Immune System. East and West

Covid certainly isn’t going away. Friends and colleagues both here in Korea and in the UK recently have been or are currently unwell with the virus. I’ve had it twice. Will I make the hat-trick? So, although we are now acting as if the pandemic is over, it’s not. We’ve just normalized it, now we know the virus doesn’t represent an existential threat to our society. In the meantime, I’ve been hearing a lot about our ’immune system’. Don’t worry about face masks or vaccines. if you want to protect yourself against Covid just boost your immune system!

Wikipedia says:  ‘The immune system is a network of biological systems that protects an organism from diseases. It detects and responds to a wide variety of pathogens, from viruses to parasitic worms, as well as cancer cells and objects such as wood splinters, distinguishing them from the organism's own healthy tissue.’’

It seems to me that in the context of Covid (or any other potentially pandemic causing pathogen) we are wrong to just limit a useful notion of ‘immune system’ to the individual biological organism.  Although, as the definition demonstrates, the term obviously relates in a very concrete way to our own bodies and refers to a system that where the hair follicles  and skin create a boundary between us and the outside world, we would surely do well to recognize how our distinct corporeal body is inevitably connected to the wider environment, both human and non-human. So, really, we should be conceiving of the ‘immune system’ in systemic terms, that is, as referring to a network of which our own individual  biological immune system is just one integral part.

But whenever people say ‘boosting the immune system’ they only seem to mean their own. As if they exist in a bubble.  I would wager Westerners are more prone to this very limited notion than Koreans and other East Asians, or people who live in more collectively rather than individualistically oriented societies. 

One way of understanding how this might be true is to consider the distinction made by the philosopher Charles Taylor (whom I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion) between the ‘buffered self’ and a ‘porous self’. Taylor limits himself only to the historical analysis of Europeans, arguing that there has been a shift from the pre-modern ‘porous self’ who is conceived as being interrelated with others and the world, to the modern ‘buffered self’, which has more autonomy, and acts as if a separate and discrete individual entity.. A cross-cultural version of this is suggested by another philosopher, Thomas Kasulis,  who argues  that there are two ways of being in the world – what he calls the ‘analytical’ and integral’ (West), the other the ‘holistic’ and ‘intimate’ (East Asian). These terms emphasize the difference between the idea of an autonomous, individualized conception of the self, and one that is more interdependently conceived. Obviously, these self-representations are not rigidly culturally distinct. In our globalized world they are converging and blurring to produce new ways of being. In Korea, its clear that the individualistic ‘buffered’ ‘integrated’ self is fast superseding the more traditional, and Confucian, ‘porous’ self, or perhaps blending to become something between ‘porous’ and ‘buffered’. A ‘filtered self’, perhaps?

 I’ve already discussed in my blog how this  this distinction impacted on attitudes to face masks. It might aslo help explain variations in ideas about ‘immunity’. An ‘integral’ self would limit the idea to the physical or  biological body, while the ‘intimate’ self would more readily extend any notion of ‘immunity’ to the transpersonal. If you consider that your ‘immune system’ extends to the social body, not just your own body, then it would be ridiculous to only talk about making sure you  take exercise, eat citrus fruits, spinach, almonds, papaya, and green tea, and get enough vitamin A, C, D, and E, and selenium and zinc. These are important, of course, but you wouldn’t stop at concerns that are limited to what lies within the boundary of your own body. When you thought of ensuring effective immunity you would want to make sure you were linking your own immunity to that of others by, for example, wearing a mask and getting vaccinated..

NOTES

The image in today’s post is from: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320101

 The Wiklipedia quote is from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immune_system

 I refer to:

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2018)

Thomas Kasulis, Intimacy and Integrity. Philosophy and Cultural Difference (University of Hawaii Press, 2002)