PublicHealth

The Australian

THE WEST’S CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE – IT’S A TREND TO DIE FOR

GREG SHERIDAN

For 50 years, popular culture in Australia and the West has mocked authority, glorified rebellion, sanctified the individual’s quest for ever deeper self-realisation and told us that Western governments are dishonest, corrupt, wicked and primarily act as agents of racism, colonialism, sexism, economic exploitation and environmental despoliation.

All this is reinforced by academic culture, which sheets all these sins home not only to Western governments but to Western civilisation generally.

Is it any wonder that these societies are having so much trouble in the coronavirus crisis responding to essential lifesaving directions from their respective governments?

The most successful societies in tackling COVID-19 through social distancing and similar suppression measures are Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea. The widespread elements of their success are well known — large-scale testing, contact tracing, tough travel restrictions, strict social distancing, strict isolation for those infected or possibly infected, and above all co-operative societies that take what governments say seriously.

These four are all deeply Confucian societies. You have to be careful about cultural generalisations but Confucianism is a powerful influence across all Northeast Asian societies (plus Singapore), just as the Judaeo-Christian inheritance used to be the most powerful and pervasive influence in the West.

The Analects of Confucius stress proper relations, family fidelity, respect for elders, respect for authority, personal morality and acting with some decorum. They esteem formal education, sober wisdom. You should respect and obey your parents, you should respect and generally obey your government.

Confucianism is not all bottomup obligation, for it also requires governments to justify “the mandate of heaven” by acting decently for all citizens.

Today, citizens in Confucian societies are able to work out that government edicts to practise social distance or self-isolation are more important than edicts such as “don’t litter” or “pay attention in class”. But having grown up in a culture in which they obey directions that say don’t litter and pay attention in class, they are more likely to follow lifesaving directions.

I am not arguing here that Confucianism is better than the Judaeo-Christian civic tradition. Nor am I arguing the reverse. It’s more relevant that Confucian societies have maintained their traditions. Their governments, even their education systems and parts of popular culture, reinforce this. In contrast, we have mounted a socially suicidal and nearly insane attack on our own traditions for at least the past five decades.

Christianity and Confucianism sometimes seek to approach similar civic virtues but get there in different ways. There is nothing in Confucius more pro-authority than the famous passage in the New Testament’s first letter of St Peter, which says: “For the Lord’s sake accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by him …”

Confucius and Peter were saying different things. Both are open to interpretation, but both understood that the good life requires submission to authority.

Yet popular culture in Anglo-American societies, and in most of Western Europe, demonises every traditional institution and demonises government itself, while glorifying the existential rebellious individual who makes a heroic stand, typically against a designated set of pantomime villains: government agencies, corporate greed, property developers, organised religion et cetera.

Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, told me this week it was important that a government enter a crisis with some “social capital” and people believe the government and its key agencies, and the mainstream media, tell the truth in a crisis.

But Australia, like the West generally, has been on a determined path of destroying all that vital social capital.

Hollywood, and its Australian imitators, and the British film and television industry, are almost (not entirely but almost) incapable of making a production that deals with security issues in which the ultimate bad guys don’t turn out to be one or other of the Western security agencies.

In the Cold War the villains were always the Russians. In the postmodern world the villains are always us, our government and our institutions.

In the digital universe, every conspiracy theory you can imagine flowers in wild profusion. But many of these wacky ideas get a very good airing in mainstream entertainment. I haven’t yet seen the ABC TV series Stateless but I’ll bet you a hot Chico roll it portrays the Australian state as the agent of unique wickedness. What else would it do?

Beyond popular culture is the deep academic conviction that all Western civilisation is inherently based on evil — racism, sexism, economic exploitation, colonialism — without any positive affirmation of the magnificent achievements of our own tradition.

Beyond popular culture, online conspiracies and the deep madness of much of the humanities in Western universities, there is a trend in psychology and culture, certainly in that bloody crossroads of popular psychobabble, to elevate the individual, and the individual’s infinite curation of their own identity, as the defining ambition of human life.

In a brilliant piece in this month’s Atlantic magazine, David Brooks describes how the American family has collapsed in the past 70 years. Its collapse doesn’t hurt rich people too much because they can buy replacements for family

— therapists, carers, tutors. And they can buy assistance to keep their own small families functioning. But it has been a disaster for poor people, who are left with nothing. Brooks argues that over the past 70 years life has become freer for individuals but more unstable for families, better for adults and worse for children. The move from big extended families to ever smaller nuclear and sub-nuclear, so to speak, families has meant the poor have fewer people to help with bad economic times, rough psychological passages, the ups and downs of childhood. Rich folks buy this assistance. Families are also sources of authority and social capital. When they go, the authority and social capital go.

One difference with Confucian societies is that their governments do everything they can to support families and to promote traditional family structures. Both sides of politics make this impossible in societies such as Australia. The left hates tradition and works to destroy it, the libertarian right can’t stand anything that smacks of government social engineering.

I am inexactly connecting an immediate crisis with long-term cultural trends. But the inability of large numbers of its citizens to accept and yes, obey, simple government directions that are literally lifesaving is a sign of a relatively recently acquired, grave weakness in our culture.

In the digital universe, every conspiracy theory you can imagine flowers in wild profusion

The Australian

 Monday, January 27, 2020 

BREAKING FREE FROM OUR MOST DANGEROUS DRUG

ROSS FITZGERALD

From humble beginnings, Alcoholics Anonymous has saved millions of lives.

Yesterday, on Australia Day, I was sober for 50 years.

Since I stopped drinking and drugging on January 26, 1970, Alcoholics Anonymous has continued to teach me that for an alcoholic one drink is too many and 100 is not enough.

Indeed, the trick for an alcoholic like me is not to pick up the first drink, and to keep attending AA meetings.

The stark reality is if I hadn’t stopped drinking and drugging aged 25, I wouldn’t have made 26.

Yet had I not started drinking at 14 I may well have taken my own life by the age of 18.

This is because, as a child, I felt like a garbage tip and alcohol enabled me to hold down those dreadful feelings, but only for a while.

Then the progressive nature of the illness of alcoholism began to thoroughly take hold. This was until, through the agency of Alcoholics Anonymous and particularly through attending AA meetings, I was released from the need to drink and use other drugs 50 years ago.

The role of Alcoholics Anonymous in combating alcoholism and other drug addiction deserves to be celebrated.

However, for the millions of lives saved and transformed by this extraordinary movement, just as many have failed to grasp its simple message and the result has been personal hell, family breakdown, and untimely death. Such is the destructive power of alcohol, society’s most pernicious and damaging drug.

On May 12, 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous had its fragile beginning in Akron, Ohio, when a recently sober New York stockbroker, Bill Wilson, fearful that being alone on a business trip, he might return to drinking, hit on the idea of communicating with another alcoholic.

After making inquiries, Wilson was directed to a seemingly hopeless alcoholic physician, Bob Smith.

As a result of listening to Wilson tell the story of his alcoholism, Dr Bob had his last drink on June 10, 1935, which is the date on which AA is regarded as having been founded.

Ten years later, in March 1945, AA began in Australia.

From its beginnings, the AA program emphasised alcoholism as an illness that could be arrested, a day at a time, by complete abstinence from alcohol.

A key aspect of AA’s therapeutic process involves what can be termed the mechanism of surrender. Instead of telling alcoholics to use their willpower, control their drinking or pull up their socks, AA suggests that a much more efficacious strategy is to admit that, at least in relation to alcohol, they are beaten.

This acceptance of defeat often produces, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, a shift in attitude that unlocks new and positive feelings, especially hope and a sense of usefulness.

Surrender in AA involves the letting go of control. Thus at AA meetings one often hears a speaker say: “I’m not a retired alcoholic, I am a defeated one. I’ve thrown in the towel.” To let go in surrender is totally different from fighting alcohol (or life). Despair and hopelessness, not personal strength, is at its source.

Few people realise that the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung was intimately involved in the beginnings of AA.

As Jung explained in a letter to Bill Wilson, “alcohol in Latin is ‘spiritus’ and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison”. Jung maintained that for an alcoholic person the most helpful formula was “spiritus contra spiritum”: spirit against spirit, power against power.

It was Jung’s belief that, for an alcoholic, the primary sources of long-term recovery were to be found in something like a “conversion experience”. This should not be confused with a religious conversion.

In AA it is a conversion to accepting at depth that, in dealing with alcoholism, it is not sufficient to rely on the isolated self. This fundamental psychic change needs constantly to be reinforced or the alcoholic will most likely revert to old ways of thinking, feeling and responding, and hence will eventually drink again.

There is a tendency for some alcoholics who have stopped drinking to believe they can be totally self-reliant and can control their drinking. Alcoholic pride suggests the individual is not really beaten.

Instead of encouraging notions of supposed self-sufficiency, self-reliance and self-control, AA restructures the whole context and asserts that, with regard to alcoholism, the person is defeated.

The AA proposition, “once an alcoholic always an alcoholic”, reinforces a fundamental fact. Thus when I speak at meetings I always begin by saying: “My name is Ross and I am an alcoholic.”

AA’s only theological conception is that of a power greater than the self. This is sometimes conceived as God, as one understands that concept, or one doesn’t.

Just as the traditional stereotype of what comprises an alcoholic often blinds sufferers to the reality of their condition, so can the traditional stereotype associated with God lead to confusion and resistance.

But once the theistic, Christian (or any other) stereotype is done away with, it becomes clear that the notion of a power greater than oneself makes room for all alcoholic people, including atheists like myself. This is the case as long as we are willing to accept and rely on something outside or other than the isolated self, even if it is only the AA group we attend.

At some time during almost every AA meeting in the world, the new person will hear the following phrase: “You may leave this meeting today and need never drink again.” Often this is something that alcoholics have never considered before.

All the elements that comprise AA (attendance at meetings, the notion of alcoholism as an irreversible condition, working with other alcoholics, and the Twelve Suggested Steps) are part of a continuing process of surrender that offers the alcoholic not only freedom from the obsession to drink but also a sense of meaning and a useful way of life. Maintenance of the state of selfsurrender underpins personal recovery and is a continuing source of hope.

Ross Fitzgerald is professor of

history and politics at Griffith

University. His memoir, Fifty

Years Sober, is released by Hybrid in March.

The stark reality is if I hadn’t stopped drinking and drugging aged 25, I wouldn’t have made 26

Health & Immunity

We must stop pandering to risky food fads

WORLD COMMENTARY

MATT RIDLEY

I suggest you finish your breakfast before reading this column. When Britain’s National Health Service announced last month that it would no longer prescribe glutenfree food, it surprised me that it had been doing so in the first place. Whether you have genuine gluten intolerance — such as those with coeliac disease — or are merely following the fad, why should the taxpayer subsidise your diet, when the shops are groaning with gluten-free products? As I shall explain, perhaps the NHS should prescribe worms instead.

Where nutrition is concerned, the line between medical disorder and dietary preference has blurred. There are genuine medical issues relating to food, but they are hidden under a heap of fads. The recent news that milk consumption is dramatically down among young people seems to be because of a large amount of fashion with a small amount of disease.

It is the medical issue that concerns me here, but before I get to that, a word about fads. Lucrative obsessions among the wealthy with “clean” food, raw food, “detox” diets and “superfood” are pseudoscience, shamelessly exploiting gullible people and worsening the epidemic of eating disorders. Much of anorexia starts with “orthorexia”, or fussy eating, driven by irresponsible advice from celebrities who should know better. Nutrition education should be a priority, and public heath authorities need to get over their monomania about the sugar industry and start thinking about the damage being done by food fads.

At the heart of the problem is a misunderstanding of the concept of dose. Any kind of food is bad for you in excess, but that does not mean it is bad for you in small doses. Likewise, if something is harmful when missing from the diet, it does not mean it is good for you when supplied in overabundance. Vitamin C is vital for people with scurvy, but of zero benefit for people who are getting enough vegetables and fruit in their diet.

However, with that off my chest, there is nonetheless a growing food and health problem. Beneath the nonsense fads, beneath the worship of kale and goji berries and the absurd detox mythology, there clearly is increasing food intolerance among a smaller number of people. It urgently needs attention, because otherwise we might find in a few decades that more and more lives are ruined by allergies and illnesses.

This is a global issue. The menu in the restaurant in Guatemala City where I dined last Friday was sprinkled with symbols: glutenfree, dairy-free or peanut-free. These are real dangers for some people, who must avoid wheat, milk and nuts, three of mankind’s oldest staple foods. In a world where almost everything has been getting better, allergies have got steadily worse. Why?

I reckon the cause is now pretty clear: a lack of worms. The allergic reaction to these foods is caused by immunoglobulin E, a component of the immune system whose day job in the past was to combat parasitic worms. A recent study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine found that key proteins from 31 species of parasites are very similar to allergenic proteins. A protein in birch pollen that triggers hay fever is very similar to a protein found in parasitic worms that causes the infection schistosomiasis, for example.

It’s not that the immune system is “bored” now we have got rid of worms. The theory is more persuasive than that: worms have the capacity to damp down inflammatory immune reactions in their hosts, the better to survive. So human immune systems evolved to “expect” suppression by parasites; without it they overreact. To put it another way, we outsourced part of the regulation of our immune system to parasites.

Milk intolerance may be different because in most parts of the world it is caused by a sugar, lactose, whose indigestibility is a genetic trait. The gene for lactase, the enzyme that tackles lactose, is switched off in mammals when they are weaned. Only in Europe and parts of Africa, where people began milking cows a few thousand years ago, did mutations spread that kept the gene for digesting lactose switched on during adulthood.

But much milk intolerance in Westerners is probably not lactose intolerance, but an allergic reaction to a protein called beta casein A1. Hence the growing popularity of “A2 milk”, a product pioneered in New Zealand from cows that don’t make A1. So milk intolerance, too, may be about proteins and may also be related to wormlessness.

As recounted in a fascinating book, An Epidemic of Absence, by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, the correlation between the disappearance of worms and the appearance of asthma, allergies, type 1 diabetes and dietary intolerances is remarkably precise in time and place. In and around the Ethiopian town of Jimma asthma suddenly became common in the 1990s only in the places and at the time that hookworm was eradicated. No other factor — air pollution, dust mites, pesticides, viral epidemics — could explain the change. In Karelia, a region divided between Finland and Russia, very similar people had far more coeliac disease and allergies on the Finnish side, where sanitation was much better and parasites fewer.

Moreover, experiments have now been done to give allergic people hookworms or whipworms. Sure enough, their allergic symptoms — from asthma to irritable bowel disease — often clear up fast. A whole industry of “helminth hackers” has emerged in the US supplying worm eggs through the post for people with intolerances. Be warned that it is not necessarily worth it.

Ideally, we would now work out how the worms regulate the immune system and replicate the effect with safe pharmaceuticals. That should not be beyond the wit of 21st-century science.

It is probably not just worms. The impoverishment of our gut flora — the bacteria in our intestines — in the modern world, as a result of excessive hygiene and antibiotics, looks increasingly likely to be the cause of various other health issues, including obesity and possibly autism, though early experiments on the latter are inconclusive. Open Biome is a “stool bank” that will supply you with faecal transplants from healthy people to enrich your gut garden. It will also pay good money for faecal donations from healthy people.

I do hope you enjoy your lunch.

THE TIMES