Envisioning a ‘Health Turn’: My Last Stage of Work from Age 65-80

-R. Michael Fisher

In spring (April 18), 2017, I will turn 65 yrs old, and begin a new journey back in Canada after 9 years living in the USA. It is not like my journey will be entirely new but the focus will be significantly different. That’s what this blog is about. It has already shifted in the past few months.

Indeed, I’ll be grateful to live to 65, more grateful to live to 80 so I can work just as hard as I have all my life since I became aware of the problems of the Human-Earth relationship in my early teens. I’ll share some autobiographic details of this ‘Health turn’ including a ‘waking up’ to my life purpose and mission. If I live longer than 80, that’s a bonus—yet, I am thinking pragmatically of this next 15 years of life (that is short) as my ‘last stage of work’ in the sense that I’ll likely have good cognitive and physical capacities from the body/mind to keep up with the growth of the soul/spirit which drives me to get up and discipline my life so as to serve some use for a larger cause—that is, beyond merely myself and only those in my close circle of cared relations. It seems that I cannot live a ‘small life.’ I feel called to a ‘great life’ even if others do not recognize that, criticize it, and even if my work will not be appreciated in this life-time—perhaps, recognized only after I am long dead and gone. So be it!

Long ago, in my 20s I knew I had some “discovery” to make in this life-time. It was to be some kind of “cure” or something. I didn’t know details. Eventually, through hard work and study, clarity came. I was to work on the Fear Problem. You might imagine that since late 1989 and diving in to the study of "Fear," in the largest transdisciplinary sense [1], takes one into all kinds of territories of human existence. I love that broad and deep variety of interests that I study. However recently, I'm focusing some of my visions, interests, research, teaching ideas and critiques upon the large domains of DEVELOPMENT & HEALTH and the intimate relationship they have with the nature and role of fear(ism) and fearlessness. It is exciting that Desh Subba and I have just co-authored our first peer-reviewed journal article for Participation magazine, published by the Nepal Participatory Action Network, which specializes in development. It is to be published next week, entitled: “The True Gift of Education for Development: A Fearist Perspective.”

Of course, I have noticed already the ‘gap’ in awareness in the general fields of Development & Health in terms of their discourses, which typically do not recognize (for the most part) the key role that Fear plays in all human activity. The latter point regarding the importance of Fear is made in both my own work on the philosophy of fearlessness [2] and the more recent emergence of work on a philosophy of fearism (or as Desh Subba, the founder of this particular philosophy, likes to write it in capitals—Philosophy of Fearism—the next new philosophy for the 21st century as part of and going beyond the philosophy of existentialism) [3]. If you have followed any of my recent writing on this FMning, you may be asking: How is this ‘health turn’ linked to my writing on feariatry? This will become clearer by the end of this blog.

A Recent Vision of Doing Another Ph.D.

With already five post-secondary degrees (ending with a Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction, UBC 2003), I am excited to possibly doing one more Ph.D. in this 65-80 year age stage of my life—as a kind of ‘kick-starter’ to enhance my effectiveness in contribution to the Development & Health fields. I’ll share what I have been thinking this second Ph.D. would be about, but let me first explain how this new direction has been forming since about 2014. First, the problem of my life has never been that I don’t have ‘good work' to do. It is more that I haven’t found “job” positions that support that work. So, I’ve been un- and under-employed most of the time since 1993. In the summer of 2014 I spent time with Dr. Annette Schultz, a nursing scholar at the University of Manitoba, who was working on a fascinating research project she had funded, whereby it was to take a largely Indigenous perspective on native peoples of Canada and their heart health issues (which, have been recognized as a concern by their own community as well as the mainstream health community). Working on a contract, Dr. Schultz hired me to come up with ways I might be able to help her with one part of the study [4], in particular, I had an integral theory perspective to offer. Eventually this led to intense interest on my part in ‘Health’ in general, applications of worldviews in critical analysis, and, particularly, all done with an Indigenous lens/worldview (as much as possible, i.e., a Two-Eyed Seeing Approach = Indigenous + Western).

At nearly the same time I had been asked by Four Arrows (aka Dr. Don T. Jacobs), an American Indigenous scholar-activist living in Mexico, to write an intellectual biography of his life and work. He’s 70 years old this year. The focus would be on his experience and theories of fear and fearlessness. He also has a strong background and doctorate degree in Health Psychology. I was delighted to work with him on this exciting book [5]. He brought me onto this project because of my expertise in fear and fearlessness, often remarking, “You are the only person I know who really gets my theory CAT-FAWN Connection.” Four Arrows and I, and Subba, at least, know that humanity has a big challenge ahead: to better learn about the nature and role of Fear, or else it will likely be the primary force that brings our species to its close on planet Earth in the not too distant future.   

My next extraordinary privilege was to work with Dr. Elizabeth McGibbon (a member of Dr. Schultz’s team), a nursing scholar-researcher-activist and specialist in critical theory and political economy of Health and Health Policy in Canada. She works as a professor at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. A month ago she contracted me to do some preliminary research for her as she was putting in a SSHRC proposal soon with a working title: “The Social Organization of Health Equity Discourses in Canadian Public Policy.” She was particularly interested in me doing a critical discourse analysis of texts in a sample of Medicine/Health articles that focused on “health equity” (and inequities) from around the world in the past few years. It was very interesting and turned me on even more to Health as a field of study in the next while. When she mentioned she was writing a textbook on Critical Health Studies, my ears perked up and we talked somewhat how this is a new emerging sub-field speciality in Medicine/Healthcare. Now, this is my focus for a next Ph.D.

Critical Health Studies, the little I know of it, is perfect for my interests and temperament, in that it is very interdisciplinary, if not transdisciplinary. I have approached the field of Education and then ‘Fear’ Studies (my own term and idea) that way—broad and deep, and critical. I have started thinking of the 65-80 year period of my life as a seasoned “critic” (capital ‘C’). Really, it fits for me to see myself developing into a Health Critic by profession. Among other ideas, I want to get directly involved in some form with  politics when I get back to Alberta. Where that will take me I don’t exactly know, but then, since the early 1980s after leaving a traditional “job” as schoolteacher, I have never known where my career trajectory was heading for sure. I live ‘on the edge’ that way. I’m a trailblazer. Often I’m completely alone blazing away making new trails where others do not. I am a futurist in that sense. I like to travel ahead of my culture, criticizing it as well; traveling into domains where the future is already starting to emerge and pointing to where my culture ought to be heading if it wants to be sane and sustainable. Oh, I just realized the other day that my futurist perspective is very much like the Indigenous perspective, where Indigenous wisdom says that what you do today ought to take in a responsible awareness of its effects on 7 generations (the future). I have always thought like this since my late teens. I have learned it is very rare in society to think this way—an ethical way.

I’m a life-long learner. I radically trust that following my passion will lead to ‘good’ even if I don’t make a lot of money, gain status and power, and become famous. I want to apply what I know and am learning to good use, even if it is sometimes very theoretical what I do. Point is, I am starting to understand it is okay to claim my identity as a Critic. The following autobiographic sketch will take you through how I became a growing Critic in many different areas and careers, until in 1989 I really settled on being a ‘Fear’ Critic. I criticize near everything I read, hear, watch that involves fear and how people use that term. I also make a distinction between criticism to attack and destroy and good critique, the latter which is what I do for purposes of positive construction.

Before I outline my autobiographical sketch of how I grew into a Critic, let me briefly outline what my next Ph.D. would potentially look like for focus: (a) I would study Critical Health Studies, which is dedicated to improving the way “health” is conceived, using various critical lenses of philosophy and theory; I have always been attracted to fields, like Environmental Studies, Rehabilitation & Disabilities Studies, Educational Studies and to approach them from a critical lens; (b) I would bring the critical lens of a philosophy of fearism (a la Desh Subba) to Critical Health Studies along with critical integral theory (a la Ken Wilber)—and, combining those, and finally, (c) I would want to examine the nature of the discourses on fear in Critical Health Studies field itself as well as Medical/Health literatures, and then offer a ‘new’ up-graded perspective that would match with the human rights agenda of “freedom from fear” declared in the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights (1948); this application to centralize the importance of fear and freedom from fear would fit into the recent critical theorizing and declaration by the World Health Organization (1987) to promote research, theory and applications to attend the deepest root causes of global health inequities—they have declared this as the study of the “social determinants of health” (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, sex, color, geography, class status, etc.) [6]—and, I want to add to those determinants of health the concept of fear (and ‘fear’ and fearism) to improve its effectiveness. The more you look for the way Fear is so influential in health outcomes of all kinds, the more you realize it ought to be not merely part of Psychology but a central part of Health Policy for all nations. Yes, inevitably Fear will be a Political and Cultural issue as much as a Development & Health issues are as well. The recent mass volume of literature on “culture of fear” and “fearism” (starting to increase in Critical Migration Studies literature [7]) are signs that Fear is now already a social determinant of health and well-being, individually and collectively.

Some of you may have been following Subba and my writing, see earlier articles in the FMning on feariatry, which is the way a philosophy of fearism can be brought in to the field of psychiatry, psychology and therapy to improve its effectiveness. However, my next Ph.D. would incorporate feariatry for sure, yet would also go beyond that because it tends to focus on mental health, and Fear plays a much broader role on social health. We need improvements in both these areas to also then integrate with physical health that the field of Medicine specializes in at least in the modern (Western) ways.    

Brief Autobiography of My Interest In Health: A Growing Critic

 I've recently been re-examining my long interest in the area of "Health" and more recently Health Policy and Health and Medical Education. To sketch out this interest, I’ll simply proceed in historical autobiographic order, based on what I can remember and have documented.

(a) My Teen Years: A Critic of Society

Although I have felt fortunate to come from a family of origin with relatively good health. Upon closer critical reflection, I have remembered more. On my father’s side, I and my brother have inherited a latent genetic flaw from my dad’s mother’s side which includes disabilities re: diabetes and early heart disease morbidity for males (my dad died of both at age 54). On my mother’s side, I have inherited post-traumatic stress disorder, as she was severely abused by her father and by the male Nazi solidiers that occupied her homeland (Belgium) in WW-II, when she was in her late teens. As an adult, she suffered multiple physical and mental symptoms of abuse of alcohol, cigarette smoking, pain killers--addictions, anxiety, fear, hypochondia, depression, and finally in old age dementia and paranoid personality disorder. A lot of that was exacerbated by oppression (classism, ethnocentricism, sexism) being an uneducated immigrant, who didn’t speak English well, upon arriving in Canada and needing to work to make ends meet. Despite being raised under conditions of a working-poor class, I have so far been very healthy but I also have learned the lessons from watching my family and chose an alternative more holistic health path. I guess I decided very young that I wanted to be healthier and happier than my parents. I grew to not like how society was prejudiced and treated poor people, of which I was one.

Even before I could talk, my dad had put a fishing rod in my hands. That was his favorite  thing to do on weekends. I learned to fish and observe nature closely because that skill allows you to know where the fish live, sneak up on them, and attract them to the hook and bait. Also, when fish are not biting, I would watch Nature and learn from it. I became a serious field Naturalist by 18-19 yrs old, especially an avid birder. It was sometime around then, that a powerful experience happened that I believe set me on a path to becoming an Environmental Critic, which blossomed in my early 20s. I was in my late teens when we returned from a very successful fishing trip south of the city of Calgary. The ritual was, if you caught fish and killed them, you cleaned them and ate them. Nothing would be wasted. I learned respect for Nature’s gift and sacrifice to feed us. But one day we smelled something awful when we cut open the fish, and then later fried them, the smell was bad. Dad said, "It is oil." These fish had been contaminated by some kind of oil spill in the river. This river we always fished in for years. Then it happened again from a lake we fished. Oil. This was a time of realizing that oil and gas industries were not being careful enough in how they managed their oil mining operations. This only got worse and we also noticed streams being deteriorated by cows walking along them eroding the banks and silting the stream bottoms, and shitting into the creek causing eutrophication. And dad pointed out the run off from barnyards too close to the waters’ edge. I became very sensitive to poor management in the agriculture and oil and gas industry. The question came to me, after I took biology classes in high school (my fav. class) and “pollution” was introduced at one point in the curriculum: What if the fish we had been catching and eating all those years were also contaminated with oil or agricultural pollutants but the dosage of poisons was so small we couldn’t smell or taste it in the flesh of the fish? This bad fish experience spoiled my relationship to fishing and I stopped. It spoiled the pleasure of my family outings as well.

(b) My 20s (20-26 years) as an Environmental & Ecological Critic

There is so much to tell in this decade of my 20s, when I went for my first career by going to college in a two year diploma in Biological Sciences (Ecological Option), NAIT Alberta. I loved learning about Life and becoming a budding scientist; and yet, I was also deeply disturbed by things I was learning and observing. I was learning that humans as a species are not as a whole very respectful of the value of Nature. My first paid job as a “wildlife technician” was working on the environmental impact assessment of a coal strip mine in the Hinton area of the East Slopes of the Rocky Mountains. I saw horrible things the forestry and mining industries were doing and how the government wasn’t regulating it very closely. I learned that people with big money and vested interests not so moral, will lie to hide the facts.

Also, in my home in Calgary, all my favorite natural areas for going birding and Nature walks were deteriorating and often being bulldozed for houses and industries being built with all the growth in urban sprawl. Development was out of control and damaging good environments both for farming and for wildlife. Air pollution due to more highways and cars was coloring the sky yellow-brown and smelled bad. It sickened me inside to see soil, water, air quality being destroyed. I learned to see pollution where most people were blind to see it or merely denied it and accepted it as 'normal.' I was trained, you might say to notice abuse of the land. After, I did my bachelor’s degree in Environmental Biology (and specialized in Ethology—wild animal behavior). I learned to my dismay that there was something very wrong with how human’s generally behaved and had been behaving for at least 10,000 years since early agriculture. I concluded that I would search throughout my life to find out why “Humans were the only species that spoiled its own nest?” That’s when I was a full-blown Environmental Critic and at the same time, though I didn’t know it, I was actually studying how humans make themselves and their environments unhealthy and the massive toll that takes on one’s Quality of Life.

To wrap-up, what is a very complex time in my life beyond what I’ll share here, I was an angry young man, you might say. I had a right to be angry at abuse of any kind. I was angry at illhealth, especially, that which was created by stupidity (that’s how I understood the problem then). Yet, my biological and environmental mentors at the time, helped me to make sense of “why” humans were behaving in such unhealthy ways—it seemed to go against evolution’s drive to produce quality. I learned that Culture is different in its drives than Nature. Culture can be pathological (fear-based). My one mentor told me that if I really wanted to change society for the better, make it more sustainable and sane, I would have to study and understand values and how to change values. I never forgot that, and soon I was studying the nature of worldviews and how that affects values and determines behaviors and health outcomes. The other mentor was even more useful in introducing me in my last year of studies to Environmental Design, where sciences, ecology, and design and architecture are brought together in one synthesis to better plan and design future landscapes and urban environments. I found this absolutely fascinating and when Dr. Val Geist, then introduced me to his textbook when I took his course, I fell in love with the concept of his book—he was searching for a “biological [evolutionary] theory of health” [8]. I have always returned to this book during the decades, and I wrote a book review on it and treasure the wisdom in it, yet to be applied even to this day.

(c) My Late 20s- Early 30s: Education Critic

I had expanded my reading and study to include R. Buckminster Fuller, Rene Dubos, Gregory Bateson and others, who wrote on global health from a new perspective. I read and other radical biologists, deep ecologists, and eco-feminists and finally I took a turn of attitude that if I wanted to make a big difference on the planet, I was going to have to go into education. I would dedicate myself to better educate children before they become adults filled with ‘bad habits’ that bring about environmental destruction and illhealth to just about everything including themselves. I took a BEd. (after) degree to become a Secondary Science teacher and got my first job but ended up teaching many courses to primary and junior grade kids. It was a great learning time, and I also learned how unhealthy the public school system is. But the major turning point was meeting a group of green thinking, sustainability eco-types, and alternative holistic health-types in the community. We formed a conscious learning community called Common Ground, Olds, AB. For eight years I lived with my wife and children in ways that were part of a growing conspiracy to come into a ‘new age’ and a revolution that carried on from the 1960-70s. The world was unhealthy and unsustainable and we had to change the way we did everything or “Life” was going to be very threatened in the near future.

To be short, I turn to one of the books at that time all of us in Common Ground were reading as sort of the ‘bible’ if you will—The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and social transformation in the 1980s (by Marilyn Ferguson). Let me quote her Introduction:

“In the early 1970s, while researching a book [on new research] about the brain and consciousness, I was deeply impressed by scientific findings demonstrating human capacities well beyond our idea of ‘the norm.’ At the same time the social implications of this research were essentially unexamined in science and unknown to the public.” (p. 17)

This was the Human Potential Movement and I loved it. I could see that in the field of Education, there was such a conservative field of knowledge being accessed, from educational policy to curriculum design to pedagogy in the classroom. I wanted more alternatives and broader scope. Children deserved the best knowledge from diverse perspectives, not narrow education that wasn’t fit for the future they were to grow up into and have to manage. I saw ‘bad education’ producing ‘bad kids’ in the sense of kids who were still not respectful of Nature and themselves in health sustainable ways. I had read lots of Environmental Education, and then Critical Pedagogy (Freire) and ideas of emancipation from all oppression grew as my mission. As I leave this era, I was so impressed with how Ferguson (1980) had laid out in her book the chapter on “Healing Ourselves” in which she was showing how the assumptions and worldview (or paradigm) behind Medicine and traditional Healthcare were being revolutionized in the margins of society by this Aquarian conspiracy and human potential movement. She talked of the crisis in health care problems of “iatrogenic illness” (caused by the very medical approach to trying to cure)—and, she talked of the general problem of dehumanization of health care that many in the profession of the mainstream were also critiquing. Then she showed a chart of the “Assumptions of the Old Paradigm of Medicine” on the left-side of the page, and contrasted that on the right-side of the page with “Assumptions of the New Paradigm of Health”—as the latter was “to correct the underlying disharmony causing the problem” (she was talking about holistic health).

The Rest is History: Health Critic & Summary

This health stuff fascinated me and I could have easily taken a path to become a professional in Health in some way. After retiring from school teaching after two years, I became a therapeutic consultant and worked with families and boys/teens in crisis in a facility supported by Social Services. I read voraciously in psychology, social work, family therapy systems, and psychiatry, etc. I almost went fully into this field of health care, and even completed a graduate diploma in Rehabilitation Studies (specializing in Educational Psychology), but I ended up choosing Education in the broadest sense, and much later took graduate degrees in Adult Education and Curriculum & Instruction—while, I was becoming an amateur philosopher in Education and in general life.

Around 1989, while in the midst of all these transitions in career tracks, a much deeper soul purpose track was emerging, of which suffice it to say was when I began to see that fear (Fear, and ‘fear’) were the most important factor contributing to illhealth. How we understood and managed fear was critical, both at the individual and collective level. I then began to be a Fear Critic. This takes me up to today, now it is time to coalesce all my experience and education to become a Health Critic.

The next blog I post will be a beginning articulation of my nascent "Health Manifesto" (Policy), integrating more systematically, much of what I have written above. Thanks for following this. I look forward to dialogue with you and your concerns. Let me know.

***

 END NOTES

1. This really began with the founding of and taking a life-time responsibility for development of the non-profit In Search of Fearlessness Project on planet Earth. I have written on this elsewhere many times since then, and won’t repeat that emergent life-project at this point; suffice it to say, it was/is all about finding, at the individual and collective levels of existence, new pathways and referent guide posts to a healthier, sustainable and ethical way—called “liberation.” My founding of the non-profit In Search of Fearlessness Research Institute (1991-) has been one vehicle to carry out this work. The ‘Fear’ Project, I defined back then, as the oppositional (destructive) tendency and hegemonic condition that humanity will have to struggle to better understand and overcome, in order for fearlessness to become the norm and valued social referent of the ‘good life’ in the future.

2. See a summary of my theory/philosophy in Fisher, R. M. (2010). The world’s fearlessness teaching: A critical integral approach to fear management/education for the 21st century. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

3. So much has been written about this elsewhere, and I will simply say that Subba, from Nepal (living in Hong Kong) has developed the conceptualization of this philosophy based upon experience and study, by which he declares that fear is the primary (not only) basis of all human motivation and existence and it powerfully shapes life like nothing else—and, no other philosophy has given fear this valued position for study and clarification and offering to help us all from suffering that often goes with it when it is in ‘excess’ and unrecognized at the core to our problems, individually and collectively. To see more on this philosophy read, for e.g., Subba, D. (2014). Philosophy of fearism: Life is conducted, directed and controlled by the fear. Australia: Xlibris; and, Fisher, R. M., and Subba, D. (2016). Philosophy of fearism: A First East-West dialogue. Australia: Xlibris.

4. The large grant that Dr. Schultz et al. received was for many projects. The one I worked on, with a team of researchers, involved a systematic survey of the vast medical/health research studies on Indigenous peoples (adults) around the world in the last 10 years. We categorized the studies into four major worldview (types), and then ‘mapped them’ for analysis. Our aim was to show what kind of bias there was in this literature and in the field of medicine/health research, when it comes to Indigenous peoples. I won’t go into details of the findings until an article is published on it, but we recently are presenting an academic paper (one of a few such presentations already) at the International Qualitative Inquiry Conference in Illinois in spring 2017, entitled: “Mapping the Worldviews Shaping Our Knowing and Practices in Healthcare: A Scoping Review of Adult Indigenous Heart Health Literature.” A small spoiler is to say that 95% of the studies were situated within the biomedical or blend of biomedical/social-science worldviews. That’s a big problem if one wants to really address the health inequities of Indigenous peoples, as the medical/health world says it wants to improve.

5. Four Arrows is a professor in leadership at Fielding Graduate Institute in California. He and I have been involved in collaborations since 2007. Our latest venture is to be entitled: Fearless Engagement: The True Story of an Indigenous-based Social Transformer: An Intellectual Biography of Four Arrows (to be published by Peter Lang, 2018). It was also somewhat uncanny, that Four Arrows latest book is founded on his “point of departure theory” of worldviews—a topic I am very interested in from working with Dr. Schultz, but also I have been reading and studying on “worldviews,” off and on, since my 20s. It continually fascinates me. See Four Arrows (aka Jacobs, D. T.) (2016). Point of departure: Returning to a more authentic worldview for education and survival. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Four Arrows also wrote the Foreword (West) for Fisher & Subba (2016) and supports this emergent philosophy of fearism approach.

6. According to Penman-Aguilar et al. (2016), “Since the 1980s, there has been a growing call for nations across the globe to address health inequities”  a seminal paper by Margaret Whitehead (1992) “created international urgency for governments and all sectors of society to attend to differences in health that have been found to be associated with social position” (p. 33). Penman-Aguilar, A., Talih, M., Huang, D., Moonesinghe, R., Bouye, K., & Beckles, G. (2016). Measurement of health disparities, health inequities, and social determinants of health to support the advancement of health equity. Journal of Public Health Management Practice, 22(1 Supp.), S33-S-42.

7. I have begun research on this and hope to write and publish a journal article in 2017-18. The working title is: “Fearism, Fortress Mentality, and the Dialectic of Fearlessness in Global Migration Studies and the Biopolitics of Fear.”

8. My two mentors at the University of Calgary in my undergrad years, Dr. Tim Myers; then Dr. Val Geist. See Geist, V. (1978). Life strategies, human evolution, environmental design: Toward a biological theory of health. NY: Springer-Verlag.

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Replies

  • Thank you for your beautiful and inspiring work, Michael. Best wishes to you on the next leg of your journey.
    Dona Reese
  • Hi Michael,
    Love your life and that you are a life-time learner.
    Looking forward to some chats in the NY when you are back in cowtown.
    Who knows we might even find a good project to collaborate on making social change, fearlessly.

    Best, warmly, Dan

  • My sis responded:

    "Wow !! Wow!!  You continue to amaze me at your drive and belief. Good on you. Very proud of your strength and courage to keep moving forward with your beliefs.
    I always love to read about your early life. Always brings memories back for me as well."
This reply was deleted.