RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dr. Finlay is a microbiologist specializing in bacterial infections and the Peter Wall Distinguished Professor at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Arrieta is an assistant professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Calgary. This essay is adapted from their new book, “Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child From an Oversanitized World,” published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Our friend Julia moved to a small free-range pig and poultry farm when her first child, Jedd, was a preschooler. When her second baby was born, she would strap him on her back every morning so that she could go to the chicken coop to pick up eggs. Jedd would chase and ride the chickens—and sometimes taste their feed and touch the fresh eggs. A couple of times, she even caught him chewing on something he had picked up from the ground.

At first, all of this caused Julia to freak out. But once she realized that Jedd wasn’t getting sick from these encounters with the chickens, she relaxed a bit. Her second child, Jacob, soon followed suit and never hesitated to get dirty on the farm. She once found him knee-deep in a cesspool of pig waste. Her early worries that her children were going to contract diseases from all this messiness dissipated, and she was pleased to see that they remained healthy.

Was Julia being an irresponsible parent—or might we all have something to learn from her example?

For most of the past century, we have considered microbes bad news, and for good reason: They cause disease, pandemics and death. Most human communities have experienced the benefits of medical advances like antibiotics, vaccines and sterilization, which have radically reduced the number and severity of infections that we suffer throughout life. Dying from a microbial infection is now a very rare event in the Western world, and, in the U.S., lifespans have increased by some 30 years since 1915—in large part because of success against infectious diseases.

Unfortunately, this progress has come with a price, as news reports have been telling us for some years now. Our anti-microbe mission has been accompanied, in industrialized countries, by an explosion in the prevalence of chronic noninfectious diseases and disorders. Diabetes, allergies, asthma, inflammatory bowel diseases, autoimmune diseases, autism, obesity and certain types of cancer are at an all-time high. The incidence of some of these disorders is doubling every 10 years, and they are starting to appear sooner in life, often in childhood.

All of these diseases have a genetic component, but their alarming growth cannot be explained by genetics alone. Recent studies find a direct link between the presence and absence of certain bacteria and all of the chronic diseases mentioned above. It turns out that the microbes within us are much more than quiet residents; they are an inherent part of our physiology, and altering them leads to disease.

Our own 2015 study (published in the journal Science Translational Medicine) found, for example, that 3-month-olds who had four particular microbes in their feces were much less likely to get asthma later in life. When those four microbes were introduced into mice, they protected against experimentally induced asthma, showing for the first time that alterations in gut microbes can drive the development of the disease. Lab experiments also have found that obese mice lose weight when they get a transfer of gut microbes from lean mice (and the reverse holds true as well, with lean mice growing fat after a transfer from obese mice).

The practical upshot of all this research is clear: Our health depends to a large degree on maintaining a robust and diverse community of microorganisms in our bodies—and establishing good gut-health as children is especially important.
During the first few months of life, the microbe community in our bodies is considerably less established and stable than later in life. Any drastic changes to it have a much higher chance of permanently altering our microbiota (as specialists call this world of tiny organisms within us) and our long-term health.

From the moment we are born, we begin getting colonized by bacteria, which kick-start a series of fundamental biological processes, including the development of our immune system. Before birth, the lining of our gut is full of immature immune cells. When bacteria move in, the immune cells react to them, changing and multiplying. They even move to other parts of the body to train other cells with the information they have acquired from these intruders. If deprived of this interaction, the immune system remains sloppy and immature, unable to fight off diseases properly.
Never before in human history have babies and children grown up so cleanly.

Scientists haven’t figured out exactly how microbes do this at the molecular level, but we do know that most bacteria will teach these immune cells to tolerate them, whereas some bacteria—the pathogens that cause diseases—prompt strong resistance. The result is to make the intestine a relatively controlled and harmonious place.

Another fundamental function of microbes is to aid in the regulation of our metabolism. Like other animals, humans obtain energy from food that is digested and absorbed in the intestines. Besides helping us digest certain foods that the intestines can’t handle on their own, bacteria produce compounds that help to define how we use or store energy in our bodies. New research also shows that our microbiota plays an important role in neurological development and even in the health of our blood vessels.

Such discoveries have led scientists to call our microbiota a “new organ,” perhaps the last human organ to be discovered by modern medicine. Most of this knowledge is still relatively new and many pieces of the puzzle remain unsolved, but protecting the initial developmental stages of our microbiota clearly has a significant impact on our health.

Inflammatory diseases (such as asthma, allergies and inflammatory bowel disease) and metabolic diseases (such as obesity and diabetes) are characterized by alterations in our immune system and our metabolic regulation. Knowing what we do now about the role of the microbiota, it is not surprising that these diseases are being diagnosed in more children. They are, to a great extent, a consequence of relatively recent changes in our lifestyle—modern diet, oversanitization, excessive use of antibiotics—that have altered the specific microbes that affect our metabolism early on. We urgently need to find ways to modify our behavior so that our microbes can function properly.

Never before in human history have babies and children grown up so cleanly, and our diets have lost many of the elements most crucial to the health of our guts. We have become very bad hosts to our microbes.

“Cultural Appropriation” is a common term among intellectuals–and a political strategy used by ethnic- and racial-identity groups on the left. It deserves to be understood so it can be called-out as a political strategy that undermines the essential commonality and cross-borrowings of American culture. Ours is a culture that, at its best, incorporates, borrows, and transforms from the multiple groups within it. That’s why tacos and pizzas are now regular features of American food.

In ZipDialog’s Daily Roundup of News Beyond the Headlines, I featured a fiction writer Lionel Shriver, who shreds the academic conceit of “cultural appropriation” and the “clamorous world of identity politics” which gave birth to it. Shriver’s essay ends with her declaration, “The last thing we fiction writers need is restrictions on what belongs to us.”

The issue is so central to identity politics, though, it deserves a separate post to explain what “cultural appropriation” is and how it works.standard-shaming-strategy-for-cultural-appropriation

You are classified as a member of a group, say, transgender, Mexican-American, or fat. Your group membership should then dominate your self-conception, at least politically.
Your group deems itself oppressed, or rather its most vocal, politicized members say the group and all of its members are. They use this group identity and its oppressed status as tools for political mobilization. The key is for most members of the group to accept this putative group identity and its oppressed status as dominant (indeed, unquestioned) characteristics of their personal identity.
Having organized and mobilized the oppressed group, you identify the oppressors who are responsible for all the group’s misfortunes and attack them. Oppressors can only attain absolution (the secular equivalent of salvation) by supporting the goals and actions of the oppressed group. Those goals and actions should never be questioned by the oppressor group or reshaped by them.west-side-story
A key element of your attack: Only your own group has the moral right to depict its own experiences, to write about them, paint them, or use their music. All others are shamed if they try to do so, especially anyone deemed to be from the “oppressor class.” Those people are “appropriating your culture.” Shame on them.

New video has surfaced from last fall showing a group of students yelling at Nicholas Christakis, the former master of Yale University’s Silliman College, accusing him of promoting violence because he didn’t support one of their social-justice causes.

In case you’re not familiar with Christakis, the story goes like this: Last fall, his wife sent out an e-mail criticizing Yale for telling students not to wear culturally insensitive Halloween costumes because she didn’t think it was the administration’s job to tell students what to wear, and then Christakis agreed with her and refused to apologize. The anger and protests that ensued over it eventually resulted in both of them having to resign last spring.

Immediately after the controversy, video surfaced of a student screaming in Christakis’s face that he should be fired. That was bad enough, but the newly publicized videos show that the hysteria went way, way beyond that.

The things that these videos show are beyond parody: One student says the real reason he didn’t remember her name was because he’s a racist. Another student compares the pain she endured from his supporting his wife on that issue to getting a soccer ball kicked in your face and having your nose broken.

Throughout, Christakis is clearly trying to remain calm. He says things like “I’m doing my best,” “One of my limitations as a person which I always had was I wasn’t very good with memorizing names,” “That’s a good argument,” and “I’d like to apologize for having hurt your feelings.”

Their response? They insist his difficulty with names is a personal, racial issue. They gang up on him, snapping and laughing and shouting over him as he tries to speak, and accuse him of lying when he tries to make amends.

Nicodemo Coria-Gonzalez, a 26-year-old illegal alien from Mexico now in custody in Austin, Texas, is thought by detectives to be a violent serial sexual predator who since December had terrorized women in North and Northeast Austin. Previously deported five times, he could serve as Donald Trump’s new poster boy for get-tough deportation policies and a massive border wall — replacing San Francisco’s Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, the undocumented Mexican immigrant facing murder charges for shooting 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle as she strolled with her father along a trendy pier. That crime inspired “Kate’s Law.” Like Austin’s Coria-Gonzalez, Lopez-Sanchez had a long rap sheet and had been deported five times.

One of Coria-Gonzalez’s reported victims was a 68-year-old woman who walks with a cane. He had spotted her sitting at a bus stop and offered her a ride to the store. She was sexually assaulted.

Austin, the state’s capital, is a trendy liberal enclave in a red state, as well as being a hi-tech mecca, college town, and veritable sanctuary city. It attracts many undocumented immigrants seeking work from employers who have no qualms about hiring them. Austin prohibits police from reporting illegal aliens to immigration authorities. The Travis County sheriff’s office, on the other hand, cooperates with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and holds jailed suspects in the Austin area on “immigration detainers” made by ICE. That may change in the near future, however, because the popular Democratic candidate for Travis County sheriff, Constable Sally Hernandez, has pledged to follow the same policy as San Francisco and stop cooperating with federal immigration authorities. This would make Austin the first full-blown sanctuary city in Texas. “I just don’t think you solve the criminal justice process by deporting them,” the liberal Democrat told the Texas Tribune. “We talk about being progressive. I believe we need to lead the way.”

ICE says Coria-Gonzalez was previously deported five times between 2012 and 2015. During those years, his rap sheet included three drunken driving arrests and tampering with a government record. After his arrest last month, ICE quickly filed an immigration detainer against him, thereby ensuring he remains in jail even if he makes his $890,000 bond.

Police believe Coria-Gonzalez may have assaulted at least 10 women and are asking victims to come forward. He presently faces two counts of kidnapping, two counts of aggravated assault, and one count of aggravated sexual assault – all related to three attacks. One of his victims was stabbed several times. She had pulled out a knife when fighting off Coria-Gonzalez, but he turned it on her. She escaped with her life.

Police tracked down and arrested Coria-Gonzalez for allegedly kidnapping a prostitute and trying to set her on fire after dousing her with gasoline. He had offered to give her a ride to a gas station to buy cigarettes. She escaped unharmed. Detectives subsequently connected Coria-Gonzalez to other violent sexual assaults after identifying his car in the gas station’s surveillance video. In all, he assaulted at least six women at a favorite location – a remote area he called his “garden,” police said.

Cops mow down Akram Joudeh, wielding a meat cleaver, near Penn Station.

Scruffy beard, sandals, previously arrested for carrying knives near a synagogue, living out of his car… and then he pulled a meat cleaver from his waistband and attacked a cop after his car was booted:

The man who allegedly hit an off-duty NYPD detective in the head with an 11-inch meat cleaver during a dramatic Midtown Manhattan confrontation has been identified as Akram Joudeh, 32, formerly of Queens. Joudeh was shot multiple times on West 32 Street, near Penn Station, by several officers at around 5pm Wednesday after a dramatic chase that culminated in three officers being injured, cops said.

The detective suffered a six-inch gash from his temple to his jaw, while Joudeh was left in hospital in critical but stable condition. Police were called out at around 5pm after Joudeh was seen trying to prize a boot off his car on West 31 St and Broadway. It’s believed the man, whose last registered address is in Queens, has been sleeping in the car.

The vehicle had reportedly been parked in the middle of the street, which is located in a busy, tourist-heavy area of Midtown. When police approached, however, he went into a rage, pulling out the cleaver and fleeing while ‘waving it around,’ a police spokesman said.

After slashing the cop, detective Brian O’Donnell, Joudeh faced the wrath of the NYPD, who promptly filled him full of lead:

Cops were called to the area just before 5 p.m. when several people saw a man with a scruffy beard and wearing sandals running with a meat cleaver in his hand, according to witnesses and initial reports. “He was running down the street, waving it,” said an MTA worker who asked not to be named. “The cops were chasing him.”

Recently, I was asked by an Italian author and journalist, working on an article for Il Giorno on the subject of “mute liberalism” and political correctness in the U.S., for my impressions of the “decadence” afflicting American culture. He wanted to know what the reasons were for what he saw as a political and cultural wasting disease and, in particular, when the inexorable slide began into self-censorship, pervasive hedonism, the debasement of the social and intellectual elites, the abandonment of republican principles and the reversal of traditional social roles.

This was a question too vanishingly large to answer definitively, but it did get me thinking once again about some of the factors that might have caused—as Québécois producer Denys Arcand put it in the title and story of his sadly amusing film—the The Decline of the American Empire, a film modeled on Edward Gibbons’ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Decadence, of course, is not solely an American phenomenon; no Western country is exempt from the vectors of degeneration at work in the liberal/democratic sphere today. But what happens to the U.S., as the guarantor of Western freedom and prosperity, happens to the rest of us. With America in decline, none of its dependents—and we are all its dependents, however loath we may be to admit it—will be spared. Indeed, most Western countries can survive their moral and political deterioration so long as America is willing and able to support them militarily, fiscally and politically, which is, for example, the story of ungrateful Europe since the Marshall Plan. Such is no longer the case. This is why the preoccupation of non-nationals—Italians like my interviewer, Canadians like me—with the fortunes of the U.S. is an issue of primary concern.

In any event, the “decadence” my interviewer was referring to obviously began a long time ago—when exactly is another question. One thinks of deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida’s theory of receding origins, the elusiveness or “eclipsing structure” of all beginnings. On the American historical scene, one could go back to the slave plantations and the Civil War, to the Salem witch trials, or to the bitter duels inherent in the very founding of the Republic between central-government Federalists and states-rights Republicans, a dispute that remains a political fracture to this day. Differing understandings of the Greek and Roman classics regarding the nature of enlightened rule and the proper relation between the governing and the governed were also a locus of contention. As Ron Chernow writes in Alexander Hamilton, commenting on the discrepancy between intention and result that has never been fully resolved, “Today we cherish the two-party system as a cornerstone of American democracy. The founders, however, viewed parties as monarchical vestiges that had no legitimate place in a true republic.” But why stop there? If one wishes, one can go back to the Mayflower and the Arbella and before. A prior “originary” point of decay can always be found.

To focus on the contemporary, certainly John Dewey’s left-oriented “progressivist” and “child-centered” education program, developed mainly in Democracy and Education, which took root in the 1920s, is a reasonable place to start our investigations. Briefly, Dewey believed the child should never be “forced” to learn but rather encouraged to follow his own natal interests—a theory earlier elaborated in the Romantic school of poetry, for example, William Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode where we read that the youth “trailing clouds of glory” is “nature’s priest,” possessing an innate apprehension of the divine. Wordsworth’s exaltation of the child melded seamlessly with his revolutionary belief as a young man in the re-pristinizing of society. It comes as no surprise that the Movement’s enfant terrible, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who espoused similar sentiments, particularly in poems like Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound, earned the praise of Karl Marx. Shelley yearned for the day, as he wrote in Mab, when the “hands/which little children stretch in friendly sport” would become the emblem of a renewed social contract. Dewey’s oeuvre was clearly influenced by the rejuvenative assumptions of his nineteenth century Romantic precursors.

Unfortunately, a return to origins or the projection of initial states isn’t how the world works. It escaped Dewey’s proselytizing ardor that prior learning and hard study, guided by erudite masters, are necessary for a young person to discover what it is in the world that genuinely interests him and what his condign aptitudes really are. This is the only route to maturity, competence and achievement. “Nature’s priest” has no future unless he is a prince of learning. Failing to understand the need for pedagogical and curricular discipline, for a wide-ranging and classically imposed syllabus, and opting instead for catering benignity in both the formative and later stages of education is a surefire recipe for producing the moral narcissist who is his only truth. The casualties of this retrograde approach, in Peter Wood’s succinct articulation from his online essay The Architecture of Intellectual Freedom, are “men and women capable of wise and responsible stewardship of a free society.”

Dewey’s ideas percolated slowly through American culture and took off in the incendiary ’60s, with the free speech movement at Berkeley, the psychedelic dumbing down of the youth population, the takeover of the universities by student radicals, and the insidious inroads made by the destabilizing emigré Frankfurt School, especially Herbert Marcuse of “repressive tolerance” fame, who, in essence, popularized the Marxist theories of Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács. The world had to be purified by the exploited masses and remade in the image of youthful innocence, a revisionary project that inspired the young, the callow and the doctrinaire. These notions captured the American seminary and poisoned the minds of generations of students. After that, the die was cast, and America was on the road to becoming a European failure. CONTINUE AT SITE