West enjoy higher standards of living, health and diet than at any moment in history. But you would be hard pressed to know it, from the miserabilist tone of much public discussion of the human condition.
At another time, the fact that people in a society lived far longer, healthier lives than their ancestors might reasonably have been thought a cause for some celebration. Today, however, we often appear unhealthily obsessed with looking on the dark side of life and worrying about our health. Even where no major health problem appears evident in the present, there is a veritable epidemic of experts on hand to assure us that we are only storing up problems for the future, warning of the threat of supposed ‘time bombs’, be it the ‘ageing time bomb’, the ‘obesity time bomb’, the ‘mobile-phone time bomb’ or whatever. As yet, these alleged health time bombs have failed to explode as predicted – remember the epidemic of heterosexual AIDS that was supposed to kill countless thousands in the UK, or the epidemic of vCJD (‘human mad-cow disease’) that was meant to leave behind up to half a million dead? Yet it seems there is always another ‘time bomb’ of one sort or another allegedly waiting in the wings to get us. In the same way, in recent years the government chief health officer has appeared to be suffering a bad case of ‘epidemicitis’, at various times describing the country as being in the grip of an epidemic of everything from flu to smoking.
Look at the list of current health panics and concerns that are addressed in this book. They cover a range of issues so wide that it might seem as if no part of the human physique or psyche has been left untouched by a huge wave of fresh diseases and disorders. Everything from our cholesterol levels to our intake of such everyday items as salt is now not only put under the laboratory microscope, but is highlighted in the daily news headlines as a potential health risk.
The list of health risks with which we have to contend grows longer almost by the day. It is well captured in the following A-to-Z (well, A-to-X, anyway) list of everything that, at least according to certain epidemiologists, is supposed be capable of causing cancer today:
Acetaldehyde, acrylamide, acrylonitrile, abortion, agent orange, alar, alcohol, air pollution, Aldrin™, aflatoxin, arsenic, arsine, asbestos, asphalt fumes, atrazine, AZT, baby food, barbecued meat, benzene, benzidine, benzopyrene, beryllium, beta-carotene, betel nuts, birth control pills, bottled water, bracken, bread, breasts, bus stations, calcium channel blockers, cadmium, captan, carbon black, carbon tetrachloride, careers for women, casual sex, car fumes, celery, charred foods, chewing gum, Chinese food, Chinese herbal supplements, chips, chloramphenicol, chlordane, chlorinated camphene, chlorinated water, chlorodiphenyl, chloroform, cholesterol, low cholesterol, chromium, coal tar, coffee, coke ovens, crackers, creosote, cyclamates, dairy products, deodorants, depleted uranium, depression, dichloroacetylene, DDT, dieldrin, diesel exhaust, diet soda, dimethyl sulphate, dinitrotoluene, dioxin, dioxane, epichlorohydrine, ethnic beliefs, ethylene acrylate, ethylene dibromide, ethylene dichloride, Ex-Lax™, fat, fluoridation, flying, formaldehyde, free radicals, fruit, gasoline, genes, gingerbread, global warming, gluteraldehyde, granite, grilled meat, Gulf war, hair dyes, hamburgers, Heliobacter pylori, hepatitis B virus, hexachlorobutadiene, hexachlorethane, high bone mass, HPMA, HRT, hydrazine, hydrogen peroxide, incense, infertility, jewellery, Kepone™, kissing, lack of exercise, laxatives, lead, left handedness, Lindane™, Listerine™, low fibre diet, magnetic fields, malonaldehyde, mammograms, manganese, marijuana, methyl bromide, methylene chloride, menopause, microwave ovens, milk hormones, mixed spices, mobile phones, MTBE, nickel, night lighting, night shifts, nitrates, not breast feeding, not having a twin, nuclear power plants, NutraSweet™, obesity, oestrogen, olestra, olive oil, orange juice, oxygenated gasoline, oyster sauce, ozone, ozone depletion, passive smoking, PCBs, peanuts, pesticides, pet birds, plastic IV bags, polio vaccine, potato crisps (chips), power lines, proteins, Prozac™, PVC, radio masts, radon, railway sleepers, red meat, Roundup™, saccharin, salt, selenium, semiconductor plants, shellfish, sick buildings, soy sauce, stress, strontium, styrene, sulphuric acid, sun beds, sunlight, sunscreen, talc, tetrachloroethylene, testosterone, tight bras, toast, toasters, tobacco, tooth fillings, toothpaste (with fluoride or bleach), train stations, trichloroethylene, under-arm shaving, unvented stoves, uranium, vegetables, vinyl bromide, vinyl chloride, vinyl fluoride, vinyl toys, vitamins, vitreous fibres, wallpaper, weedkiller (2-4 D), welding fumes, well water, weight gain, winter, wood dust, work, X-rays.
Or perhaps, to put it more succinctly, being alive can give you cancer.
Not so long ago, few would even have been aware of the existence of many of these issues, never mind worrying about them. Yet somehow our forebears seemed to survive perfectly well in blissful ignorance, their lifespan lengthening from generation to generation, despite often pursuing lifestyles and diets that would now be considered dangerously irresponsible.
So let us stand back from those headlines for a moment and ask ourselves, how could it be that many people now apparently feel threatened by so wide a range of new health risks? How could it be that so many different dangers suddenly appear to be menacing our society at the same time – and, moreover, at a time when as a society we are in such a state of rude public health?
It seems clear that this divergence between the facts of our longer, healthier lives and the perception of such varied and rising risks to our health cannot be explained by the specifics of any particular issue. It is not the details of our salt intake or of our cholesterol levels that make so many people open to these sorts of health concerns today. Rather, there must be some broader, overarching trends at work in our culture and society that can lend new weight to the fear of previously unimagined risks.
In order to grasp what is going on here, we must first come to terms with the broader spirit of the age.
For a start, we are faced today with a powerful cultural aversion to risk. Health risks that might have once have been brushed off as acceptable or negligible are now elevated into important issues of public concern. Thus ‘passive smoking’ – the inhalation of the smoke from other people’s tobacco – has recently become the subject of a major health crusade across the West, despite the questionable evidence of the real effect of environmental tobacco smoke on public health, and the fact that fewer people now die of smoking-related diseases than in the past. In a climate where there no longer seems to be such a thing as an acceptable level of risk, many other minor health risks can be used to spark major overnight controversies.
Where health risks are concerned, it seems the orthodoxy now is always to assume the worst-case scenario to be the most likely one, however far-fetched. Humanity has always faced risks, and there has always been a debate about how to manage them. Today, however, unlike in the past, risk is seen not as something we can handle or perhaps even turn into opportunity, but as something that we suffer from and must be guarded against.
The assumption that we cannot cope with risk and uncertainty reached a new level when the British Medical Journal came out with the argument that the word accident should henceforth be banned, since such incidents were really avoidable if we took the proper precautions. Not only, it seems, is there no longer any such thing as a manageable risk, but it is apparently no longer acceptable to suggest that accidents will happen.
Underpinning this heightened desperation to avoid or limit risk is another powerful theme of contemporary culture: the notion of human vulnerability. Once the widespread assumption might have been (based on some sound historical evidence) that humanity could survive more or less whatever was thrown at it, that the resilience that had taken us from the caves to something approaching civilisation was pretty well indomitable. Today, the opposite tends to be assumed.
The default setting for the human condition is now widely seen as being a state of vulnerability and victimhood. The autonomous individual who stands on his or her own two feet appears to be an endangered species. Instead the assumption is that we are pretty pathetic specimens who must need professional intervention and advice to protect us from the problems of everyday life. We are a society on the couch, under the supervision of the therapeutic state.
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