Day after day, the miseries of the pandemic are paraded at the top of the news. Funny we hardly hear of many other plagues actually killing more people, wars, pollution, other diseases and starvation! Meanwhile the massive propaganda blitz in favour of vaccination presents it as the only game in town, as if it alone is capable of delivering us from all the miseries of the pandemic, while people questioning this are represented as purveyors of doom and gloom. Actually answering their questions or attending to the points they raise hardly features,- they are generally merely dismissed as cranks, conspiracy theorists, etc. Anyone would think that the world has not seen plenty of plagues in the past, albeit sometimes with horrendous loss of life, but we got through them! Since I have looked out in vain for an exposition in plain terms of a positive alternative to mass vaccination, I shall just have to attempt it myself. But how might I think I am in a position to do so?
I have prided myself in recent years of being one of those elderly people 'qui osent, enfin, être eux-mêmes', though I would also like to think the effort to 'be myself' goes back a lot further, especially since I wrote across the top of my answer in a tripos exam, in 1967, that 'expecting me to write four essays worth writing in three hours is absurd - I will give you one good one'. The esssay I did write was about Baudelaire, and I'm sure he was proud of me. Meanwhile I shared digs with a medical student, who thought that the only realities one could be sure of were bio-chemical ones. I thought that if our lives were going to be run by such people, God help us, though I doubted if Baudelaire provided quite the best alternative. Anyway the fact is that while I am not an expert about anything, I have been thoughtfully present to this world for a good while, and I have no need to look over my shoulder at anyone telling me what to think! What is more, I am at bottom hopeful.
One thing that I have realised over the years is that everything is interconnected, and on the subject of hope, I would point out that we are faced with multiple much more serious threats than the pandemic. The pandemic is a mere squall before the coming storm; it might be described as a little challenge to limber us up somewhat,- to get us used to the idea that the normal notions of Enlightenment and the March of Science have had it, and what's more the entire human race is in one big dire mess together. Curiously enough, we may find that the very things that will sort out this pandemic connumdrum may also be what we need to do to prepare for that storm, so clearly delineated by David Attenborough in A Life on Our Planet!
First move must be to batten down the hatches and take in sail, quickly. An end to speeding about! Less flying, less motoring, less crazes and crowds! We must quieten down, be more thoughtful and indeed contemplative, though certainly not just putting our heads back under the duvet; we must look after one another, while also attending to our own health and food, where it comes from, how it is produced; we need to test our resilience and see to the things we rely on, which so often we have merely taken for granted,- to keep our heads up as long as we possibly can, while being mindful of the ground on which we stand, appreciating nature and the wilderness and comprehending the extremely dire damage which we are inflicting on it. Everything that is normally good for our own and nature's health, and so often gets ignored, will increase our resistance and resilience; but we have to decide, once and for all, whether or not we want to face reality, indeed, whether we really want to live at all.
This is not possible on the basis that we are merely the product of blind bio-chemical processes. Are we not called to anything more than keeping as cosy and secure as possible, to mere survival for a short while before the curtain comes down on a miserable farce of an existence? Is squeezing the very last drop out of our orange the supreme value? But even if we cannot get our heads around the idea that we are creatures of a loving God, indeed the very apple of his eye, and that he loves us and wants us to thrive, surely it should be possible to acknowledge that the human immune system, along with all of nature, is a most amazing phenomenon, worthy of our greatest respect, indeed reverence, mostly way beyond our understanding as it still is? Certainly we should seek to understand it better, but no doubt every answer we get will raise greater questions. Meanwhile a wise man will certainly not think, as Boris Johnson said recently in a unguarded moment*, that greed is a sound motivation for intervention, nor indeed that a clever new technological fix can do better than our immune system, or even foster it better than nature, enhanced as may well be with methods produced carefully and disinterestedly over time. Actually any really good fisherman could tell him that there is no luck in greed!
Let it be noted that I am not claiming that technology is necessarily destructive and idolatrous. Like capitalism, it is a good servant but a bad master, and we too need to see see ourselves as servants of the Supreme Good. If we confide our undertakings to God, he will indeed lead us into the fullness of truth and empower us to complete his creation. No doubt many medical practitioners of all kinds aspire to work in this spirit, but few express it as well as did the father of modern homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, who is said to have had a notice on his desk stating 'I treat, God heals.'
Homeopathy today continues to attract the scorn and indeed opprobrium of the medical establishment, and one has to ask why? They claim it is a dangerous fraud, which anyway does not work, for the simple reason that it does not work according to their way of thinking. One can only reply that as a matter of definite experience it does work, but in a subtle way more in the nature of a work of art or indeed a sacrament. As a matter of fact the Eucharist, as understood by Catholics, provides a good approach to the understanding of homeopathy. If you put brain cells under a microscope, of course you do not find ideas, memories or thoughts, any more that you can find feelings, emotions or love by looking at a heart, or the body of Christ by inspecting a consecrated host. They are nonetheless really present, just as Catholics down the centuries insist that the Blessed Sacrament 'works'. The attempt to 'go straight to God' started out by denying this; away with papist or any other paraphenalia! But it is not given to us to comprehend reality directly, head on; it would probably destroy us if we did; we must work obliquely, as it were, and mainly content ourselves with images and symbols, while remembering that effective ones do actually embody what they represent....
We do not understand properly why homeopathy works, though it may be that quantum physics will prove enlightening. Meanwhile we see that it does work, and since it also works on animals and babies, don't go down the rabbit hole of placebo effects. Certainly, there is a chicken and egg dimension to it all, and Christ could not perform his miracles where there was no faith.,- but faith is not necessarily blind, rather it is a matter of looking at things differently. It by no means excludes reason, any more than love itself does; there is just a lot about it which is beyond reason. If one cannot accept that, one has to say goodbye to love, beauty, and as it turns out, health and life itself.
So having thus attempted to clear the ground, as it were, allow me to report that covid 19 has proved quite amenable to homeopathic treatment, and indeed there are prophylactics that appear to be as successful as any vaccine in preventing it. There are also other holistic treatments, ones that do not consist of arrogantly brushing aside our immune system, but rather of seeing what we can do, respectfully, to enhance it. Zinc, vitamin D supplements, among other things, have their place in overcoming the deficiencies of our own particular constitution and life-style. Collectively alternative therapies do however have the 'disadvantage' of threatening the interests of a multi-billion dollar industry, with very many interests vested in it.
It's not that I would necessarily rule out the use of vaccines, in the fire-fighting mode that allopathic medicine excels at. I do however much doubt if they constitute a viable mass method of moving beyond the pandemic, and Fiona and I agree that they do not offer either of us a desirable way out individually. People are not all identical bio-chemical machines, and the road to healthy living is different for each of us. We all have our problems, and we must also remember that none of us will get out of this world alive. What is important is living in a vibrant way; while we all should try to live our lives to the utmost, prolonging physical life in a fearful, zombie fashion when our vital force is spent and especially when our every move is commanded by a controlling Government, does not avail! Meanwhile, who would buy a new car from a manufacturer who does not stand over it, one that is likely to be obsolete by the end of the year?
Does a future beckon in which we must be taking shots for every disease and variant that comes along, while not alone depending on governments to pay for them, but also to pick up the tab for casualties? The Irish Government is already paying out millions in compensation for victims of the swine flu vaccine. What sort of a bill is coming down the tracks for covid ones, while we have to take more and more of them? But the homeopathic approach trains and strengthens our natural immunity; they say it is like training a horse to jump higher and higher fences, and will tell you how sickly children thrive better after overcoming a disease like measles, which our mothers used to send us around to the neighbours in order to catch and get over with, while we were young.
We have come a long way from 'sailing the Gannetsway', and with my poor old boat laid up and gasping for life in Portugal, I sometimes wonder why I keep on with the blogs. Yet they keep presenting themselves to my mind, generally in the early hours of the morning, and I know of no better paradigm for the voyage all of us must make on the seas of life, nor particular context more interesting to me than this west coast of Europe, nor opportunity to bring vibrancy and interest into my own life, nor any more likely place in which to keep the flags of joy and freedom flying.
I hope the blog will soar better than this old steamer called 'Gannet', which can't have been very gannet-like when my father as a student sailed on her from Hamburg to England on the 2nd August, 1932. I think it must have been much more fun that flying is today, or even going on a liner, but as my brother-in-law Anthony points out, who dug the photo off the internet, that was two days after the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag. My father's aunt had said to him 'This means war, Bernard. All they think about is war.' I wonder if he thought of the Gannet when, after long and difficult years when civilisation seemed to be dying, he and I sailed west from Rye in the Scoter, a 27' sailing boat, and our hearts soared with the first gannets which we met off the Dorset coast. I never saw them east of the Isle of Wight, where I suppose the water is too opaque for them, and presumably the southern North Sea is the same. Still, I expect that other voyage similarly felt like an escape!
As an 'anti-vaxer' one feels rather as a pacifist must have done in Germany in the 1930s, but as surely as we most urgently need to find an alternative to war as a way of coping with the difficulties of life, so we need to stop thinking about this pandemic as a war, with vaccines as our weapons. I do not underestimate its miseries, but this pandemic in itself is a less drastic challenge than that other one, and furthermore we need to see it as a potentially creative opportunity.
The good news is that I shall hopefully be back to confronting more immediate obstacles than the likes of the pandemic and Brexit soon, though they will still be there, and not in any abstract sense either. I am planning a trip to Nazaré next month....
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I welcome feedback.... Joe