Nikolaus Oliver is on hand to connect the Human Microbiome Project, the old idea of the Body Politic and the global economy.
The question of recovery has never been more vexed. Are we recuperating? Is a relapse imminent? Were we ever really healthy in the first place, or is this longed-for condition now reserved solely for China and India? We seem less and less certain. And while I am of course speaking of matters economic, something not dissimilar holds for other spheres of human life. It reminds one of the old idea of the Body Politic, in which society is compared to the human body. The heart was king of the body. Serfs and labourers were the hands and arms, scholars and such were the brains.
Today, the marketplace is the stomach, consumers are the muscles, Ben Bernanke is the Achilles tendon. The American economy has traditionally been like the big toe - carrying all the weight at each step and making forward motion possible. Now the concept of the Body Politic may be changing. More exactly, the concept of the human body may be changing - as a result of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP), which takes as its jumping off point the astonishing fact that inside you and me invasive microbial cells outnumber our own cells by 10 to one. There are about 100 trillion of them. They live in our guts, our mouths, our noses and, well, just about everywhere. We weigh more because of them (but don't worry, it's only a few kilograms). Without them we wouldn't be healthy and we wouldn't be us.
The HMP is already showing that the human body is much more complex than we thought, relying on trillions of symbiotic relationships. I need my bugs and they need me. Does the HMP suggest that we might fruitfully re-conceptualise our notions of the global economy, its health, its diseases and its recovery? In science and medicine we learn every day just how little we know. Isn't it arrogant and foolish to think that we have fully grasped all the intricacies of the global market - a system every bit as complex and subtle as a living organism? I suspect that there are factors in play that we have overlooked and ignored. They may be small, numerous and work silently. If we identify and understand them, it might just turn out that they influence everything.
As an idea, the Body Politic may be old, but perhaps it still has much to offer.