Subsidiarity, Solidarity, and Health
Out of the UK last week was an interesting piece on a statistically significant decline in illness and hospitalization in the town of Frome, in the County of Somerset, England. What is the reported cure? Socialization.
Social isolation in an age of hyper-connectivity is becoming a paradox too large to be ignored. Are we capable of true health outside of community with each other?
One of the perennial problems with discussions on public health in many places is the idea that high-cost, bureaucratic, centrally run systems are the primary solution to ill-health. Such a system is meant to help the maximum amount of people possible.
There are two possible pitfalls with such an approach, as I see it.
Firstly, solidarity as a principle involves my solidarity. That is to say, my personal efforts to visit the sick, to help my next door neighbor, or generally speaking being available to those in need. It involves a mobilization of my person to reach out to others, precisely because they are human beings, endowed with intrinsic worth. It is easy to offload this call to solidarity by putting it on the shoulders of “specialists” and bureaucrats. It is also easy in this vein to monetize the problem, by making it a question more of the allocation of tax dollars than the mobilization of human beings.
Secondly, we remember the principle of subsidiarity, which tells us that local solutions tend to be the best, and that there is an order to my solidarity: kin, friends, community, Church, nation, etc. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to give donations for a problem thousands of miles away, if there is a serious problem down the block.
The medical literature is overwhelming that isolation in any form leads to mental and physical degeneration. The Bible frequently decries various forms of social ostracization and loneliness as having its origin in human sinfulness. Famously, Christ in the Gospel of Matthew presents charity as one of the primary criteria by which God judges human beings.
It remains to be seen, as the article in The Guardian admits, whether the numbers on health out of the town of Frome can be proved to be related to their drive to create more social interaction. Yet it’s hard to deny on any level that public health would vastly improve if more people dedicated themselves to spend at least part of their spare time in reaching out to people around them…and this doesn’t have to be extreme or far-flung. It is not for nothing the commandment reads, “Love your neighbor as yourself”.
If we want to start learning how to love, just look out the front door.
If you want a prayer to bring with you today for those who are sick or in need, may I suggest this one?
Oremus pro invicem. Let us pray for one another.
