Part 21: Probioticists and Antibioticists
Public attitudes toward nature have changed significantly in my lifetime.
Earlier posts »Intro:About »1:Born Of Lockdown »2:Need For Naturalism »3:Equivalence Of God & Nature »4:Special Role Of Science »5:Right & Wrong Tech »6:Smartphones & Covid Vaccines »7:Irredeemable Tech »8:Tower Of Babel »9:Eden & The Fall »10:Mary Shelley: Prophet? »11:Naturalist Congregation »12:First Three Beliefs »13:Natural Health »14:Trinity & Six Freedoms »15:Importance of Continuity »16:Chicken Little »17:New Fundamentalism »18:Obstacles to Naturalism »19:Mr. Bean, Proto-Naturalist »20:Body Modification
I was born and raised at an arm's length from nature. In my case, that was the literal distance from my mother’s breasts. When I was a tot in the 1960s, the breastfeeding of children was horribly out-of-fashion in the US. My siblings and I were all fed formula from a bottle. The first time I ever saw a woman breastfeeding was on a trip to Denmark when I was approximately 18 years old. That was quite enlightening!
In the 1960s and 70s, technological interventions—like formula feeding instead of breastfeeding—presented a very strong promise. Formula feeding was a modern, scientific, secure, and predictable alternative. Therefore, it was also higher in status. During my childhood, I suppose the only American women who weren’t formula feeding were likely the ones who couldn’t afford formula. A lot of tech in those days was targeted toward women, toward freeing them from traditional expectations, including biological expectations. In many people’s minds, breastfeeding was one such biological drudge. My mother voices no regrets (though I’m fairly sure she doesn’t understand what she missed).
Similarly, in the grocery stores that I remember as a child in the 1960s and 70s, there were comparatively few fresh fruits and vegetables. Instead, alongside the shelves of packaged infant formula, there were many “modern” convenience selections, such as canned goods, boxed ready-to-cook meals (e.g. Hamburger Helper), and frozen meals such as “TV dinners”. Fashionable women considered cooking from scratch to be quaint, something you could experience at Grandma’s house when you visited her. People anticipated an age of synthetic convenience food, something that appeared with a “whoosh” at the press of a button, like in episodes of Star Trek or the Jetsons.
Furthermore, in those days, the human race seemed on the edge of eradicating that age-old enemy: germs. Sophisticated homes, like my own, were kept in germ-free fashion with scented antiseptic sprays, like Lysol. Dirt, bacteria, viruses, and were considered the enemies. Natural odors were simply embarrassing. Antibiotics, vaccines, and chemical disinfectants were considered wondrous inventions, ushering us into an era in which we could vanquish all threats and discomforts from the microbiome, even from within our own bodies.
In short, new tech in the household was booming, and everyone seemed to want to get in on it. Older and more natural practices—including natural herd immunity for disease—seemed destined to fade away. It was a tech-bullish "antibiotic" age, in a large sense of that word. There was little confidence in messy nature, and plenty of confidence in sanitary and synthetic technological solutions. The outlook was that we should use commercial tech in order to transcend the filth and unpredictability of nature.
In those days, nature was often viewed as old-fashioned, traditional, uncomfortable, tiresome, and dangerous. The advantages of mechanization and the Industrial Revolution were coming right into our homes and into our very bodies, and we were welcoming them with a capitalist fervor that paralleled the communist fervor of our cold-war enemies, who were also largely idolizing the same tech tech.
The probiotic shift
As always, things change, and the progress of history did not become a straight line of technological advancement toward a Jetsons lifestyle. Instead, a shift toward trust in nature occurred. For example, the downsides of infant formula feeding became widely studied and discussed. By the 1990s, breastfeeding was becoming fashionable. In the supermarket, fresh fruits and veggies were abounding. Home cooking enjoyed a resurgence, as did getting one's hands dirty in the garden. Organic food became desirable.
At the same time, in the field of medicine and health, the same pro-nature, pro-tradition shift was also occurring. A large amount of research was indicating that many germs were actually helping us. The “hygiene hypothesis” and the notion of "good bacteria" became prominent, and probiotic treatments for some diseases started being developed. More people started questioning vaccines for scientific reasons, not just as a matter of faith. Furthermore, it was becoming obvious that bacteria were becoming resistant to our antibiotics. Gradually, the illusion of a future germless world was broken. People were beginning to see that tech was not the answer for everything.
At the same time, human-produced chemicals in the environment were increasingly causing concerns about toxicity. The perception of "uncleanliness" was changing for many people. Hands covered in dirt and germs could easily be washed, but hands covered in chemicals were becoming a potential long-term threat for diseases like cancer. "Clean" was largely taking on the meaning of "chemical-free" for many people, rather than "dirt-free". Lysol was losing customers.
“Natural health” became a buzzword for many. Both science and personal lifestyle were trending toward a criticism of chemically driven industry, chemically laden farm products, and chemically intensive healthcare. I’ll dub this trend the “probiotic movement”, in a large sense of of the word “probiotic”; that is, having confidence in existing biology and nature.
In short, from perhaps the mid-1970s through the 1990s, nature was increasingly viewed as a source of goodness, wisdom, inspiration, and health. Of course, this shift in perception did not happen equally to everyone, but it was fairly far reaching in society. It certainly affected some groups more strongly, such as classic environmentalists—who value clean water, air and soil—and health enthusiasts—who think that humans should strive to keep their bodies as free as possible from manufactured chemicals.
I even remember specifically thinking—in the 1990s—that the population was coalescing into two camps: those who considered dirt and germs to be the major threat to humankind, the “antibioticists”, as opposed to a grass-roots movement who considered artificial chemicals to be the major threat, the “probioticists”. The antibioticists, simply put, trusted that human technology was best. The probioticists placed more trust in nature, and felt that it should be cooperated with. I imagined even then that these opposing viewpoints would likely come to a future loggerheads.
Even though probioticism gained increasing popular support, the antibiotic outlook still stayed strong. A simple explanation for this is that antibioticism is the obvious favorite of corporate interests, which have a clear financial motive to favor human-invented chemical and pharmaceutical products. Such inventions are patentable and therefore much more profitable than solutions already available in nature. Given the power of corporations in modern society, their influence on governments, and their influence on the population via advertisement, there is an entrenched “establishment” of antibioticism that will not easily disappear. One result of this is that most people have mixed views on this issue, and lack consistent opinions one way or the other.
A new tactic of antibioticism
Possibly due to the increasing influence of probioticism, beginning in the 1990s, the antibioticist PR machine seemed to take on a different strategy. Through the 1970s, this machine had emphasized rewards, promoting the gee-whiz tech that would deliver us to the carefree lifestyle of the Jetsons. However, because it was increasingly obvious to people that these rewards were elusive, the PR machine started increasingly to promote fear of key aspects of nature and to encourage a feeling of moral duty to intervene in and manipulate nature. Generally, this has become a “fear/control/eradication” tactic, which involves the aim of eradicating some part of nature, under the guise of assisting nature or public health. I’ll give you some examples.
One obvious means that fear of nature has been spread in the past few decades is through the demonizing—by public health—of childhood diseases that had been considered normal rites-of-passage for children in earlier decades. Although the intervention of mass vaccination for, say, measles and mumps had started in the earlier 1960s, diseases like these were not feared in 1970 because everyone was still familiar with the fact that they are not generally serious. As proof, see this video of snippets of popular TV comedies in the 1960s and early 1970s, all dealing with measles.
In contrast, by the 1990s a fear campaign was underway, and these generally mild illnesses were outlandishly depicted in public health literature as mortal threats. By the early 2000s new parents—as well as their kids—no longer had any collective memory of chickenpox or measles “parties” that responsible parents of earlier generations took their kids to, to cultivate herd immunity. The obvious benefit to creating fear of such diseases is increased sales of vaccines. Any further benefit of the vaccines is not obvious at all, if one honestly crunches the numbers of both risk and reward, and adequately considers the many unknowns.
Of course the publicly-stated aim of mass vaccination is the eradication of a certain disease, such as is often erroneously claimed about the “success” of jabs for polio and smallpox (see the book Dissolving Illusions by Dr. Suzanne Humphreys). This aim of eradication is hopeless and unscientific at its core, but is nevertheless often repeated.
Another example of the new tactic of fear/control/eradication started in the 1990s, this time under the guise of environmentalism rather than public health. I remember it well, because I was coaxed into believing it at first.
In the 1990s I noted that—in progressive communities in the US—fear of "exotic invasive” non-native plants began taking form. In my home city of Seattle, there was a completely futile publicly funded eradication campaign against Seattle’s own ubiquitous blackberry brambles, which had been taking over habitat from other species of plants in the region for many decades already. Many environmentalists of the day were swayed by the idea of restoring the Seattle ecosystem to an imagined pristine state, via the large-scale removal of blackberries and the restorative replantings of “native species”. I even volunteered in early efforts to do this, but I started to question the activity on my first day of doing it.
Despite identifying as an environmentalist at the time, as I was hacking and digging away at some blackberry brambles with a volunteer work group, I began to think that the idea of eradicating such a useful and tasty bush was unjustified. The environmental Puritans who were pushing this effort obviously didn’t understand that blackberries had become part of the existing ecosystem, providing excellent cover for burrowing animals, like rabbits and garden snakes, as well as plenty of juicy berries for other mammals and birds.
It took me only some days to reason that the architects of this effort didn’t understand that nature is strong and resilient, and that nature works in ways that are beyond their tiny, mechanistic, and simplistic understanding of it. They imagined themselves smarter than nature, and imagined that nature was helpless and dumb, requiring their assistance. They did not recognize nature as something far greater than themselves.
There is a traditional religious saying: “God works in mysterious ways.” In the typical style of Naturalism, I’ll simply replace the word “God” with “nature” in order to find a corollary truth: “Nature works in mysterious ways.” Because nature is much bigger than us, and is incomprehensible in its entirety, it never requires our assistance. Instead, as the inferior of nature, we owe it our respect rather than our imagined assistance.
In the next part, I’ll explore environmental and public health Puritanism.