Rupa Marya and Raj Patel radicalize care through deep medicine and an urgent appeal for plurality

Dr. Rupa Marya and Raj Patel are the authors of a brilliant new book entitled Inflamed: Deep Medicine and The Anatomy of Injustice (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602529/inflamed). Dr. Rupa Marya is a specialist in internal medicine. Her research looks at the ways that social structures predispose certain groups to health or illness. And while Rupa is central to a number of revolutionary health initiatives, a few I want to make sure I mention are her work on the Justice Study–a national research effort to examine the links between police violence and health outcomes in black, brown and indigenous communities–and her work on the board of Seeding Sovereignty, an international group that promotes Indigenous autonomy in response to climate change. Raj Patel is an award-winning author and film-maker, and a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He has worked for the World Bank and the WTO, and he’s also participated in global protests against both of these institutions. He’s served as a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and published on an extraordinary array of things in a variety of different fields. He’s written for The Guardian, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Times of India, among many others. His first book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, made a big impact on me when I was a doctoral researcher. His second, The Value of Nothing, was a New York Times and international best-seller. I speak with them about our current moment, as another year begins, as the Omicron variant of COVID-19 rips through beleaguered cities, as climate fires in Colorado destroy almost a thousand homes (despite there still being snow on the ground), and as we somehow still see new year’s resolutions being discussed, as they are every year without fail–even in spite of the pandemic. New year’s, though, as Antonio Gramsci wrote, is less about renewal and more about “turn[ing] life and [the] human spirit into a commercial concern,” a sort of gut-check moment that is imagined to matter as a means of cultivating well-being. But it’s a means of cultivating well-being where we end up thinking, as Gramsci put it, “that between one year and the next there is a break, that a new history is beginning.” But the notion of a new year’s resolution seems nonsensical if we take seriously Marya and Patel’s sense that health, in its truest sense, is an “emergent phenomenon of systems interacting well with other systems.” Inflamed is a book that can help us locate the roots of disease outside of the body, in an economic system that generates obscene levels of toxicity and risk. The body, they point out, is really just doing what it is so incredibly efficient at: achieving equilibrium with its environment – the problem is that the environment has been so thoroughly damaged that the work of equilibrium has become corrosive to our bodies. Marya and Patel describe Inflamed as a “call to advance health” through “vivid and radical experimentation.” Their intervention privileges anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist and anti-white-supremacist perspectives. It acknowledges how important self-care can be in a profoundly exhausting system, but reinforces this idea that self-care is still totally inadequate when the problems we face are so clearly collective. For this reason, their notion of deep medicine is all about decentring the individual, learning ways of being a “plural being,” reengaging with what Rupa describes as “old new ways of being, knowing and learning” that encourage life-preserving networks of care. What would it mean, here, to reimagine water and land protection as acts of “care,” as acts of “love toward future generations” that also, crucially, upend the logic of private property?