To Guide or to Govern

I wrote To Guide or to Govern while thinking about the boundary between guidance and control.

The poem sits naturally between two of my recent books. The Institution as Hard-Matter examines what happens as institutions progressively lose permeability, become less responsive to feedback and correction, and narrow the possibilities available to those within them.

Medicine After Nuremberg takes these ideas into medicine and medical ethics. At its centre is the relationship between professional authority and individual autonomy: expertise may guide, advise and care, but the individual retains the right to understand, choose and refuse.

That is the distinction the poem is trying to capture. Guidance walks alongside another person. Governance becomes something different when advice becomes command, trust gives way to fear, and consent becomes coercion. The poem appears in Medicine After Nuremberg immediately before the chapter Observing Ethical Systems, where these relationships are considered as interfaces through which information, responsibility, authority and trust are exchanged.

The background photograph comes from Atlas 2. It shows a field of networked filamentous structures observed in blood using dark-field microscopy. I chose it because the image provides a visual counterpart to the ideas in the poem: individual elements exist within relationships and networks, and what happens between them can be as important as the elements themselves.

Both books are available to download free as PDFs from my website. For those who prefer a physical copy, a link to high-quality printed editions will be available shortly.

The image below shows the six books in the NixonLab Soft-Matter Series.

All the best

David

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