German philosophic brooding over foundations or metaphysical commitments of any kind. No mind would be given to the foundation or direction of growth happening in the theoretical structure of science because such a thing is seldom acknowledged as determinative. 

As 20th-century specialization proceeded, the broad-minded scientists gave way to the broad church of specialists whose knowledge of philosophy often comes down to Karl Popper’s principle of falsification—though few know this as a philosophy of science, rather than the philosophy of science, or just “science” which has freed itself from all philosophy. 

Yet, it was Popper’s renegade pupil Paul Feyerabend who, more than anyone else, illustrated in historical detail how naive the myths of the scientific method are—that is when one looks at how determined and “contaminated” scientific facts are by theories, making definitive “falsification” impossible.10 

Critiquing the myths and methods of science, however, was nothing new. Nietzsche excelled at this long before Feyerabend, and Goethe before him, but to extend general critiques into specific science required science itself to become an object of detailed study, and this indeed happened in the postmodern era.

The sociological study of science has even helped improve modern ideological structure, especially where the barriers to interdisciplinarity have been weakened. However, this can go only so far within a thoroughly captured academia. Individuals transgressing disciplinary boundaries is very threatening, not only to the specialists entrenched within the bureaucracies of science but to the larger system of power itself. This system depends on compartmentalization to prevent strong factions from developing within its expert class where they could challenge the old guard.

Consequently, the ideology of our liberal society ensures that real competition only exists between individuals and special interests all within a system thoroughly naturalized within the liberal mind to limit the power of knowledge creation to compartmentalized and more or less capitalized fields. 

But suppose knowledge producers stop competing for slots within the static structure long enough to start cooperating on something that lends legitimacy to an idea or science threatening to the majority who depend on the status quo for their livelihood. How likely is this if there is not some chance of quick success and support?

Scientific paradigms have often changed at points in history when a crossroads or roadblock was reached, but seldom purely out of concern for the direction of progress. Visionaries may frequently arise, but visions don’t become strong factions in a system such as ours without a hint of some greater opportunity than that provided by the dominant paradigm. 

Yet even this is becoming increasingly unlikely except where the pressure is great enough to overcome what has become quite the consolidation of academic, state, and commercial interests, with endless opportunities for advancement—even where there is no real practical or technological progress to be made.

This is why, for the most part, that even if such alternative networks have been so difficult to develop within academia, they have exploded in popularity on the internet. Unfortunately, with the confusing variety of knowledge networks and niches on the internet, and the extremely politicized nature of 21st-century science, tribal alliances have been easily triggered and the pressure of public awareness needed to trigger change in the mainstream has been lacking. 

Even when power is made to pivot, it has a way of making the change it needs to its ideology to save face without admitting any mistakes or external instigation. Political tribalism makes this seem acceptable to adherents and makes nuanced debates over fundamental science impossible. 

Whenever political associations are triggered, what could have been constructive alliances break down, as anyone with an institutional reputation (or a niche internet audience) on the line rushes to distance themselves from the wrong side of the cultural divide.

With the rise of rival nationalist factions within the dominant international system, internal contradictions threatening the system necessitated a “reset”. Demonizing ideological threats to the expert bureaucracy became more pressing and relatively easy in 2020 when fears were stoked of a contaminating virus and were then easily overlaid onto existing fears of impurities in the system. 

When an escalated technocratic consolidation of the economy and an increasingly mandatory “gene” therapy marketed as a “vaccine” were hailed as the answer,11 any protest was already aligned with numerous overlapping contagions in the minds of the liberal majority. 

With vaccines, these tactics work well for a simple reason. Vaccination is credited with being an integral part of the most foundational and accepted accomplishments of medicine and science. Questioning something called a vaccine, whether this was an appropriate label or not, was akin to doubting all of medicine and therefore the liberal religion itself. 

After a bumpy road of widespread vaccination resistance in its early days, lingering skepticism was generally considered a fringe issue. However, as the biopower wielded by technocrats becomes more centralized—as new biotechnology labeled as  “vaccines” became central to the further extension of the national security apparatus into the realm of biodata—it also became more difficult to treat so-called vaccines as simply some isolated issue about the reasonable limits of liberty, or as separate from the larger issues in the politics of science. 

Even before covid,12 fears circulated about those unbaptized into the liberal religion breeding new forms of the diseases the vaccinations were supposed to protect from. If this was happening not really in traditionally conservative areas, but with liberals that had their own view of the science, it didn’t matter. The natural-living progressive was considered akin to a conservative libertarian, selfishly concerned with their rights over the scientifically proven good of everyone.

Covid, of course, somewhat altered the politics by forcing all the skeptical into the same camp more or less. Yet, after so long treating vaccine hesitancy as a fringe issue concerning one’s freedom to be unscientific even supposedly at the expense of others, when rapid social change accompanied the covid crisis, and with the vaccine concept so central to the rationalization, it was easy to demonize anyone with legitimate questions.

As problems with the injections came more clearly into the light, and a vaccine skeptic from one of the most celebrated liberal families was able to help move the topic out of the fringe, one of the seemingly major means used by the planet-wide push for a new social system pivoted but did not disappear.

When the consequences and failures of some so-called vaccines became obvious to more than just what had been considered a crazy corner of the counterculture, noncompliance became somewhat more difficult to demonize and control. Yet other issues are always there to justify the technocrat’s end of biotechnic management. 

Compliance with biotech injections is only incidental since what social planners and genetic engineers have long hoped for is not tied to any one conspiracy or agenda. The general trajectory is baked right into the system itself and will find a path forward no matter how much the alternative media exposes what they think are the bad guys.

Without a widespread understanding of the paradigm underlying technocracy and its intricate entanglement with modern history and society, any roadblocks to its cybernetic vision are only temporary. Even if somehow a new paradigm emerges, a rationale will always be found to move forward the means to greater biospheric control—that is unless the new paradigm is founded on a mature sense of the problems in any value system, but especially those claiming to be free of bias or beyond legitimate evaluation by anyone, even authorities, since in our society they lose credibility once they fail to fall in line.

To this end, one must ask how it has come to this: how did it come to the point where any critique of the wisdom behind particular developments or deployments of technology, even ones that may alter the trajectory of the evolution of our planet and all its beings, is considered illegitimate, anti-science, anti-democratic, or worse? 

There was indeed rapid societal change in 2020, but this change didn’t come out of nowhere. Illich could see the contours half a century before, and the so-called problem of “disenchantment” that accompanied the mechanization of society concerned thinkers even before it became visible in the industrial revolution.13

It was not difficult to imagine even then—perhaps less difficult than it is now that it has become naturalized—that the promises of objective universality inherent to liberalism and the European Enlightenment carried a potentially more dangerous opportunity for totalitarianism than had been possible before power could guise itself as being so anonymously constituted, not to mention so effortlessly applied and ubiquitously distributed through technology. 

However, to liberalism’s defenders, the inevitable dangers were merely corruptions of the spirit of reason and the Enlightenment, not any essential contradiction. Or if there were contradictions, they would be overcome by the essentially liberatory impulse towards truth and justice inherent in this spirit. That this was just another myth, however, wasn’t strongly appreciated until what we call postmodernity. 

Yet, by the time of the late 20th century, the myth had become so deeply entrenched and hegemonic—with, as Illich pointed out, a medical religion as the capstone to the bureaucratic organization of everything—that when that religion began the most extensive phase of its social engineering project through a holy war on microbes, there was little that academic thinkers were prepared to do other than analyze the situation. 

For there was little in the way of vital alternative traditions upon which serious theorists could build or gesture towardward, no way to give a constructive valence to the impassive negativity or neutral style of discourse as expected of the modern professional. 

An unconventional but still Christian priest like Illich, antithetical to the normal academic posturing of scientific sociology, was not, as mentioned, so constrained. Indeed, he was free to not only passionately dismiss the whole pattern of modern education, medicine, and society in general, but also give some sketch of how it all could be reversed, and our tools delivered back into the hands of everyday people (or possibly even spiritually-centered community).14

Yet, as our tools have become increasingly integrated into the web of digital intelligence networks, there is no going back, no reversing the emerging matrix-society. The way out, as always, is through. Experiencing and understanding these burgeoning networks of postmodern power is vital if humanity is not to become their essentially passive nodes.

Otherwise, every attempt at resistance, every “positive” project of alternative trajectory becomes merely content, every myth and metaphysics, a dream playing out upon a stage set by systems no one can understand—systems and structures having been long relegated to the design of compartmentalized experts whose agency merges seamlessly into a hyperspatial digital consciousness.

This makes the postmodern era of knowledge the crucial and critical eye of the needle through which any future tradition must be built. Without it, without passing through the filter of continual contextual evaluation, any positive vision will have difficulty escaping the dogmatizing momentum of its myths—especially in their capture by capital and its neo-feudal form of digital fiefdoms. 

By “the postmodern era of knowledge”, it is meant not just some trend in academic philosophy but the discovery across the fields of science and theory of the larger world of mutating and modifiable “programs” of reality with which any particular world or knowledge form is entangled.15

That the discovery of this entangled world of labyrinthine contextual determinations did not lead to a more mature self-conscious era of modernity, but instead a collapse into the paradox of dogmatic uncertainty, is unfortunate but not surprising.

The lingering look of the modern mind toward some rationalized ground forestalled our launch into the infinite, bungling any sufficient understanding that the ground is not uncertain or undecidable, or only so when it is formalized and universalized. 

That the truth is open to different paths and forms and impossible to free from decisions on its structure—and concerns with the inevitably biased ground of particular contexts—does not necessitate that it is doomed to oscillate between ambiguous static circumstantial poles (like the wave and particle of physics or the left and right of politics), but capable of creative construction, of determination by new gradients of difference ever-adjusting to the times and redefining the meaning of basic structures. 

But before this can happen in any kind of large-scale positive form, humanity must reckon with the trajectory of its current structure and the immense role played by power in its most basic foundations.

Power/Knowledge

Modern thought has been through a long and complicated struggle against the totalizing impulse of power politics, not often enough aware of how this naive negation has only entrenched it more opaquely within the struggle for its own power and ideological authority. 

With philosophy losing its cultural capital as scientists professionalized and marketed themselves so successfully at the close of the 19th century, and as the 20th century progressed with science becoming increasingly a struggle over funding—not over any fundamental differences in truth and value—the promise of open debate over values which characterized the liberal era began to come to an end. 

Today one can see many of the themes of the pre-liberal era returning—so much so that “neo” or “techno” feudalism has become a justifiable label for describing the emerging technocracy.16 One would be justified in thinking that the liberal era was just a long transitional period between a religious authoritarianism to a technocratic one.

From a contemporary perspective that recognizes affinities between the ideology of today and the era of State religions, one thing should be obvious: trust in the processes set loose by liberal and democratic values has been naive. 

While it is true that this trust has always been subjected to critique and scrutiny by everyone from the most passionate Romantic critics of the Enlightenment, to even its most intelligent adherents, without serious alternatives, that criticism was diluted, even as it became more pursuasive.

While the postmodern era is full of skepticism of power and debate on values, rarely does this skepticism not already assume some kind of liberal scientism as, if not the ideal then at least the least bad of our current options. Anything else, any conflict over fundamentals still reminds too many of the dark specter of our darkest ages.

The world has more or less accepted the ideal if not always the reality of a regime that markets itself as a neutral and objective system designed to minimize the dangers of irrational and subjective values. The consequence today is that it has become increasingly difficult to imagine an alternative or to critique the institutions of our society without retaining the basic assumption that any problem is just a “bug” in the system—a “contamination” from the errors of human subjectivity which demands a further dilution of all values, perhaps into the algorithmic proficiency of artificial intelligence.

It is common and easy to see that there is indeed corruption in science and politics, that money and power make the outcomes produced by our institutions less desirable than they could be. But the modern mind still tends to believe that, short of explicit corruption, short of some kind of “conspiracy”, the invisible hand of the market, the guiding spirit of a neutral democratic process, or the disinterested scientific researcher will deliver us to, if not the best of all possible worlds, hopefully, the least bad. 

Consequently, when one looks for the source of our problems and cannot single out any one person or cause to blame, (which for the real issues of the technocratic system is difficult to do by design), many will inevitably conclude that the problem is just natural and inevitable, perhaps requiring further scientific research or refinements in the system, perhaps one day being cured through such technologies or techniques, or even from some inevitable revolution that fulfills the promises and overcomes the contradictions. The more conservative may focus on one scapegoat or another, speculating on corrupting agents who are spoiling it all for everyone.

But when one no longer understands the necessity to evaluate the consequences and value-context of the truths that govern our society, and our only path of critique is to accuse each other of fundamental error or corruption, is it any wonder that the mediation that democracy was supposed to make possible has become impossible? Is it any wonder that politics has become so polarized and oriented toward conspiracy theory?

Rather than delving too much into politics, showing how different sides use terms like “conspiracy theory” (often in hypocritical ways), or dwelling on the evidence that the term’s rise to prominent usage owes much to the CIA’s attempts to discredit research into the JFK assassination,17 it would be helpful to instead give some context to the truths that are coming to govern our society without assuming they must be simply wrong or a product of corruption. 

To understand what is happening one must set these easy answers aside. State finance whistleblower Catherine Austin Fitts, while no stranger to the kind of analysis that gets labeled “conspiracy theory”, nonetheless came out of her experience of systemic corruption with a keen sense of how ineffective the scapegoating impulse can be.

She once memorably suggested that corruption is just a cover story along with incompetence, complexity, and “bad guys”.18 Yes, bad people there may be; corruption there certainly is; the system is undoubtedly very complicated, and many people with a lot of power are not up to the task. But these cover stories reinforce our misunderstanding of how our society works, and buying into them ensures that the workings of power will continue to be made inscrutable. 

For despite whatever truth these cover stories may have, they distract us from the reasons the system is the way it is. They keep us looking for scapegoats or heroes, or fetishizing some technique or technology that promises a life and society free from the necessities of doing our own thinking and changing our way of relating. Indeed, it is difficult to even acknowledge the things we are all doing to which this system is just an adaptation.

In the words of Michel Foucault: “People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.”19

While this may seem like a convoluted way of saying that we can’t know all the effects of our actions, by assigning a kind of independent agency to our actions separate from us, Foucault hints at deeper insights about the way the trajectory of society is determined by forces that have a kind of life all of their own. 

These forces are not just a simple sum of the intents of individual actors, with their actions simply escaping their original hoped-for effect through modification by other actors. We all act within a structure of possibilities already shaped by forces and contexts beyond anyone’s understanding or intent. 

However, this doesn’t mean the social context of our lives is natural or inevitable—quite the contrary. Our social system is in large part an arbitrary selection from what is possible, shaped by the contingent forces of history, but dominated by powerful forces that need to be made conscious—that is if we intend to be anything more than the vain material for the workings of these forces, which seem to be taking on a kind of “consciousness” of their own with the rise of AI (or perhaps merging with one already “present”). 

Much complex debate continues within social science and the philosophy of science about the relation between truth and society, in what sense knowledge could be said to be “constructed”, or the nature of social forces that seem to “emerge” from our actions, but then go on to develop a life of their own. Yet the simple fact remains that “facts” are not as clear-cut as we want to believe, dependent as they cannot help but be on other and sometimes incompatible factors and contexts. 

This simple point has been a philosophy and science theme for some time. The meaning has just often been misapplied and misunderstood, justifying a fragmented utilitarianism and an abandonment of holistic research. This has allowed badly analyzed ideas and facts to remain uncovered as contradictions merely sprout new regimes of truth, which, even if they are analyzed, are not often given deep evaluation, except perhaps for their political utility. 

While this has been the trend in academia, and evaluating a truth for its utility for resistance to the dominant power bloc is better than nothing, it still leaves all truths as they are—as they exist alongside each other in a melting pot of pragmatic techniques and potential political ends, but seldom anything beyond some unrealistic democratization of what is essentially becoming a cybernetic system of reified jargon that no one can comprehensively understand. 

And one must understand something to control it. Decentralization and democratization of course sound good. However, they are mere euphemisms for power’s growth into us all if they are not also an opening into a greater understanding of the systems we use and use us.

As it stands, most people are overwhelmed and mesmerized by the continual discovery of “new truths” by our research institutions. To sincerely ask what the consequences are—what the social forces are that are producing these truths—is not enough, for, as mentioned, it is done so within the frame of finding corruption, not with a mind to real alternatives, and these are impossible without understanding the system one is in and which follows one into every alternative.

To understand the contemporary rise of the soon-to-be ubiquitous presence of one or more biosecurity states on this planet, it helps to go back to the 19th and early 20th centuries when much of this began. In his “The Pasteurization of France”, Bruno Latour shows in remarkable detail the complex social forces at work that gave rise to the revolutions in social engineering that were made possible by the discoveries of Louis Pasteur. 

At the time of Pasteur’s work on microbes (the mid-19th century), the living conditions in many European cities were worse than most of us today can imagine. At the time there was widespread awareness that something had to be done. 

Before any convincing evidence or theory of blame was placed on microbes, a popular health movement rallied under the label “hygiene” to undertake a vast urban renewal project to clean up French cities. The problem was that such a project was so vast and obviously needed, but with so many possible avenues of pursuit, that it could not be centralized and organized at the necessary level. 

When germ theory arose, despite its many problems and inconsistencies, the potential for focusing the energies of society on such a radical and necessary change by scapegoating microbes was understood immediately by health advocates everywhere.20

The important conspiracy was the selling of a conspiracy (corrupting microbes everywhere!) taken up by people across the hygiene movement, who themselves did not so much conspire as jump on a theory that could justify consent to such large-scale changes in society. 

It was then widely understood that, while there was much more to even contagious disease than microbes, many of the most important factors were tied up with the extremely unhealthy conditions of the lives of the urban poor. These factors could be addressed under the banner of cleaning up the cities, and this did not require a nuanced and potentially contentious theory, especially one that might lay the blame on capitalists.

Indeed, blaming microbes was in line with blaming the wretched poor, not only diverting blame away from the industries and governments creating the situation, but empowering them with a new level of control to supposedly protect society from the dangers of nature and the uncivilized—but, of course, what was in actuality the biological consequences of the industrial model. 

In the early 20th century, important developments set the momentum of social forces to work further along these lines, developments whose inertia and power are only now coming to define every corner of our existence. A big leap forward in the further engineering of our society was accomplished at this time by philanthropic organizations, especially in America with the Rockefeller Foundation.21 

By the middle of the century, the Rockefellers had successfully transformed and consolidated medicine to fit the needs of the burgeoning big industries of the time. As medicine was forced into a rigidly institutional model, biology, under the patronage of the Rockefellers, was also severed from its grounding in medicine, and freed to develop into the engineering discipline it mostly is today, dominated by the reductive and lab-oriented microbiology over the ecological sciences of life that seek to understand it in its living context.

The Rise of Microbiology

The story of how the life sciences were transformed and consolidated into a technocratic model is important for understanding how to disentangle them, especially when so many of our contemporary biological concepts are laden with that history. In her excellent book “Molecular Vision of Life”, historian of science Lily E. Kay writes:

During the 1930s a new biology came into being that by the late 1950s was to endow scientists with unprecedented power over life. These three decades culminated in the elucidation of the self-replicating mechanisms of DNA and an explanation of its action in terms of information coding, representations that laid the cognitive foundations for genetic engineering. Scientists could now manipulate genes on the most fundamental level and attempt to control the course of biological and social evolution; they laid claim to “the secret of life”. The new biology, which became known as molecular biology, emerged as a dominant disciplinary trend. Its molecular vision of life promised to function as Occam’s razor, paring down the convoluted explanations offered by traditional biological fields. This new science did not just evolve by natural selection of randomly distributed disciplinary variants, nor did it ascend solely through the compelling power of its ideas and its leaders. Rather, the rise of the new biology was an expression of the systematic cooperative efforts of America’s scientific establishment—scientists and their patrons—to direct the study of animate phenomena along selected paths toward a shared vision of science and society.22

She then asks:

why did scientists and their patrons privilege and promote a molecular study of life?…the trails leading to the answers reveal a synergy between intellectual capital and economic resources, a potent convergence of scientific goals and social agendas, shaped initially by the cultural imperatives of the interwar period and later modified by the experience of World War II.

The motivation behind the enormous investment in the new agenda was to develop the human sciences as a comprehensive explanatory and applied framework of social control grounded in the natural, medical, and social sciences. Conceived during the late 1920s, the new agenda was articulated in terms of the contemporary technocratic discourse of human engineering, aiming toward an endpoint of restructuring human relations in congruence with the social framework of industrial capitalism. The support for life science must be seen within that larger investment in the human sciences. Within that agenda, the new biology (originally named “psychobiology”) was erected on the bedrock of the physical sciences in order to rigorously explain and eventually control the fundamental mechanisms governing human behavior, placing a particularly strong emphasis on heredity.23

She continues: 

[E]ugenic goals played a significant role in the conception and design of the molecular biology program…  

[But] precisely because the old eugenics had lost its scientific validity, a space was created for a new program that promised to place the study of human heredity and behavior on rigorous grounds. A concerted physicochemical attack on the gene was initiated at the moment in history when it became unacceptable to advocate social control based on crude eugenic principles and outmoded racial theories. The molecular biology program, through the study of simple biological systems and the analyses of protein structure, promised a surer, albeit much slower, way toward social planning based on sounder principles of eugenic selection.24

So just as the framing of hygienic issues as a “war on microbes” helped launch the wave of social engineering projects that spread out from the “Pasteurization of France” in the 19th century, theories of genetic determinism helped catalyze a remaking of society in the 20th, as war began on scapegoated genes. From the vantage point of the 21st century, one could say that these two social campaigns—and the theories supporting them—were just different stages in the same process of modern science and society’s development into the contemporary biosocial engineering paradigm. 

What one sees now is that these two outmoded ideologies, leftover from an era obsessed with the purity of science and a pure society based on it, have been given a new gloss and effectively fused into one reductive paradigm of genetic engineering in a battle against “bugs” in the smooth functioning of the technocratic system.

However, the bugs are now not only the microbial and genetic components of illness but any of the uncontrolled viral vectors of society, whether they be viruses themselves or any “free range” animals or people whose genetics are subject to unregulated change.

Despite the success of this trend in science and power, its reasoning is weakened in the light of more recent and thoughtful trends in biology. For instance, what we call viruses are better thought of as the communication network of the planetary genome than the destabilizing agents of disease as often thought.25 

The trajectory of industrial medicine has conditioned an unhealthy focus on a biased selection from the whole ocean of naturally evolving and communicating genetic material, a sea of churning dynamic evolution in which all life on Earth swims and which serves as its most immediate medium of adaptation. 

Viruses could be considered simply as the most easily pathologized of this material—the intercellular signals and debris found around stressed and sick cells undergoing death or certain kinds of adaptation.

Despite the debate in alternative circles on the nature of viruses and whether the concept of a virus is even an appropriate construction from the available evidence, virology cannot just be dismissed as a monumental error. Indeed, after the success and broad power of germ theory were demonstrated, and the subsequent transformation of medicine under the industrial model was secured, virology was an inevitable development down this path of finding profitable scapegoats for illness. 

It was an inevitable move towards pathologizing one of the largest sources of genetic variation on the planet. A teeming sea of constantly and rapidly evolving potential naturally must be at least tamed on the dangerous road to biospheric control. To completely control it, however, would require a nearly impossible level of technological transformation of everything on Earth.

Indeed, there are trillions of what could be called viruses in every body and nearly every inch of space on Earth. Technocratic science was bound to pathologize some portion of this nearly ubiquitous sea of genetic material all around and within us in one way or another. The biotech industry in particular was bound to position itself as the necessary mediator between us and this continuum. 

This is because an open unmasterable continuum is the natural competition to the divisible conquered spirit of an artificial life. Like the physical continuum that was necessarily rejected as natural philosophy was pushed out of physics to make room for its modern industrial iteration, any biological continuum must also be replaced by industrial medicine. Life’s natural dynamic mediator between forms sits right where technocratic power would like to be, between all forms of life, inspecting any viral vectors that could threaten its position.

Of course, it is not just viruses; our own genes are scapegoated as well, and are getting targeted by a science that cares more about short-circuiting every kind of natural adaptation to a sick world than actual health. But our genes are a storehouse of previous strategies and adaptations. They will no doubt be replaced and taken over by a more manageable cybernetic system, but first, that system needs to attack the largest source of continued adaptation.

Admittedly, adaptations are not always ideal. Genetic diseases often are a kind of lingering reminder of ancestral conditions and trauma that could be reversed in helpful ways. However, biotechnology is not in the business of improving biological adaptation, but rather replacing it with dependence. 

If organisms need medical help, it is in their struggle to adapt to change and in improving conditions that cause problematic adaptations. It is not in building a catalog or arsenal of defenses against all change. For instance, one certainly would not want to have an immune response to the countless viral variants around them even if that was possible. 

While virologists have had to admit, given the dynamic complexity and abundance of this vast “virome”, that viruses can’t all be bad, they have convinced the world that there are nonetheless certain really bad ones we need to be fortified against and from which science can save us—with the implication that, in the process, the medical industry will become our vital planetary immune system.

In light of recent biology, however, none of this makes sense. When one steps back from the tunnel vision of industrial medicine’s war on symptoms, it is quite clear, for instance, that, like bacteria, there are no “bad ones” exactly (even though some may show up more often around or even take part in pathogenic processes). 

This isn’t to say an abundance of certain microbes or viruses in the wrong bodily space can’t have an ill effect. However, good and bad are defined by numerous contexts, not just location. Even supposedly good “probiotics” can become overgrown in certain conditions. It makes no sense to simply attack the most likely to be bad when the important factor is the conditions that can make something bad. 

For example, our bodies depend on bacteria in our gut and skin, but if too much leaks into the blood, it can be a problem. However, the problem is the leak or cut, even if there is a place for aggressive action when boundaries have been breached. Likewise, cells make viruses for a reason, but indeed this process can be a less-than-ideal adaptation and can get out of control when the body is seriously struggling.

Still, the dangers of disease processes are “willfully” undertaken by a struggling body because this danger is perhaps preferable to even more risky and out-of-control mechanisms down the line. Indeed, the body will bring back viral proliferation as a strategy from a kind of memory that persists even after all traces of the material have been sanitized with drugs.26 

As an integral part of life’s communication network, viruses are important to the stability of the biosphere. They are a part of the planet’s biological heritage and memory. Even when they trigger illness, the rashes and flu-like symptoms with which we generally associate them serve important functions. These can help vent heat, clear toxic conditions, or keep the body from squandering its energies, preserving biological integrity.27 

In the sense that these symptoms are communicable, they are like “biological statements”,28 social communications in the form of both bodily and genetic expressions. These can be aggressive perhaps, but like other protective biological expressions, they warn or ward off more than they actually kill anything, and are certainly not capable of mass murder. They may trigger certain symptoms, but these are often cures for other diseases.29

Some even have great therapeutic value. When the body is allowed to properly process the information carried, even from the stressful signals of other organisms, it can better adjust to or prepare for the struggles around it. It may even let down its barrier to certain viruses, allowing their replication, knowing it will counteract others that are not beneficial at the time.30

This is a relatively straightforward and rational extrapolation from a picture of life viewed in its general dynamics as a more or less intelligent system. Abstruse theories and debates over this or that line of causation can obscure the obvious for a while. However, as long as some sincere science continues, the simple truths of interconnection and reciprocal determination that one can see at the heart of all wise traditions come back around.

This has been the case throughout the history of biology, with holistic and reductionist, vitalist and mechanist camps competing for dominance, but eventually finding, like life itself, that competition and cooperation, the whole and the parts, are not separate or exclusive but two sides of the same thing.

However, what matters more than platitudes about balancing the two (since they are always co-present), is how they are framed and enacted in a society. The Nazis certainly railed against “mechanistic” science, but in practice subjected their society to an extremely technocratic regime, reducing everything to a cog in its machinery.31 They valued a cooperative or even “organismic” model of the state, but along with that came a ruthlessly competitive attitude with anything perceived as outside “the whole” of the German people.

The burgeoning American Empire after the war was competing with the ostensibly communist Soviet Union, so it was helpful to blame the Nazi atrocities not only on their supposedly irrational mysticism and holism but also on their supposed statist squelching of good healthy capitalist competition. 

In reality, of course, the Nazis were making good use of capitalism for their own ends, and emerging after the war, the new order led by American elites was following suit, cooperating and organizing at unprecedented levels while using capitalist competition merely to further their not-so-different ends.

Just as German biological and psychological theorists active within the Nazi period were under pressure to sound holistic and anti-mechanistic because of the ideology, so have theorists in Western culture been under pressure to not do so. For some reason speaking in a vague mystical language about life and evolution is more suspect than the real dangers of Nazi ideology which are perfectly acceptable within reductionist biology. That danger is not in applying any organismic metaphors to society, and certainly not in cooperative, ecological, or spiritual models of social evolution, which in some form can be quite helpful at this juncture. 

Whatever our models of life and the organism happen to be, they will affect how we view and organize society. So the question is: what are those models? Specifically and especially, if they are inevitably applied to society, how do they conceive of the boundaries of the organism and the relations between them? Suppose the model assumes strict boundaries between beings or between kinds of beings. In that case, the way cooperation and competition get framed will most likely be along some rather dubious lines.

In contrast, in recent years, a new picture of biology has been emerging that is not necessarily opposed to mechanistic and microbiological descriptions, just its narrow reductions. It puts every chemical and causal line into a broader perspective. 

In its light, one could say of the human organism that: our bodies are not just a composite of our own cells (which are in a sense beings in themselves), but also a veritable “super-organism”—a coherent ecosystem of countless microorganisms, all mediated by a liquid-crystalline network of water.32  

Even our own cells evolved through an integration of ancient microorganisms.33  The immune system’s job is not, as was once thought, to defend a rigid self-boundary against a completely foreign “other”, but to find homeostasis in a changing environment it is always in the process of taking in and reorganizing.34

With this in mind, much of what we call disease, even new disease, is just one or another variation on a time-tested mechanism for establishing better biological balance. Out of the repository of responses developed and learned over evolutionary history, the body does its best in an environment that is not always easy to adjust to. While these responses are sometimes out of proportion or out of control, this is difficult for even the most ideal system to avoid when inundated with contradictory information as our bodies are in the current environment. This is especially true given the chaos of signals coming from the modern mind and its storm of conflicting emotional energy.

In any case, bodies can usually be gently nudged away from inappropriate expressions, and even given better information to do their job. Attacking and fighting the body’s attempts only drive these processes deeper into its repository of tools, which often means even more blind and desperate mechanisms.

These are not such radical notions. They recur throughout the history of medicine. Even immunology has debated what “immunity” means since its very inception as a field. The central figure in the early days, Elie Metchnikoff, conceived of it as a kind of equilibrium between different cell lineages within the organism, reflecting more of a struggle internal to every body than a struggle between species.35 

Probably the most important figure in its history, Frank Burnet, used to say “Immunology was more of a problem in philosophy than a practical science”.36 The reason being that the common sense notion of “immunity” relies on a pretty shaky notion of the organism with strict boundaries.

While microbiology has doubled down on these reductionist notions, theoretical biology has long been busy detailing a very different understanding of organism stability. It is just that now such theoretical concerns are becoming obvious, not only across the various disciplines of biology but to the everyday person exposed to popular health movements. 

If indeed we are a superorganism, a coordination of many different organisms and “cell lineages” as Metchnikoff put it, then health depends on a balance between genetic stability and variation. Because of this, as has been long recognized, even the notion of “gene” is outdated.37 There is no static entity at the micro or macro level; there is no genetic or organismic self except the stability achieved within a continual flux, which can even use viruses as a rapid mode of adaptation.38 

One can indeed get too much exposure to this flux, it is true—we all need to ease out of the womb of a controlled environment before we can become mature and free. However, one can also get too little, becoming ever more dependent on technological mediation of the environment to simply maintain function. 

If humanity takes this path, it may empower some genetic engineers, but it will disempower the rest of us. Their reductive notions persist even under pressure from new science, beholden as they are to an industry built up around and preying on people fearing contamination and change. 

However, if the boundaries between organisms, species, and even between living and merely material things are instead framed as contextual distinctions made within complex overlapping systems, the technocratic obsession with control and purity is going to have a harder time pushing its agenda. 

Whether that obsession is with the genetic purity of a distinct ethnicity, or the subjection of the entire human race to a scientifically managed picture of the proper genome—in other words, whether of the fascist or liberal variety—the dangers of scientism remain more pertinent than any fear of fascism. 

The liberal and fascist worldviews, despite their diverse possibilities, still ultimately refer back to a principle of purity that is antagonistic to life’s ideal of harmony. If this still implies a kind of purity, it is a positive purity, one of harmonizing differences rather than negating oppositions. 

While this could be and perhaps should be the ideal of liberalism, it has become more about what it is against than what it is for. Its biopolitical vision is indeed no fascist fantasy of superior evolution, but rather a matter of preserving genetic information. It is mostly a defensive posture, a vision of all species as needing strict boundary maintenance, with any evolution based on further fortifying humanity’s and even the earth’s current embodiment or supplementing it with technology.

While purifying the Earth of toxic pollution is necessary for all health and harmony, obsessing over the more or less natural traces of unexpected change rather than the clearly dangerous toxins of industry reveals the kind of purity envisioned. Whether it be the trace gas blamed for climate change or the trace viruses blamed for disease, endless debates about the exact level of blame to assign these factors in what is inevitably complex multi-factor issues only serves to distract from the more obvious factors wreaking havoc on the biosphere. But more importantly, the panic over every unexpected change further entrenches a regime of control and dependence that makes change ever more catastrophic when it need not be.

Such control reverses what truly “holistic” care of the world would look like, purifying the entire ecosystem of spontaneous viral vectors, which—even when catastrophic or pathogenic—are helpful signs of stress and adaptation. Not only is life forced to adapt to technology, but technology will inevitably take over the lead role when it should be the other way around. 

Ideally, science should listen to life and take the patterns of problems as signs of how best to improve the quality of all forms of life and their various environments. Ideally, technology and human invention should design environments with a mind to transform their viral vectors into more harmonious expressions.

However, such a symbiotic model of life must always compete with models that focus on and therefore increase the prevalence of the mechanisms of control. Following the industrial model, institutional science has naturally prioritized studying the closed systems of control over the much more complex relations of open systems of mutual adaptation. Yet, it is not just capitalist control of science at work; capitalism is an extension of our survival fears and aggressive over-reactions to those fears, and those have had their own influence over biology.

As Keith Ansell-Pearson puts it in his book Viroid Life: 

In biology…symbiosis has had a curiously awkward history which reveals much about the anthropocentric determination of the subject and about hominid fears of contamination. It has played, and continues to play, a subversive role in biology since it challenges the boundaries of the organism. Indeed, it has been argued by one commentator that it was not until 1950, when geneticists extended their field of study to micro-organisms, that biology recognized that there were means other than sex for translating genes, such as infections and symbiotic complexes. Prior to it was the institutionalized boundaries of the life sciences themselves, such as zoology, botany, bacteriology, virology, genetics, pathology, etc., which prevented the synthetic studies of symbiosis from being properly assessed.39 

Lily Kay, after detailing the control exerted by capitalists over biology and medicine, felt motivated enough to distinguish her account of the processes that led to this dominance from some kind of conspiratorial narrative of infiltration. She added: 

These observations are not Machiavellian attributions or pronouncements of academic subversion and cooptation. The complex set of relations of scientists to patrons and of intellectual programs to the social agenda can be better explained within an analytic framework of cultural hegemony: through the explicit and tacit constitutive processes of consensus formation. Within that framework, “power” includes intellectual, cultural, political, and economic power; and mental life is not a mere shadow of material life. From this perspective the maintenance of hegemony does not require active commitment by an academic constituency (or by subordinates) to legitimate elite rule. Rather, the two reinforce each other in a circular manner to form a “hegemonic bloc” sustained by formal and informal systems of incentives and power sharing, particularly through half-conscious modes of complicity. Hence this viewpoint does not regard hegemony as a form of subtle coercion or top-down social control but, rather, as an interactive process between different social groups vying for power.40

Whatever the complex reasons, even if one admits that the progress of biological science has been guided in certain directions more conducive to the interests of big business and social engineers, the obvious questions should be, so what? What can be done? 

The Multiplicity of Meaning vs. the Trap of Information

While sociological analysis of the history of ideas can help us understand the social forces determining why reductive models and narrowly mechanized fields of science end up being funded and developed, how can these better-funded and better-promoted sciences be critically reconstructed within less reductive frameworks and fields?

Without that critical connection, any new more holistic theories of biology fail to link up with specific critiques and alternatives to mainstream pronouncements, especially when fears are stoked. It becomes easy to paint postmodern critics of the influence of power in science as relativists when they do little more than document the problems—sometimes barely doing even that, since it can be difficult to truly evaluate a problem without understanding what is sacrificed when knowledge is socially guided one way rather than another. 

It is difficult to resist not becoming resigned to the way things are or begrudgingly accepting the pronouncements of obviously corrupt institutions. Because even if the limitations of one’s media-manicured ideology are suspected, one is hard-pressed not to become so enthralled by the seemingly sophisticated products of supposedly high-tech corporate competition, that even skepticism of politics and power does not lead to questioning the value or seeing the danger in the basic truths and ways of life produced by our specific system. Without a larger context, it is difficult to get the scope of just how narrowly focused the scientific, political, and economic competition has become to basically a question of the means and distribution of technocratic control.

Even with the popularity of alternative medicine and non-traditional spirituality, few people have an alternative system of values deep enough to resist seduction by authoritative-sounding rhetoric backed by centuries of powerful investments in the liberal faith in neutral science and democracy. 

Traditional or alternative medicine, for instance, has quite a difficult time winning trust when the entities identified by modern biology as the most dangerous causes of disease are (at least from the perspective of the contemporary compartmentalized mind) not even recognized by the traditional systems. 

It is all well and good to go to your village or traditional healer for common complaints, but when authoritative-looking experts come along and speak about a new and deadly illness—one perhaps even created by science itself and so seemingly beyond any traditional knowledge— many will simply hand over their health to the supposed treatment. Resistance to the modern system then seems reckless or ideological, clinging to some outdated conception of the body and disease. 

Critiques of biotechnology then get lumped into the same prejudiced categories. It is assumed that any criticism of genetic engineering comes out of stubborn reactionary principles—perhaps as an extension of being against social engineering by principle which the conservative conspiracist reads into every coordinated social policy.

One can then easily dismiss any critique as an instance of devotional purity to a dogmatically objective ideal, this time the supposedly objective system of nature being tampered with by the error-prone subjectivity of human agents. In any case, it becomes easy to push any critical position to the margins of politics or the contradictions of modern conservatism.

The resulting biopolitics gets framed as a struggle between two religious ideologies: one devoted to the purity of human science and progress, and the other to the pure unalterable goodness of nature, or a society returned to its natural liberty, freed from the contaminating influence of the chosen scapegoat.

This false choice gets mapped onto other historical or cultural differences, equally oversimplified by conflict into generic camps like the divide between the sciences and humanities, or the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Only some people realize how generic and abstract these divisions are from historical reality.41 Even within Romanticism proper there was an alternative science that anticipated many of the ideas that constitute the interdisciplinary sciences of today—including what might be called a new era of biology informed by this interdisciplinarity.42

These have been growing and “emerging” in nearly every field in which the repeated failures of the old reductive paradigm have manifested; they just need to be better coordinated and funded. Other hierarchical dualisms supposedly long settled within biology and medicine, like Darwin vs. Lamarck, mechanism vs finalism, or germ theory vs. terrain theory, are also getting frequently overturned or complicated by research across the fields of science less bound by the pressures of industry and the power of closed-system design.43

As the closed-system linear models so dominant in microbiology are increasingly found to be unhelpful outside the narrow context of engineering appearances, the contrast between those that are doubling down on this closed-system control model, and those studying the way biological forms work and adapt in cooperative networks needs to become politicized in a way less burdened by the categories of the past.

For her part as a historian, Lily Kay does what she can to give a feel for what’s at stake in genetic engineering. In her second book “Who Wrote the Book of Life”, she explores how the metaphor of a “genetic code” came to be applied to genes mostly as a function of the rise of information theory and cybernetics during World War II. She argues that the application of this metaphor not only pushed biology to develop into a discipline well-groomed for integration into the Cold War security apparatus, but it was basically a bad metaphor to begin with since DNA is not really a code in the strict linguistic or cryptanalytic sense.44 

By thinking of genes as some kind of master key, we have set ourselves up not only for a society devoted to genetic engineering but to engineer biological markers as if they were some kind of linchpin to biological function when they are nothing of the sort. 

By looking at any biological structure as merely embodying an abstract formative principle of information, we cut it out of its various contexts of functionality that give that information its meaning. A code is not much of a code if it only tells you what words are sometimes formed from its symbols, but not what the words mean or why one word may be used rather than another. 

The idea of “information” that came to dominate molecular biology replaced what was previously the central concept of biological “specificity”, where the “reason” for any specific biological form had to do with the other forms it interacted with—like the complementary forms of a lock and key—and with the functions it served in specific niches, not some programmable expression of a brute cause hidden in the code of DNA.45

Simplifying a complex network of agents adapting to and forming various functional contexts down into a narrow linear model of cause and effect is very helpful when the pressure is on to show results. This, of course, is because manipulating a single causal line in a restricted context and leading to a specific form is always easier than understanding a problem. 

Being able to change the form or appearance of a problem will usually impress anyone who doesn’t understand the problem better than you do—especially when the real source of most problems is, once again, not just a “bug” in the system, not a bad gene or germ or any surface feature or single cause, but inherent to the system itself. 

Even if this fails to impress in the short term, like the so-called human genome project, which did not deliver on any of its promises, in the long term all the failures add up to a kind of success, not in actually solving problems of course, but in mesmerizing the world with its ability to model and control them.

Speaking about the overhyped human genome sequencing project of the 1990s, famed geneticist Richard Lewontin discussed this process in his Massey lectures broadcasted on CBC:

[The genome sequencing project] regards the gene as determining the individual, and the individual as determining society. It isolates an alteration in a so-called cancer gene as the cause of cancer, whereas that alteration in the gene may in turn have been caused by ingesting a pollutant, which in turn was produced by an industrial process, which in turn was the inevitable consequence of investing money at 6 percent. Once again, the impoverished notion of causation that characterizes modern biological ideology, a notion that confuses agents with causes, drives us in particular directions to find solutions for our problems.46

He then asks:

 

Why, then, do so many powerful, famous, successful, and extremely intelligent scientists want to sequence the human genome? The answer is, in part, that they are so completely devoted to the ideology of simple unitary causes that they believe in the efficacy of the research and do not ask themselves more complicated questions. But in part the answer is a rather crass one. The participation in and the control of a multibillion-dollar, 30- or 50-year research project that will involve the everyday work of thousands of technicians and lower-level scientists is an extraordinarily appealing prospect for an ambitious biologist. Great careers will be made. Nobel Prizes will be given. Honorary degrees will be offered. Important professorships and huge laboratory facilities will be put at the disposal of those who control this project.

 

We see in the genome sequencing project an aspect of biological science that is not often spoken of and is perhaps the most mystified of all. What are said to be fundamental discoveries about the nature of life often mask simple commercial relations that provide a powerful impetus for the direction and subject of research.47

But, given all of this, what choice do we have? Aren’t the “deeper” sources of problems too complex? Aren’t human beings naturally going to invest in quick fixes for surface symptoms? Perhaps for the foreseeable future. Yet, even our treatment of symptoms is disastrous when we think the symptoms are the cause and launch ourselves into a war with them. Think how the entire food web has been affected by taking the war on microbes too far, or the war on fat and cholesterol. 

By attacking markers and symptoms we have made things much, much worse. Because we did not just remove a troublesome surface feature but have shifted to a new ecology or economy that extends the range of the problem into new layers of co-adaptation. Whether it be the ecology of refined foods and toxic pesticides that replaced traditional diets and agriculture, (a proposed solution to the war on hunger that was further fueled by the war on fat and cholesterol and now the war on climate change), or in the very related case of the war on drugs,48 in every case the problems multiply. 

But so do the profitable solutions, and, therefore, so do the opportunities for consolidating management of the burgeoning system by the monopolizing gravity of the power of capital. That consolidation is an inevitable result of every war we wage, and every symptom we remove, because it turns every local or ecological problem into a vital link in a chain of globalized and complexified dependencies.

Capitalism, however, is, like everything else, just another symptom. Its tendency to compound and complicate problems by moving them around geographically, or by burying them under layers of complexity, is indeed a kind of natural order. It is an extension of the way each of us may fail to properly address our inner conflicts, preferring to try and exhaust every possibility of an external solution before being forced to open to the necessary cooperative adjustments needed for real change.

On the other hand, if we have some sense of the interrelatedness of problems, we can begin to cooperate to improve the quality of their expressions. The problem with mistaking surface features and symptoms for the real issues, then, is not merely a question of depth. We cannot just remove the troubling symptom and worry about those deeper causes later—or leave them to idle philosophers who simply “speculate” on levels of depth that are supposedly completely impractical and besides the point. 

Symptoms are almost always a part of the system trying to achieve a better arrangement with its environment. However much a system may be failing to achieve this, and however ugly the process or agent of change may be, when we attack the symptom or agent, we are severely hampering the process of adaptation and possible transformation. 

Yet, simply trusting that the symptoms are “natural” and will eventually lead to some kind of ideal outcome—or that all we need to do is escalate the process—is a misunderstanding of the nature of signs and their meaning. It isn’t that symptoms are signs of some deep cause to be rooted out, but neither are they signs of some singular purpose or natural destiny. Everything is a symptom of the system and the system has no hard boundaries or core foundation.

The meaning of a problematic sign is open to interpretation. Still, the best interpretations are those leading to an appreciation of any potential causes or seemingly destined purpose as symptoms and signs themselves, signs of a teeming multiverse of meaning filtered down into the best potentials of approach to its most optimal transformations.

Such interpretations often need a view of some relevant symptoms as relative causes, but always in the context of the relative improvements or equilibriums they were meant to achieve, thus accounting for their meaningful existence in the first place. Otherwise, one knows not what any cause is doing in a functional context. By segregating problems and the fields devoted to solving them as modern industrial knowledge does, one is hard-pressed to see any chain of causes in any larger context of relations that could illuminate its meaning. 

It isn’t that causal explanations are bad. They are great for engineers,49 and engineering is certainly helpful when it is grounded in a deeper understanding of the systems it is intervening in, or perhaps with simple machines meant to be relatively indifferent to their context. However, if one is not just interested in patching up a mechanism, but determining why it broke and how it might be improved, one needs to be careful with reasons and “causes”, whether they are of the originating or the purposive variety.

It is not just that they are too simplistic to capture the complexity, but that they also make things more complicated than they need to be. For in a culture dominated by engineers with no respect for the science and the art of signs—that is with the real and objective infinity of their meanings—it will be the engineers pressed into answering the inevitable questions of why. And they cannot help but merely drive the causal lines and techno-solutions into ever-more detailed and narrowly dependent determinations.

The Space Of Problems

The old joke about the priest asking the thief why he robs banks is one way to illustrate the problems of letting humanity’s narrowly gifted savants dictate knowledge and society.50 When the thief answers “because that is where the money is”, he misunderstands the question in the same way virologists do when they answer why someone gets ill. 

Describing an event by giving the situation details doesn’t reveal why one thing happened rather than another. Why is a person a thief or ill in the first place? One may say a person can be called a thief because they rob banks or called sick with a certain disease because the disease is a name for a certain set of symptoms. This may be more or less what a modern doctor does, but this is not interpretation, not thinking, not likely to see the unique pattern of symptoms, and determine the best approach.

Someone gets ill because of many reasons and contexts, many triggers and conditions that go into making that event a reality. However, the relevant factors can be understood as a general pattern and used to explain why all the specific mechanisms of illness get triggered, or applied to deduce helpful changes to improve health. Someone may be poor, for example, and that poverty determines that they have a bad diet or have a lot of stress and toxic exposure that creates the conditions where their body cannot adapt well and so falls ill. 

We could get lost trying to short-circuit the mechanisms of their illness, just as we can get lost questioning why they are poor, why there is poverty in the first place, and so on, but that “space” between the infinite plane of reasons and the immediate site of a problem is where the important factors are located—factors like: how can we help them? By attacking their symptoms? By curing their poverty? 

Or by seeing how these things are related in ways that can lead us to intelligent intervention— for instance, by helping them work through the larger pattern into a healthier one with less harmful stress and illness? And maybe some symptoms need addressing along the way. But one needs to understand what one is doing.

When the unthinking technicians of microbiology answer the question, “why does a cell fall ill”?, they tend to merely follow a single line of events back towards some kind of brute beginning they can blame. And since as a specialist they cannot follow any line back towards the complex systems of society and the production of interpersonal tensions and environmental toxins that make illness a likely adaptation, they naturally follow back the mechanisms they can explain. 

These mechanisms, however, will seem to terminate in, or rather germinate from, some vector of unexpected information, because no matter what the “cause” of illness, its most general characterization could be framed as simply the adaptations of an organism to the shock of relatively novel or overwhelming change. But because modern specialists are trained to think in the mechanical terms of an engineer, they can only think of novelty as a contaminating cause; or as they are increasingly replaced by and inscribed within bioinformatic systems, just bad code. 

To reiterate, since much of the adaptations we call illness originate in the shifting expression or substitution of structures trackable in the genes of either human cells or other “genes” in the environment, controlling that source of change in the human, microbial, and viral genome was a logical consequence.

But it is a dead end. If illness is an adaptation, then programming our cells to stop adapting to stress through the spontaneous change of illness and instead relying more and more on technology forces us down a difficult road. 

To even begin to improve on natural adaptation, we have to understand what the illness is an adaptation to, and industrial medicine seems hell-bent on cutting or burning out every cancer, or forcing antibody production to trick the body into thinking it already went through an adaptation that it in reality has not (contrary to popular belief, antibodies do not clear infection since they are produced long after cells stop producing the viruses). 

It isn’t that illness is a good thing in itself, or that every adaptation is for the better. Indeed too much stress breeds chronic illness that can become permanent genetic traits that follow families down their genetic line. And indeed the crises of acute illness can sometimes fail to reset the system and someone dies, seemingly of the process itself. 

But their death was not caused by the illness as much as the acute crisis was part of a last burst of energy to save and reset the system, and this does not always succeed. Death was happening regardless. The infection was a storehouse of possible avenues of variation.

Cancer, viruses, and other illnesses are all the body’s attempts at communicating and coordinating possibly helpful changes in cellular function and energy production, often triggered by mediating influences like oxidative, nitrosative, and related stressors. These are more aptly termed the “causes” of most diseases than the specific symptoms which reflect more the individual’s variable mode of response than any helpful indication of the cause.

But stress, especially oxidative stress, is part of the fire of life. Calling it the cause of illness is not very helpful, however true. The real causes are in the meaning, in the possibilities for change opened up by the crises of life’s inevitable novelty.

Yet much of what counts as real solutions are close to traditions that modernizers can claim are resisting modern methods out of ignorance, but this is wrong. The most advanced theory and method comes from trying to understand how the complex open systems of nature and the traditions that have evolved close to it work and work so well. As Lewontin points out: 

Hybrid corn is said to be one of the great triumphs of modern genetics in action, helping to feed people and increase their well-being. Yet the development of hybrid corn and, indeed, almost all plant and animal breeding as it is actually practiced has been carried out in a way that is completely independent of any scientific theory. Indeed, a great deal of plant and animal breeding has been done in a way indistinguishable from the methods of past centuries before anyone had ever heard of genetics.51

What he does not discuss in these lectures from 1990 is that after so many failed predictions and promises, a scientific and popular culture of resistance is growing. After engineering projects like the human genome project (which was completed in 2003) failed to unlock the promised keys to the master code of life, or after the dismissal failures of GMO agriculture to improve the lives of the world’s poor, activist-scientists like Vandana Shiva are helping to organize another way.52

The scientific question of why traditional methods of ecological and physiological cultivation work is being answered directly and indirectly by the scientists and thinkers of the world who care more about the big picture than the pull of power. This need not be a path opposed to technology or progress but rather furthering a kind of progress based on an ecological understanding of everything as part of open mutually adapting systems. 

On this path, the reductive tools of microbiology must be inscribed within a debate about the bigger picture since they seldom do more than engineer mechanisms, mechanisms whose meaning, by nature, transcends the simple linear systems studied by the often brilliant but more or less “autistic” priests of our emerging technocracy.53

Yet despite the increasing convergence of alternative methods, the power of the technocrats grows with the ever-escalating fear that they cannot help but produce in a vicious cycle of dependence and disaster. 

Increasingly, as the system becomes defined by this cycle, manageable and identifiable illness and dependence could become the preferable option—a reassuring identity and comforting escape from the disaster of full participation in an even sicker sector of society as it undergoes its cataclysmic transformation into an inhuman machine. Here is Illich again:

In a morbid society the belief prevails that defined and diagnosed ill-health is infinitely preferable to any other form of negative label or to no label at all.

It is better than criminal or political deviance, better than laziness, better than self chosen absence from work. More and more people subconsciously know that they are sick and tired of their jobs and of their leisure passivities, but they want to hear the lie that physical illness relieves them of social and political responsibilities.

They want their doctor to act as lawyer and priest. As a lawyer, the doctor exempts the patient from his normal duties and enables him to cash in on the insurance fund he was forced to build.

As a priest, he becomes the patient’s accomplice in creating the myth that he is an innocent victim of biological mechanisms rather than a lazy, greedy, or envious deserter of a social struggle for control over the tools of production. Social life becomes a giving and receiving of therapy: medical, psychiatric, pedagogic, or geriatric. Claiming access to treatment becomes a political duty, and medical certification a powerful device for social control.

With the development of the therapeutic service sector of the economy, an increasing proportion of all people come to be perceived as deviating from some desirable norm, and therefore as clients who can now either be submitted to therapy to bring them closer to the established standard of health or concentrated into some special environment built to cater to their deviance….in the first historical stage of this process, the diseased are exempted from production.

At the next stage of industrial expansion, a majority come to be defined as deviant and in need of therapy. When this happens, the distance between the sick and the healthy is again reduced. In advanced industrial societies the sick are once more recognized as possessing a certain level of productivity which would have been denied them at an earlier stage of industrialization.

Now that everybody tends to be a patient in some respect, wage labor acquires therapeutic characteristics. Lifelong health education, counseling, testing, and maintenance are built right into factory and office routine. Therapeutic dependencies permeate and color productive relations. Homo sapiens, who awoke to myth in a tribe and grew into politics as a citizen, is now trained as a lifelong inmate of an industrial world. The medicalization of industrial society brings its imperialistic character to ultimate fruition.

Health has ceased to be a native endowment each human being is presumed to possess until proven ill, and has become an ever-receding goal to which one is entitled by virtue of social justice.54

What Illich did not anticipate is that the ever-receding goal of health would not only completely recede as accepted reality, but that those claiming it as a native endowment would become the enemies of social justice. On top of that, the ever-increasing categories of disease would make the identities of illness (or in other words, any divergence from healthy norms and its representation), not health and its attainment, the celebrated but hollowed-out horizon of social justice. But that is a topic to tackle next.

Notes:

1. Illich (1976) pg. 209, 208
2. Illich (1976) pg. 209
3. Illich (1976) pg.174
4. Geiger (1976)
5. “Books of the Times” (1976)
6. Warzel (2021)
7. Scheff (2012)
8. Mathews (2006)
9. Whitehead (1925)  pg. 24
10. Feyerabend (1975)
11. Both the word “gene” (Keller 2000)  and the word “vaccine” are increasingly problematic and politicized terms. People can argue over whether the covid shots were vaccines, gene therapy, or something else, but the fact remains that they were clearly different from previous vaccines, and the line between social, ecological, and genetic engineering is getting increasingly thin in light of the facts that the genome is fluid (Ho 2008) and effected by the other two registers, and that there is a regime emerging intent on tying them together even more intimately.
12. I will capitalize AIDS, and HIV, but not covid, because AIDS would be confusing not to capitalize, and at least they left HIV and AIDS intact as separate phenomena, even if they were often conflated. With covid, the levels of the conflation of so many things under this one word reached such an absurd degree that it does not deserve to be treated as a proper noun, but rather like an adjective arising from a sociological attribution, as in the covidizing of everything. Nonetheless, there was a shift in influenza symptom patterns and most likely a lab-altered virus at work during covid. But the actual effect of the virus in people is way beyond the science of virology. There are arguments to be made that “covid” symptom patterns have more to do with how our bodies use the virus as a strategy for dealing with new levels of toxicity than what is even possible for current biotechnology to design. For extensive support of this line of thinking see Firstenberg (2016). This book was written before covid, but it gives convincing evidence that “influenza”, a term with roots in the belief that the disease was caused by the “influence” of the heavens, has always been about electricity. His argument fills an important gap in understanding the history of disease, but it is a little narrow. While changing weather patterns and their electrical effects were historically a major factor for the timing of colds and the flu, serious epidemics were more of a product of the general poor health of people, even if sometimes brought into an acute crisis with rapid environmental changes of various kinds. Yet, even in these cases, the timing of acute crisis is not solely due to simultaneous responses to meteorological and electrical change. In Chinese medicine, any destabilizing changes in the environment and their health effects are classified as “wind”, but wind includes people’s chemical stress signals, what we call “viruses”. Communicable stress patterns in people can become an additional factor reinforcing the stress of environmental change, but this can also be seen as a potentially helpful vector of information. Just as you can catch someone’s fear, but that fear may be an appropriate response to danger, so you may copy someone’s illness out of a biological “belief” that it is a good time to go through the process (see note below). While Firstenberg does not discuss these factors, he does give interesting evidence that influenza patterns were correlated with sunspot cycles, which alter magnetic fields here on Earth. He argues that this changed with the introduction of electrical technology, with new developments and increased levels of exposure triggering epidemics. Yet while electrical toxicity from technology probably plays a role in many modern and certainly most contemporary diseases (not to mention light toxicity), the timing of various epidemics probably has more to do with multiple rhythmic factors, not only new technology and weather changes, but sociological, psychological, and even cosmic rhythms. Indeed, electromagnetic mediation is involved in all of these because life is electrical and responsive to slight changes in surrounding fields. Indeed even the planets can have this effect (Scofield 2023); yet, one should not focus on this to the exclusion of everything else, even if electricity has been one of the most neglected aspects of modern medicine and biology. Exclusive focus leads to warring factions, all arguing over what “really” caused this or that disease, instead of finding the important connections among various patterns and factors, especially those repressed by the interests of big business. Another neglected factor, for instance, is chemical toxicity, which one would think would just be a background factor, and not explain why people get sick at the same time unless there was an acute poisoning. However, carbon cycles create seasonal variations in chemical exposure, which only adds to the complex but often correlated reasons for illness. As this work argues, disease patterns are by nature due to a diverse but overlapping ecosystem of biological, psychological, and sociological adaptations.
13. Asprem (2018)
14. Illich (1973)
15. While by using the phrase “possible programs”, I am giving a nod to Stephen Wolfram (2002), his work is just one small part of the postmodern change in knowledge and society, a change, however, that is indeed tied up with information technology and modeling (Cilliers 1998).
16. Varoufakis (2024)
17. DeHaven-Smith, Lance (2014)
18. Memorable to me since she made this point at a kind of “conspiracy theory” conference in 2014. I attended this event on a whim because of its claim to focus on deep-state economics and technology. While definitely not your usual alien conspiracy event, it was still nice to see such an explicit rejection of the scapegoat model that burdens so much alternative research. Here is a recording: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0mimIp8mr8)
19. At least attributed to him (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983, pg. 187)
20. Latour (1988 part one)
21. Kay (1993)
22. Kay (1993) pg.3
23. Kay (1993) pg.8
24. Kay (1993) pg.9
25. While this is a phrase popularized by the controversial scientist and doctor, Zach Bush, it is a pretty straightforward extrapolation from accepted facts about the role of viruses in evolution and the constitution of DNA.
26. Viral conditions are seldom “curable” with antiviral drugs, if ever. Antibiotics can wipe out most bacteria, and in the process force the system toward even more pathogenic adaptations. But bacteria are separate enough from the body that specific ones can be removed, perhaps opening up a niche for other organisms or further complications, but removed nonetheless. With antivirals, the drugs can only repress the expression of a virus. The body will reactivate the virus, sometimes decades later. Virologists claim this is because of hidden reservoirs even in non-retroviral conditions, but one can also see this persistence in non-militaristic terms. The body retains the viral strategies it has picked up, not because of a well-fortified bunker, but because they serve important functions. For instance, MIT scientist Steffanie Seneff (2013) points out the role viruses play in sulfate transportation in sick cells. As for how the body maintains this memory, Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier (2015) found evidence to suggest that the memory of viral disease could be stored and reactivated by the electromagnetic field of the organism, which is consistent with the biophysical model of the organism surveyed in Ho (2008).
27. This is standard reasoning in traditional medicine, especially Chinese medicine, where the true pathogens are environmental qualities and the negative emotions that can reinforce them. In a sense, all illness begins as a kind of “wind”, a change in the environment that someone has trouble adjusting to. In any case, true health is the ability to adapt to and balance these factors; attempting to eliminate change in the environment is disasterous and debilitating.
28. This phrase and much of the characterization of viruses in these paragraphs, while summarizing more references than I can put here, owes a particular debt to the work of Jane Roberts, particularly (1984).
29. One could argue, for instance, that the reason certain viral conditions protect against other conditions (Nuwer 2020), is that some diseases are more effective mechanisms of the body dealing with the same underlying dysfunction than others. Viruses could be seen as strategies that are passed around and used when needed. If this logic was understood, we would invest more energy and money into mapping the conditions and functional niches of disease, instead of attacking them in isolation. For instance, cancer is quite clearly a kind of later-stage mechanism that the body resorts to when other measures fail, yet so much effort goes into trying to destroy or outsmart it, rather than shift this mechanism into better ones. Acute infections and the fevers they tend to invoke are sometimes the best thing for cancer; it is a platitude of many traditional medicinal frameworks that a good fever can cure almost anything.
30. Roberts (1984)
31. Harrington (1996)
32. Ho (2008)
33. Once a heresy championed by Lynne Marguilis, now standard textbook biology, with some interesting new consequences explored in books by popular scientist and writer Nick Lane (2015).
34. This was another radical notion not too long ago, basically the view held by the great systems theorist Fransisco Varela (Protevi 2013); now it is pretty much the working model implied by much of the rapidly expanding research into the microbiome and viral biome. 
35. Tauber (1994, pg.20)
36. Tauber (1994, pg. 157)
37. Keller (2000)
38. Dr. Jack Kruse (2012) has speculated that humans naturally have more gut permeability perhaps as a way to get more viral DNA into the blood, which in turn has allowed them to make more rapid evolutionary adaptations. Viruses then, in this model, would be partially responsible for our large brains. Perhaps we tapped the dynamism of the virome to drive our rapid ascent into consciousness.
39. Pearson (1997, pg.132)
40. Kay (1993 pg.10)
41. See Asprem (2018), and Harrington (1996). Basically, the winners write the history; unfortunately, because the Nazis have come to be identified with a vitalistic side in what was actually a complex multi-sided struggle throughout modernity over the meaning and direction of science, everything that smacks of mystical, vitalistic, or holistic approaches to science gets framed as belonging to an at best outmoded, if not dangerous and monolithic ideology.
42. While there are various ideas on what constitutes the new biology, some quite fringe and others much closer to establishment narratives, I take Ho’s (2008) very erudite survey to be definitive.
43. Everywhere you look postmodern complexity is forcing science to embrace ideas it had supposedly outgrown. This is especially the case in theoretical biology, where Ho (2008) argues for a neo-Lamarckian approach to evolution. This, of course, has made her controversial. More generally, the names of concepts are changed, and no acknowledgments of errors are made public, especially in medicine where lawsuits could follow any explicit publicity surrounding the millions of lives lost. While one study of overall death counts during covid suggests a specific number of lives lost due to error of blaming a virus (Rancourt et al. 2020-2023), how would one even begin to calculate the loss of life and health due to the scapegoating of saturated fat and cholesterol for heart disease? Fortunately, interdisciplinary science and the more theoretical fields are less bound by these kinds of considerations. Consequently, they can openly point out previous errors and embrace the correct ideas of the past that were not properly understood. 
44. Kay (2000, pg.38)
45. Kay (2000, pg.73)
46. Lewontin (1991, pg.51)
47. Lewontin (1991, pg.51)
48. Banks (2010)
49. Thalos (2013) argues that causality should not be used in pure science, but should be restricted to engineering.
50. Garfinkel (1981)
51. Lewontin (1991, pg.4)
52. Shiva (2020)
53. By using the word autistic here, I mean no disrespect to people struggling with autism. Indeed, in keeping with the themes of this text, I think it is more problematic to call a person autistic in the sense that that is just the way they are, or that it is essential to their being as an identity. I think our society is becoming more autistic for many environmental, sociological, and even soulful reasons, but I don’t think this is something to be celebrated. We are all these days more or less autistic, and that is something we need to face if we want to avoid disaster.
54. Illich (1976, pg.129)

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