The Need for Enemies
The wise learn many things from their enemies.
-Aristophanes
There's something about the shower that is often inspiring. The swirl of water flowing down the drain is a nice metaphor for the way disparate thoughts sometimes come together. I'm going to present this more or less as it came to me in the shower today.
I was contemplating how Senator Rand Paul had just argued in the U.S. Senate that air pollution doesn't cause asthma. He's basically right, and few argue for a direct causal relationship, as the linked article points out. But there is evidence that air pollution increases the suffering of asthma patients and continued regulation of pollution makes sense for a host of other reasons.
I'm interested in what does cause asthma. It's a disease that's mostly confined to industrialized countries. I'm currently reading The Wild Life of Our Bodies by Rob Dunn. In it he describes the "hygiene hypothesis" which suggests that our auto-immune diseases aren't caused by some pathogen in the environment, but a lack of a parasite in our bodies. The origin of the problem of asthma isn't that the air is too dirty, but that our latrines are too clean.
In Radical Honesty, Brad Blanton says that our minds need something to chew on, to keep them from chewing on us. So it is with our immune system. We need the whipworms, hookworms, tapeworms and other "parasites" to engage our immune system. Over time we've become dependent on the company of our enemies and when they are removed, we become sick.
This is probably also true for other divisions like Democrat vs. Republican, Catholic vs Protestant, Sunni vs Shiite, Theists vs Atheist, etc. We need our enemies, and we need them to be strong. The exaggeration of Soviet strength was vital to keeping the defense budget high for decades.
We're caught in the Illusion of Asymmetric Insight. As we define ourselves by what we are not, our identity necessitates our enemy. I think this is why we've been more lost than ever since the fall of the Soviet Union and why we needed to start two wars in the last decade. We were floundering and the narrative that "they hate us for our freedoms" was a vital one for the preservation of the national sense of self.
Recognizing that illusion of asymmetric insight is important. We need to see through the caricature we create of our enemies. So often we want to destroy our enemies, but we don't see how doing so would also destroy ourselves.
There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Mike Lewinski
Silver Spring, MD
November 18, 2011
