“Love – is anterior to Life –
Posterior – to Death –
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Breath -”
This is the entirety of a poem by Emily Dickinson, in her characteristically distilled fashion.
Today I feel drawn to take a moment to look at the theme of love – and what this may have to do with medicine.
We could say love is not so much a thing as a form of relation between things; a connecting power; a unifying force. There are many forms of love, but perhaps the common element is that all involve some form of connection with, and/or caring recognition of, something or someone beyond ourselves.
In this sense of connectivity, love is perhaps the antithesis of the scientific method, which generally functions by studying things in isolation. Connectivity and isolation are like opposite forces: one of joining, and one of separating. Note that I’m not saying one is good and the other bad – both have their uses and applications. In a healthy civilization, both would find their place in our outlook. Yet at the current point in our evolution, I perceive an imbalance which is beginning to be corrected: love as a connecting or unifying force is not our centre of gravity, but has been scorned out of the practice of science. Instead, science as a separating force has become our anchor. The next jump in our evolution, as I see it, lies in integrating both of these forces and perspectives: namely, maintaining science and at the same time bringing the missing magic ingredient back in – love.
Modern medicine prides itself for aspiring to be scientific. In a broader sense, too, over the past few centuries of human development, science has been considered our crowning achievement as a civilization, and the banner of our times and aspirations in the industrialized world.
Science can indeed be credited with much that is good. However, as with many things in life, sometimes we grow so busy admiring the positive side of something that, in our loyalty, we fail also to protect ourselves against its limitations or negative effects – or to grow beyond them. A necessary prerequisite of evolution, in a mental sense at least, lies in recognizing what aspects of today’s outlook may be limiting us, and which we can grow beyond.
So, when we consider the blessing of the scientific method, it lies partly in the ability to isolate variables as a way of discovering accurate information about the world. This, in itself, is a tremendous prize worth treasuring and celebrating.
Isolation of factors, via reduction of life’s complexities, leads the way forward to greater accuracies. This process can help us to overcome baseless fears or superstitions, false concepts of reality, and, what’s more, to discover many things about reality which we hadn’t even imagined to be true in our wildest dreams – such as the amazing, sometimes counter-intuitive results obtained in modern physics research.
Yet at the same time, as with all sources of light, there must be a shadow cast too. What shadow has this method cast?
It seems that the shadow cast on our lives by over-applying these methods of isolation and reduction is that not only medicine but also modern civilization in general has become increasingly void of meaning to many people. The apricot has been pitted, and former rainforests – both physically and metaphorically – have been desertified.
Something is missing in the modern outlook which many people are brought up to pride themselves in, and I would say that this is a sense of living systems and information fields.
First of all, the object and focus of scientific study is most often “things” or “parameters” or “variables.” This is part of the useful process of reducing or isolating.
Somehow, then, this has also crept into most people’s minds as a way of thinking, even outside of the context of science. Suddenly many have then also developed a reductionist view of life and death; a sense that we are “only” physical lumps of matter and thus, when these lumps of matter which we call our cells and organs break down and decay at death, that we cease to exist.
Call me a ‘vitalist’ if you will, but I question even the scientific validity of this outlook. Even to assume that we are “only” skin and bone, and that our intelligence is only an emergent factor out of the “pond,” is just that – an assumption. We can no more prove this to be the case than we can prove the reverse. To my mind, the reason many modern people have such a nihilistic view of life and death, I suspect, is not that it is genuinely scientifically validated, but rather, that it seems to fit conveniently within the general reductionist outlook, like hand in glove – forgetting that reductionism is a useful part of the scientific method but not “the full Monty,” by any means.
We are at a turning point in history.
The isolating and reducing aspects of science have been extended to their full capacity, and have helped us to understand a great many things, but, as Ervin Laszlo argued so eloquently in his amazing book “The Systems View of the World,” now it is like the pendulum on the grandfather clock of Time – that reaches its maximum extension in one direction then starts to swing back. Thus over the past decade in particular, there has been a veritable explosion of research and ideas concerning the interconnectedness of all things; a new direction of the tide which has been gaining momentum, as charted grippingly in books such as Lynne McTaggart’s “The Field.”
Now in addition to isolating things in order to study them, we find ourselves extending the scientific method to its complementary activity too – looking at the relationships between things, and even, on a grander scale, at the unity of all things.
Here we are discovering that both “things” and their “relations” consist of information fields in a constant process of exchange. These “things” and “relations” can be characterised as an endless series of inter-relating systems, like Russian dolls one within the other. Thus we can apply both the reductionist method to analyze parts of systems, and the unification method – or connectivity perspective – to connect things together into a wider outlook.
I chose a poem about love to launch today’s blog because what more fundamentally symbolizes life’s unity and connectivity than love? As such, I see this as a way forward both for science as well as other areas of our lives. I’m not presenting the theme of love as some sort of religious teaching, nor as some sort of pop song consciousness. . . Instead, I’m referring to the simple, everyday phenomenon which humans – and animals – feel and act on all the time: love as the power to connect. It does not matter who you are, or what your beliefs are – as living beings we share a common craving and capacity for love and connection.
As I write this, and as you read this, perhaps more important than the words or concepts would be thoughts such as, “With whom have I connected today? Who has touched me today? Who can I touch today, and tomorrow, and the day after that?”
I’d like to emphasize love not as a replacement for science, but as a much-needed complement to it, which comes back into the emerging systems model of science in a far more prominent way than in the past. When working within a new medical and scientific model where connectivity rules supreme – where we are not only looking at the cogs in machines, but also looking at how they all work together to create a unity of purpose or result – love becomes an inevitable centre-stage player.
That is for two primary reasons.
First, we cannot understand living systems without recognizing the central role of love as a force of connectivity between and within them.
Secondly, as soon as we recognize the interconnectedness of all of life, we realize that “what goes around comes around,” and that when I hurt my neighbour I am hurting myself – and I don’t mean this in a moralizing sense, but purely and simply in a “bigger picture” sense. Often, when we act to hurt others and/or our environment, it is through failing to perceive the wider perspective in which it affects us too. As a symbolic example, I remember the story in a beautiful French novel I once read, made later into the acclaimed films, “Jean de Florette” and “Manon des Sources.” In it, a jealous man is a blight on his neighbour’s life through various nasty actions which ruin his family and lead also to the death of the man (the latter played by Gerard Depardieu). Years later, the jealous man discovers – to his horror – that the man he tormented to death was, unbeknownst to him, his own son. In a moving scene, he breaks down in tears when he realizes.
The systems view of the world also automatically implies a sense of empathy and compassion, because it is an antidote to the sense of isolation which has come about through more nihilistic, disjointed outlooks on life. Suddenly, it’s no longer every man out for himself, because we start perceiving the millions of ways in which we are each deeply interconnected with others – and with a shared environment in which we live.
I want to re-emphasize that I intend nothing religious in this article, although I’m sure many religions would agree with some of these notions. Instead, I intend this as a scientific coming of age – and a welcome to the age-old theme of love, like a lost sheep brought back into the scientific fold again. I’m seeking only to make earthy observations about the nature of reality and ourselves, the way we relate to each other as living systems, and a more encompassing worldview which is being thrown up by modern science in the form of Laszlo’s “systems view of the world.”
And returning to the subject of death, a more scientific view of it would be that there is much we don’t know. The nihilistic view is surely just as unscientific as the idea of a soul which outlives the body, in the sense that neither can (apparently) be proven via reductionist principles.
However, the living systems revolution taking place in science offers the potential to transform our understanding of who and what we really are, how we come into being, and what makes us alive – and, in so doing, we come to recognize that, far from being just lumps of matter, there is an overarching connectivity which defines everything we are and do. We exist not in isolation, but in constant communion, just like all the trillions of cells within our organs that are engaged in a constant “chatter” of information exchange. Thus, when the orchestra stops playing its symphony, and the sounds pause, there is no rational or plausible reason to take the nihilistic view which comes from identifying ourselves only with the sounds, rather than also with their source: the instruments, their players, the director and the composer – none of which cease to exist when the symphony ends – and all of which, in most cases, plan future concerts as well.
Such a vitalistic viewpoint had long been scorned as unscientific and disproven, yet the tables are turning on this question, and new life – literally – is being breathed into our outlook.
That, in turn, is trickling down to the way that we practise science, and, correspondingly, the way we practise medicine too – and the reasons we practise medicine.
On that note, as it was so short and concentrated in nature, I thought I’d end this piece the same way I began it – with Emily Dickinson’s poemlet – and because of the wonderfully positive worldview that she suggests here. (By the way, her last line, “Exponent of Earth” has alternatively been published as, “Exponent of breath,” so I’m including both versions in this article! Sometimes the poet wrote various versions of a poem, and/or her handwriting was sometimes misread. The version below is, I suspect, probably the most authentic one).
Each of us was conceived when two human beings came together to “make love,” and as we see in nature all around us, there is a link between love and its cousin, creativity. So the notion that love is a creative force which brings living systems into being, and outlasts them, is – although not something easily provable – nonetheless one that fits with a general systems outlook, and, to me at least, makes sense:
“Love – is anterior to Life –
Posterior – to Death –
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth -”