I was recently cycling back from the curious business of sitting a citizenship exam – not to see whether I was a good one or not, but whether I could become one – when I saw a notice indicating that new buildings were proposed in the general region of the main hospital. A new building in Vancouver is nothing new – the place is an inferno of construction, so much so that one might imagine that a war had just been fought here. The interesting thing about these new buildings was that they will replace the old building of the cancer research agency, and with it, I suspect will disappear all references to a campaign to cure cancer by the turn of the millennium, which adorn the outgoing structure. Furthermore, there was no mention of demolishing the new buildings in five years time, so perhaps this time there will be no time limited campaign to eradicate this most wretched of afflictions.
Of course cancer has not been cured, but this is no shame on any one research establishment. And one should not forget that Nixon declared war on cancer over thirty years ago, but that hasn’t been a resounding success. One is reminded of certain other recent wars of somewhat dispersed intent. However, it appears that the overall rate at which people actually die of cancer, at least in some parts of the world, including the top two thirds of North America, has been falling. The incidence of some kinds of cancer having peaked a few years ago is also falling, at least in some groups of people. In general though, a sadly large number of people are still contracting cancer, though a lot more of them are surviving, and living quite well.
The efforts at trying to combat cancer are obviously well intentioned, but as a non-expert but avid listener and reader of the news, I seemed to remember hearing little about primary causes and much about individual treatments and diagnoses. On digging a little deeper I discovered that last year there was a report written by the US National Institutes of Health simply called ‘Cancer and the Environment.’ They said that about two thirds of all cancers are caused by environmental factors, and then proceeded to run through an astonishing range of just about everything that constitutes the industrial world as being a known or likely carcinogen. Diet was mentioned several times in the introduction, but as nothing definite could be proven, they declared that it wouldn’t be part of the main report, which seems to me to be quite extraordinary. Pesticides, however, were fair game since they have been proved to be dangerous, though even now many of the nine hundred possible ingredients have not been tested.
But still it is the food issue that nags. What if a major cause of cancer and many other health problems with us and the world is the industrial food process itself? It is a question most in the West dare not ask, since the majority of us live in ways and places which are very far from being able to produce a large proportion of our own food. This is most especially true of North American city dwellers.
Is it, I wonder, another example of the kind of lie which Plato first propounded in the Republic? In that fascinating, fertile, and in many ways also frankly unfortunate work, he makes it quite clear that the rulers, in the interests of governance, can and must tell lies, supposedly ‘noble fictions,’ but that if the populace do likewise, then they shall be severely punished.
Two examples are the myth of the metals and the mating method. The metals myth is that we are born composed of gold, silver, bronze or iron. Those made of gold shall be rulers. Those of bronze and iron shall be workers. A class system by any other name, but allowing the rulers a good cover for selecting the right people to join their elite (and giving yet another meaning to term the 'golden rule'). In stark contrast to today’s corrupt elite - see for instance Enron’s Ken Lay being carted off in irons - the Platonic rulers would forswear all material riches. The other myth was that mating partners were chosen by luck. In fact they were chosen by the very same rulers in the interests of improving the human breed. However, they thought there might be some popular objection to this, hence the use of a ‘noble fiction’ to cover the truth.
Plato did have real and serious concerns about the Sophist’s belief systems and the kind of society it produced, in which self-interest trumped that of the common good and might was definitely right – tough luck if you were weak, either by birth or misfortune. Unfortunately many of Plato’s remedies for the immorality and greed of the Sophists have in practice led ironically to similar and even worse problems of power abuse, such that over two thousand years later, it is clear that there are governments who have now somehow managed to combine the worst of the Sophists with the worst of Plato.
However well intentioned Plato was, I think we have had enough noble fictions both in politics and food. Doing something about the politics is tricky, but doing something about food is by no means impossible as many - but not enough - people are proving daily. If we return to taking more care of our own food production (which oncoming energy problems will force upon us anyway), is it possible that we shall also be in able take more care of our politics and government and even see a reduction in the number of people contracting both cancers of the body and belief systems?
