The Renaissance liberated our ancestors from preoccupation with the afterlife, and empowered them to seek happiness here and now. The lifestyle changed, and the culture blossomed. What will the next "great cultural revival" be like?

From scraps of 19th century science, our ancestors concocted a narrow frame—a "rigid and narrow" way to look at the world, which made us misunderstand and damage culture. Convenience—which identifies "happiness" with acquiring and experiencing what feels attractive—is a case in point.

When we look at the world through convenience, the order of things we are living in easily appears as the best possible one. When, however, we embrace wholeness as goal, and broaden the way we look so that we may see things whole—we see our condition in an entirely new light.

We here illustrate that by a few examples.

Political hygiene

Why do we have such faith in our senses?

Wholeness is obviously precarious: We may have all the wealth of the world—and yet a single nutrient that is missing in your diet will make it all in vain. Our senses have evolved to guide us to right choices in nature. Our civilized condition has been only an instant in the course of our evolution, to which our senses had no chance to adapt.

It is impossible to step into the shoes of another and feel how he feels; especially if this latter lived many centuries ago. What ground do we have to claim that the civilized lifestyle, as it has develop, makes us more happy than what our distant ancestors living in nature were?

One might imagine an experiment, where a large group of humans from a single genotype and living on the same geographical terrain is divided into two groups. For a number of years the scientists let them live in two different lifestyle, so that one part of the population lives in the civilized way, and the other in the way this population lived before the civilization reached them. Then the scientists studied the differences. But such an experiment is, of course, practically impossible.

Such an 'experiment' did, however, happen—in real life! Early in the 20th century a number of world populations were living on the borderline of civilization, so that part of the population lived in the old way, while another part got civilized. Weston Price undertook a ten-year journey, visiting those populations, and painstakingly recording the data. The results of this research were published in a book titled "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration". Its message was that civilized nutrition is deficient; that it tends to cause physical degeneration. Consistently, Price reported, the people living in the pre-civilized way were generally doing better, as individuals and also socially.

Werner Kollath extended this line of work to laboratory experiments and statistical analysis of trends. He diagnosed that while the modern healthcare developed as a way to combat infectious diseases (where distinct "causes" and "cures" may be identified), typical contemporary health problems are lifestyle-induced. "Typical contemporary diseases", Kollath wrote, "are in the domain of the non-specific". He found that this new kind of problem requires a completely new approach to healthcare. He also realized that this problem had everything to do with the influence and the power of the large industries. Hence he conceived a new academic discipline, which he called "political hygiene".

The rest of the story we told in a blog post.

In 2005 we contributed to EAHMH a presentation "Healthcare as a Power Structure". Historiography, these vignettes or case histories. But we also offered a circle... and a methodological contribution...

Kanyini

There is a popular myth, that the "human nature" is acquisitive and self-serving; and that the market capitalism we are living in is the best and the natural way to organize our society.

What if it's the other way round?

What if the order of things we are living in is just the one that emerged through the social and cultural "survival of the fittest"? What if the way we are is a consequence of growing up and living in the ecology that this order of things created for us?

We may try to find an answer to this all-important dilemma by a thought experiment. Imagine a culture, living perhaps on some faraway island, which developed as the alternative of our culture—where no strife and no war existed; where the people did not develop weapons, science or technology. What would that culture be like?

Imagine now that our civilization discovered and colonized their island. What consequences would this meeting of cultures have on the aboriginal one?

There is no need to imagine: This did indeed happen.

When Australia got colonized, the white men working in the country side would often "satisfy their needs" by catching an Aboriginal woman in the bushes and raping her. As the number of children conceived in this way grew, they became a political issue: Those children are, after all, half-white; their souls must be taken care of! Those children were then taken from their families, to attend special boarding schools where they were given Western culture and education.

Bob Randall was one of them, and he lived to tell the story. One of the first things he observed in the boarding school was that those (white) people were preaching Christianity, but without living it; we were living it!

Randall never again found his mother and family. What he found when he returned to his village was a population of destroyed and desolate people.

Randall, however, also got to tell us about the original Aboriginal culture. His main keyword is "Kanyini", explained as "the principle of caring and responsibility that underpins the Aboriginal life". See him explain it.

Paticcasamuppada

We have now come to the most interesting part. We gave it a name, "Happiness between One and Plus Infinity", and made it a theme of one of our ten conversations. The question here is about the extent of human wholeness—what sort of abilities, what way of being, could it produce?

So imagine a laboratory, where people experiment on themselves, trying a variety of lifestyle choices, practices...

F.M. Alexander and Moshe Feldenkrais

The heaviest thing we ever lift up and carry is the one we can never get rid of.

Teacher Gandhi and Arne Næss

What was Gandhi's real gift to mankind?