While I was reading today’s Chuck Norris quote on my page-a-day calendar at work this morning, which read: “The only time Chuck Norris catches a cold is when he has it in a headlock,” I was struck by the way in which cold medicine commercials regularly demonize our body’s natural defenses. For example, there are medicines that claim they can help get rid of nasty mucus. Of course, as unsavory as mucus is, it happens to be a natural defense in gumming up harmful virus particles in our nasal passageways, throat, and lungs, to prompt us to cough to get rid of the mucus and the invader it has captured. Far from being an enemy, mucus is our own loyal servant. Likewise, we think of fevers as a disease, but in reality our body unconsciously uses fever to cook certain types of diseases based on the truth that the vast majority of such diseases are more heat sensitive than we are. Sometimes that guess is mistaken, and when it is both we and the diseases inside of us perish. In any case, much of the side effects that we seek to cure with medicine are in fact the way that our bodies respond to illness, and so by curing side effects without dealing with the root causes of disease, we merely handicap our own ability to overcome, even if we feel better by it.

Defenses in general can be pretty destructive, even if they are often necessary in a dangerous world. As a student of military history I have long shared an interest in fortifications, and those who study fortifications know that the strength of a fortification in large part limits the size of cities and buildings, makes for limited transportation routes, which increases traffic and reduces the flow of people and goods, and often wastes productive space in order to provide for necessary defense. Even the ruins of defenses can be unsightly, even if they are immensely valuable as a tale of the problematic history of a given area and a record of the violence that was feared or experienced in a given place. Just like with our bodies and hearts, the defenses of our physical world are evidence of the knowledge or fear of life in a dangerous world full of threats.

In many ways, the defenses of our body and of our physical world can be our worst enemies. The minefields that are set up to block attacks from enemy armies also blow up and maim innocent civilians years and even decades after the war is over. Yet such wars long kill and hurt and destroy long after the soldiers have stopped fighting because of the way that the warfare has shaped the world and the people in it. Likewise, the warfare that results between people and diseases tends to result in the destruction of genetic material on both sides in order to overcome the attacks of the other side. What is created in a defense, whatever safety it provides, does so with tradeoffs, in taking away from something else. We are better if we are strong enough and secure enough to be open, but that is not always seen as possible.

It is little surprise that nations and cities build walls, or that our genetic code shows characteristic threats like sickle cell anemia as a way of limiting the damages of malaria. The fact that life in a dangerous world increases our own scars and vulnerabilities, and that the way in which we survive often keeps us from thriving. Even with regards to physical geography and our health, we are our own worst enemies, and even unconsciously. Given that this is so, that it is possible for us to make our world and our genetic code dangerous without conscious plan in order to make life a little safer from a specific threat, it is little wonder that everything else in our lives leads us to be our own worst enemy as well. Let us save that discussion, for another day.