We have constructed a world for which we ourselves were not constructed. And, knowing not the place from whence we came, we mistake now for eternity.
Does the street pigeon know it’s a street pigeon? Or does it just think it’s a pigeon?
For an incomprehensibly long expanse of time, the body was our species’ only tool for procuring its means of survival. Intense and highly varied physical demands were placed on our ancestors from birth to death as they hunted, gathered, fought and fled. Consider the complexity of physical problem solving required to traverse natural terrain at speed while hunting prey, or fleeing from predators, in coordination with an array of other upright apes. Imagine the diversity of sensory input and motor output during such efforts, and the absolute necessity of both absorbing and appropriately responding to every available piece of environmental information – sounds, smells, sights – in order for the hunt or escape to be successful. Obesity, short-sightedness, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular dysfunction, poor spatial and kinaesthetic awareness, fragile knees, immobile hips, lower back pain and upper body strength deficits would have been beyond maladaptive in such situations. Lack of physical robustness and competence would have posed a severe survival threat to early humans at the level of both the individual and the group. Not being able to hold one’s own in the domain of physicality would have been simply unacceptable, if not evolutionarily impossible.
Undulating landscapes peppered with low tree branches, half-buried rocks, shrubbery of varied density and all sorts of other creatures offer a stark contrast to the straight lines of the stock-standard city street found in every variant of advanced human civilisation on earth today. The juxtaposition between our bodies and theirs is surely equally dramatic. We can only assume that prehistoric humans experienced their embodiment in a radically different manner than we do ours. What has made possible such a drastic transformation in human physicality?
The answer is innovation. Human beings have always survived by innovating. Our lineage first distinguished itself from all others with the development of tools and techniques designed to enhance the potency of the human body. Lacking the sharpest claws, the thickest fur, or the strongest jaws, Homo sapiens crafted spears and axes, fashioned clothing, and acquired skills in the preparation of food that allowed it to transcend these physical limitations. Our interaction with reality became mediated by primitive technological practices that saw human artefacts inserted into the space between our bodies and the world. We discovered that we could protect ourselves from the natural world by literally distancing our vulnerable physical frame from the threats it posed.
This unique ability to engage with reality through increasingly complex tools plays the leading role in the story of human civilisation. But for early humans, such innovations functioned always only as extensions of the body. Arms were made longer and sharper with spears, skin was made more resilient with clothing, and jaws were made more efficient by cooking food before eating it. Although the human mode of interacting with the world changed radically with these technological upgrades, the body on this side of the interaction and the world on that side of it both remained fundamentally unchanged.
The next quantum leap in human civilisation emerged when our attention shifted from surviving today to surviving tomorrow. Despite our powers having grown significantly with the invention of basic tools that enhanced the otherwise relatively limited abilities of our bodies, we remained no match for the forces of nature. We still subsisted at the whims of the natural world, which could send a cyclone or drought to strike us down at any time no matter how many spears and coats were crafted. Then we discovered that we could use tools to upgrade not only our own body, but also our environment. Like beavers building dams, we started crafting uniquely human habitats in an attempt to make the world predictable enough to guarantee the survival of both individual and species now and into the future.[1]
The increasingly artificial environment we constructed for ourselves demanded increasingly little of the human body. This process really began in earnest with the domestication of animals and, more broadly, the Agricultural Revolution. Food was no longer hunted and gathered, but raised and grown. The nomadic life of our antecedents was supplanted as we built permanent dwellings, moved indoors and hunkered down. Forests were razed, land was levelled, fields were tilled, seeds were sown and crops were harvested. Working the land entailed a new suite of physical tasks, many of which were outsourced to animals – horses for transporting people and goods, oxen for ploughing fields, dogs for protecting crops. The animal’s role was, of course, one of pure labour. And although plenty of human labour was still involved, the human being’s modus operandi had started to become primarily cognitive. Whereas athleticism had surely been a prerequisite for success in hunting, wise planning and sensible decision making were what made for success in farming.
Animals were good labourers but they brought with them all the familiar deficits of a biological system. They needed to be fed and cared for, they could harbour disease, the potential output borne of their labour had an inevitable natural ceiling, and they invariably died. This problem was solved by the Industrial Revolution, which used mechanical technology to transcend the limits of biology. Machine labour replaced animal labour as reins and whips were superseded by cogs and buttons. The physical competence demanded of humans adopting the industrial mode of life was reduced to new lows as people adapted to the amenities offered by large-scale cities, which were able to mechanise previously laborious tasks with increasing efficiency. Our brains continued to do progressively more as our bodies did progressively less.
The zenith of this evolution was the Digital Revolution. The desk job emerged and then flourished with the rise of the screen as the role of most human bodies in the production of goods and services was reduced to thumbs and forefingers (hence ‘digital’?), whose task was to tap away from nine to five while the rest of the body did as little as possible. Productivity shot to the moon as the human mind strived to completely untether itself from the limitations of flesh and bone. By escaping the inherent liabilities of matter and moving to ‘the cloud’, a whole new array of products became available, many of which were scalable ad infinitum, leading to levels of wealth never before seen or imagined. The struggle for survival became a struggle no more for a far greater number of human beings than ever before.
The tale of human civilisation should be read, in many respects, triumphantly. We began as one animal species among many struggling for survival. We are becoming, now, an animal that (perhaps rightly) shirks at calling itself as such, has developed near-complete control over the earth’s resources and has the power in its hands to destroy that earth or even attempt to leave it. Too often the successes of our species are overshadowed by a naïve nostalgia for a forgotten past where a lifespan of three decades was par for the course and human ambition could barely stretch beyond plans for the next meal.[2]
The fact, however, is that the human body evolved under the environmental conditions encountered by our distant ancestors, and it remains adapted to those conditions. The speed of cultural and technological evolution far outstrips that of biological evolution; the human body is now what it was then. And, having evolved for eons in environments demanding an unimaginable breadth and depth of physical aptitude, we now find ourselves in a largely artificial environment from which every possible movement challenge has been very deliberately subtracted. One can successfully navigate any modern city without ever touching the ground, encountering a sloped surface, squatting below parallel, moving one’s spine or lifting one’s arms overhead. The terrain is strictly predictable and any unpredictability – a slippery surface, an uneven set of steps, an elevated platform without a guardrail – becomes grounds for litigation. We have thoroughly flattened the physical environment, giving rise to a concomitant flattening of our physicality.
If my apartment is too small for a dog, is it not also too small for me?
Put bluntly, the human body is profoundly maladapted to the habitat we have constructed for ourselves. New norms of luxury and comfort have made diseases of abundance more dangerous than those of scarcity for most human beings today. More people are now at risk of eating to death than starving to death.[3] The situation is one of evolutionary mismatch; the human organism must encounter physical challenges in order to function optimally but the environments we traverse are stripped of all such challenges. We have become profoundly disembodied as a consequence.
Most solutions offered to the problem fail to comprehend its depth. They plug one hole after another, seeking piecemeal remedies to our ailments while chronically neglecting to address the issue as a whole. Each new trend in health and fitness emerges as an attempt to resolve one aspect of the incompatibility between the natural world in which we evolved and the artificial world in which we now live, proffering reductionistic solutions to a holistic problem. Our ancestors faced famine so we implement intermittent fasting protocols. Our ancestors encountered inclement weather so we practise cold exposure. Our ancestors undertook days-long persistence hunting efforts so we do cardiovascular conditioning exercises. Our ancestors spent hours each day gathering wild fruits and vegetables so we lift weights. Despite this patchwork of correctives, however, our daily lives remain fundamentally at odds with the expectations of our bodies.
Don’t give me vitamin D and tell me it’s the sun.
Why can we not see the forest for the trees? Having developed technologies that could replicate certain functions of the human body, we seemingly came to conceive of the body in terms of those technologies. We built irrigation systems, then said the heart is like a pump. We built automobiles, then said the body is like an engine. We built computers, then said the brain is like a processor. Food is fuel, exercise burns energy, and sleep recharges us. We created tools and used them to transform the world. Then the tools and the world transformed us back. And we somehow forgot ourselves in the process.
We are not machines; we are complex biological systems. And our physical structure emerges at birth expecting to be exposed to the extensive movement demands confronted by our hunting and gathering forebears. Can we really expect no negative consequences to stem from reducing such complexity to finger clicking and thumb tapping? Or for those consequences to be resolved with 30-minute workouts three times per week?
More exercise is, of course, one option. But the ‘exercise’ attitude toward physical training is stuck in the world of cost-benefit analyses, bang-for-your-buck messaging and means-ends reasoning. 30-day fat-loss challenges, 10 minutes for six-pack abs, and the only two exercises you need to get your middle splits. Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. Studies emerge proving benefits for health, longevity and cognitive performance. Exercises are to be done in order to optimise for such benefits, betraying the underlying assumption that training is worthwhile only insofar as it can give us something else. The body is valued in terms of its utility, but not for its own sake – a ‘good’ body being one which increases my likelihood of finding a mate, decreases my chances of dying prematurely, and stays healthy enough to allow my brain to continue doing the real work. Do this, get that. There is, however, no three-easy-steps-to-become-a-good-father tutorial (I hope). And just as a transactional relationship formed with another person – one based solely on what they can do for us – is fundamentally deficient and doomed to failure, so too is a transactional relationship with one’s own body.
Another option is movement practice. The movement approach tackles head-on the lack of environmental complexity at the root of the disembodiment dilemma. Accepting that our world no longer forces complex physical challenges upon us, the movement practitioner chooses to face them voluntarily, acknowledging that what we need above all is not better cardio, stronger muscles, thicker bones or less fat, but greater movement complexity. The orientation is toward a diversity of movement similar to that experienced by our ancestors – brachiating, wrestling, moving close to the ground, striking, climbing, interacting with a wide range of objects, dancing, navigating chaotic movement scenarios – while allowing the practitioner to remain embedded in the modern world, rather than demanding an escape from it. Movement practice is not intended as one supplement among many; if done right, it is the wholefood of physical training.
The movement perspective also represents a shift away from the question of what ‘my’ body can do for ‘me’ and toward relating with embodiment on its terms. It means engaging in one’s physical practice with full awareness of the embodied experience, rather than training merely for the benefits of ‘having’ this or that kind of body. To be sure, plenty of so-called movement practitioners fail to access this quality of awareness, while plenty of people engaging in other forms of physical practice succeed. The difference with movement practice, however, is that the focus is explicitly on the act of moving itself, and on doing so not in the interests of a future performance or competition – or for weight loss, muscle gain or anything else – but for the sake of movement per se. So running on a treadmill while watching television or ruminating about the day just gone becomes running through bushland while being completely absorbed in the sensations, emotions and sensorimotor processes involved in the motion of running itself. The movement is thus performed not ‘with’ the body but ‘as’ the body.
In moments of real practice, mental chatter falls away and one’s awareness is completely absorbed by the movement. We feel this to some extent when we achieve a so-called ‘flow state’ when playing sport (which is precisely why we play sport). While in such a state, nothing appears in the theatre of consciousness that does not pertain to the current sensorimotor experience. It’s not that the mind is somehow transcended but, rather, that one’s cognitive attention is utterly subsumed by the physical experience. Mind and body are united. But then the game ends, the ‘flow’ is broken and our being is fragmented once more as the mind-body duality reasserts itself. Movement practice allows us to cultivate the experiential union of mind and body as our default mode, rather than something only to be encountered in those rare moments of flow. Fragmentation thereby becomes the exception instead of the rule.
Each radical step forward in human civilisation has reflected an attempt by the mind to transcend the limits of the body. But we are of this world, even as our brightest minds strive to take us beyond it. Despite our attempts to abstract it out of existence, the body remains the site of our greatest pleasures and the source of our deepest pains. Embodiment is the ground of all else. It is the bedrock of our reality. This is both a conceptual truth and an experiential one. Through movement practice, we can discover the extent to which our habitual patterns of thinking, feeling and perceiving are bound up with the idiosyncrasies of how we move, carry ourselves and breathe. The complete intermingling of these different layers of our being gradually becomes clear as we develop tools for transforming the mental and the emotional via the physical.
But, one might ask, have we not outgrown the world of the body? The fantasies of the virtual-reality proponents and artificial-intelligence believers seem to imply as much. I would, however, argue to the contrary. Real life never goes out of style. When push comes to shove, the tangible always prevails. In a time where information flows lavishly and one’s life in ‘the cloud’ seems realer than reality on the ground, it pays to operate in a domain whose currency is lived experience. We know this even as we like and follow and unfollow and upvote and downvote and share and subscribe. We confess as much with our words. We’re hot with anger, cold with hatred and warm with love. We’re blue with sorrow, green with envy and red with rage. We lose ‘contact’ with a friend, ‘reach out’ once more and then promise to stay in ‘touch’ moving forward. We struggle to put our most meaningful experiences into words and, when we’re especially lucky, we’re left speechless. When life is at its best, only the vocabulary of the body remains – the language of the felt, the seen, the heard, the touched, the smelled, the tasted. The butterfly in your stomach, the shiver down your spine, the water in your eye. Elon can pursue his plans to colonise Mars but, in the meantime, the magic is happening here. Now. In, through and as the body.
— Thomas Emerson (August 2021)
REFERENCES
[1] Biologists call this process niche construction. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4922671/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3497824/
[3] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight and https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news-stories/global-poverty-facts