The Joy of the Knife: On Autoimmune Responses in Politics

“If we look at culture as a superorganism with its own immunological mechanisms, we can recognize modern societies as being profoundly dysregulated, and this gets worse the more modern they get.”

Right before the turn of the 20th century, a German scientist named Paul Ehrlich unwittingly summarized the spirit of an entire age. He did so through no fault of his own. He was not pursuing philosophy; he was not even penning any sort of intellective commentary. Rather, he was conducting science—the dry, Baconian kind.

So, what could Ehrlich have said that was so comprehensive? Two words: horror autotoxicus. In uttering those words, he confessed by way of scientific indirection to a deep-seated longing in the European mind. This was the same longing that gave motive and drive to the whole enlightenment project: the dream of an impervious interiority. Horror autotoxicus expresses a belief in the rationality of nature. It means, in nuce, that bodies are ordered wholes, horrified by self-harm and that they cannot exhibit any hostility to what is properly their own. Ehrlich, who would later receive the Nobel Prize for his work on immunology, did not believe in what is now called autoimmunity. As he put it: “It would be dysteleologic in the highest degree, if under these circumstances self-poisons of the parenchyma—autotoxins—were formed.” Autoimmunity just would not make any sense.

By expressing his unbelief, Ehrlich proved himself an authentic convert to the modern worldview. According to this worldview, the Self has an intrinsic integrity; it is an individuum imbued with property rights. Horror autotoxicus implies a continuation of this self-conception all the way down to the biological and chemical levels of the (human) organism. Even though Ehrlich has now been proven wrong, the debate on the existence of autoimmune diseases—diseases that provoke an organism’s immune response against its own healthy tissue—went on well into the 1960s. It was only quite recently, in the last 50 years or so, that immunologists really started taking autoimmunity seriously.