Conflict and the immune system

This is part of a series on conflict that I am going to work on over the summer. Other pieces include: when conflict feels like death, on conflict and eldering, on conflict and apocalypse, and more.

For about six years I have been trying to write a piece about the immune system. Each essay I start comes from a different direction: the immune system as a way of understanding militarism. The immune system as a way of understanding relationships. I am fascinated by the part of our physicality that western medicine has named immunity. Western narratives about the immune system mirror how we have learned to hold difference, conflict, disagreement and attack. So, here is my next attempt. If you are reading this, then the eighth time is the charm. 

What we call immunity is not about a physical location in the body or even a single specialized system. Instead it is a conversation about relationships. What gets called the immune system is the part of us that negotiates between the “me” and the “not me,” or the “us” and the “not us.” 

Western medicine has asserted a framework that largely assumes we have to assess these encounters for how much they are - or are not - a threat. And this is called immunity and like anything else, it is a story. How other medical traditions talk about the body and how the body navigates and is in relationship to the world outside the body is not the same. Most medical systems other than western medicine look at the body as one part of a connected whole, where health is about balance with the forces of life within and outside of the self. I am not anti-western medicine but I deeply believe that western medicine is incomplete. 

Western anatomy has separated our response to threat from physical aspects that are about attraction and longing, about encountering something pleasurable that we want to learn from. But all of these are aspects of how we relate to the “not me.” Here is an example: oxytocin is called the “feel good” hormone because that is one of its qualities. Oxytocin is what releases when you are turned on or have moved through something emotionally difficult with a beloved and now have that kind of high that comes from getting through it. It is also what releases when you band together with those you feel connected with to take down somebody else. Oxytocin supports love and intimacy and it can also support hatred and bias. 

Every single part of your body has the capacity to assess what is self and what is not self and then to take action or no action once that assessment has been made. We were taught how to assess the world around us by other living kin, the trees and the soil. The trees taught your white blood cells, a central part of what is called the immune system, how to exist. Bird song and the vibration of moving water shapes your limbic system’s capacity to rest. There is no border between “not immune system” and “immune system” anymore than there is a border between the land that voted for Trump and the land that voted for Sheinbaum or Carney. There is no border between “us” and “not us,” and there also is a space of difference between “us” and “not us.” This is true without contradiction. A literal both/and.

The concept of immunity is political. It has always been political. Long before it was applied to our bodies, the word “immunity” was a legal term. Its oldest traceable meaning would be “to not change/go/move” but by the time we got to Rome’s empire, the word meant “not paying a share” or "exempt from public service, untaxed; unburdened, not tributary." Then in the 15th century, just as the people who live in Western Europe were encountering a world on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and figuring out what they could take from it, the meaning began to shift to something simpler: “free, exempt.”  But free or exempt from what?

The earliest recording of taxation occurs in about 3000 BCE in Egypt. Called the “Following of Horus,” these were the monies paid when the Pharaoh toured his kingdom assessing what people were growing and building. He took a percentage of what was there, most often through grain or goods, to be used to build things like the pyramids at Giza, irrigation networks and new cities. Over the last 5,000 years, every time there has been an Empire, there has been some form of taxation, with the earliest examples found in China, Mesopotamia, Babylon, Greece, and Persia. 

In imperial regimes, paying taxes is often the action that divides the line between enslavement and freedom. Taxation is the responsibility expected by a citizen in exchange for the benefits of living under Imperial protection. Under this system, you pay for your freedom.  For those who can’t afford this freedom, then what they have to give is their body. In the earliest system of enslavement, the body was a tithe to the empire. This was not the system of chattel slavery that evolved in the United States, where enslavement was considered an essential part of a body, first indigenous bodies and then Black bodies. Under chattel slavery, enslavement follows the family line down to the descendants. This was not the case in the earlier systems. In these earlier systems, exchanging your body for labor is what you did when you had been conquered or were too poor to pay taxes. It’s not that different now as poverty and conquest increases the likelihood that your body and life will be an object to be studied, controlled, disciplined and punished.

Immunity as a legal concept emerged to say that sometimes a person is exempt from all of this: exempt from paying taxes and exempt from enslavement. Exempt, an old word that means “free from being taken from.” Immunity is a way of saying that a person can have all of the benefits of Empire without any of the responsibility. These days we also call this entitlement, a word tied to the concept of private property where a person “owns” land because their name is written on a deed. Exempt from imperial costs, entitled to the benefits of ownership.

In the present moment, if you are legally considered immune, it means you can’t be prosecuted for a crime.  You can’t be held to account for your action or inaction.  For example, you can’t sue the President for actions they took as president; to judges for their legal decisions, and you can’t sue leaders or officials from countries other than the US. Your legal spouse is immune from having to prosecute against you. As a witness in a trial, if you freely give testimony then you are immune from being prosecuted for that testimony. Journalists are immune from being prosecuted for reporting on illegal activities without sharing the names of their sources and nonprofit organizations are immune from paying taxes. 

Then the concept of “immunity” was applied to the body. Immunity in the physical sense seems to refer to a body that is exempt or free from the impact of the world around them. Free from the impact of germs and microbes and other people’s pain. This is the goal, isn’t it? The idea that if you are immune, then your body is somehow protected from the slings and arrows of other lives, whether people or pollen. This is ironic as our bodies learned how to protect ourselves from our exposure and co-evolution with trees and water and soil and a whole range of plants that get called medicinal but are really just kin. We are strong because we have learned how to let the stranger in and then to adapt to what the stranger brings. That is still how our bodies work but the concept of immunity means something else.

In western medical teaching, the immune system is only presented as what the body does when threatened, when its boundaries are breached. This framework focuses on the most extreme ways that the body might protect itself to be exempt from the actions of the outside world and, if the outside world gets in, eject what it sees as dangerous. The concept is militaristic. And it is divisive, focusing on separation as protection, immunity taught like a bubble surrounded a person. Immunity means safety means being exempt from the pain and struggle of the other lives around us. No taxation, no enslavement, just your home with a door that locks and no need to pay attention to what happens outside, even if our neighbors are screaming. We are immune to it.

There is no such thing as an immune system. There is no such thing as a standard immune system or a way that your and my and their immune systems operate. What is called the immune system is as varied as each one of us. Your immune system is just another way of talking about evolution, it is shaped by what you inherited at birth, and I don’t just mean genetics. It is shaped by everything you have ever experienced, by the land where you live, by the fact of disaster or ease, by the people who are close to you and far away, by the animals you live with, by what your ancestors did and didn’t experience and I don’t just mean your bloodline, by the shape of solar radiation and by everything else. What is called your immune system is nothing more than your body’s wisdom about what it has experienced during your lifetime and what your ancestors’ experienced and the predictions made as a result. Your immune system is not about being exempt from the impact of life, it is about the wisdom that comes from being fully engaged with life. 

The way that our bodies respond to potential harm is a significant and important part of how we relate to the “not us” but it is only one part of something much larger. How we assess and respond to harm is far more complex than a single story. Our bodies have evolved multiple ways to be in relationship to harm across many generations. We have innate ways - called innate immunity - and adaptive ways - called adaptive immunity.  Innate means that it is always here. Unchanging. Adaptive means the opposite, this part of the system changes to meet the moment. And as is always the case with bodies, not all bodies have this in the same way. But the pattern of innate and adaptive threads across the collective of all of our bodies.

The innate parts of our immune system are our skin which is a barrier between us and the world, the mucous in our mouths and noses which makes it hard for elements to pass through, the acid in our stomach which kills what has not evolved with us to move into our intestines, our microbiome which is the part of our guts that was created by the many parts of the land that created us and that creates our food and which does not let things pass that are completely unfamiliar (lactose intolerance anyone?), inflammation which is what happens when something DOES get in and then white blood cells, the children of the phytoncides created by trees, come in and destroy or eject them (sneezing, for example). There are scores of types of these and included in the types are dendritic cells which basically act as the storytellers about what is happening so that we become wiser from what we have experienced. Also the innate part of our system, which is not how immunity is described, is our capacity to experience pleasure, to know relationships are good for us when they are, to discern when someone is sad or upset and then reaching out to meet them. They include every capacity we have to care and connect, this innate part of us that helps us build an experience of life that we want to protect and cherish. 

The adaptive part of the system is as complex as the innate system. It includes a multiplicity of ways that the body responds to the unexpected, communicating rapidly from one part of the self to the other. The adaptive part of this system also knows how to cut its losses, meaning when it sees that it has lost a fight, it works to mercy kill the part of the body that has been overwhelmed. This happens all of the time in small ways that you are unaware of. We only see it when the result is the loss of a finger (hypothermia) or a limb (loss of blood and nutrition.) And it also includes our capacity to shift our moods, turn quickly in response to an unexpected crisis or call for help and a thousand other ways that we adapt to strengthen relationships and connection and care. To not include this in a conversation about the immune system is to create a military that is separate from the systems that care in ways that are dangerous. Just as they are at the level of the State.

The adaptive system doesn’t only adapt to expel or destroy, it adapts to learn and to grow. This is how vaccines work, a thousands year old West and Eastern African system of care that was stolen by western medicine and claimed as a British discovery. Vaccines, or inoculations, support the adaptive part of our immune system, as do the plant medicines that evolved alongside us. I think of us this when I think of the cultural meaning behind the Italian word “protezione,” which is protection in English. In English, the word draws the same kind of image as the concept of an immune system, this bubble that prevents what is inside from feeling the shitty shittiness that is outside. But in Italian, as it has been taught to me, particularly in southern Italian teachings, protezione is not about protecting but about shoring up. Sometimes hard things happen in life, this word says, so we shore each other up so that we are steadier and stronger and more able to adapt to what rises when it rises.

The immune system is memory work. And contrary to what the word “immunity” implies, it is not about being exempt from the dangers and shifts of the world around us, it is about how we engage with and learn from the world. It is about willing to be impacted, to have our bodies need to adapt and change to how the outside comes to the inside. And then care if how we shore each other up to meet what happens when it happens.

Immunity is the memory and practice of relationships. Like all memories, it is shaped by the past and, when integrated, it is the basis of wisdom. It is not a separation strategy but an integration strategy. Which is why, all of these words later, I want to talk about conflict. Because as pain is the signal to the individual body that something is out of balance, conflict is the signal to the collective body of the same thing.

Where do you think your understanding or experience of discomfort with another person came from? Most of us spend a lot of time talking about what we witnessed with our parents and from the people around us and that is all true, but the reason I am writing this piece is because it is so much deeper than that. Once the concept of empire emerged, or the fact that a set of people can claim more than their share of what is our interconnected lives, then every aspect of what connection means began to change. The word “empire” is a very honest word. Its oldest meaning is to produce or procure. That is the purpose of empire: to procure more than what was had before from places that are not your home. And when I say this is ancient, it is ancient, but it has not been part of our species forever.

The first evidence of a hominid engaging in ritual was from 800,000 BCE where there is evidence of red ochre used in a ceremonial way. Red ochre is still found in rituals across the earth, being applied to bodies, to stone, to animals and to items that have been created. The first evidence of fire was from about 400,000 BCE - yes, I love that there is evidence of ritual before our capacity to control fire. The first evidence of art making is jewelry from 300,000 BCE and that is about when homo sapiens entered the chat. We started wearing clothing and building beds with plants that repel insects about 200,000 BCE. We started making tools and gathering food from the ocean which means building technologies to catch fish and other creatures well before we began to migrate from the African continent. And by “we,” loves, I don’t just mean us homo sapiens. I mean our hominid cousins, Neanderthal and Denisovan and more. In 40,000 BCE, us homo sapiens began to become the primary hominid branch and, at the same time,  this is when the first signs of social inequality were found. The first evidence of large-scale warfare - not empire, just a big ass battle - is from about 13,000 BCE. It is around 8,000 BCE - 792,000 years AFTER we first showed evidence of ritual - that we began to build walled cities. This is when some of the microorganisms and diseases that we live with began to emerge. It’s when we first we began to domesticate food, in multiple places across the planet, all at the same time. It wasn’t until 3,000 years later, around 5,000 BCE, that the first signs of imperialism showed up, those battles extending past the walled cities to take over other walledl cities, as well as the first evidence of torture, of us becoming the species we are today. It’s been about 7,000 years since we became a species with the capacity to take more than what is ours to tend. And then about 3,000 years ago, after imperialism had been around for about 4,000 years, a bunch of Roman legal scholars created the concept of immunity in order to ensure that some people don’t have to deal with its impact.

Pause. Don’t try to understand this right away, just feel into it. What does this tell you about how you and your kin have learned to navigate conflict? And by “your kin,” I am asking you to think as a species for a moment, not a specific cultural group. And by learned, I don’t mean directly taught, a teacher or parent sitting down and explaining things to you. I mean absorbed over generations, the fact that it is possible to take more and that the best you can hope for is to be protected from all of this taking.

The human species is an ecosystem, just like every other living being. This means that while the history above covers multiple continents, it doesn’t cover all humans. There are human communities who have built protocols, cultural practices to ensure that their children have something that tempers this capacity for violence. Recently, I was listening to an Ojibwe elder tell Nanabozho stories. Nanabozho, also Nanabush and lots of other names, shows up in Anishinaabeg stories as a teacher, a trickster, and more. The story I listened to was the story of the gift of fire. The story describes how a bunch of greedy spirits stole the fire from the people and so the people were cold. Nanabozho found where the fire was being kept and when the spirits were fighting among themselves, got the fox, the squirrel and the bear to bring the fire back to the people. I am not going to tell the story here as it deserves to be told because it is not mine to tell, but as I was listening to the details I kept noticing the values embedded in this story: taking more than your fair share is wrong, the animals are our kin and can help us, even the most powerful as in the spirits can sometimes do wrong things and have to be brought back to balance. Nanabozho stories carry many teachings like this, teachings about how we treat the land and are part of the land, stories about humility and what to do in moments of conflict and how to manage our egos and pride. I thought about what it would be like to be a child growing up with this story of fire, hearing it more than once and then, becoming an adult sitting in front of multiple fires. I thought about how each time the fire was there, burning in front of me, I would remember the stories I had heard which means I would remember the values I was taught and the person I strive to be.  All of the Nanabozho stories, as well as many others, are like that, connected to the land that we see every day so that the land becomes part of our memory of who we are and who we want to be. Values, then, are not abstract but are as alive as the kin that live alongside us. I compared this with the stories that I heard as a child: hero stories like in Greek and Roman mythology that eventually, for children in the present moment, became Star Wars. These stories are always, in some way, about good versus evil but in a heroic way. This, say these stories, is what is important: to become the exceptional one who rises above everything else to fight the good fight and win. These are not stories about humility but about rising above and becoming something special. They are about magic powers that are either the stuff of fairy tales or science fiction, implying that the Force is the stuff of fantasy.

Again, pause. Notice this. How do you think this impacts your approach to conflict, to those moments when someone is angry at you or you are angry at them? How does it shape what feels like fairness to you?

What the history of conflict teaches me, these seven thousand years of knowing how to take more so that our neighbors suffer, is that us homo sapiens have this capacity. We just do. We have the capacity to separate from the interconnected natural rhythm of life and to accrue what we want despite its impact on others. Whales and elephants and dolphins who have similar complex intellectual capacities don’t do this. It seems like it’s just us. 

What makes our people different across the earth is not about our capacity for greed but how we teach our children to manage this capacity. How much we tell ourselves the truth about this capacity and about the excuses we make to justify this taking. How we build protocols into our daily lives - or don’t - that prevent us from giving in to that part of ourselves or, when it rises as it will, from being accountable for how we have stepped out of the web of relationship and chosen individual protection. This is all about taking seriously our capacity for living in contradiction, defending our choices, and working hard to be immune from the impact of our actions and from the pain that is around us. I use the word “us” again on purpose because this is about a species capacity. Maybe you were raised as part of a people who have good protocols. Maybe your people had good protocols but the ravages of global capitalism, the internet and the marketing of luxury as entitlement means that the protocol is wavering. That is for you to tell the truth about to yourself and your kin.

Much of what we teach each other about conflict is about how we deal with it when it is happening. This is necessary. It is important to learn and practice the skills of communication, of centering yourself, of listening and of demonstrating care help deeply when moments are tight and twisted. But working on conflict is more than that.  

When the immune system is not “working,” our medicine diagnoses it and then prescribes patches and fixes. Public health teaches that what we eat, how much we sleep and the stress in our lives impacts our health, but that does not translate to a commitment to the systemic change needed to ensure that all people have enough: healthy food, clean water, safe place to sleep and so on, even as some people working in public health try to do this. It does not translate to direct confrontation of the pharmaceutical industry's impact on the lands it steals medicine from or the fact that most medical technology continues to be experimented on vulnerable populations in exchange for money to support their survival. As long as we are not centering the fact that all life is interconnected and everything impacts everything else, we are in danger of leaning into our capacity for protecting mine at the expense of yours.

We work with conflict in the same way. It’s a patch and fix system, rather than a commitment to building the protocols embedded in the world around us, which will always be the natural world, that help us to remember, and not just with our awareness but with our gut, that how we exist in the web of life directly impacts how well we get along. We are part of a web of life where there is no immunity, there is only learning from the impact we have on each other. We can’t protect each other from conflict and by the time conflict rises, it is only a symptom of something deeper. 

Conflict, like pain, is a signal that we are out of balance. And being out of balance isn’t just about how you change what is happening in your individual body, as though an individual body can be separated from the larger context. The rebalancing can be local - a misunderstanding between two people that is cleared up with a direct conversation - but sometimes what is out of balance is larger than that. I think about this every time I work in rooms where the histories of the greatest violence in this country are held in our bodies and we are all in different positions in relation to those histories. And no amount of political education and organizing history will make any one of us immune to this. These are just true things, they circulate among us in the same way that pollen and the flu and humidity swirl within and between our bodies.

What would an innate system look like for conflict tending? What about an adaptive system? Maybe the innate system is the fact of our instinct; the way that our gut tightens or we get a tight feeling in our heart when we encounter someone who is not telling the truth to us. Maybe the innate system are the values that we are raised with since birth that teach us how to assess the world and how to encounter the stranger or the friend who suddenly shifts how they are with us? Innate systems include the ways that a community celebrates itself, feeds and nourishes the bonds between its members, and builds a sense of mutual accountability through mutual respect and care. An innate system includes the feeling of being part of something, of being safe and loved by those around us. Another innate system would be the deep respect that we have for life and the way that it acts as a modifier when moments of rage rise up and we want to strike out. It’s also the way a community or family has safety plans in place, practices that are about how we show up in unexpected crises or threats. This would include having already talked through and decided how we act when someone is not willing to be accountable and continues to cause harm. I think about shunning practices that show up in a variety of cultural groups around the earth. Shunning is what happens when someone deeply breaks a community’s values and so are then expelled, just as our body does to a germ or microbe it can’t work with. Generation Five, one of the birthing grounds for transformative justice, was in the process of gathering stories about communities who found ways to hold a perpetrator of child sexual abuse accountable without calling the police, recognizing that for families of color in particular, when the state steps in, a wounded family is likely to experience further harm. Innate systems are what most of us don’t have when dealing with conflict because these are practices, agreements and commitments for how we are going to be together and then what we will do when our community commitments are broken or harmed. In the United States, the innate systems that most people rely on is the gun in their gun locker. This is the military view of the immune system, where the only response to any perceived threat is to blast them away, to be exempt from the complexities of life and other people’s pain.

Adaptive approaches to conflict are as varied and constantly changing as life itself. Adaptive approaches depend on having innate systems in place because the innate systems are the steadiness while the adaptive is what you do when elements of the steadiness don’t work. For groups of people considering conflict, adaptive strategies depend on our capacity to trust each other as we orient ourselves to an unexpected situation and adapt to it. And as the body has shown us, a primary key in all of this is communication. At REP, while the hotline was running, what we taught in the earlier days was to have groups of three people responding to a crisis, particularly when there was conflict involved. This would enable two people to separate and work with the two different factions and have a third who is moving between, enabling communication. Just like the adaptive part of our system. Adaptive systems are knowing who to call when what is happening is beyond what our innate system can address. Adaptive systems depend on knowing each other, being able to quickly say, you step in here because you have shared experience, speak Ukrainian, have a bigger body, are an elder, and on and on. Adaptive systems are also spiritual systems and self-aware systems. They include our capacity to notice that we are triggered by something and that our response to a situation is much bigger than the situation allows. This includes our capacity to suddenly shift from perceiving ourselves as in danger to realizing we are not and then being accountable and relational about what has taken place.

Our bodies have had at least 300,000 years to practice and build our innate and adaptive responses. More than that if you consider we have been practicing since we were single celled organisms and first evolved the capacity to move away from what might hurt us. There is a reason why our ancestors, in assessing how we protect and grow and thrive, evolved our first instincts to be instincts about relationship and connection: our capacity to turn towards who supports and loves us, to nuzzle towards what we need, and to feel the support of the weight of the earth.

What we call conflict work can lean on these hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. The blueprint is here, just as it is for everything else. What we call conflict work starts way before a moment of conflict rises. It is not about what we do but about who we are - together as well as apart. There is a reason why so many of us can’t tell the difference between abuse and disagreement and conflict and harm. Attending to conflict is as much about the spiritual and cultural basis of our communities and families as it is about the strategies we use to deescalate a moment of tension. And, in both the individual body and community, when things are out of balance, the systems designed to keep balance don’t always know how to act. So we get outsize responses and community breakdowns and horizontal hostility in the collective system and autoimmune attacks and too many free radicals in the individual system.

There is no such thing as immunity, there are only different shapes of impact. No one should be exempt from the impact of other life around them. This doesn’t mean we don’t support our bodies and each other to protect when protection is necessary, but we weave that protection into the way that we love and care. It is not separate.  If your people have built a world based on the concept of immunity, whether the protection is money or private property or the police, then trust me, just like the cell that closes down to guard its insides from the outside, you are already dying.

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