Exploring the Ecology of Life

In my book, 'When Logic Came to Town and Man Broke in Two,' the final version of which is now nearing completion before it goes to the publisher, there is a chapter on how I believe one should understand what ecology is. In it, I state

“When I started school, my freedom of movement was restricted. And soon enough, so was my freedom of thought. When I moved from an idyllic small community to a rough industrial town, I was constrained by the need to assert myself and be left in peace, in relation to a kind of children and adolescents I was not used to—children who had experientially grown up under different circumstances, with other pressing interests and perceived social demands. And at increasingly higher levels of education, the compartmentalization of thought became ever tighter. I wanted to study animals, to become a zoologist, but to do so at the university level, I also had to learn enough mathematics, physics, and chemistry—subjects that, in their internal character, did not seem to me to have much to do with living beings. These subjects became an obstacle for me. I found them boring, lifeless even, and the teachers I had did not make matters any better. In all this, I was confronted with and could not escape a series of limiting circumstances in the world, circumstances that restricted my own expression of will and my own opportunities for experience. It was, to some extent, self-inflicted, but not entirely. For what was it that made me unable to feel the connection between living animals and physics textbooks? It was not just my own fault.”

Ecology, in other words, is your and my everyday life, nothing else.

Everything you can do and everything you experience is a matter of ecological relationships and conditions.

This applies to what you believe, what you think, what you feel, whom you associate with, what you do and are capable of doing, and, not least, what your own living body—your interface with the environment—is doing all the time, largely beyond your own consciousness and conscious knowledge.

Without this body, you cannot do a single thing in this world.

Every second you are alive, you are completely dependent on this changeable, adaptable, but deeply enigmatic organism that in every respect wants nothing more than to keep you going.

So what happens when you truly want to know something about the mystery of your own body, and you live in a culture, in a society where your own body is said to be a composite machine that can only be adequately understood if it is broken down into its smallest components, understood in terms of molecular interactions? And when the answer to why you suffer from one thing or another is that this or that molecule in you is present in too low a concentration, or that this or that biochemical reaction in some of your body's cells is not proceeding as it should? And when the only treatment you can get from state-licensed healthcare providers is often nothing more than being urged to take a certain so-called medicine?

Where did the mystery of your living body—that is, the you that exists in your everyday life—go then?

Our cultural understanding of our bodies is deeply influenced by what can be called the biomedical paradigm, very briefly alluded to above. What is it? Before anything else, it is really just a way of thinking. It is a specific, very distinct perspective on the world.

It is crucial to seriously understand the concept of perspective correctly here. Without a definite intellectual perspective, we cannot think.

I mean that literally. It is from some—often very rigidly defined—perspective that we think and strive to understand things.

Thinking from a specific perspective is not wrong in itself!

It becomes wrong, with consequences, if for some internal or external—that is, ecological—reason we insist on thinking about something important from only a single perspective.

This matter of perspective is something Eric Schüldt and I have discussed in many podcasts over quite a few years now. It was also what I worked with and taught as a researcher and senior lecturer in human ecology: everything was about different perspectives on what happens in the world and about the central and important insight that every perspective is limiting.

It is because it limits that a perspective is necessary to be able to think at all!

One simply makes certain assumptions and sticks to them. Everything that does not fit with these, or contradicts them, is ignored. This, again, is not wrong—provided one knows what one is doing.

If one begins to believe in a single perspective as if it were a dogmatic religion, then there is danger afoot, especially on a societal level.

I call this the totalization of partial perspectives. Translated to societal conditions, it is a dictatorship if a society officially asserts a single perspective.

In the living, bodily, organic, and at the same time artificial ecology we all find ourselves in, the totalization of partial perspectives will sooner or later have fatal consequences.

This insight motivates me to try, to the best of my ability, to contribute to increasing and strengthening people's ability to shift perspectives, to be able to think in more than one way.

That is why I researched human ecology.

That is why I do podcasts with Eric.

That is why I have written a book.

And that is why I am one of the initiators of the Swedish Fascia Convention 2024, in Uppsala in early November.

This world-unique conference, without exaggeration, is deeply about perspective—about a different, though not entirely new, perspective on our own living bodies as inextricably linked with the societal, natural, and artificial ecology that we ourselves help to shape, whatever we do.

A perspective that also must not be totalized, intellectually speaking, but which is truly needed given the state of the world, and of us, right now.

To the Swedish Fascia Convention

By Per Johansson, PhD in Human Ecology & Historian of Ideas

About the Swedish Fascia Convention

For over ten years, we have been trying to understand and explain what fascia is, why it is so important to understand, and how our entire perception of the body and of humanity changes when we see ourselves as living beings.

We are not alone in this. Prominent researchers like Guimberteau, Theise, Pollack, and Levy have fought against the tide to get people to embrace the concept of the living body.

In November 2024, we will talk about this, live, in Uppsala.