Perspectives in Public Health: Thoughts on connectedness, unity, and meaning

I had the joy of meeting some visiting Chinese scholars yesterday. Amid other things, we talked briefly about the writing of John Donne, and about cosmology. This post is dedicated to them and the hope that our relationship may deepen along lines such as these.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

These famous words by John Donne were not originally written as a poem - the passage is taken from the 1624 Meditation 17, poetry online )

Related links:

The Importance of Social Relationships

1) For a human to sustain peak performance, it is not enough to engage the brain; we have to engage the heart....
4) Sustaining that shared spirit is what makes the daily pain tolerable; to paraphrase old wisdom: the spirit can survive any illness, but a broken spirit - who can bear?

5) The side-conversation of any "business" decision has to be a human conversation that says: "We share a goal, we share these values. I really like you. Now, what was it we were arguing over and deciding?"

6) If it doesn't have a spirit, create one; if it has a Spirit, treat that as if it were a living being, with its own "health" and "fitness," and make sure that there's a program to keep it healthy.
7) Beware of solutions based on technology or "systems" that neglect compassion. Compassion is the strongest suit there is, the strength to build on - "He ain't heavy, Father, he's my brother."...

Social Connectedness as the end of our exploring.

Maybe there are ways to add more people to a group and get better decisions, unboundedly. If so, we may underestimate the insights in religious scriptures.

Our tacit assumptions about that question dominate science's view of "religion", and what insights collections of goat-herders could possibly have that could ever compare with what brilliant, modern, university-educated experts could conceive.

National Policy Implications

Health, Wealth, Social capital, Guanxi and Policy

If we don't understand the nature of life, we can't possibly reason correctly about the "health" property of it, let alone reason about finding cost-effective interventions to improve or sustain it.

The nature of life is not obvious. I believe we have it all wrong, and as a direct consequence of this we have flawed personal behaviors, corporate behaviors, and a flawed national policy and system of "health care." Until this error is fixed, our efforts to improve "health" will simply fail in baffling ways.

Where did we go wrong?

There is a way out of this mess

Executive summary - there is a way out of this mess we've gotten ourselves into. It involves using renewable spiritual power instead of oil or technlogy to power our commerce. There is substantial hard-nosed evidence that this works, economically. It should be investigated further, cause, frankly, we're dying out here

Virtue drives the bottom line

... Religion, business, and science are often depicted as in conflict, so it catches the attention when all three of them agree on something. That something needs to be investigated.

Recently, the value of virtue in driving high-reliability, high-performance organizations is increasingly being revealed by studies and real-life examples....

Clergy takes on the mortgage mess
Martha Graybow, from Reuters, looks at what the US Clergy think about the mortgage mess in today's Washington Post. I agree wholeheartedly that there are "spiritual solutions to economic problems" but don't see them mentioned in that article.

One characteristic of spiritual solutions is that they tend to look at the bigger picture, in all three dimensions of space, time, and social scale. Like great health care, the solutions are proactive, preventing the car crash in the first place, not miraculously repairing the damage and deaths following it.

The solutions involve what seems to be a lost art these days - understanding the actual causes of outcomes, and the consequences of our own actions, and then, gasp, altering our behavior so we don't get into trouble next time.

Unity with Diversity

Two principles of the Baha'i faith that are directly relevant here are

Spiritual Solutions to economic problems, and
Unity with diversity

Put in a nutshell -- "unity with diversity" is the key to harvesting the power inherent in having multiple constituencies, many factions, many nationalities and cultures all in "one" larger organized living shape.

The power does not come from "resolving" the differences, but in EMPLOYING the differences. Consider for example your arm. You have one set of muscles that ExTENDS your arm, and another set that RETRACTS it. It would be silly to "resolve" those muscles into their common factor, which would be zero impact. You NEED the option of going either way, at any time. You NEED both of them.

"uniformity" would spell death. Coherent diversity spells SUCCESS, motion, new life at a whole new and larger scale that benefits ALL The muscles.

I have a hundred or more posts on the nature of "unity in diversity" on this and my prior weblog. Here's a few starting points:

Unity with diversity is the central problem

....Should this be possible? Well, we all walk around with a living example - our own bodies. Our bodies have trillions of cells, with great specialization in different areas for different purposes, and yet with a common identity and purpose. Our bodies exhibit the type of "unity with diversity" I'm referring to.

On a scale larger than cells, or organisms, or corporations, we have national and global needs as well to accomplish "unity with diversity." We need to treasure our global diversity, as it is rich with information and value, not to ignore a great variety of music and food. It is rich as well in different perspectives and world-views.

A bad strategy to accomplish "world peace" or conflict elimination is to attempt to homogenize the world into any one framework or cultural system. This strategy is effectively "the Borg", and the same as "eliminating silos." It won't give us the differing perspectives we need to survive. It removes the necessary ecological complexity. For species, simplification and homogeneity turn fatal at the next turning of the road, and change of conditions. It's like having all elm trees in a country, then catching Dutch elm disease. It's a very bad strategy.

What we need instead is the same type of "diversity within unity" that our own bodies exhibit, mathematically. ( I don't mean we should paste people together into a global sized blob of protoplasm!)

What I'm talking about here is really the key issue behind multi-cellular organisms, and why those are successful models for our bodies and our corporations. Nobody wants "the Borg", but nobody wants World War III either. As the world gets smaller at a visible rate, we are forced to confront these hard issues.

To accomplish that, as discussed in my prior post, we need to learn how to communicate between silos, across world-views. ...

Beyond Reason

If culture is akin to a person, what that describes is perhaps an 18 year old young adult.
What we are sorely lacking is the vision of advancing past that to the equivalent of marriage or civilization. They say that a good marriage is one between two adults who are capable of living separately just fine, but who prefer to live together.

They have gone beyond the need for independence and have moved on to mastering interdependence -- what might also be called "unity with diversity." Neither one dominates and both benefit.

American language has no word for that, as "adult" or "mature" has been converted to mean "able to purchase cigarettes and pornography". Clearly this is not a subject of much discussion.

This is extraordinarily relevant, because it is not in the independent reasoning category that our civilization is breaking down, so much as in this re-linking step into a synthesized larger reasoning, perceiving, and acting unit -- a meta-person.

Our schools still teach the "Rambo" approach to great individuals, but across the board we see the start of realization that we need better group work, or team work, or collaboration, or cooperation, or unity, or something over in that general direction. We need something in which no one person (or corporation, or country, or concept) dominates everyone else to the extinction of the other.

Now what, contemplating the market crash (with many links)

Pathways to Peace (contains link to a wonderful slide show with music)