Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[Wade Riddick <wriddick AT usa.net>]

As far as scientific and literary pursuits, I wouldn't go so far as to
classify one as mastery and the other as not.  There's a great deal of
overlap.  Most great scientists don't get very far without a creative edge
and a desire to think outside the box and take risks.  That means a lot of
failures you never hear about.  When you're playing on the cutting edge of
science with a real problem with no obvious resolution, you are playing
with a great unknown and you're trying to read a lot from contexts.

Science is all about stripping context from a situation and reducing the
relationships to the lowest common denominator so you can repeat the
experiment, so you can distill knowledge and pass it along.  In everything
else from social science to a plot, it's not possible to reverse the arrow
of time and repeat things by changing variables here and there.  Knowledge
gets revealed and you have to do your best with what you've got.  I'd say
that leaves room for forgiveness; it becomes a necessity.  Imperfect people
acting with imperfect information don't understand all the consequences of
their actions and they're bound to make mistakes.

Interpretation and context come into play whenever the model doesn't fit or
can't fit.  You can examine the way individual actors behave in a small
auction and derive certain rules about how people behave psychologically
and in small groups.  You can't add all that up to make sense of things at
the macroeconomic level - at least not easily or absolutely.  You can even
derive proofs on the limits even the best models will have on predicting
the system's future behavior.  There are a lot of trade-offs now in
modeling - how much do you want to pay in computing time, how far into the
future do you need to see, how accurate does it need to be?

While Hitler liked to think of himself as a scientist, let's face it: the
Nazis were burning books they couldn't write, much less read and
understand.  I think a lot of bullies have appropriated the cloak of
science to speak with authority.  After all, as we add more people to the
population and more avenues of communication, it becomes increasingly
difficult to say a thing that needs to be said and be believed.  How do you
know to believe something when someone says it?  What we have is a game of
information - and without proper regulation, Gresham's law applies.  Bad
money drives out good money.  Reputations crumble when not properly
maintained.

Did anyone prone to doubt the legitimacy of the Supreme Court's decision in
_Bush v. Gore_ change their mind when certain Justices' children got jobs
from one of the litigants?  Will anyone ever trust again what a stock
analyst from an investment bank has to say when his bank has investment
business with the stock at issue?  Technical analysis of stock trading is a
bunch of statistical bullshit and yet people continue to spout is like a
proven science.  None of its foundations are really valid.  (But it does do
one important thing which economists still refuse to do and that is take
into account aggregate supply and demand for selling stock.  If economists
did this, then they'd be moving the discipline of high finance too close to
survey-dominated disciplines like psychology and sociology.  They don't
want to accept the idea that irrational psychology affects people's
economic behavior and it has to be measured by asking questions.  If they
do, several generations of "scientific" economics papers have to be thrown
out the window.)

As I talk to others about how horribly my life has been maimed by outright
medical incompetence and how I'm still unable to get adequate treatment for
my worst problem, TMJ, I've come across all sorts of people with similar
stories.  Some have turned to alternative medicine.  They know their own
doctors have lied to them about things as lowly as low fat, high carb
diets.  They figure how worse can things get if they see an 'alternative'
practitioner?  And, indeed, some of these 'alternative' practitioners are
at least reading the latest scientific papers on certain disorders and
staying current.  Still, with any medicine, caveat emptor.

It's here where I think science gets its dirty name among the rest of us
unwashed.  We fail to distinguish between researchers and engineers.  We
don't like to think of our neurologists as the same sort of people who
write Windows code that drops us into the blue screen of death, but most
neurologists don't do original research and they're just working from
cookbook recipes handed down to them.  Any time an engineer can hide behind
science to keep their shoddy workmanship from being questioned, they will.

A good scientist, like a good writer, knows to ask those questions.  What
if things are different than what they tell us in school?  Why is this
anomaly here?  What if this character made different choices?  What if the
world was a little different?  What if the world *is* different than we
think it to be?

Context and bias and all of these factors may not hold over in very
repetitious experiments when theories are verified but it's pretty
important stuff when you're dealing with the unknown.  Whether you're
formulating new theories of reality or you're simply a reader in the middle
of a novel, it's that element of surprise and revelation that you feed
upon.  What's behind the next corner?  What's that lurking in the shadows?
Turn the next page and read what's printed in the great book of life.

It might require a certain professional diligence and the path might be
strewn with the corpses of better men who gave up their day job to be poets
or dally in cold fusion, but it's definitely not a pursuit in the same
class as accounting - although to watch Enron go up in smoke, clearly we're
bedeviled by a group of accountants who see themselves more as frustrated
artists.  Then again, rather than the quest for truth dependent on
revelations and lucky breaks I think Arthur Anderson was more attracted to
certain social aspects of the contemporary art scene which substitute
celebrity for talent.  (And if you want talentless celebrities just turn on
any one of the hot new reality shows where costs have been cut by
transforming drama from a story-telling enterprise to an amateur sport.
Reconstructing a new reality which seems more real because we wore out the
old reality.  Did we really wear it out or did it wear us out?  It doesn't
matter.  We'll pick up a new one next time we're at the store.  Consumption
will give us our fix.)

In a profession which requires an adherence to "standards" and where
deviations in the design of a bridge or the treatment of a patient can
result in death, creativity is a little more frowned upon.  To a certain
extent I think you see this lack of entrepreneurship even in academia.
Witness how we teach our graduate students.  Do we broaden their fields of
knowledge or do we narrow them down to a few areas of expertise.

Which is better as far as communicating knowledge which is useful in the
real world?  Is it better to train an economist to have some knowledge of
psychology, politics and statistics or just train one with three times the
mathematical skills?  The answer's obvious to anyone with an eye on the job
market - unless you're willing to go into business for yourself.

I can remember a conversation I had with Babin too.  I wanted to write a
paper comparing and contrasting the family structures in Faulkner's "Barn
Burning", a short story from Anderson's "The Egg" and Oates' "Where are you
going?  Where have you been?" and use it to draw some view of how American
families had changed over time.  Babin said that would be great... but
that's not what an English literature class was all about.  Maybe in
sociology.  Of course, I know what they would say in a sociology class:
"That would be great... maybe for an English literature class."  I've long
since forgotten everything else he said to me during the semester but
because I had atypical teachers in the honors program at LSU who did this
type of analysis all the time, this exchange stuck with me by way of
offering a contrast of what "normal" academic life would probably be like.

And that's fine.  If there weren't gaps, there wouldn't be room for
entrepreneurs to move in and start looking for gold in all that shadowy
dark matter between the disciplines.  But is knowledge going to change more
as time goes forward or change less?  How will we know what's important and
relevant if we're only trained to think in one discipline - if fences are
built up and we're told to stay on our side?  You can't speak with
authority about treating a disease because, well, you've only *had* the
disease and you're not a doctor.  We're going to deprive you of legitimacy
because of that.  No Larry King for you... well, maybe if you made money on
a book or you're secretly paid by a pharmaceutical advertiser (but then
we've only confused market success for constructing a logical argument.  It
doesn't matter if you're right and a peon.  You're still a peon.)

        "Mommy?  Why is it called a value stock if it keeps dropping?"
        "Well, it's like a shoe sale, honey.  The more it drops in price,
the more of a value it is."
        "I thought investments were supposed to go up, Mommy?"
        "That's a nice lad.  Go play with Al Gore and leave Mommy alone."

Doesn't that about sum it up in the press corps today?

We ought to yank our universities out of the millennium-old rut they're in.
There needs to be a more advanced degree where students focus on coursework
in an area each of science, business, liberal arts, mathematics, so on and
so forth.  Forget the dissertation.  We need electrical engineers who can
speak Chinese, understand historical changes in stock market regulation and
take into account the psychology of learning when they design a new
product.  We need lawyers who can tell if a chemical industry "expert" is
spewing bull on the stand and doctors who can manage their own books and
buy real estate without inspiring snickers.

For ten bucks a month, I know how to cut your TNF-alpha levels in half
using just one commonly found herb.  For $1000 a month, big drug companies
will offer rheumatoid arthritis sufferers a shot of Remicade which will
take care of 95% of TNF-a.  Of course, it's more cost effective to treat
diseases before they occur.  So how much money do you think is spent
getting people to change their diets and exercise more?

Speaking of trusting the messenger and games of information, do you really
think if a bevy of horny young nymphomaniacs airlifted themselves into your
living room every time you consumed the right six-pack that anyone would
ever have to advertise beer?  The product would fly of the shelves on
simple word of mouth.

What's the truth?

The truth is, alcohol tends to be an addictive product.  Half of all
alcohol sales are to alcoholics.  One beer a night won't be as good as one
glass or red wine a night, but it will improve your health.  Much more than
one beer will dramatically harm it.  You think beer companies have a
financial incentive to encourage self-restraint?

It's a good thing we don't actually sell sex in this country.  What is
there left we could sell it with?

There's certainly a role for prescription drugs in medicine, but is it the
only role?  It is if the only people paying for doctors' continuing
education are drug companies.  Some of you won't notice either way because
you're always well.  For the rest of us, it makes all the difference.

So when you sit there and start asking a doctor complicated questions about
a complicated condition and they get short with you... take it personally.
It's certainly not any part of any "science."

It's a psychological failing.

It's different I think in the law, which is all about judging conflicts of
interest, broken contracts and failure and where things are in constant
flux, not because of logical inconsistencies but because the world the law
has to govern is itself in flux.  When you go to a lawyer and they don't
know the answer, they look it up and bill you for the time.  If it's not in
an area they practice, they know something they can refer you to.  There's
even a professional review board, a code of ethics about what you can
charge clients and how you should conduct yourself.  You go before other
people - common people - and you have to argue your case in a way they can
understand and there's always someone picking it apart.

When you go to a doctor with something mysterious and they can't figure it
out right away, suddenly that image of a detective on a trek for the truth
vanishes.  The first question is, do you have insurance.  If you don't,
they charge you more since they figure there's no company to argue with.
When they run out of the tests in their specialty and still don't know what
it is, they don't pick up a book and learn new science.  They don't sit
down and ask, well, what are all the biochemical suspects which would lead
to swelling of someone's hands.  If it ain't in their cookbook, it doesn't
go in the stew.  They say go see someone else - we don't know exactly who,
but go see someone else.  And they'll run you around in circles for months
and years like that when it's just cheaper to pay one guy to sit down and
work it out from scratch for you.  That's what a lawyer would do.

"I don't know anything about problems of insulin resistant microvascular
tort law.  But at $150 an hour, I'll solve it for you."

You know what?

It would be a hell of a lot cheaper if we always did it this way.

Law school prepares you to realize how much you don't know and it prepares
you to find it out.  If you pass the buck, you lose business.  Doctors
don't approach their profession as an entrepreneurial apprenticeship
because they've never structured their schools around the simple basis that
knowledge changes.  You argue with your professor until a fact is learned
and a proper diagnosis made... and then it's learned.  You go out and
practice and that's that.  If anything, it's the unorthodox doctors who
become successful who get hauled before any review boards - even if they're
right.  That's perfect interest group behavior.  As sick as I was, I
spotted it a mile away.

Since many people with one medical problem often have another and they
interact, doctors who don't understand the basis for these disorders can be
deadly.  For instance, a doctor might prescribe an NSAID for a patient with
TMJ - a class of disorders where candidiasis is common (yeast in the
sinuses) - not knowing that NSAIDs are contraindicated for patients with
TMJ.  They do this because there's nobody else there to argue with them.
You go into a courtroom with lawyers determined to beat each other.  You go
into an examining room with one single doctor.

You know the difference between God and a federal judge, right?

God doesn't think He's a federal judge.

God doesn't think He's a doctor, either.

Let's say you go back to a doctor who actually knows sinus infections are
caused by yeast and instead of the normal antibiotics, they also address
the underlying yeast overgrowth in your intestines by prescribing an
additional anti-fungal.  But, oops, they've given you Cipro which has the
effect of upregulating one of the matrix metalloproteinases which dissolves
collagen - which might be OK in a normal person but with TMJ you already
have plenty of collagen erosion.

Or say you're treating a diabetic with a foot infection and you know
periodontal disease is common in diabetics but you don't know quite why
because you don't read the latest research now that you're out of school.
It's your turn at the top of the fraternity bossing others around and
making money instead of getting hazed yourself.  You forget to read that
doxycycline is used to treat periodontal disease because of its
downregulation of MMP-9 and instead you prescribe Cipro which kills the
infection but has even worse consequences for tendons and teeth.

Welcome to my life.

I need two hands to count up the *classes* of drugs that have been
misprescribed for me.

Why?

I simply trusted that doctors knew more than I did.

They don't.

They may be smarter than I am... but not when they're lazy.

I can understand damage done to me because there wasn't enough information
at the time to make a guess about what was going on.  I can't forgive the
rest.  They don't even think they've done anything wrong.  That old
arrogance remains.

There are any number of substances I could inject into my jaw to treat the
temporomandibular joint, but none of them are approved by the FDA.  Some of
them would be incredibly cheap, too, and they all show incredible
potential.  They make sense from the standpoint of cellular studies of
diseased joints and they make sense from the standpoint of foreign clinical
studies which have established their effectiveness.

And who teaches TMJ treatment in the US and who reviews new treatments?
Surgeons.  Historically there's been about a 1-3% success rate for TMJ
surgery, but despite superoxide dismutase injections being 70-80% effective
on problem cases in other countries, surgery remains approved and an SOD
doesn't.  Same for hyaluronic acid injections and other things.

You think heart surgeons who make $100K on a bypass want any competition
from $1000 in EDTA chelation shots?

Hell no.

And if you don't know anything about statistics, you'd never know how they
were cooking their study designs to "prove" surgery was superior.  Hell, I
can't even handle numbers again yet and even I can tell by the way some of
these studies have been designed what their problems are.  If you frame the
question and control the agenda, you're out of the woods before the fight
even starts.

That's OK.  I can play the game too.  When I realized the dentist could
only shoot me up with anesthetic, I looked into other substances which
scavenged free radicals like an SOD.  Lidocaine happened to be pretty good
at tackling oxidation and - what do you know? - it actually worked.  The
whole process took me several months to figure out since a lot of my
neurons were oxidized too and I couldn't concentrate but, hey, here I am a
sick guy and I got to a place most healthy doctors won't go to on their own.

Am I some sort of modern day parable - the patient so sick only he could
treat himself?  Something like that?

Sure, I know mistakes are not supposed to happen again and again like they
did in my case, but they have.  Maybe as science progresses, there will be
fewer stories like mine to tell.  But saying medicine has standards and
practical oversight doesn't change the fact that medicine is particularly
poorly organized as a social endeavor.  The auditing and supervisory
measures are inadequate.  There's nothing much in place to check conflicts
of interest.  The means of disseminating new research don't work.

Mostly there's no adequate collection of data.  You buy a DVD at Walmart
and that information goes into a national computer, a field in a
spreadsheet is notched up and the decisions of purchasing managers are
altered accordingly.

And what happens if the numbers on the Worldcom balance sheet look a little
funny?  Do institutional shareholders do anything?  (Actually they did in
this case.  They sued and the Republican judge who was a relative of the
RNC head rejected the suit as baseless - *with prejudice* - a year before
the company bellyflopped for exactly the shenanigans alleged.  Like I said.
Adult supervision counts.  We are our brother's keeper.)

What happens if the medicine the doctor gave you actually worked?  Do they
call you back six months later, collect that information and report it
back?  Why not?  The car company calls you up to see if you're happy with
your new purchase.  They want to know what color you'd like to see the next
model in.  Hell, they spend millions trying to work out what will be hot
next year.  That's because the balance of power is with the consumer and
not the patient.  Do you think a drug company would ever collect data on
the appropriateness of their drug for certain disorders?

You think sick as a dog when you can't think straight you can suddenly
brush up on everything you need to know and argue that a given medicine is
contraindicated or that you're not "psychosomatic?"  It's harder for a
doctor to get sued if he tells you you're nuts and you should see a
psychiatrist first.  Better to do nothing, right?  First do no harm?
Better to blame the shrink?

Let's say you do get a bottle of pills instead of the couch trip.  You're
going to get the medicine, take it and figure the doctor has already
checked the fine print on the bottle, aren't you?  And when you die because
of that mistake - or maybe the pharmacist just plain couldn't read his
handwriting - who will you run to?  Will your family think to check the
bottle?  Will they have the education to do the research?  Will they have
the balls to ask questions or will the high priests of everything
biological have properly intimidated them from the start?

Easy, you say?  No problem?  Of course you can spot that.

Well, I kind of fooled you.  What if you don't die but three years later
you develop really complicated problems - and you weren't on one medication
but five?  Do you keep your life together in a spreadsheet like that?  Will
you think to make the connection?  Will you have the proper training even
if you have the records?

Will you know how to think for yourself?

Are we teaching our kids how to address their ignorance on their own when
they get their degrees?

Should we be teaching "truth" for an incomplete secular world or should we
be teaching a constant process for getting there?

It's not the easy lies which are hard to pick apart.  You go into a murder
interrogation with six suspects and you know while one of them probably did
it,they'll all tell you they didn't.  You have to collect independent
evidence to build up an argument... to make sense of it all.

Isn't that what all these debates have been about the last few weeks -
making sense?

Everywhere I look it seems the notion that man is fallible has fallen out
of fashion.

People don't make mistakes.  OK, people make mistakes but they don't chuck
their ethics in a moment of weakness.  OK, they chuck their ethics but they
don't do it maliciously and deliberately.  Well, OK, they do it maliciously
and deliberately but only if they're different than us, see - you know,
they grow beards, speak a funny language and have strange customs.

Why are we even playing these games?

I'm sick and tired of journalists who don't ask questions.  What good are
they if they don miniskirts, grab pompoms and cheer the markets?

Like my political economy professor said, why do we even report up days as
good news?  Stocks go up.  Stocks go down.  People make money.  People lose
money.  Who are we to judge?

And yet we get, "every day in every way I'm getting better and better..."

Every day the war with Iraq seems to get cheaper and shorter - and we
haven't even fought it yet.

Every day the unemployment rate is falling... and so is the employment rate
- but that's good too!

I swear I haven't seen such an unhappy set of factors foreign and domestic
converging since the '20s and '30s - not that anybody'd tell us if they
noticed.