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

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  • From: Wade Riddick <wriddick AT usa.net>
  • To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [percy-l] College Essays
  • Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:08:00 -0500

>Peter and Rhonda,
>
>I too sympathize. I normally stagger my assignments, but I messed up
>with my cut and past job on my syllabi. All four classes turned in
>their work this week!

If I could chime in my two cents, the decline in reading and writing that's
occurred in American society across the last fifty years has had a very
deep and detrimental effect on our collective capacity for independent,
critical thought. As life and our understanding of it grows increasingly
complex, it's all-the-more crucial that we hone our analytical skills; I
don't know how we do that if it's not writing and grading essays and
tossing around ideas in seminars. Instead of investing in the development
of these faculties, a variety of political choices has made teaching this
sort of reflection more expensive and out-of-reach for the average citizen.

If you or your students doubt the benefits, then let me simply say this. I
doubt I would be alive today if I didn't have a degree in English and
graduate classes in microeconomics and statistics under my belt. The
amount of bullshit that masquerades for scientific truth in medicine today
is truly staggering - and deadly. I didn't just encounter potentially
fatal misinformation from one doctor; I got it from almost every corner.

For example, I brought in research published in scientific journals linking
gut bacteria loss to autoimmunity and one gastroenterologist told me he
didn't "believe" it - as if personal "belief" is supposed to be a measure
of scientific proof1 - and then he referred me to the local doctor who had
first pointed me to the theory saying, "She has a good reputation with
problem cases like yours."

I understood instantly from game theory that he was relying on a
reputational effect as a cognitive short-cut for his decision-making. But
he didn't need to. All he had to do was stay current with the literature
once he got out of medical school - you know, do what he's required to do
by law. He believed Dr. Cave could help me because she had a "reputation"
for helping problem patients no one else could deal with. What was she
using? Magic? In his mind, what was her "reputation" supposed to be based
on?

In a competitive marketplace, economically useful information is supposed
to be disseminated. If a doctor does something better than you do and
you're in competition with him, you're supposed to study what he does. How
does that information travel? The only source of new information for the
average doctor these days seems to come from drug company reps who have
economic incentives to skew their spiel. And if it's not covered by a
patent, they have no incentive to discuss it.

If you haven't been trained to spot subtle lies, you can't get a clear view
of reality and you can't help your patients. It's like deconstruction.
How do you understand what's not being said? How do you understand the gap
between what is said and the underlying reality those symbols are supposed
to represent? How many doctors get the kind of liberal arts education we
did? For that matter, take a look at the stock market slide and ask
yourself how many businessmen could benefit from a few history classes.

Our economy brims with specialists who know very little about reality
outside their increasingly narrow field. They cannot integrate what they
know with information from even closely related fields - even when lives
depend on it. The result is a comedy (or tragedy) of ironies. You see
this when a rheumatologist tells patients to eat foods that make their
inflammation worse because he thinks of it as a "nutritional" problem and
that's beneath him.2 You see this "semiotic bubble" when the executives
running A.I.G. and listening to their investment products division didn't
understand the basics of forensic accounting, fraud and Ponzi schemes (or
worse; perhaps they did).

It's easy for the sign to drift away from the signified. Perhaps we all
need a little shock every once in a while to prick the inflated bubble and
shake loose the light - or, as Albert Gore, Sr., put it, "Defeat may serve
as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out."

Having said that, when I consider the current socioeconomic and
technological trends, I can't help but worry that our capacity for
independent thought and collective judgment is in decline. Perhaps this
upcoming political realignment will prove me wrong or at least reset the
clock. I certainly hope so.

If the medical examples don't stir your soul or bother your students then
consider this: I've been in cash for several years now. Like Warren
Buffet, Paul Krugman and a lot of other contemporary critics of our
capitalism, I knew our economy was tied together with bubblegum and
shoestring and Bush was running short on shoestring.

Wade Riddick

1. I think T.S. Kuhn would say it is and I would agree with him; but
that's entirely the problem. We don't train people to understand that
their grasp on rationality is essentially a "belief" that we need to
constantly question in light of new evidence - particularly in the
sciences. Yet as we need more of this as scientific knowledge multiplies,
we're getting less of this.

2. It's not a bad choice economically since it does make the patient
sicker which then sends them running back to the rheumatologist for more
medicine. Of course, it's hard to construe this as good behavior in the
context of the Hippocratic oath. For another example of bad medicine,
consider how many rheumatologists think it's acceptable to prescribe COX-2
inhibitors like celebrex to arthritis patients despite the fact that it
makes autoimmunity worse and degrades the formation of new collagen in
joints.






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