Imperative of Community Health
There is a natural imperative of community health for humans, one that existed in our ancient life directly in nature and that lives on in a transformed but no less essential way in the modern world.
Because we are naturally social animals and today are ultimately dependent upon one another, our individual health and quality of life is and has always been a function of the health and fitness of our social groups. In our time, because of the rise of science and technology, our life and health conditions are subject to much greater variability than in wild nature, but also to an entirely new potential for open-ended progression and improvement that was not possible before our time.
Today, we are a people dwelling together in an advanced and deeply interconnected global civilization, one based on profound new knowledge and technological capacities. What each of us does, or does not do, can affect others in important and often unprecedented ways – whether in our neighborhood or another part of the world.
This new interdependence includes personal conduct influencing our security, environmental quality, lifestyle options, workplace conditions, and civil rights. In our time especially, when people act in an uncoordinated or anti-social way, there is near immediate chaos. Consider this natural and newly heightened fact of human life the next time you pass through a traffic intersection, enter a store to buy food or other products, or phone a friend or link to the Internet.
Our natural human need to cooperate closely is the foundation of both traditional and contemporary communities. The manner and degree to which we cooperate at a community level, in fact, generally determines the quality of life and health in them. This point is of course often greatly underappreciated, even today. Often, our personal conduct is seen more in isolation and we frequently overlook the many ways the health-related attitudes and choices of one person affects the health and quality of life of others.
On this point, considerable research has demonstrated strong social “network effects” in many important health-related areas. When we eat poor quality foods, fail to exercise, make unhealthy work and lifestyle choices, disinvest in our future, or harbor irrational prejudices, as examples, we encourage these same behaviors in others – and far more strongly than previously realized. The effect of more intelligent choices and outlooks on others, however, is equally strong. This same research thus suggests a powerful potential to transform the health of our individuals lives, communities, and global society through progressive improvement in our shared attitudes and behaviors.
With these ideas in mind, we would point out that the modern alternative to actively planning for and promoting increasing community health is the substantial limitation, in one form or another, of our full and now greatly expanded modern health and quality of life potential. Today, the alternative to using our rapidly advancing science and technology to promote quality of life, and to encouraging active cooperation for health as a general model for society, is passive acceptance of collective life, and thus individual life, in far lower states of health and well-being than are now possible.
If we adopt this modern passivity, we resign ourselves to live as prior generations did, in fundamental ways, instead of beginning to live as more advanced generations in the future might or will. Rather than cooperating and behaving more intelligently for greater mutual benefit (in the HumanaNatura system, emphasizing our natural intra-group beta-cycle behaviors), we will continue to overweight ourselves toward the more primitive and less effective modes of human life that marked most earlier civilizations and the more contentious state between human groups in nature (conditions dominated by what HumanaNatura calls our natural alpha-cycle behaviors).
In practice, whenever we fail to act to promote community and societal health and quality of life, we unjustifiably take our lives and social environment as lacking in compelling opportunities for positive change or initiative. We inevitably live less thoughtfully and healthfully than is possible, both as individuals and as an interdependent species, curtailing immediate our health levels and inhibiting conditions that engender social investment in our future health (including naturally healthy intergroup conditions of transparency, equality, and reciprocity). As we will discuss, whenever we consciously or unconsciously do this, significant and needless barriers to individual and community health naturally arise or are permitted to persist. Compounded across all of us, the full result of inadequate cooperative action toward increasing health is an enormous and waiting revolution in the state of modern life – one involving the use of contemporary science and technology to build new and self-progressing conditions of individual and collective health.
In our Community Health Program, HumanaNatura will explain the important ways in which positive health-promoting change – and frequently, far reaching transformation in our shared quality of life – now can be reliably achieved in our individual and collective lives. To live without awareness and action on this essential new modern fact of human life, one implicit in our evolving science and self-understanding, is to greatly limit our own personal life potential and reduce the quality of the health-influencing social environments and systems that surround us each day.
Specific and pervasive forms of individual inaction and community health limitation in our time include: 1) allowing inherited community health and life conditions to gradually and imprecisely develop, 2) permitting traditional conceptions of community life and health dominate and constrain present and future conditions, 3) confining health promotion efforts to the individual level and not addressing our health’s natural social dimensions and influences, 4) failing to support and improve existing public health programs intended to enhance community and societal quality, 5) selective, self-serving, or tangential production and use of health-related science, and 6) living apart or significantly estranged from human communities.
Each of these approaches to modern life and health are often in ample evidence around us and yet have been shown – in an increasing number of comparative health and longevity studies – to reliably lead to substantial community and individual health reductions. Objectively, and perhaps intuitively, we understand that our individual and family health conditions are strongly shaped and even actively determined by the general state of community and societal life around us. Despite this fact, we often fail to adequately act on and invest in our potential for increased collective health and accept greatly inferior community health conditions, relative to those that are now possible. In applicable research, these patterns of health disinvestment have been shown principally due to overreliance on traditional mores and unexamined conceptions of society, and to our systematic under-appreciation of the importance and power of cooperative action and investment in our future.
For perspective, we would point out that community life and our social groups more broadly can be seen productively as evolved states of competing personal interests, goals, hopes, and fears – all operating in varying degrees of integration with (or, conversely, isolation from) the larger environment. In this sense, our communities are settings that tend toward their own internal equilibriums or centers of gravity, corresponding to these forces and the compounding choices that occur and interact within them. For this reason, no community can be expected to be optimally progressive on its own, especially when significantly isolated from natural challenges and the constraint of long-term viability, and each must be examined and consciously guided if it is to be advanced in principled ways (i.e. toward greater total health, quality of life, adaptability, sustainability, etc.).
Put another way, every human community on earth today requires work, if the people in it are to reliably achieve superior quality of life and advancing states of health. Like individuals, our communities must be actively cultivated and invested in, if we are to realize the many benefits that sustained cooperation offers in a scientific age. This may seem a simple idea, but most communities today routinely fail to act on this very basic proposal, and often operate as if we still lived in an earlier time of more limited human knowledge, organizational capacities, and material possibilities.
In this program, we will show how the progressive identification and mitigation of community health limiters is now both desirable and possible – using contemporary health science and organizational quality techniques – as are the continuous pursuit of new community health enablers or quality of life opportunities. Both steps take the form of a scientifically-informed and progressing Community Health Agenda, and require new, more deliberate, and sustained participation and investment in our communities (and in some cases our entire global society) than is often the case today. Fortunately, modern health-related social investments in this direction have been the focus of national and international public health efforts for over a century, with enormous positive impacts on contemporary health and longevity upon which to build.
As will be discussed in more detail, these prior community and public health investments have already added more than 25 years of life expectancy and appreciably reduced disease and disability in the developed world. These earlier impacts, which we will discuss in some depth, provide a strong foundation and critical evidence of the power of community health promotion. They also suggest that enormous opportunities for further community health improvements wait for new efforts today, a hypothesis that is increasingly confirmed through the comparative health and behavioral economics research we mentioned before.
Given our inevitable state of interdependent life and health, and considering our science-based modern potential for new social investments in community health and quality of life, HumanaNatura’s general program proposal is that participatory and open-ended public health efforts should become the central focus and principal mission of the world’s modern communities. As suggested in the Introduction, this change in the basic operating model or approach of our communities and global society represents a fundamental break from our past and marks a shift to the active promotion of progressive health-based life amidst our new human setting of advanced science and technology.
This change begins from but promises to repurpose key aspects of modern life – the new human state of advanced science, industrial technology, political stability, and general prosperity – to create new health and life-enriching benefits and opportunities for all people. Though a pragmatic process, it in essence fulfills HumanaNatura’s call for a new cooperative and health-centered ethos, emphasizing natural and more powerful beta-cycle human conditions, to replace the competitive wealth-centered outlook and more primitive alpha-cycle orientation that has dominated and slowed the advancement of human civilization for centuries. This new approach to individual and community life requires new personal and political openness, much greater use and finer application of available science, and far more imaginative conceptions of and investments in our personal and human potential amidst advanced technological society.
Together, individual and community health promotion efforts within the HumanaNatura system promise to set the stage for revolutionary new levels of human health and self-awareness in our time. They promise to create greatly increased health expectations and breakthrough conditions of realized health in and around us, and powerful new cycles of progressive human vitality and quality of life for the future. We will suggest, and help you to confirm through action in your community, that all of these potentials now exist in our modern condition of life, but each requires and waits for new, deliberate, and sustained health promotion efforts by individuals and their communities, across our global society and over time.
Let’s turn next to a brief summary of HumanaNatura and our four-part natural health system, before beginning an extended discussion of the methods, benefits, and limitations of existing public health efforts today.