I think the words scientific evidence have to be prefixed with the words “today’s” scientific evidence.we have all seen it before, scientific evidence on drinking coffee, on wine, on eating chocolates, on fats, on milk products, on breast feeding, on, child rearing (anyone remember Dr.Spock?), on dieting, on the amount of sunshine we are allowed. In fact in any sphere of human existence the “scientists” have intervened and have had their say and have been debunked and moved on to accommodate themselves elsewhere. Every generation is told a new story and we fall for it every time. Those of us who have survived to tell the tale are ignored at best or vilified if we become an inconvenience.
I have followed the so called “scientific evidence” for over 50 years and am astonished at what they have got away with so far. Yet they have no one to answer to, for their mistakes. Oh, there is always new evidence which has been found or the current research supports the new findings or that the times have changed or the sun is in the wrong sky (ozone layered sky for instance). What makes them so arrogant as to think that what they say today won’t be exposed as false in as little as five years’ time? I try to go by my own observation and the experiences of my peer group when it comes to matters of the health and lifestyle. For, remember one leads to the other. The right lifestyle leads to health.
Ok, some disclosure. I started this post because of my bone broth. It’s all the rage among the avocado community and right now I have a large slow cooker bubbling away. I thought I’ll step outside the health fashionistas to see what the “scientific” people say. I found most scientific articles cautioning against bone broth. It has not got enough nutrients in it, it’s just another fad, you have to watch out for the concentrated lead in it, and so on. At best they say the vegetables in the broth should do you good. A reluctant admission this, given that the health experts are still hooked on the official fruit veggie version of health.
Well folks, that was one aspect of our confused times. The other belongs to art. Be patient. I write so rarely I have to get all my rants out at once. I was recently at a Rodin exhibition. There was the famous Kiss of this couple all wrapped up demurely around each other, very virtuous looking as befits the Greco-Roman-Christian tradition, all athletic and toned torsos (who looks like that these days?) but as to anything even remotely approaching sensuality or even, god forbid, sexuality, there was not a hint. They were positioned like those living tableaux of the early part of the last century when nudes were posed on stage in their sterile poses and not allowed to move.
What woke me to this crushing Christian modesty in Western Art, is when I walked a few paces further and found statues from the peak period in African culture where the nudes flaunted their nudity in smile-inducing extravagance. Their women figurines were entirely composed of their vaginas and male figures flaunted their strong penises quite dwarfing their bodies. All this made me think of the hundreds of nudes I have seen in various art galleries and museums, nudes of the Greco-Roman-Christian tradition where women had non-existent vaginas and males were portrayed with unbelievably small penises. It’s almost as if, if the artists could possibly get away with it, they would have created male nudes without a penis. Sometimes the guardians of our Christian morality take direct action. Someone had hacked away the genitals of the Sphinx which Epstein constructed over Oscar Wilde’s grave in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
No wonder that the Christian Patriarchy under whose moral code we still live, have always marginalised African and Hindu art as the “other”, too primitive or too irrelevant for civilised discourse. Art that does not glorify Christian values is even today looked on as mere curiosity, unique, worth looking at but not important enough to be included in mainstream cultural conversation. I put it down to the fact that the patriarchy is mortally scared of rampant and threatening sexuality. The loss of control over the prescribed order of things, you see! Sorry if I labour the point. As someone said once, “it is necessary in the wilderness, to cry loudly, to be heard”. And sometimes, I have to rant.
lifestyle warbler 