Eat Pie

Eat Your Epigenetic Pie

By John Taylor; 2006 December 07

Recently we ended an essay with a sort of prophesy from the Gorgias predicting chaos if the body ruled over the soul, which is to say, if the soul lost the ability to discriminate among the arts of cookery, health (gymnastic) and medicine. Without the discernment to pick among them they would all mingle in an indiscriminate mass. Which is pretty much the way things are today. An example. In my early school years they taught us that the earth could support one carnivore for every ten herbivores; if all of us became vegetarians there would be one tenth the pressure on the environment.

Naively, as a child I thought, "Like QED, eh? It would be a simple matter to settle on this as a broad social goal and with big helpings of advertising and relatively little sense of deprivation on anybody's part we could all be vegetarians in the few decades before I turned fifty." Instead, no, the reverse has come about. The very idea of rational social planning is firmly ejected from the public agenda, even in the face of looming climatic disaster. In Texas and a few other corporate-corrupted states -- in violation of all laws of free speech -- it is actually illegal to write anything that the beef and chicken lobbies might find objectionable. In other words, I would find myself in jail for restating the basic ecological facts taught to me in primary school.

The reason I became a vegetarian was that my body tends to be more sensitive to unnatural chemical insult than most. My wife loves meat, and eating what she cooked literally crippled me with arthritis. I could only putter and dawdle around leaning on a cane. I crawled painfully, slowly into the car, and once there applying the brake or accelerator caused shooting pain up my legs. Eventually if I was to function at all, I had to break off from what was being served and do my own vegetarian cooking separately. Today I make up huge batches of gazpacho soup and bean salad regularly, enough to last over a week of daily servings, and, thank God, I can walk, and even run.

Anyway, the latest biological discoveries are explaining why I am so much more frail and sensitive than those around me. There used to be a big argument about whether illness and other characteristics and abilities are caused by nature or nurture. Now however a huge new factor has suddenly jumped into the middle of things. If it were up to me I would combine the words, "nanurture," or "nurchurchure," but scientists perhaps wisely are calling it "epi-genetics." There is even talk of mapping out the epigenetic code, a task that would be orders of magnitude tougher than mapping the genetic code.

Epigenetics comes out of Scandinavia where they do what would be done everywhere if we had a lick of sense: they record detailed health records and keep them over many generations. We junk ours after a few decades -- I know that because on a work assessment in the 1980's I was given the job in Chedoke hospital of going through the medical files of the old sanatorium and choosing what to keep and what to toss; this was extremely painful to me, because in my mere minion's opinion it all should have been kept. I would have been happier being forced to shovel gold artifacts, diamonds and pearls into a blast furnace.

Anyway, the researchers with the intact Scandinavian records found out that girls raised in conditions of plenty passed on to their granddaughters a higher incidence of diabetes; similar visitations were passed on from boys raised in various adverse conditions to their grandsons. So, why am I sensitive?

My father's father was apprenticed young in England as a carpenter and painter, and he must have suffered severe chemical exposure because he ended up in later years working part time as a church janitor, and he eventually lost all his hair, was bedridden and died of cancer a few months before I was born. My mother's father, according to family legend, was a soldier in the Great War, and suffered under several mustard gas attacks. For the rest of his life he woke up in the middle of the night screaming. My mother was born in 1916, though, so her genes may not have been damaged if the gas attacks had not yet occurred. I cannot look earlier in his history because that is pretty much all I know about him (there was a divorce after the war ended, though I know he raised another family, most of whom lived to become seniors).

In view of the discoveries of epigenetics, it is interesting to think back on how the grandfather-grandson tie must have affected Shoghi Effendi. His grandfather was, we believe, morally and spiritually perfect, but that does not mean that He was not affected by physical adversity. We know that He very much was, and indeed if he had been invulnerable that would take away from His moral courage. Vulnerability is part of His meaning, his lessons about what perfection is all about. Indeed, reading Dr. Afrukhteh's memoirs I was somewhat surprised to learn that the Master paid careful attention to his health. He discussed it with Afrukhteh at various stages of the latter's medical education, and later hired him as His doctor. I am no expert in medical history, but I was surprised to learn that Afrukhteh checked His cholesterol and found that it was clear. I did not know that medicine even knew about that, and here the Master was, apparently, carefully adjusting his diet to keep it down. Since I read that I have been eating more of what the Master ate, pomegranates, dates and figs.

At any rate, the Master's epi-genome must have been assaulted more than just about anybody in that age of epidemic disease. Not only did He suffer frostbite crossing the mountains and deserts in the family's exile, but he also consciously sought out wherever He lived the sickest and poorest people in the area in order to help them. This must have meant constant exposure seriously damaging areas, and any number of chemical and biological harms. Think of the filthy places in which the poor lived then.

With the Master's intuitive knowledge, He must have been aware of the long term consequences of what He was doing. He must have known what we now know, that the male is the real weaker sex, and that male issue of fathers regularly traumatized are weeded out. For example, fighter pilots, regularly exposed to forces of many gravities, almost always father girls, not boys. Male sperm dies, or is damaged by such conditions. So it happened to the male sons of the Master, none lived past young childhood. They were weakened. Yet Abdu'l-Baha never diminished, even to the last days of His life, giving money to the poor and visiting them in their affliction.

Is it any wonder, then, that Shoghi Effendi turned out sickly from an early age, and died relatively young of a heart ailment? And that he could not conceive issue, male or female, reason unknown? He no doubt suffered the epigenetic consequences of his grandfather's charity and self-sacrifice. True, it was exacerbated by the betrayal of an unfaithful family. But the fact that in spite of all that Shoghi Effendi accomplished so much in his short life, surely here is a example and a lesson for us all.

And there is an epigenetic lesson too. Now that we are getting a better idea of the long term consequences of our actions, is it not time to unscramble the "chaos" that Plato's Socrates talked about at the start of this essay? We must separate out cookery, health and medicine, then harmonize and prioritize them, and in so doing let the soul rule over the body. We spend billions on over-the-counter drugs, on cosmetics and cuisine, and what are all they but mere dressing up the body and food and pretending that they are healthy? Plato rightly called it a form of flattery. And flattery is nothing but lying, lying in a good cause, but lies nonetheless. Surely really being healthy is better than pretending to be! Surely it makes more sense to put our money into that first, and then if something is left over we can buy a little perfume, makeup, cough syrup or have a meal at a high priced restaurant. But for God's sake and our sake, let us do first things first.