Tag Archives: Ideology

The Over-Medicated and the Under-Medicated

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From Dissident Voice, a piece by Joseph Grosso on the drug companies’ recreation of the definition of disease:

“This year will see the publication of the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), the field bible for mental health professionals. If earlier editions are any indication the latest one will feature and slew of newly established disorders all to be treated with the latest anti-depressants or anti-psychotics……

Other disorders, both mental and physical, conjured up or legitimized in recent years include Social Anxiety Disorder, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, Irritable Bowl Syndrome, Estrogen Deficiency disease, Osteoporosis, not to mention the always stretching boundaries of ADD (see Adult ADD) and ADHD to include more and more drug takers. It can’t be said that the effort of branding new disorders and expanding the very concept of what disease is has been a failure for the drug companies. Prescription drug use has skyrocketed over the past two decades. Americans now spend money on prescription drugs in amounts that equal or surpass the amount spent on higher education and automobiles. Their profits enable to have a death lock over the country’s political process. The predictable flipside being that, according to a 2005 survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse the number of Americans who admitted to abusing prescription drugs doubled from 1992-2003.

While American children living in the suburbs get pumped with medication for all sorts of overstated or marketed illnesses, children living in the planet’s rapidly expanding slums perish of preventable digestive-tract diseases rooted in contaminated drinking water and overall polluted conditions. In sub-Saharan Africa alone neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are the most common conditions affecting the region’s poorest 500 million people. A recent assessment published in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases estimates that hookworm, an infection that weakens immune systems and causes anemia, occurs in 40-50 million school aged children. Schistosomiasis, the second most prevalent NTD claims 192 million victims and is ‘possibly associated with increased horizontal transmission of HIV/AIDS.’ There are many others (Lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, roundworm) often overlapping in the same individuals. Why put all of them under the banner of ‘Neglected’? The WHO webpage puts it thusly:

The misery caused by neglected tropical diseases is largely hidden. Affected people live almost exclusively in remote rural areas and sprawling shantytowns, where lack of safe drinking water, poor education, poor sanitation, substandard housing and where access to health care may be virtually non-existent… Neglect also occurs at the level of research and development. The incentive to develop new diagnostic tools, drugs, and vaccines is low for diseases with a market that cannot pay…”

Samuel Johnson on Hypocrisy

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Samuel Johnson writing about the misuse of the charge of “hypocrisy”:

“Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.”

The Hundred Who Made the Economy Collapse

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Vanity Fair’s piece on the hundred who made the economic crisis manages to include blackberries and VIP rooms, Ralph Nader, George Bush and Bill Clinton, Woodrow Wilson, Republicans Hank Paulson and Hank Greenberg…

But it omits Robert Rubin….and Larry Summers…and Tim Geithner….and any of the numbers of hedge funds that were shorting companies for years….and it forgets AIG….and  Barney Frank..[Correction: It does include AIG and Barney Frank, a great improvement] and even good old Eliot Spitzer, who should have done much more, for all that sound and fury about going after crooks…

What a tendentious list.

Do-Gooding Dimwit?

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Meddling and ignorant idealism is never a power for good, as this recent turn of events in Burma illustrates:

It is a remarkable irony that an unknown American, who presumably wanted to champion Suu Kyi’s democratic cause, was the catalyst for her latest troubles. But so go the unintended consequences of political inexperience. “Burma’s pro-democracy movement has long been an attraction for fantasists, fanatics and adventure tourists,” writes Aung Zaw, editor of the respected online news magazine the Irrawaddy, sho covers Burma from neighboring Thailand. “Did John William Yettaw consider the consequences [of his swim]? Did he think for a minute that he would do more harm than good? Probably not.”

One of Suu Kyi’s lawyers branded Yettaw a “wretched American.” Inside the country, it can be easy to spot the foreign idealists masquerading as, say, tourists or teachers, who have made it their mission to change Burma…… As Aung Zaw noted in the Irrawaddy, two British activists who were convicted for staging separate political protests in Burma in 1999 were both released early after serving only a fraction of their jail sentences. Good news for them. But Burmese can hardly expect the same treatment. If Suu Kyi is convicted — and Burmese courts have a frighteningly high conviction rate — few expect the Lady to taste freedom anytime soon. “

More here at Time.

My Comment

Idealists? I wonder. A large number of these do-gooders aren’t idealists so much as vain, self-important no talents, who gain a passing glory by linking themselves to ‘mass movements’ or ‘popular leaders’. In their own countries, they’re nobodies. But in a third-world country, their US citizenship, racial membership in the ‘ruling class,’ and the relative strength of their currency, gives them a status that their own accomplishments cannot. It goes to their head. Pretty soon, they fancy themselves saviors. They interfere, stir up trouble, and then conveniently leave, letting the ‘natives’ take the rap for their arrogant intervention…

On the other hand, there’s something remarkably “stagey” about the whole incident. And when I note that Gordon Brown – he who sold off Britain’s gold at the bottom of gold prices and has now presided over the bankruptcy of its banking system — seems to be throwing righteous and media-genic fits over the Burmese junta’s response, I have to wonder.

I think about Bill Clinton’s miraculous intervention on behalf of the two journalists in North Korea….and in a world of simulation and media myth-making, I have to file this under “What really did happen?”

Christopher Dawson on Hostility to Religion (Comment added)

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“Behind this vague tendency to treat religion as a side issue in modern life, there exists a strong body of opinion that is actively hostile to Christianity and that regards the destruction of positive religion as absolutely necessary to the advance of modern culture.”

—  Christopher Dawson

My Comment:

As I’ve written, I am an agnostic and a skeptic….not so much about God, as about language. Which means, I read Dawson or Voegelin, with as much attention (or inattention) as I read Marx. The latter does not seem any more “scientific” than the former to me. Indeed, the only thing that makes something a religion is the hostility to opposition that adheres to it. [correction: this is an overstatement. It should read “one of the things that make something a religion.”] From that point of view, most of those who believe themselves to be actively hostile to “god” and “religion” are actually devout believers – their temperament is exactly like the rabid fundamentalists they denounce.

I, on the other hand, believe myself to be a Christian agnostic and a Christian skeptic.

How can I subscribe to such a contradiction in terms? [For those unfamiliar with theology, there are many leading theologians who are quite skeptical or even unbelieving in “god”].

For me, it is not a question of lacking faith in God. That is quite a simple-minded kind of contrarianism.

My heresy is a little deeper. I lack faith in language.  I have no faith in words as a fixed repository of meaning.

As for “god” – the conventions and symbols one grows up with can never really be uprooted and it seems wiser and truer to accept them as equally the outgrowth of the mind as logic or empiricism.  If I must confess disbelief in “god,” then I must confess it equally in “man,” “truth,” “justice” or “logic,” “you” or “me.”

What naive empiricists never realize is that what endows facts with their “factuality” is the “mind.” There is no escaping that.

Not do we have to go from naive empiricism to naive idealism, i.e., we don’t have to leap from “just the facts, ma’am” to “Just my opinion.”

Instead, we continually adjust our thoughts and subjective experience to the hard edges of facts so-called, to the limitations of objective experience. We do that through the refinement of our language. We continually reflect the tension of existence in a conditional, fractured, and fluctuating reality through language that expresses the contradiction and paradoxes inherent in our existence as mind-body.

In that spirit, I have no problem with affirming:

Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium…..

Neither Right Nor Left Nor Stupid

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Increasingly, I find that I fit neither left nor right, as it’s conceived in the United States.  I’m not even a libertarian.

I’m not surprised.

People have a relationship to language that I find puzzling and foreign to me. Even repugnant. It’s an instrumental view. It’s also a very fundamentalist and dogmatic view.

Words are much more complex than that.  To fit our narrow ideologies into them, we have to drain them of their power, their ambiguity, their richness – all the ways in which they don’t mean what we say. They never do. And bless them for that. Bless them that they always escape us. As experience always escapes us.

I am not a progressive, if progress means latching on to every idiotic scheme that flatters its manufacturer’s vanity at the expense of hard-won experience.

I am not a conservative, if conservatism means mistaking your own prejudices and ignorance for immutable truths.

I am not a libertarian, if liberty is a theory that you force on the reality of freedom and unfreedom.

I am not a pragmatist, if pragmatism is simply opportunism disguising itself as prudence and state craft.

I am not an extremist, if extremism is driving a good idea into insanity by literalism.

I am not a moderate, if moderation means selling your conscience to mass opinion.

Large parts of public debate are simply stupid, in the broadest sense of that term.

First, they are stupid, because many of the people engaging in them aren’t smart. Sorry.  It’s just so –  they aren’t people who’ve subjected themselves to any discipline besides saying whatever they think at the moment, unrestricted by expertise, criticism, reality, history, memory, conscience, or anything else.

Journalists simply aren’t true professionals in many respects and don’t have standards equivalent to the legal or medical profession. The IQ necessary to practice journalism of any kind isn’t that high. Writers generally tend to be smart people, because it takes a high level of intelligence to sustain an argument through the length of a book or through a good academic paper. But most journalists write little reports of 5-8 paragraphs – most of it on the order of “he said,” “she said,”  and “then so and so did” – and sometimes they don’t even get around to doing that.

Second –  public debates have become stupid, because there’s too much chatter going on. And the quality of things tends to deteriorate when the quantity goes up. Good ideas get taken up by dumb people and at the end of it, the good idea isn’t recognizable any more as good…or even as an idea. It turns into a slogan, an idiocy, and it tends to produce idiocy even in intelligent people who take it up.

Third – public debate is stupid because ideology tends to make us stupid. It requires us to strait-jacket our thinking, to look through a particular lens, to read only our side sympathetically, to pick winners and losers competitively.

Words have their own destiny. They are not our pawns or hostages.