No culture without physical culture

Politics, Health

Recently news was out about the presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. If you want to know what he is up to, read this great interview on IM-1776. As well known to many of you, RFK Jr has done much work in pointing out the widespread corruption of health by various multinational corporations, playing a major role in bringing to light the various crimes surrounding covid-19. Whatever else his politics might be, his strength lies in this: making health into a task of politics again, and being unashamed for voicing truth against medical-political orthodoxy.

There is no healthy nation without healthy people. Since ancient times, a political society was always seen as an organism made up of its members. And just as each individual organism was to stay healthy by keeping its parts in order through a healthy lifestyle, so politics is the art of managing the greater organism. As basic as these observations are, it is clear that in the West, politics has had little care for health. And if it has, it is only in a superficial and twisted way. This is of course most clear in the US, where obesity rates are said to be much higher than in other countries, and where usage of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, fluoride, and so on is much more widespread than in most of Western Europe. I have said before that if politics is to mean anything today, it must become concerned with the most basic of human realities again. Health, for one. It is better to be strong than it is to be weak. And it is better to be healthy than it is to be sick. Even if you know nothing else, you know this. If a regime’s rule leads to increasing disease, then this is all you need to know that something is deeply wrong. The essential task of all politics is to keep the organism healthy, and it has failed. Do you believe strength is better than weakness, do you believe health is better than disease? You already know everything you need to know, and all that needs to be done.

Today, of course, there is a lot of hesitation in taking the health of a population and its environment as a major point of political action. As, arguably, the last time nations unashamedly put health forth as the focal point of political action, it was done under the names of fascism and national socialism. If fascism is the politics of order, and if health is about a well-ordered life, then you must think deeply about what you care about most. Health and vitality, or political correctness. It would mean realizing that no one has been helping the sick and deformed, we have only been praising them. 

A politics that is focused on health would in many ways constitute a return. I need not remind you that at the origin of Western culture there stands Ancient Greek culture, and Ancient Greek culture was a culture of health, a physical culture. 

In his Laws, Plato speaks about a difference between two types of doctors; there is the slave-doctor, and there is the real specialist, the master physician. The slave-doctor is the pill-pushing type, giving each patient the same treatment, without concern for the individual nature of their case, how they came to fall into disease, and how they can prevent themselves from falling ill in the future. The patient leaves, healed of his symptoms, but he is still just as foolish, and not knowing what behaviour caused the disease in the first place, he might well fall back into disease soon after. The specialist doctor is different; he treats free men who are actually interested in knowing how they came to fall ill, and this doctor does everything to explain to his patients how they came to be ill, and how they can prevent getting ill in the future, what exercise to do, what foods to eat and which foods to avoid, and so on. Interestingly, Plato notes that the slave-doctor looks with disdain at the real doctor, saying: “You ass, you are not treating the patient but tutoring him. Anybody would think he wanted to become a doctor rather than get well again.” (Laws, 857e) The slave-doctor shames the good doctor, for from the point of view of the slave-doctor, the good doctor is not healing patients, but merely telling them how to heal themselves. The good doctor is seen as a socially irresponsible creature, for he doesn’t want to heal slaves, he wants to make slaves into free men who can heal themselves.

There are those who want to be healed so they can go on and stuff themselves yet again, and there are those who want to heal. This is the difference. If you are like me, Plato’s description might sound familiar. You go to a doctor, and when you ask him for information or whatever it is that he is doing or planning to do with you, the man responds bewildered. “What? You want to know what is wrong with you, and how I propose to solve it? You don’t just want a pill?” Most people do not care, and so most doctors do not care. Philosophy is often seen as the passion for learning. And if this is true, we can easily see why men like Plato thought philosophy so necessary and essential. In everything we do, and in everything that happens to us, we can be interested in learning from the situation. Or we can act like a slave, go to the slave-doctor, and ask for a pill so we can go on with our lives just as ignorant as before. It is not about praising philosophy over other disciplines, it is about doing all things with interest, consideration, and thought. He who wants to learn, and he who wants to be kept safe from the hard work of learning.

From what we can gather, the free men of Greece had for a long time some sort of disdain for the doctor. He was not worshipped like the men in white robes are worshipped today. Instead, men worshipped the teacher of gymnastics. If something was wrong with you, before you visit the actual doctor who can work all sorts of magic on your body, just go to the gym and ask the coach there to ask you what to do. He might just say that you are a disgusting fat pig and that you should exercise more. And there you go, you just saved yourself from spending piles of money and suffering side effects. The gymnast makes and keeps men healthy, the doctor is the one who prevents sick men from dying. This is how it was. And so it is perhaps a clear sign of decline when we gladly spend our livelihoods on social security for pill-popping slave-doctors, while we think ourselves too good to spend a fraction of the money on a gym membership, quality food, and guidance from those wiser than us. 

A number of writings remain to us from Ancient Greece, and we often see descriptions for how to live one’s life in order to stay healthy. One of these by 4th century physician Diocles of Carystus, seemingly written for the average man (read, not a professional athlete), recommends vigorous exercise twice a day, with many walks interspersed throughout the day. This was average, this was normal. Tell someone today that you exercise more than three times a week and, unless you’re a professional athlete, they will think you are mad or using exercise to hide some deep insecurities. What was once normal and considered a minimum for a healthy life is considered pathological today. Of course, we are talking about free men here. And we can ask; if one does not have time to exercise two times a day, can one really be considered free? Increasing rates of obesity are only superficially the result of increased liberty, “we can enjoy whatever we want” and so on. In truth, it is an increase in the density of slaves, and along with it, an increase in the amount of slave-doctors. What is truly tragic today, however, is that young boys and girls who have everything going for them to live a free life of health and vitality, are pushed down into disease and slavery by an increasing presence of malicious actors, and there is little escape. Soil, water, and sky are poisoned, countless vaccines are injected shortly after birth, and there is the widespread illusion that education and medicine truly do exist to make one more capable and free. The slave-doctor thinks he is a real doctor. And the slave thinks he is a free man. And as Plato saw, democracy allows the slave-doctors to push the real doctor out of the polis.

Today, we see health and fitness as just one part of life. The child goes to school, and there it has all sorts of classes. Mathematics, history, chemistry, languages, and next to all of this a short hour or two of exercise per week. The Greek view however seemed much different. Exercise was not just one activity next to so many others. Rather, it was the precondition for everything else. Without a healthy body, the mind rots. And without physical culture, culture becomes impossible. It is important to know history, but it is equally important to shape yourself into the type of person that will know what to do with this history when confronted by it. The type of person who can digest the material learned, and whose nervous system is primed for insight. The depressed and diseased organism will think and evaluate differently than the healthy and vital organism. 

One can wonder if all views of Ancient Greece as a culture of the mind are not part of some elaborate psy-op to make you blind to the importance they gave to physical culture. One points to Plato or Socrates, men in robes thinking and debating all day. But one cannot even imagine a Socrates without the gymnasium culture that allowed men to gather and converse together. 

“Whoever concerns himself with the Greeks should be ever mindful that an unrestrained thirst for knowledge for its own sake barbarizes men just as much as a hatred of knowledge. The Greeks themselves, possessed of an inherently insatiable thirst for knowledge, controlled it by their ideal need for and consideration of all the values of life.”

(Nietzsche, Philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks, 31) 

If culture is the way in which life decides to give shape to itself, and if politics is how life is given shape at a societal level, then there is no culture without physical culture. Before anything else, politics is about this physical culture. And so when news like this hits us, there is hope, for some men do still realize that without physical culture, there is no culture at all. 

One often points to Plato who, like others in his time, says it is not fitting for every man to watch his health like an athlete would and spend as much time exercising. But when one reads this, do realize that the average training of the average man back then was much closer to the training of the average athlete today, war-ready year round. 

Of course, a life devoted entirely to training and study is impossible, for most. This was equally true for the Greeks, perhaps. What does change however is the norms we have for training. Do we see exercising once a week as enough, or is twice a day the minimum? Where do we set the bar? When I was in school, I believe we had two short hours of physical exercise a week. And of course, we didn’t really learn anything, we played stupid games. Not a single body was strengthened in these classes. Werner Jaeger writes: 

“The whole life of the Greeks (more than any other people) revolved around their gymnastics […] and perhaps the life led by a citizen of a Greek city-state in the fourth century allowed him more time to spend on the culture of his spirit and the care of his body than any other life ever lived by man.” (Jaeger, Paideia, III, 44) 

Yet of course, we can not imagine an Athenian free man in the fourth-century spending all his time in the gymnasium, oiling himself, lifting weights, and wrestling. The Greek ideal was about harmony. And so, the virtues of the physical —health, strength, and beauty — must be brought into harmony with the virtues of the soul —piety, courage, temperance, and justice. It is not a question of physical or intellectual culture. Rather, it is realizing that culture is the process by which all the faculties of men are brought into harmony through the pursuit of one ideal. This ideal itself being the harmony of parts. Know well, that physical health = harmony. When all one’s bodily parts work in harmony with each other, this is when health is known. And so, if harmony was the Greek ideal, the Greek ideal was health. Culture is nothing but the way in which life decides to give shape to itself. And evidently, life can be given shape in better and worse ways — harmonious or disordered, strong or weak. Beautiful, or ugly. Healthy, or sick. A ‘culture’ which is not devoted to the shaping of the physical is only a culture in a half sense. In truth, there is no culture without physical culture. And the deeper the roots in the physical, the higher the degree to which the mental faculties can develop. This is what the Greek idea shows both in word and deed.  

These are some things I think about with RFK Jr coming onto the scene. And even if his presence is worth nothing else, it can remind us that politics is about health. That health is culture, and that culture is health. Trump dared question vaccines on twitter some years ago, but even he never really did so in public. Moreover, only the truly aberrant and misguided can disagree on the importance of something so common-sensical as health. And if nothing else is achieved, what can be achieved is the creation of a few strong and vibrant boys who would have otherwise become fats. If a man from the left enters the gym and sticks to it, it is only a matter of time before he drops his former political beliefs. It is a win either way. 

As I have been speaking about the Greeks, consider that in one of the principal Hippocratic writings —the epidemics—, each chapter starts with a description of nature, the seasons, the positions of the stars, the quality of the water, the air, and so on. This was the Hippocratic teaching; before you try and heal a sick man, look at the environment in which he lives, and all will become clear to you. Moreover, a skilled physician will be able to predict the types of diseases that will flourish depending on the climate observed. Today, you need not be a physician to see the degree to which our environments are poisoned. Food, soil, air, and water. If any politics is possible today, it will consist principally in a fight against the poisoning of man.