I’d bet my house that if more Americans knew and accepted this fact, we’d have more rational identity politics:
“We have over 10 times more microbes than human cells in our bodies,” said George Weinstock of Washington University in St. Louis. But the microbiome, as it’s known, remains mostly a mystery. “It’s as if we have these other organs, and yet these are parts of our bodies we know nothing about.”
So much of our politics is a defense of a mistaken definition of self, an ignorance about the systems we inhabit and a tendency to “dumb down” what is always, inherently a complex web of relationships that are seldom apparent or what we believe them to be.