The pandemic as the end of consumerism. Everything that's happening is happening because it had to happen

 These Medieval ladies look like fashion models. With their splendid dresses in silk brocade, they are displaying their wealth in an age, the 14th century, in which Europe was enjoying a period of economic growth and prosperity. They couldn't have imagined that, one century later, Europe would plunge into the terrible age of witch hunts that would put women back to their place of child-making tools. It is the way history works, it never plans, it always reacts, sometimes ruthlessly. And all that happens had a reason to happen (above, miniature by Giovanni da Como, ca.1380)

 

Can you tell me of at least one case in history where a society perceived a serious, existential threat looming in the future and took action on it on the basis of data and rational arguments? Yes, sometimes they can fight relatively minor problems and, in the case of our modern society, we do have some examples of success, say, the attempt to control the ozone hole problem. But how about truly major threats, those that can wipe out an entire civilization? With the best of goodwill, I can't think of a society (including ours) that perceived the problem in advance and acted on it decisively and effectively. Normally, problems are denied or misunderstood. At best, societies react to existential threats using a primeval stimulus-reaction that may be aggressive or defensive, but almost never rational.

Curiously, our society, that we call sometimes "The West," was the first in history to have a chance to do something rational to avoid the destiny awaiting it much before the threat was clearly visible. It was in 1972 when the newly developed digital computers were coupled with a powerful analytical tool, "system dynamics." The result was the study called "The Limits to Growth" that foresaw how the gradual depletion of natural resources coupled with increasing pollution (that today we call "climate change") would cause the whole Western economic system to collapse at some moment during the first half of the 21st century. The study also suggested rational solutions to avoid collapse: reduce consumption, stop population growth, manage pollution, and the like.

As we all know, the attempt was a remarkable failure: society reacted as if the threat were the people who were trying to sound the alarm. The "Limits to Growth" study was ridiculed, demonized, and ignored. Now, it is much too late to apply the remedies that had been proposed almost 50 years ago. 

It could have been expected. Society lacks the tool that allows people (sometimes) to act rationally: a central processing unit like the one that's part of our brains. My friend Nate Hagens uses the term "superorganism" to describe how society works. I use the term "holobiont" for the same concept. I think it is more correct: an organism needs a central nervous system, but a holobiont may be perfectly functional without one. The kind of holobiont we call "human society" at best has just embryonic structures acting as control systems. Sometimes, control takes the form of a "great leader" who usually does more harm than good. 

So, in most cases, the societal holobiont reacts to perturbations by a mechanism of local interactions among its components. It may well be an effective method: by a series of trials and errors, the holobiont is normally able to absorb an external perturbation and re-establish a certain balance. But it can't plan for the long term, nor for perturbations so strong to require a rearrangement of the whole structure of the system.  

What we are seeing in the West nowadays is the reaction of the societal holobiont to a threat that, in itself, was not large. The COVID-19 pandemic could have been ignored, instead it triggered and amplified a series of effects that were the result of much stronger perturbations. Resource depletion and climate change are making what we call the "consumer society" (aka "consumerism") obsolete. Simply stated, there is little left to consume, and consuming it is bringing not just a climate disaster, but a possible collapse of the whole ecosystem. That just can't go on.

Dimly, the great human holobiont is perceiving these threats and it is reacting as it can: using the tools at hand. Of course, it is very difficult to convince/force the majority of the people to stop consuming resources. It can't be obtained by rationally explaining to them the concept of resource depletion (it has been tried, it just didn't work). But it can be done by using propaganda to scare people and that seems to be working (*).

So, what's happening is perfectly rational, at least in a certain way. The consumer society is being disassembled and destroyed: people are forced to consume less, to travel less, to use less resources. International mass tourism has disappeared forever, commerce has taken a tremendous hit, and other institutions that we took for granted seem to be standing in line waiting for their turn to jump off the Seneca Cliff: schools, universities, public health services, and more. 

Of course, not everybody will consume less. The resources not used by the poor anymore are being funneled into the military system which, in turn, is expected to make sure that the elites can keep consuming as much as before, and possibly much more. That's still possible because the members of the elite are few and their impact on the resource base is much lower. 

There is nothing strange, here: a "consumer society," wasteful as it is, is rare in history and it doesn't usually last for long. In most societies of the past, commoners had no such thing as a "right to consume." Their role was of producers or of soldiers and there was no surplus available to them: just the bare essentials they needed in order to survive. And we may well be reverting to that situation. 

It all happened so fast that we have all the reasons to be surprised, even stunned and bewildered. But nothing really new is happening, it is just an adaptation to a new situation. It takes a form that hides the perception of what the real problem is: we think it is an epidemic, whereas it is mainly resource depletion. It was the same thing when, during the period called "Renaissance," the newly formed European states realized they needed manpower for their industries and their armies. Their reaction was indirect. It didn't consist in explaining to women in rational terms the reason why the state needed more children from them. It consisted in unleashing a hate campaign against women, accused to be witches and burned at the stake in considerable numbers. It was, in a certain way, effective. Women were pushed back to their traditional role of child-making machines. And population exploded.

Last week, I wrote a post on how witch-hunts are related to the current pandemic. Later, Timothy Sha-Ching Wong sent me some excerpts from a book by Peter Sloterdijk. He says the same thing I had said:

The misogynistic excesses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, with their numerous live burnings of women, should not be understood as a regression of modern ‘society’ into medieval ‘barbarism’, nor as an epidemic sexual neurosis, as psychoanalytical commentaries usually claim. They were rather the hallmark of early modernity itself, which followed its main impulse in accordance with the new demographic imperative: to ensure an unlimited availability of subject material.

And you see how history doesn't exactly repeat itself, but it surely rhymes a lot. 

(*) Disclaimer: I am not saying here that the pandemic was invented by the powers that be, I am not saying that the virus was created in a biological weapon laboratory, I am not saying that Bill Gates is trying to kill us all with a fake vaccine, and I am not supporting any of the many conspiracy theories that we can see around the web. It should be obvious that the SARS-Cov-2 virus exists and that it is a real threat. But given the situation, such a disclaimer is necessary.

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From Peter Sloterdijk’s “You Must Change Your Life” (pages 340-341). Excerpts provided by Timothy Sha-Ching Wong

 

“The measure of all measures in this field is the state- and church-sanctioned maximization of ‘human production’ – even Adam Smith, in his main work of 1776, speaks calmly of the ‘production of men’, which is governed by the ‘demand for men’. It was set in motion by the systematic destruction of the informal balance between the manifest patriarchy and the latent matriarchy, and thus by the annulment of the historic compromise between the sexes that, under the mantle of the church’s life-protection ethics, had become established in Europe since late antiquity and remained in force until the late Middle Ages. Hence the unprecedented offensive to enslave women to the imperative of reproduction and the systematic destruction of knowledge about birth control, which went down in history under the misleading name of ‘witch hunts’. 

 

As Gunnar Heinsohn showed decades ago in co-operation with Otto Steiger and Rolf Knieper, the misogynistic excesses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, with their numerous live burnings of women, should not be understood as a regression of modern ‘society’ into medieval ‘barbarism’, nor as an epidemic sexual neurosis, as psychoanalytical commentaries usually claim. They were rather the hallmark of early modernity itself, which followed its main impulse in accordance with the new demographic imperative: to ensure an unlimited availability of subject material.

 

With its terror against midwife-witches, the early nation-state handed its business card to ‘society’ as the latter modernized itself. The question of whether one can genuinely ascribe a ‘highly developed expertise’ to the ‘wise women’ of that time in matters of contraception will perhaps remain open; supposedly, however, over a hundred procedures for the prevention of unwanted offspring were known before the repression began – procedures whose effectiveness may, in some cases, be open to doubt. But apart from this, the consequences of ‘witch oppression’ were soon plain to see – and represent statistically. During a long period of rigid demographic policies, the modern state in alliance with the Christian clergy refused to tolerate the conventional controlling function of wives over the ‘source of humans’ at all, let alone respect it. The guided sensibility ofearly modernity declared infanticide the exemplary crime against humanity and a direct attack on the national interest; here one finds a rare case of total congruence between family and state morality.

 

It is anything but coincidental, then, that the greatest modern state theorist after Machiavelli, the jurist Jean Bodin (1530-96), a former Carmelite monk, distinguished himself as one of the most rabid witch hunters of all time. The writer of the epochal Six livres de la république (1576) was at once the author of the most brutal witch-hunting tracts of all time, published in Paris in 1580 under the title De la démonomanie des sorciers.

 

What he wanted to achieve in his dual function as the founder of the modern theory of sovereignty and master thinker of the inquisition against reproductively able but self-willed women is plain to see. The crux of the matter had already been revealed a century earlier by the authors of Malleus Maleficarum, alias The Hammer of the Witches: ‘No one does more harm to the Catholic faith than midwives.’

 

From now on, Catholic faith implied an unconditional subjugation of married persons to the consequences of marital intercourse, regardless of whether they were in a position to ensure a sufficient inheritance, and thus a productive future, for their offspring – without consideration, even, for the question of whether one can expect workers with no property of their own to bring up children at all. The policy of ‘capital expansion through population increase’ calmly passed over objections of this kind. In truth, the population explosion of the Modern Age was triggered in part by the extensive incorporation of the propertyless workers, the subsequently much-discussed and usually wrongly declared ‘proletariat’, into the family and procreative praxis of late aristocratic-bourgeois ‘society’.

 

In matters of procreation, the attitude of most Reformation theologians was even more Catholic than that of the papacy. Martin Luther, who produced half a dozen children with Katharina von Bora, taught – intoxicated by the élan of his own faith – that Christian men should rest assured that if they increased the numbers of the faithful, God would not withhold the material means to nurture them as long as they were sufficiently diligent. Heinsohn and his colleagues incisively sum up the maxim behind such thinking: ‘Generalization of individual irresponsibility in the form of responsibility to God.’

One should note here that the concept of responsibility is significant neither in theology nor in classical moral philosophy; it only moved to the centre of ethical reflection in the course of the twentieth century, when the explosively grown problem of actions and their unintended consequences gained a large part of the moral attention.

 

It is undeniable, however, that to this day, Christian sexual ethics – in its official Catholic form – shows a resolute blindness to consequences that would like to be mistaken for trust in God. Because of their commitment to the protection of unborn and born life, an honourable thing in itself, Modern Age churches of all confessions acted as de facto accessories to the most cynical biopolitical operation of all time.”

 

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This post was slightly modified after receiving suggestions from Louis Nuyens III, AD Mitchell, and an anonymous commenter.

On the Edge of the Cliff: We need a new way of seeing the world

A new blog by Ugo Bardi, "The Proud Holobionts"

Long-term predictive models don't have a very good record, but some turned out to be prophetic. One case is that of Hubbert's 1956 prediction of a peak in the production of fossil energy shortly after the start of the 21st century. He was optimistic about the possibility of replacing fossil fuels with nuclear energy, but, apart from that, he was right on target. Now we are on the edge of the cliff and we have to take a different attitude toward the ecosystem that supports our existence. The concept of "Holobiont" may help us a lot in this task. We are holobionts, the ecosystem is a larger holobiont, we must find a way to live together. 

The American geologist Marion King Hubbert deserves the credit of having been the first to see the main trends of the 21st century, nearly 50 years before it were to start. In his 1956 paper, Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels, he presented the figure above: a bold attempt to place the human experience with energy on a 10,000 years scale.

Of course, Hubbert was overly optimistic about nuclear energy which, in reality, started declining decades before fossil fuels did. But, with this graphic, Hubbert had laid down the human predicament several years in advance with respect to more famous studies such as "The Limits to Growth" (1972). Catton's "overshoot" (1980), and many others. Without a miracle that could replace fossils well before they would start declining, the human world as it was in the 20th center was doomed. Nuclear energy was not, and could not have been, that miracle.

Hubbert's may not have been always cited, but the debate on the decline of the natural resources raged for decades -- with most of the debate being based on various interpretations of the concept of technological progress. In the most optimistic views, depletion was not considered a pressing problem and, in any case, it was believed that technology would chase the problem away, automatically and without pain for anyone, purely on the basis of market forces. In this view, it made no sense to slow down economic growth in order to save resources: on the contrary, accelerating the exploitation would lead to more growth and to the consequent availability of more and more advanced technologies. The opposite attitude was that the problem was important and imminent, but that predictive models could lead to planning efforts based on slowing down the exploitation of the remaining resources, giving sufficient time for a technological switch toward higher efficiency/new sources. Over time, the debate veered more and more toward the concept that climate change was a much more important problem than resource depletion. But the contrasting attitudes didn't change.

All the debate led to nothing. Nothing was decided, nothing was done. Society turned out to be impervious to early alerts and technology unable to be the miracle that was touted to be. In 2020, we have arrived at a critical point: the start of the irreversible decline of the technological society that had been developed over about two centuries of use of fossil fuels as an energy source. We are seeing the "Seneca Cliff," the unavoidable destiny of a system that has expanded beyond its limits, that has gone in heavy "overshoot" to use Catton's definition?

And now? Clearly, it is too late to deploy miracle technologies: we are starting to go down and the question is how to face the decline: can we still avoid to turn it into a crash? The data show that it would still be possible to soften the decline and to go down on a relatively smooth slope. But the resistance to the unavoidable is actually worsening the situation. Politicians and most of the public are still convinced that the way to go is to "growth" without realizing that they are hastening collapse and making it faster and harsher.

How did we arrive here? It was not a failure of science and technology. It was a cultural failure. We tried to manage the future without the right tools. In retrospect, it was obvious that tools developed in an age of abundance wouldn't be useful, actually counterproductive, in an age of scarcity. Imagine a banker stranded on a remote island trying to get food by building a automated cash teller. You get the point.

At this point, we could say that we need a new vision of the ecosystem. That's correct, although reductive. It is not a question of what we "need." It is a question of an unavoidable cultural transformation that's going to come, whether we like it or not. We have to come to terms with the ecosystem. In different terms, we could say that the ecosystem is going to decide what it is going to do with us -- not consciously (probably) but just practically. Either it is going to get rid of an obnoxious species -- the humans  -- that has done only damage to everything, or that species is going to take a different attitude that will make it less obnoxious.

That's the challenge we face, not an easy one, but not impossible either. The cultural tools we need have been partly developed and are being developed. A basic one is the concept of "Holobiont" the idea that the fundamental components of the ecosystem are not organisms, but holobionts intended as colonies of creatures that hang together for mutual benefit. Human beings are holobionts, trees, forests, steppes, and tundras are holobionts. The whole ecosystem is a holobionts. And we can be proud of being good holobionts and learn to live together with the larger holobiont we call "Gaia" . Will we be able to do that?

We can discuss these matters on the new blog "The Proud Holobionts" and in the Facebook group with the same name. Onward, fellow holobionts!

Is Gaia a Superorganism? No, she is a holobiont!

A few days ago, I was discussing with a friend and he used the term "superorganism" for Gaia as the Earth Goddess. When I said that Gaia is not a superorganism but a holobiont, he asked me, "but what is a holobiont, exactly?" I thought about that for a while, and then I said, "a holobiont is a democracy, a superorganism is a dictatorship."

If you have a friend who is a biologist, try to tell her that Gaia is a superorganism. Likely, she won't be happy and she might ask you, rather venomously, "And so, tell me, good sir, how could natural selection have generated this -- ahem-- 'Gaia' of yours? You tell me that there is only one Gaia on this planet and so, in order to evolve, did perhaps different planetary ecosystems in the galaxy competed with each other?" I am not inventing this, it is the scathing criticism of the Gaia theory that Richard Dawkins produced in his book, "The Extended Phenotype" (1982).

Given a certain interpretation of Darwin's idea, Dawkins' position is logical and even unavoidable. There is just one problem: the common interpretation of Darwin's theory is wrong.

Don't misunderstand me: Darwin was one of the greatest scientific geniuses in history. But we need to take into account that he was working on limited data and with limited tools. He himself could never decide exactly between two concepts that he used interchangeably: "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest." They are not the same thing, not exactly at least. If you emphasize the idea of the "survival of the fittest," then you see evolution as a continuous competition among the best in the search for the even better. It is a cutthroat competition, nature in red tooth and claw.

But it doesn't have to work that way. An alternative view of evolution is more compatible with the idea of "natural selection" and it takes its inspiration mainly from the work of Lynn Margulis (1938 - 2011). In brief, the unit of evolution is not the organism (at least, not only the organism) but the holobiont. And evolution is not competitive but mainly collaborative. 

It is a long story, and I invite you to read the fundamental book "Symbiotic Planet" (Margulis, 1998). See also an article of mine on "Cassandra's Legacy" and my Facebook group on holobionts. To summarize, holobionts are collaborative societies of organisms that live together, helping each other. A good example is a human being, a community formed of the main organism (the proper "human"), and a large number and variety of micro-organisms (the microbiota) that live inside and on the surface of the main organism. Every living being on this planet is a holobiont, and there are holobionts formed of smaller holobionts: think of a forest. Trees are holobionts, a forest is a holobiont formed of trees. Holobionts are a self-similar entity operating at various scales.

Then, evolution is a mechanism for keeping a population stable. It operates mainly at the bottom, not at the top. Those organisms which are defective because their genome is damaged, those that Gorshov and Makarieva call "decay individuals" (Biotic Regulation and the Environment, 2000), are removed and the genetic information contained in the population is maintained intact in order to regulate the system. It is not the "survival of the fittest" but the "non-survival of the unfit."  It is a mechanism that sheds entropy away from the system.

Holobionts do compete, but the concept seems to be (this is an interpretation of mine) that while organisms search for perfection, holobionts strive for the good enough. Mostly, holobionts just survive. And those that survive tend to shed away those parts of themselves which are not good for survival. Holobionts continuously exchange genetic information with other holobionts (it is called "holosex"). In this way, they teach survival techniques to each other. You could say that holobionts are a democracy, while organisms are a dictatorship. (you might also say that holobionts are communists, but that means pushing the similitude a little too much.)

So, back to Gaia, now it should be clear that Gaia is a holobiont, just like us (see also this article by Castell et al.) You could call Her a super-holobiont that includes all the smaller holobionts of the biosphere. Then, this idea overcomes Dawkins' objection: Gaia exists not because She competes with other superorganisms. She exists because the sub-holobionts that form Her collaborate with each other. Think of a forest: did it evolve by competing with other forests? No. It came to exist because trees survive better together than alone. The same is true for Gaia. She operates like all other holobionts. She survives because the living beings of this planet survive better (actually, only) if they are together. Gaia is what She is.

The beauty of this concept is that it gives a form and a substance to Gaia that other views don't provide. So far, Gaia has been an abstract term, mostly described in terms of scientific models and equations. But if She is a holobiont, well, the Goddess is one of us! She is a living being just like us. And when you pat, touch, or caress another human being, you are patting, touching, and caressing the Goddess herself. You can do that with your dog, too! We, living creatures of the biosphere, all partake in the same holobionticity!

And so things stand: onward, fellow holobionts!



See my also facebook group on holobionts  and Erik Assadourian's site on Gaianism
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Note: these ideas are not new, after all: 

“I will sing of well-founded Earth, mother of all, eldest of all beings. She feeds all creatures that are in the world, all that go upon the goodly land, and all that are in the paths of the seas, and all that fly: all these are fed of her store. Through you, O queen, men are blessed in their children and blessed in their harvests, and to you it belongs to give means of life to mortal men and to take it away.” Homeric Hymns,

Why do people touch each other all the time? Sex among holobionts

Nowadays, we are encouraged to exterminate our skin microbiome by means of various poisonous substances. But this is not a good idea. We are holobionts, and our microbiome is part of us. If we kill the microbiome, we kill ourselves. Touching each other is a way to keep our microbiome alive, it is a form of sex ("holosex") intended as a form of communication.  The lady in this picture seems to understand the point, at least judging from her unhappy expression. (see also the "proud holobionts" group on Facebook)

Humans tend to touch each other. They hug, pat, rub, kiss, cuddle, clutch, caress, clasp, embrace, each other a lot. Think of the kissing habits ("la bise") that's typical of the French society, it is done also in Italy and in other Latin countries. In most societies (*), at least some kind of skin contact is supposed to be a sign of reciprocal trust and confidence.

But, today, we are seeing a completely different pattern diffusing all over the world. With the coronavirus epidemic, people are not shaking hands anymore, to say nothing about kissing and hugging each other. Not only people don't want to touch other people, but they are also positively scared of getting close to each other. It is called "social distancing" and it involves a series of ritualized behaviors of dubious efficacy against the epidemic that include wearing face masks, sanitizing one's hands, spraying disinfectants all over people and things, raising plexiglass barriers, and more.

So, what's happening? Is social distancing just a temporary need or something that will last in the future? The answer depends on whether skin contact is useful for something: if it is not, we could as well abandon it, apart from strictly reproductive needs. But why do people touch each other? For one thing, we may be reasonably sure that if touching each other were harmful to us, natural selection would have eliminated this behavior from our genetic pool and from our cultural habits. On the contrary, touching each other has positive advantages. It is because we are all holobionts.

Let me explain: I am a holobiont, you are a holobiont, all the living creatures surrounding you are holobionts. The term is a little abstruse and still scarcely known, but it has been making spectacular inroads in biology from when it was proposed by Lynn Margulis in 1991. You probably heard of Margulis as the co-developer with James Lovelock of the concept of "Gaia" as the control system of Earth's ecosphere. And, yes, Gaia is a holobiont, too!


So, what is a holobiont? It is a community of living beings that share food, shelter, resources, and protect each other. A tree is a holobiont, a forest is a holobiont, a coral reef is a holobiont, your dog is a holobiont. And, as I said, as a human being you are a holobiont. You are an entity formed of a human organism and a large microbiome formed by a complete ecosystem of microorganisms living on your skin, colonizing your gut, helping various hormonal syntheses more or less everywhere in your body. Without a microbiome, you wouldn't survive for long, although you may eke a precarious existence with a reduced set of the full-fledged version.

And, as a holobiont, you are having sex all the time with other holobionts (and, yes, with your dog, too!). That needs to be explained as part of the great fascination with the concept of holobiont. We are starting to develop a definition of "sex" that goes beyond the conventional one. In our case, as humans, we think of sex as the exchange of genetic material between a male and a female of the same species (actually, we also practice non-reproduction oriented varieties of sex, but that's another form of communication). The result of reproductive sex is meiosis and a new individual with a mixed genome. It is called also "vertical sex," meaning that genetic material is transferred from parents to offspring.

In contrast, the horizontal gene transfer is the movement of genetic material from a donor organism to a recipient organism that is not its offspring. Bacteria, by far the most common lifeform on Earth, exchange genetic material simply passing it through their membranes, a mechanism called "conjugation." And viruses are great genetic exchange machines: they are packages of DNA and RNA that move from a host to another.

A holobiont is, as they say, another kettle of bacterial culture. It is formed of an ensemble of organisms, so it doesn't have a proper genome. But it has a hologenome, the ensemble of the genomes of the organisms that compose it. The hologenome has the same meaning of the genome, it is the "blueprint," so to say, of the holobiont. And, since holobionts are living creatures, they are born and die. So, the hologenome must be transmitted from one to the other. It is the transmission of constitutive information. It is a kind of sex that we may call "holosex."

By means of holosex, holobionts transmit hologenetic information from an individual to another. It is in this way that evolution occurs: "bad" holobionts, meaning those which are unstable, or unable to ensure the survival of the organism, are de-selected and disappear. It is a form of natural selection, not exactly in the neo-Darwinian sense, it has a certain degree of "Lamarckian" transmission of information. If a holobiont has developed a capability that other holobionts don't have -- say, resistance to a specific parasite -- it can transmit it directly to others by the exchange of micro-organisms. There is no need to wait for the population to be replaced by a new generation of individuals who have inherited a certain trait.

But then, how is exactly that holosex, sex among holobionts, works? Well, you don't need special organs and, of course, there is no male/female distinction. Hologenetic material is mainly in the form of microbial lifeforms of various kinds. To exchange these tiny critters, holobionts need to be in contact with each other or, at least, close to each other. Then, the passage of microbes mainly occurs by means of skin contact, although there are other possibilities.

That's why holobionts tend to touch each other: they hug each other, they pat each other, they rub each other, and they kiss each other: it is to exchange chunks of their hologenome, performing holosex, if you like to use this term. They tend, as we can imagine, to be cautious in doing that because they could exchange "bad" microbes and be infected with some illness. As we all know, sex is necessary, but nobody ever said that it is not dangerous. Holobionts need holosex in order to transmit and maintain their hologenetic structure and they need to accept that there is some risk involved. No sex, no life. Not for long, at least.

This means that, sooner or later we'll go back to touch each other and, perhaps, in France they will restart with la bise. Now, it looks as obsolete as dancing rituals to the moon Goddess in the night, but that may return, too. And so, onward, fellow holobionts!

(*) it may be possible that the Japanese exchange microbiota by means of their habit of communal hot baths, notoriously a place where bacteria thrive, So, they don't need to touch each other as much as Europeans do.

(**) To know more about holobionts and discuss the subject, see the "Proud Holobionts" group on Facebook