©2000 Blackwell Science, Inc.

COMMENTARY

.

Health and Wholeness from Topology to Laughter: Notes Toward a Theory of Connectedness

Michael Booth

Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy, Murdoch University, Western Australia

INTRODUCTION

While ecologists have been struggling with prob-lems of boundaries, interconnectedness, and theduality [institutional culture/nature as in Rap-port

et al.

(1998)], social scientists have had theirown struggles, also with boundaries, interconnect-edness, and duality (with questions of mind/bodyadding to those of culture/nature). Many of thesestruggles are clearly relevant for health and forthe puzzles of its cognate concept “wholeness.” Inthis article I comment on six of these develop-ments, hoping to sketch their relevance to studiesof ecosystem health.

The first is called the Möbius strip and showsone way to dream the connectedness of natureand culture, body and mind. The second, onpower, makes our actions more a matter of com-munication and warm feelings, which immedi-ately feels healthier. The third and fourth, linkingall the others, are understanding and responsive-ness. Fifth is meditation, promising responsive-ness to a surrounding world and to our own bod-ies. Recognizing humor is the last, for that upsetsall the apple carts and marks a new connected-ness with a person’s environment.

These tales of ideas and traditions intercon-nect. The tales can stand alone, but are a surfacelike the Möbius strip I shall now describe. Suchstories are perhaps a theory in formation or stagesof a process we’re all going through.

THE MÖBIUS STRIP

There are always questions about where theboundaries of an ecosystem should be placed

(Rapport

et al.

1998). This problem of definitionwas neatly put a decade ago as an ecosystem being“something more than a community of speciesbut less than the biosphere” (Rapport 1989). Here,I am concerned more with the human sense that“health” is related to becoming whole. By tracingmodels of this as they emerge in social science,what health could mean for ecosystems may alsobecome more clear. Questions like—Can a partof nature be healthy yet contain unhealthy re-gions? Can a healthy ecosystem continue to re-main so if it is surrounded by degraded systems?(Rapport 1989)—have comparable forms for thehealth of a person. Social science and humanitiesresearchers have borrowed models from scienceto deal with such questions. I would also suggestthat humor is a good source of insight here.

In social science the Möbius strip has beenfruitful as a metaphor for an interconnectedworld. It has been used in Elizabeth Grosz’s book

Volatile Bodies

(1994) to subvert the theoreticalplay of inside and outside. A body is not dividedinto the personal interior where all is quiet andsecret and, conversely, a busy external world formeetings and activities. This denial of the usualdividedness of inside, where ill-health resides, andoutside, which is then mere context, is achievedthrough a “twist” of perception metaphorically re-lated to the Möbius strip of topology.

“Topos” is Greek for “place,” and mathemati-cians’ studies of places and their connectedness iscalled topology. Topology is often explained asstudy of the properties of places irrespective ofshape or distance—what in other words would re-main invariant as a rubber surface was stretched.One early product of the study is Möbius’s strip.

The longer edges of a ribbon provide bound-aries separating places on its front and back sur-faces. This remains true if the ribbon lying on aplane is joined along two of its shorter parallel

Address correspondence to: Michael Booth, Institute for Sustain-ability and Technology Policy, Murdoch University, Murdoch, Western Australia 6150; E-mail istp@central.murdoch.edu.au.

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sides so that it becomes a cylinder. What is insidethe ribbon, including its inner surface, is still re-moved from what is outside (Figure 1).

Let’s ask how places on the one side of theribbon might connect with places on the otherside. One solution is to join the ends with a twistinto a loop (Figure 2). This is the Möbius strip.Adding a twist before joining the two ends resultsin the two sides of the ribbon becoming one inter-connected surface. Martin Escher (Coxeter 1985)used this twisted loop for a drawing of ants onsuch a surface. He highlights how on crawling allover such a strip they visit all of the surface andencounter no boundaries. Rather than beingtrapped on an inside or an outside these antsmove freely. Without the twist, ants on the ribbonwould have been on the inside or the outside.

Elizabeth Grosz (1994), in borrowing this con-cept from topology, is doing more than saying in-ner and outer surfaces connect. Grosz is suspiciousof any duality carrying normative expectations.Rather than two surfaces open to being proposedas the good one and the bad one, the one open toexamination and the one hidden away, she wantsa model for interconnection of poles. Then “sub-jectivity” and “objectivity” can be joined withoutprivileging what is outside and making more ob-scure how we ever construct subjectivity. For Groszboth inside and outside of bodies lie along a sin-gle surface of discourses that intertwine and formin relation to each other. Difference is not ob-scured, but made pre-epistemological. The ten-dency to set up metaphysical boundaries is short-circuited even before it gets going.

Applying this to ill-health makes a contextmore than an external occasion for a purely in-ternal lack. An illness becomes interconnectedwith its surroundings. The fragmentation—lack of“wholeness”—of an environment, while not iden-tical to an interior’s degradation, is intertwinedwith this and the two are unavoidably intercon-nected. The two are in a sort of communication.There is a single surface of meaningfulness be-tween them. I want to relate healing to wholeness,through extending this sense of communicationto any reaching out across barriers that preventsthese becoming barriers to health.

POWER THROUGH COMMUNICATION

Koestler (1967) has indicated that all wholes havethe property of being a part of still larger wholes(H. Regier, personal communication). In a sense,then, they are only stages within a hierarchy ex-tending from the smallest parts to the most abso-lute of wholes. The hierarchy would force us foreach entity (“holon”) to recognize how it is bothpart and whole at the same time. An ecosystem isthen never separate from its surroundings. Healthin the sense of wholeness becomes an enigma.However, if we rewrite “becoming” whole to meanforming into a communicating set of entities,wholeness need not be so absolute. The model ofthe hierarchy can be amended so that what countsas fitness in an individual case is detailed commu-nication with the environment.

Take humans and nature for instance. Powerof humans over nature has usually been seen interms of force, as in the physical manipulation ofthings and processes, or economically as mea-sured by the accessing and utilization of a re-source. In all of this there are pressures, forces,and devastation, but no communicating. Boulding(1989) adds to these aspects of human power—calling them “sticks and carrots”—an integrativetype of power. This form of power has a face hefeels has been hidden. It is a form of power notoften analyzed and commonly disregarded.

Relating to nature through threats and eco-nomic incentives alone leaves humans seemingseparate from natural forces. There is then a strictdichotomy, just like that of “inside” and “outside.”Conversely, Boulding’s third face of power wouldenable an interconnectedness. It is the power ofintegration. Involved in communication, in feel-

FIGURE 1. Joining the ends of a ribbon to form a hoop.

FIGURE 2. A Möbius Strip: joining the ends with a twist.

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ing, and in touch, this power adds “hugs” to thesticks and carrots of military might and econom-ics. Rather than understand hugs in terms of em-braces and intimacy, let’s see how one agent canaffect another agent while not subverting theother’s agency. This would be a form of commu-nication whereby expression affects another yetdoes not push in a single direction.

Where two individuals are in contact, can thehealing of one be related to the healing of theother? The answer seems to be “yes,” once we rec-ognize the healing in communication. Sharingmeanings means gaining a greater sense of theother’s being, understanding how I, through myactions, may affect the other through theirs.

UNDERSTANDING

Many have argued that human activities typicallydegrade the health of an ecosystem when clear un-derstanding of environmental agency in the eco-system is lacking. Large fish catches are seen assigns of a dense population and not as fish understress that are in transit from one zone to another.New techniques are adopted without care for howthey may alter the balance of different species.They are judged only for their economic role.Fish size is seen as indicative of maturity when otherfactors may be changing this relationship. Theseexamples are all from a magisterial survey of hu-man cultural pressures on Lake Erie over a 150-yearperiod (Regier & Hartman 1973). They all reflecta poverty of understanding about the agency ofother beings. Knowledge is taken for granted, sim-plified, and complexity of interactions ignored.

When human activities degrade an ecosystemit is usually through greed or lack of understand-ing, or both. No single surface of communicationenables the one-sided humans to fit adaptive re-sponses to details they have understood or re-spected of the other side’s “health” and agency.Metaphorically, ecosystem studies that highlightthis problem are congruent with the Möbius strip’semphasis on overcoming “boundaries.” Metaphorsthey use carry over themes from fields where theyare more straightforward to less transparent casesneeding some picture to make them more clear.Ecosystem health works as a metaphor for thoseprimarily engaged in environmental management(Costanza

et al.

1992) because we believe that thereis a clear sense of how health care for humansworks. Yet care for others through communicationis still lacking in most medical contexts.

For over two decades alternative approachesto healing have contested the benefits of a one-sided “magic bullet” view of health management(Diesendorf 1976). Diesendorf and colleaguesregard a community’s health as involving townplanners, paramedical practitioners, those in al-ternative medicine, public health campaigns, reg-ulations over advertising, lessening hazards intreatment, and indeed the total human environ-ment. Medically however, cancer patients whoare uncomfortable with the 3-fold powerful (anddamaging) practices of chemotherapy, surgery,and radiotherapy (poisoning, cutting, and burn-ing), are still told that nothing else will count astreatment. Yet hugs, through their role in com-munication, set up processes between humans,and provide benefits for health whose value maycarry over to other ecological situations. The shiftis from the knowledge, characterized as medicalexpertise, to the more therapeutic skills of thecommunicator, social worker, community devel-opment officer, and family counselor. It is a shiftfrom knowledge to understanding.

“Understanding” as a topic for inquiry has along history of incorporating “holistic” awarenessinto older accounts of “empathy.” German schol-ars of the early 1800s reading texts from the pastwanted to describe how historical and religiousdocuments carried meaning. These human docu-ments needed understanding, not just “knowl-edge” of their factual contents. It was importantto take into our being something of a way of life,of being embodied in a world situation, not justwords and letters. Historical studies and culturalstudies all had this “ecological” aspect. The result-ing studies came to be called “hermeneutics”(Wilson 1989) after the Greek verb for communi-cating found also in the name Hermes, God ofmessages, and in hormones, chemical messengerscirculating in human bodies.

Ecological science has always needed thesame sort of wider feeling for the “object” beingstudied.

a

The feeling involves a skill in knowingthe other, a skill, like all skills, more tacit than ver-bal. The “tacit knowledge” (Polanyi 1958) onwhich much scientific metacognition is thoughtto depend has a relation, through phenomenol-ogy, to this same hermeneutics. The care involvedis what ecosystem sensitivity also requires. Thiskey attribute of careful science has been easily for-

a

One example where such feeling is discussed in relation to a leading scientist is E. Fox Keller’s account of Barbara McClin-tock’s work on DNA processes in maize (Keller 1983).

Booth: Theory of Connectedness

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gotten in insistence on proof, on methods for ver-ification, on theories and their truth.

Human agencies, using simplified and uncar-ing frameworks of power/knowledge, fail to elab-orate the interconnections that might save themfrom poisoning or crippling their ecosystems. In-dustries fail the ecosystems on which they dependwhen they simplify human/ecological interac-tions, assuming (carelessly) what suits them indus-trially. They need “understanding” of a form thatgoes beyond discrete messages, giving them statis-tical but inevitably partial details (Booth 1989,1993). One construction of this need (Rapport &Regier 1995) suggests that a commitment to eco-system integrity requires “a kind of redemocrati-zation.” Normative institutions, in this study “theexisting conventional agencies in the various lev-els of government,” have to move to another levelof action since they “find it difficult to collaborateeffectively in the usual legalistic, bureaucraticcontext.” The writers comment on how new formsof governance are required here. The parcelingout of different details of any ecosystem betweengovernment groupings is like an unintegratedform of embodiment for this ecosystem knowl-edge. The newer forms of governance requiredwould provide opportunities for the “professionalexpertise of the therapists of ecosystem integrity.”Therapy here would consist in the first instance ofmaking more whole the existing power/knowl-edge within human communities.

RESPONSIVENESS

Donna Haraway (1991) has noted how no angleof view can be comprehensive. In this oft-quotedarticle she discusses how all knowledge is “situ-ated.” Any presentation of views is partial, subjec-tive, or one-sided. Objectivity, never totally sepa-rate from subjectivity, is another dichotomy wecan denote in terms of a Möbius strip. Your view-point is somewhat different from mine and thereis room, therefore, for me to acknowledge bothmy own partiality and yours. Yet for each of us ob-jectivity and subjectivity intertwine like positionsalong an endless ribbon forever changing its pat-terning. Only through partiality acknowledged inthis way, suggests Haraway, can we reach a senseof the objectivity attainable through sharing. I con-tribute to any shared attempt at reaching firmerand more comprehensive understanding throughmy embodied awareness, and do so by integrat-

ing into that awareness many circumstances of mybeing.

Like an ecosystem embedded within an evenmore wide-ranging ecosystem, one of Koestler’sholons, my personal objectivity is always open tocorrection by the autonomy, or agency, present inthe larger whole. This process often leads toirony, as I find the larger system’s perspectiveturns my one-sided view around, showing howpartial it is. Providing a larger context underlineshow what I thought I grasped has in its sounderversion far wider ramifications than I had dreamt.In ecosystem terms, it is like the unexpectedemerging as humans connect with their ecosys-tem (Savory 1988). Haraway (1991) notes of herepistemological view, that it “makes room forsome unsettling possibilities, including a sense ofthe world’s independent sense of humor.” Hu-mor does indeed affect personal healing. It over-comes the dulling abstractness so pervasive in thepresent world. It may be the stimulus we need tojump metaphorically from the hot water-numbinghuman science and government a little fasterthan the frog of green activist folklore.

To motivate this approach to humor we mustfirst appreciate how deep the hot water has be-come. I shall place this in terms of how cut offfrom our place in nature we are. In

The Spell of theSensuous

, Abram (1996) describes how

aleph

, a He-brew letter, is also a Hebrew word meaning “ox.”Its symbol, like a capital A on its side, suggestedthis animal.

Gimel

, another Hebrew letter, formedas a rising and then descending line, was also theword for “camel.”

Qoph

, a circle with a tail, was theword for monkey—it survives in the shape of ourletter “Q.” When these were borrowed for theGreek letters:

alpha, gamma

, etc., “the Greek namehad no sensorial reference at all” (Abram 1996)and so these letters ceased to carry the meaningthey once had. As Greek gave vowels a form andrejected their way of being sounded, yet not writ-ten, as had been the case in Hebrew, the intru-sion of wind and breath into language was lost.

In poetry, and laughter, expressiveness in rela-tion to the deeper and wider conditions of embod-iment remains present as breath and emotion. Inmost language it has long since been replaced byprecision, but this has not ensured the care ofcommunication mentioned earlier in this com-mentary. As Rapport (1989) notes, following Ana-tol Rapoport, metaphor’s use should not be in po-etry alone for it has “also a legitimate place inscience.” And metaphor is one key way of bringingreal experience into play in our abstract contexts.

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Environmental health needs to intertwinewith human health. Greater wholeness of the onewill reflect greater wholeness for the other. Muchhuman health is communicated or known throughembodiment rather than through words. MichelSerres (1995) has a photograph of two men inconversation over coffee cups in a café. He re-flects on the meaning conveyed by the lines onone man’s face, by the outstretched hand of theother. These create a space between the two andthe flow of communication across this space,largely not in words, is the spirit of their conversa-tion. It is through their embodiment that what-ever they say takes on its deeper meaning. Serrescomments on the wrinkles of a smile marking oneman’s face; these forms of communication haveresilience often lacking in cognitive exchanges,yet our dominant model for what we communi-cate remains cast in words and abstractions.

Ecosystems will be healthier when human ac-tions help create the meaningfulness of “a spacebetween” for human beings and the ecosystemswith which they connect. This is akin to Bould-ing’s “hugs,” for we need less control (powerthrough our own agency) and more “care” wherea space is left for the agency of the other. “Objec-tivity,” to quote Haraway (1991) further, “is notabout disengagement but about mutual and usu-ally unequal structuring, about taking risks in aworld where ‘we’ are permanently mortal, that is,not in ‘final’ control.” The emphasis shifts fromthe “controlling” forms of theory to those of re-sponsiveness as you find in sympathetic responseto laughter lines or to a face ready to smile.

To mark this shift I outline a contrast be-tween two works, both setting out to give natureback its spirit. Carolyn Myss (1996), in

Anatomy ofthe Spirit

, suggests that we view pneumonia as sym-bolic of destruction of rain forest from which “theearth draws the greatest proportion of its oxygensupply.” Myss’s concept here is more mysticalthan practical: “I believe that our cell tissues holdthe vibrational patterns of our attitudes, our be-lief systems, and the presence or absence of an ex-quisite energy frequency or ‘grace’ that we canactivate by calling our spirits from negative attach-ments.” In comparison is the sense of intercon-nectedness expressed by Abram (1996). Abram’stheme is human responsiveness, and he writes ofwatching a stranger learning to ride a bicycle forthe first time. Abram’s own body, although stand-ing solidly on the ground, “inadvertently experi-ence(d) the uncertain equilibrium of the rider.”When the stranger’s bicycle teetered and fell,

Abram felt “the harsh impact of the asphaltagainst my own leg and shoulder.” The intertwin-ing is clear in an everyday event where one part ofa living whole is aware of the bodily processes ofanother part. Here spirit is not an abstract theo-retical notion, it emerges in a shared reality.

MEDITATION

Abram also discusses “the circular manner inwhich a nuanced sense of self emerges” that is“regularly acknowledged in Buddhism.” A deep-ening relation with other beings is partly achiev-able through meditation, a practice more every-day in its bodily involvement than the esotericnature of Buddhist writing tends to imply.

Therapists and practitioners have both turnedto meditation for the promotion of human health.Ainslie Meares, an Australian medical practitio-ner in the 1960s, attempted in

Cancer: Another Way?

(Meares 1977) to get his cancer patients to en-gage (and trust) their body in the practice ofmeditation. The book has pages of short poems.Through the words Dr. Meares used in conversa-tion with the patient with cancer, he sought poeti-cally for a human condition of integrity of bodywithin self. This is what theoretical wholeness hasalways promised. Here is a sample:

Just the calm and the stillness/Is that enough?

No./Certainly not.

There’s the calm and the stillness/Thatcomes in our everyday life./It’s more than thiswe need./Much more./We need the calm andthe stillness/In the whole of our being/To setthe healing free.

How can I get it/In the whole of my being?

No one can

get it

, of that I’m sure

./It comes/

It’sjust that it comes

.

Well, how does it come?

It comes when we let it./It’s as simple as that./The ease of our mind./The freedom within.

The strongest emotion in response to thesewords may well be frustration. The poetry is aimingat responsiveness rather than peace and rhetoric.Replete with objections, resistances, complaints,and questions (and tantalizingly few answers),Dr. Meares’s book requires reading “between thelines.”

If you’re concerned/With what is printedhere./You’ve missed it all./You don’t under-

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stand./Go back to your drugs./Or the rays orwhatever you like.

Yet the mantra returns to one rhythm:

Let the healing come. . .It comes in the calm/And the stillness/Of body and mind./More./More than our body and mind./The whole ofour being.

This “wholeness” of being, largely lacking in theabstractions of most literature on health policiesor medical science, is associated in Meares’s po-ems with letting go. I have outlined in this com-mentary how Western world practices commonlyignore the agency of a living world. In our ownhuman health we have left too little to the agencyof human bodies. Medical institutions are inevita-bly dominated by the separateness of the “inner”and the “outer,” since for them communicationhas little to do with treatment. Subjectivity is thenan optional extra cast as largely irrelevant. Herepower/knowledge is conceived with too little“need for redemocratization.”

HUMOR

For letting go we have to turn to laughter. Nor-man Cousins, who documents his own recoveryfrom a life-threatening state of toxicity in

Anatomyof an Illness

(Cousins 1979), is one who regardslaughter as the best cure. Cousins found that adiet of Marx Brothers films in the private room ofa hotel with contracted nursing care did moremarvels for his ankylosing spondylitis than thehospital that had been treating him. Another fineadvocate for humor in dealing with sickness is Dr.Hunter Adams (The West Australian 1997). Adamsgained wider appreciation recently through thefilm “Patch Adams.” As clown and director of theGesundheit hospital project, the once classicallytrained doctor, says: “Often, dissatisfaction withwork, family and self prevent a cure or improve-ment in health from ever happening.” Laughtertransforms the topology of the body’s cares, andripple by ripple brings a bodily change. Laughterhas embodiment as its focus and its practice. Itshakes us up, not just metaphorically but physi-cally. From the facial muscles, through the lungsand physical inspiration, to our stomachs, and fi-nally rolling on the floor; all these degrees of ourhumorous response move our bodies and physi-cally send them into various degrees of the twist!It is as if a Möbius strip comes physically into ourlives.

Laughter is not too far from other processesof embodiment encountered in ecology. Whilethere is no strict ecosystem parallel to laughter,the bodily involvement probably works throughpeople’s immune systems. Laughter is known toincrease the body’s T-cells, and it also fills thelungs with oxygen. The films that made Cousinsbreathe in with relief and out again with a rush ofbreath are films ridiculing boundaries, forminguncommon links, and translating the normal sep-arations of body and society into grotesque incor-porations. They are comedies of incorporation.The stress effects and disturbances examined byRapport & Regier (1995) are discussed in part interms of rejuvenation processes in degraded eco-systems. More pointedly, their article outlines hu-man efforts toward commitment to ecosystem in-tegrity. Is it too far-fetched to describe humans,while they are hardly the lungs of anything, as yetthe hormonal stimulants of a system moving to-ward incorporating its own more vigorous re-sponse to stresses?

In this article I have used commentary on so-cial scientific developments of recent years tostimulate some thoughts about boundaries oper-ating in other areas of thinking, particularly ecol-ogy. Topological study of boundaries allows thethinking of processes to avoid the “obvious” blackand white distinctions and instead be embodied,dynamic, dare I write “natural.”

Through a sense of the understanding be-tween two people as arising

between

them and be-coming incorporated, there is an analogy forother processes of communication. Bodily pro-cesses such as meditation and laughter can helpin achieving better health for an individual. Eco-system health may also be open to human respon-siveness. As humans’ own thinking encouragesthem toward ways of being, incorporating under-standing rather than abstract structures, theirbodies coming into contact with the world of oth-ers may become less of a stress and more a facetof the adaptive immunity of a wider system. Then,not only can we incorporate into our living somebetter understanding of these systems, but theprocess of incorporation may itself emerge as anaspect of ecosystem health.

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