It determines our hair, and it determines our entire body, right down to our shoe soles. It determines our excrements. It determines our behaviour, it determines our lifestyle. It determines our hope and dreams for ourselves, for all life, it is all-pervasive, everywhere. If one was to mention a singular common concept, a dignity that is above all others, which dictates our lives into the smallest details, it can only be health. What a horror! Thus, some live entire lives in opposition to the «health dictatorship». Just look at how ghastly, how hideous it is: the lifestyle! The clothes are supposed to be ugly. The sandals they walk in, whatever they are called… such revolting sandals! Such an unaesthetic exterior, big yellow toenails, strutting around in flip-flops! And the candy! It looks like something from the pharmacy. It is supposed to be coarse, it must be ugly – only THEN it is healthy. Only NOW, it is healthy.
We would like to have a life before we die, but this has become difficult, because health is ruling. How has this happened? What is the historical fundament? What are the ideas behind? Which ideologies are the source of the health-logic present today? What do the philosophers say about a health dictatorship? Let’s mention a bit of Focault, shall we – just for the sake of it – like in the good old days of «bio-power».
Breakfast
It is not only the puritan Americans who invented the garbage cereal we eat for breakfast, and the lumpy bread we put in our stomach. It was also the Germans! When we eat health-food, it is because of the Germans. Let us go back to Germany, let us go back to the turn of the century, should we start with «Lebensreform»? Or should we venture as far back as Romanticism? We can travel far back. It would be relevant to begin in the mid-1800’s and the health movement that evolved from here.
Like the anti-alcohol movement which originated both in religious such as health contexts. But we could also begin with the vegetarian movement; one of the earliest branches and roots of the health movement that further developed in the early 1900’s. How was it invented to not eat meat, but live sorely on greens? Could it be part of Romanticism, to define it as «natural»? Actually it is a much older movement, all the way back to the Greeks and ancient times: people simply improved when they followed a vegetarian diet. Different theories were established by looking at the human set of teeth, to then conclude a similarity to the teeth of monkeys. This lead to the though that perhaps we should only be eating fruits, just like the monkeys do. We are actually not carnivores; our small canines, some argue, are not designed to mush and tear meat. Our chewing ability is made to eat fruit. We are really not predators; we are cows. Similarly to cows, our intestines are not really adapted to digest meat.
The vegetarian movement experienced a first real strengthening in the late 1800s, when the urban life and its meat consumption began to become the normality, along with other customs, of the more costly kind such as coffee, sugar, and expensive white bread. Some considered this development as dangerous, as a threat to the survival – because these foods were both expensive and proved to be unhealthy. Reformers looked backwards in history, for a «natural diet» – couldn’t such a diet be both cheaper and healthier?
À propos «healthier»: this is such a German civilisation criticism! The indigenous good nature, against the wicked city. This originated from Rousseau, who in the mid 1700’s described the human as a «nature-being», but one who has been moved and disconnected from its original naturalness.
It is civil-rhetoric of the Enlightenment marching through here, and it is especially interesting that it is taking place in Germany. In the 1700’s – after the end of the 30 Year War – people began to concentrate much more on citizens or population, rather than focusing on territorial defence. During this time an economic theory named «physiocracy» developed – originating from a Greek term for «government of nature». It is a theory which harvests the wealth inside the soil, for then to develop into «mercantilism», a name for a national economic policy that is designed to maximise the exports of a nation: wealth is in the population. Therefore, there is a focus on having a population growth. Statistics become popular and useful such as national counts. In 1764 in Germany there is even the «Medizinische Polizei» – a medical police. It is not a police like the one that complies with laws, but one closer to the Greek term «polis». There is a desire to account knowledge on the territorial of the population; how do they live, how many children do they have, how do they die, what do they think about, how do they procreate, how sick are they. This is happening from the late 1700’s on, but especially proliferated in the 19th century. It becomes a powerful leading force, and Germany has the centrally leading users of this, known today as a state science – «Staatswissenschaft».
The knowledge from the data collected on the population is transformed and individualised and condensed to regulation of health. It is a behavioural regulation for the individual, who now has to live in accordance with overriding rules, and strives to be as strong as possible, as healthy as possible and as laborious as possible. Before this fully blossoms as a reality, the mid 1800’s is marked by a massive industrialisation, through which it first and foremost is concerned with establishing a workforce as efficient as possible. The healthcare system is only rudimentarily expressed, and the industry turns out to be killing all the workers. Initially the goal is to utilise the labor as intensively as possible, until they realise that the workers get so worn out, that is not financially worth it anyway. The state is forced to correct such losses by introducing social legislation.
We must climb the mountains
Leisure is what they got, the industrial workers. But not because they were having more fun, but because they were going to regenerate their productive forces. This all emanates from the question of «the good life», «the real life», which all arrived from a religious belief of life-source, the Vitalism. What is it? Vitamins? With a contemporary use of the word, we today apply both a narrow and a broad understanding. The wide encompasses everything that deals with the joy of life, life-power and optimism, the desire to procreate and so forth. The more narrow area, derives directly from philosophy of Nature, believing that there is a very special vitality, aligned with other natural forces. A life-force that carries information about how the living organisms should evolve, how to multiply and shape itself. How single individuals – the species – should grow and develop. This is before the knowledge of genetics, yet this force can be seen as a kind of genetic information on how the individual should generate arms and legs and ears and nose. To live in accordance with that, that is the fundamental philosophy of vitalism. The vitalistic current of the 1900’s is the conviction that people, in order to become part of nature again, must return to the «natural» to locate the inner life-force and open themselves to it. The civilisation had removed this ability from the people, and it was believed to be an obligation to seek the places and methods that re-open the life-force. I.e. taking off our clothes and place our bodies in the sun. «We must wander naked in the woods.» «We must climb the mountains.» All the cultural tendencies which develop around the 20th century, have given us an openness to vitality and urges us back to something more «original». With these descriptions, one can see it clearly: see Paradise as a place that existed before culture. Rousseau argued that the Enlightenment and the advances of Science did not bring anything better. With the vitalistic movement, elements come back from Romanticism. If the Enlightenment urges us to become adults, the Romantism appeals us to be like children again.
Primitivism was described as an element that can be cultivated in humankind – it is part of our person, as an untapped «primitive element» which has the ability to blossom. There exists a large drawing, a kind of map, that records a visual overview of the Life-reform movement: the old versus the new life. In the old age it is all about hard work, pollution, sooty chimneys, etc. In the new century, here we see the naked people walking around in Paradise, white swans on shiny waters, and the children are playing, and the flags are moving in the wind, etc. All absolutely naive – and absolutely problematic.
In the Life-reform movement and Vitalism in the light of health, there are two beliefs: either we live «actively alive», or there is the rising eliminating version related to hygiene which is «killing the unhealthy». Later this is known as bacteria. This can be seen as sanataria are renamed to sanatorium. Sanitas, which originates from healthy living, a place where one is just maintaining a healthy life, becomes a sanatorium, as the word «sanar» means «to treat». Many begin to attain a more treating relationship with health, different from merely participating in unfolding the living. Initially, it is a positive ideal. But it develops into a hectic, diagnostic trend, where everything which might deviate even the slightest bit from a «bell-curve normality» is betraying the common sense. If one deviates from what common sense dictates, one is mad – one is irrational and a danger to others as to oneself and in need of treatment. Especially from doctors.
Certain ideologies benefit from this direction as it unfolds a religious potential: Paradise, The Fall of Man, etc. In America, the Adventists were really fond of health food. They were in principle vegetarians, which really has a foundation of believes based on «the cooked» opposed to «the raw». The raw is good, it is natural. Graham flour, invented by the reverend Sylvester Graham, is a popular bran of flour which includes the oat bran. Course and rough is good. Kellogg’s later invents his Corn Flakes. He establishes his own sanatorium – The Battle Creek Sanatorium – where it is all about eating corn flakes and Graham flour all day long. The intestine must be cleaned from meat, and cornflakes can be used for this procedure. They are mixed up with water and simply stuck up behind in the rectum, flushed out like that. Kellogg himself even spent his entire honeymoon on this diet. Instead of sex with his wife, he got a custard with cornflakes stuck into his anus three times a day. The sanatorium was a massive success, people loved it, and similar places began popping up around the world.
More healthy than healthy
The asceticism is the problem with wellness. It is built on the willpower’s domination over the body. The body should be suppressed. It must taste horrible, it must be painful, one must suffer in the gym. One must run. The disciplined version of the body is in suffering. It is an educational health concept provided by the state and the most dominant kind is based on «you must». Like the Ten Commandments. Yet several of the diet advices from the Reform-movement, are still considered to be valid and in active use today. It is the educational health council of the state who believes in the disciplined life and helps spreading such concepts as widely as possible. Since the late Middle Ages we have been thinking that we will take care of the sick and let the healthy be as they are. And all of a sudden we get a standard norm which, instead of saying that what is abnormal is the sick, says: what is normal is the perfect. Which means: all abnormal is not perfect – or in a different way: the body not resembling the anatomy book is abnormal. This fits perfectly to the standard norm of medicine’s «normality principle», as it makes it possible to always find a reason for interference and treatment. In the old, more binary distinction between sick and healthy, you were only in the eyes of medicine as long as you were ill, but at this time you begin to examine the healthy. Meaning, you could actually be more healthy than healthy!
In the main street of any German city one can find a «Reformhaus» – a health food store, which derives directly from the Lebensreform. In the DDR, it was considered normal to swim in the nude. There was even a «Textilstrand» for swimmers in swimwear. From the 1920s to the beginning of the 1930s there was an explosion in social experiments, among there vegetarians and nudists. They truly believed in a retreat to the «original real». Yet the tragic with this philosophy is that it could be used and abused by National Socialism. This irrational mythologising led to something as absurd as «Der Volkskörper» – the body of the people. Suddenly there was a public body, which should be clean; a pure body, in its most optimised shape and it was believed to be infected by disease from the decadent Jews.
This «health-narrative» was placed directly at the feet of the NSDAP, but even before the Nazi Partei, there was another large trend around the turn of the century: the degeneration of the human species. What Darwin had shown was that there were certain species that were more survivable than others. And it was believed that human beings were in moral decay, which was a sign that humanity as such was not suited to survive its own civilisation’s development. Since Romanticism, there had been the tale of a history in decay in Germany, a history on the verge of doom – of the Western world’s total downfall. The Lebensreform movement was in this regard an attempt to take such premonitions seriously and declare: «Now, we need to take man by the hand, and let it be its true self». Becoming what the human really is; a natural being; a biological being. But interrupting this ideal plan is a period of massive terrible political turmoil and controversy which makes it possible for Nazism to grow roots. The solution to this growing and seeming threat to humanity, is by the Nazis then found in placing blame on race, which extends the mythological substance, as well as being an extension of a previous and much longer scientific movement of hygiene.
Stiffening Gaze
Aesthetics accompanied the Nazi vision, and looking at these olympian discus-throwing or spear-throwing naked men jumping around in nature and doing gymnastics, this cultivation of the body is the basis for the way in which we today have continued to visually reproduce athletes and elite. When browsingvisual catalogs of the Lebensreform around 1900, it is hard to say when that shift really happened – when does it flip and become carriers of Nazi ideology? By close inspection and comparing, one can see something aesthetically happening with the body. At some point it becomes heroic in a different way. The features become more marked – they are fighting in a new way: the eyes of the men are stiffening. The women get a bit broader around the hips.
An important issue here is the relationship between aesthetics and health, and the attempt of aestheticizing «the healthy». In the beginning of the 20th century, a moral established that the healthy human being is the good human being, for then to grow throughout the century to become the beautiful human being in the healthy human being. «Not too much» is the goal, not to cross over, it is better to be able to «stand back» AND live a well-balanced life. It is an ancient Greek thought that the balance is the goal. Aristotle had stated that alcohol is good, food is good, but too much ruins the enjoyment. Hippocrates described «a healthy lifestyle» based on a balance principle. When health was placed in form and categories, it was not just mystified but also scientified which means, it was established and «purified» as a science. From then on it becomes a race which is difficult to stop, because no one can be against the optimisation of health, just like no one can be against the optimisation of safety. Therefore health has its own irrationality of rationality. Where rationality escalates to such an extent that health is no longer better for people’s life, it does not make people more vigorous, but instead people embed themselves in a discipline of optimisation. An optimisation of biomass, moralisation of obesity, aestheticization of the slim body.
Time after time, it turns out that the scientific justification for diet advice, for behavioural regulations, etc. does not last, and in fact was a post-rationalisation of something we do for moral reasons, aesthetic considerations, ideological, philosophical and religious, actually, of speculative and anxious ideas, which convince us that if we follow simple rules, we will not die. Nevertheless, there is a great constant of concrete perception of what looked like healthy dietary manners a hundreds of years ago and what we consider healthy food today. Overall, it is the dominating irrationality that rationality turns into, that causes the imbalance. That any failed ideology is a rise to fascism. Diet advice is not always the answer. What hundreds of years ago might have been a calling to save the nature of our species, an emancipatory movement which would liberate man from the smothering degeneration of civilisation, has now become a simple socioeconomic commitment.