what is sickness?

I have a geography book from 1898 and it exemplifies the kind of beliefs that were general at the time, and certainly the white race is the pinnacle of evolution, and as you noted the asians are the next step up and the blacks are at the bottom. This was when the Europeans were at the top of the heap, with the northwest ones at the very tip top and the southern and eastern ones, not quite lily white, a bit of off-white. Well nordic whites were at the top of the heap then and pretty proud of themselves, and of course they were writing the books.

Maybe I was too glib in saying these guys weren’t scientists. They did generally have elevated academic positions and I think they wore those cool white coats, and how is Joe Six Pack going to be able to tell that they weren’t following the tenets of science?

Maybe I was a little too glib about the sociologists too. The study of human behavior and of humans in groups is certainly a legitimate study. But it’s also a really complicated one. Scientists can isolate a single electron and determine its properties and then generalize that knowledge because all electrons are exactly alike. But it’s hard to isolate a single person in a group action and no humans are alike. Experiments are the life blood of scientists, and it’s hard to do experiments on groups of people. There are studies, but studies are very complex and they involve a bunch of math and generally people major in something like sociology because they are no good at math. And then there is the thing where nobody gets too excited over whether the tip of the spaceship is made of tin or tungsten, but people get very excited over whether the best solution is people working individually or in groups, and the sociologist soon discovers his bread is buttered better if he sides with the right or the left wing.

That racial antagonism, which of course is not really racial because we are all of the same race, is basically us vs them, you see it with Croatian vs Serb, Russian Ukrainian vs Ukrainian Russian, Crip vs Blood, Sox fan vs Cub fan.

This whole thing about whether a thing is a sickness or not, is a bunch of hooey. If you have measles I can take your blood and find the virus. If you have diabetes I can see it in the composition of you blood. If you have alcoholism I can only determine that by watching you in the tavern. There are things that are really diseases and there are things that are just called that for various reasons.

Alcoholism is called a disease to get a little sympathy for alcoholics so that we treat them a little better, “Oh he is an alcoholic, he can’t help himself,” and can more easily cure them, likewise calling mental strangeness a disease is meant to make it a little more sympathetic.

But calling it a disease is a double edged sword, because that also implies that it should be treated, there is something wrong with that person and they need to be changed. And generally people don’t want to be changed.

And all those attempts to make gays straight, I don’t know if any of them have ever worked, and most gays say they have been gays as long as they can remember, and I don’t recall any point in my childhood where I could have gone gay or straight and just happened to choose straight, and then there is the fact that if it is voluntary why would you ever choose to be gay? So I think it is probably something physical although nobody has ever found what it could be.

But this question is political too. The right wingers want to think it is a voluntary thing therefore they can make life harder on gays on the theory that this will tend to make them more likely to decide to become straight. The left wingers want to think it is involuntary, so there it is, they can no more become straight than a black guy can become white, and so they are just another minority, and you know how we lefties love minorities.

And I think the AMA’s deciding it wasn’t a sickness was purely a political move. When we all thought that gays were these sinister characters it was popular to be against them, but now that we think they are all cute and witty, it’s more popular to be for them.