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.

I Wish I Could Remember

I wish I could remember where I read that thing about scientific racism. If it was a book, I still might have it around somewhere but, if it was a magazine, I'm sure that I don't. What I do remember about it is that it featured reprints of articles that had been published in a scientific periodical back in the late 19th Century. It may have been the British magazine called "Nature", or some other one that has been around for a long time. With each article there were footnotes or something that explained what scientists believed at the time because, otherwise, the reader wouldn't know what they were talking about. One thing they said was that the term "scientist" was kind of new at the time, and some of the scientists didn't like it, preferring to be called, "men of science". Anyway, the Theory of Evolution was still pretty fresh in those days, and people were trying to make it apply to other things besides the origin of species. The term "survival of the fittest", which Darwin himself never used, was interpreted by some to imply something called "social Darwinism".

I was surprised when you said that sociology is not a science but, since you obviously know more about the subject than I do, I will take your word for it. This would explain your assertion that there is no scientific basis for racism, for racism is surely a sociological phenomenon. I don't think that anybody believes that one race is biologically superior to another anymore. Although people tend to classify others by appearance features like skin color, it's not the Black's appearance that bothers most people, it's their culture and social behaviors. Those differences are almost unnoticeable when you only have one Black guy living in a White neighborhood or army barracks, but they become more apparent as the percentage of Blacks in a group increases. If it was only one White guy living among all Black people, he would definitely be aware that there was something different about those dudes. Even you have admitted that you feel a little uncomfortable when traveling through an all Black neighborhood, but you don't mind mingling with them on your own turf. In a truly integrated society, the Blacks would be all spread out among the Whites and Hispanics, and I'll bet everybody would get along just fine. That is unlikely to happen any time soon though, because birds of a feather do indeed flock together.

Okay, so what do the scientists say about those gay people? If the AMA is more political than scientific, then their assertion that homosexuality is not a sickness would seem to be invalid. Then again, I believe it was the AMA that decided it was a sickness in the first place, so that must also be invalid. So what is it? I have heard it described as a "lifestyle choice", but I've also heard that people are born that way. Is it genetic then? It's definitely a behavior, but is it a behavior disorder? I'm sure that the gays don't look at it that way, they must think that they are normal and we are the dysfunctional ones. Of course, if everybody was gay, the human population would be at an evolutionary dead end. That must have been what happened to all those early human species that are now extinct, they were all homos, so they couldn't have any kids.

You can wear a white lab coat but that won't make you a scientist

There is an excellent show going the rounds now, called Cosmos, a newer version of a show originally by Carl Sagan, only this one with Neil DeGrasse. I think it originally was on Fox, but now it is going the rounds, NatGeo, maybe Discovery, The Science channel, the way these kinds of shows do. I never saw the Carl Sagan show, but I caught a couple episodes of this one and I really liked it.

What I really like about it is it tells the story of science from a historic viewpoint, first science believed this and then it discovered that, but then this, which I think is better than the litany of what it currently believes without any explanation of why we believe that.

Because science is not a collection of current theories, science is a method, the scientific method, you start out assuming nothing, you have an hypothesis, you have a test of the hypothesis, if it succeeds the hypothesis is confirmed that strengthens the hypothesis, if it fails the hypothesis is dead. I’m pretty sure they taught us this in Gage Park. I think they are still looking for the top quark, if it cannot be found, or more accurately if it is proved not to exist, the whole standard model goes out the window and they will have to go back to the drawing board.

There have long been philosophers, and you know how I feel about philosophers, but what we think of as scientists in the western world really didn’t show up until the late middle ages. Before that the church, which was the only learned body around, thought the whole world was made of air, fire, earth, and water, and things floated or sank depending upon how much of each they contained, and they believed that because some Greek had said it two thousand years previously and they had never bothered to investigate it.

Oh we’ve gone through the history of science before I am sure. Just because some guy calls himself a scientist doesn’t make him one. He has to have facts to back him up. Copernicus was a scientist because he had observations and calculations to back him up. Galileo actually did experiments, most famously dropping those balls off the tower, though that story may be apocryphal.

Those white supremacist guys were never scientists. They never had any proof of what they said. It was all the accident of history that at the current time the Europeans were at the top of the heap, and they had some snake oil head measurements or something. They may have had academic degrees and stature in their community, but when you asked them for proof their white lab coats were empty.

I remember taking sociology courses in college and they would spend the whole first period explaining why they were a science, but of course that made it even more obvious that they were not a science at all. They are just philosophers and politicians. And mental health people, outside of knowing some drugs work sometimes, they don’t know shit.

There. But I was a little troubled when I wrote that part about first science thought this and then when it discovered that was wrong it thought that, and I thought isn’t that pretty much what Beagles complained about them changing it. So let me say this about that. When we were kids we didn’t know much and as we grew we had to change what we thought as we found out about other things, so that at any point what we knew is the best we knew at the time. At any rate that’s the way it should be, it would be stupid to decide to believe something when we are 14 or 40 or whatever and just decide we were going to believe that for the rest of our lives no matter what. Science is like that, it is just our best knowledge at the current time.

As for your last sentence, I think the AMA is more political than scientific, but if, for instance, definitive studies showed that gay marriage was indeed going to take us all to hell in a handbasket, then I would have to be against it.

"Nevertheless, It Still Moves" - Galileo

 The trouble with believing in science is that they keep changing it, and it's not always a linear process. I don't know if science ever taught that the Earth was flat, but I'm pretty sure that it once taught that the Earth is stationary and that the Sun, the Moon, and the stars all revolve around the Earth. Then Copernicus decided that, no, the Earth revolves around the Sun. Some time later, another scientist must have decided that the Copernicus was wrong because, when Galileo came along teaching that Copernicus was right after all, he had a hard time selling the concept. Most of his opposition came from the Catholic Church but, in those days, there was not such a clear distinction between science and religion as there is today, and I'm pretty sure that many of the scientists in Galileo's time sided with the church on the issue. Well, that's not exactly true because the word "scientist" was not in common use at the time, so Galileo and his colleagues were probably known as "philosophers", as were the theologians of the church. Anyway, Galileo eventually backed down because they made him an offer that he couldn't refuse, not if he wanted to avoid death by torture. Years later, somebody asked him why he hadn't stuck to his guns and become a martyr for his beliefs. Referring to the Earth, Galileo said, "Nevertheless, it still moves."

Until the early 20th Century, science taught that racism was cool. They used to believe that the White race was the most highly evolved, that the Yellow race represented a more primitive step in the evolutionary process, and that the Black race was the least evolved of all. Even after most of the scientific community trashed that idea, there were some well respected scientists in Nazi Germany who still believed it. If they had won the war, they well might have imposed their beliefs on the rest of the world's scientists and we would have learned it at old Gage Park. Therefore, it was the force of arms that finally defeated scientific racism, not the eloquence of reason.

When we were kids, the scientific community classified homosexuality as a sickness. Before that, it had been considered a crime in most jurisdictions worldwide. Sometime in the 1970s, the American Medical Association announced that homosexuality was no longer a sickness, and they shifted their efforts from trying to cure it to trying to help people learn to live with it. I don't know what kind of scientific evidence or logical reasoning went into the AMAs decision, but it was generally accepted by the scientific community at large. Now, if some new evidence came to light, causing the AMA to reverse course and revert to their earlier position, would you support them?

A reasonable discussion implies the use of reason

Reason and logic my friend, go together like a horse and carriage. If we are not deploying logic, if we are saying I know what I am saying does not make any sense but I am going to say it anyway pretending it bolsters some point, then we are not having a reasonable discussion. If we are both exchanging opinions that we believe in just because we seem to believe them and haven’t given any thought to why we believe in them and don’t plan on ever doing that, I suppose we are having some kind of conversation like maybe you have with the guy on the next barstool when you are both loaded, but that is not a discussion.

The particular section of the southwest side were I grew up was extremely racist. It was nigger this and nigger that all day and night long, anything that went wrong, like the Kedzie bus only going as far south as 51st to the breaking of your shoelace when you knelt down to tie it, was routinely blamed on the niggers. Not that I was a paragon of virtue, but I was a big believer in science which clearly indicated that racism, whether you thought it was right or wrong, was stupid, it was like believing in a flat earth.

So I didn’t go for that stuff, but it was all around me, it rubbed off on me, and every now and then, usually some black person cut into line ahead of me or something, and I would be thinking, fucking niggers. But then I had to stop myself, Good Sense Uncle Ken from his perch on one of my shoulders would wag his finger at me, and I would have to admit that what I had said was wrong.

And so it has been my whole life long, and now distressingly as I age not so gracefully I guess, I find that that racist thing is coming more and more to the fore. They say old folks are less tolerant than young folks and maybe it is true.

But still Good Sense Uncle Ken still steps in and corrects me everytime one of those stupid racist thoughts pops into my mind. I could just say well I guess I don’t like black people just because I don’t like black people, but I don’t because I know it is stupid, and I can think the thing through again and realize that it is still stupid, and I never, no never, say to myself that that is just my Internal Sense of Right and Wrong and let it stand.

There is a book, and they made a movie out of it which you can sometimes see on probably TCM, A Member of the Wedding, written by Carson McCullough, which is set in the south, and at one point the young girl at the center of the story thinks about her nanny who had in her youth gone to Cincinnati and seen snow. It just seems so distant and exotic to her. Strange to think that something so commonplace and mundane to us would seem exotic to others.

Reasonable Discussion

I don't think that all reasonable discussion necessarily has to be logical discussion, logic is only one of the various tools that we use to make sense of our surroundings. I figure that, as long as we don't get violent or abusive, we're being reasonable. My original position was that gays shouldn't be allowed to get married because that's not what marriage is for. I believe that your original position was that they should be allowed to get married so that they can have equal access to the tax breaks and other economic advantages that married people have. I then said that I would rather see those benefits denied to all married people than to see gays gaining equal access to them. At this point you should have realized that my opposition to gay marriage wasn't entirely based on logic. The truth is that I have an emotional bias against gays, maybe not against individual gay people, but against the idea of people being gay, and against the idea that they have banded together to form yet another special interest group that seeks to dominate the political scene.

I have admitted that my paranoia about Blacks and gays taking over the world might be just a matter of perception. I don't watch a lot of TV, but it seems like what little TV I do watch is becoming more and more dominated by Blacks and gays. I suppose that it's all relative after all. Fifty years ago there were very few Blacks on TV, and no gays at all. Hell, they didn't even talk about regular sex on TV back then. I didn't even own a TV during the late 60s and early 70s, so that's likely when the transition began. It probably wouldn't have seemed so dramatic if I had been watching all along but, when you go away from someplace and then come back, any changes that occurred in your absence are more noticeable. Then there's the fact that I'm not a spring chicken anymore. I'm old now, and that's what old people do, wax nostalgic about the good old days and bitch about how the world has been going to hell in a hand basket ever since. If we don't do it, who will?

I admitted that my little anecdote about Cleveland was an unscientific observation. When you think about it, it makes logical sense that the entire government of Cleveland should be Black, assuming that Cleveland, like most big cities in the East, now have a predominately Black population. This is no big deal because the Whites have largely abandoned the inner cities, and I suppose somebody has to live there. You have told me that Chicago is only about one third Black, one third Hispanic, and one third White, which is probably why you have a Lebanese mayor. What's really scary is that we have a Black President of the United States but, then again, he's only half Black and he doesn't really act all that Black, so maybe it's all right. We had a Catholic president once, but he never did turn the country over to the Pope, and we haven't had another one since.

I think you're right that Northern people like to brag about their hard winters. It kind of sets us apart as a hardy breed, doesn't it. Garrison Keillor, who hails from Minnesota, claims that cold weather builds character, and he ought to know.

This reminds me of another amusing anecdote: When I was working at the paper mill, we had a Black truck driver come in from Alabama. He had never seen snow in his life and, as luck would have it,  his first trip to Michigan occurred during the Blizzard of '78. Coming up I-75, he drove through a long stretch of state forest, maybe 50 miles, before coming to the lights of the next town. His first impulse was to be relieved at returning to civilization, but then he thought, "People  actually live here? What kind of people would live in a godforsaken place like this?" By the time he backed up to our loading dock, he was a nervous wreck. He couldn't decide what would be worse, going right back out on the road, or spending the night among the cedar savages. I assured him that we weren't so bad as all that, and that he would be safer laying over in Cheboygan than going back out in that mess. I don't know what he finally decided to do, but he was sure about one thing, that he would never come back to a place like this again, even if it cost him his job.

What The Institute stands for

You can’t use everybody decides for himself either. No wait a minute you can, in fact that is what everybody should do. BUT they have to be able to explain why they believe that in clear logical terms, and if somebody comes up with an argument against it (which also has to be clear and logical), they have to be able to refute it in the same manner, and on and on, and eventually a logical inconsistency will be discovered in one of the two sides and then the person upon whose side the logical inconsistency has been revealed, will thunk his forehead with the heel of his palm, and say, “Well I’ll be dogged,” and change his viewpoints gladly, thanking his opponent for helping him to see more logically and clearly.

That’s the way the world works isn’t it?

Anyway that’s what I always thought The Beaglesonian Institute stood for. What do you think it stands for?

How do you know that if you watch a lot of television it looks like the gays and the blacks are taking over the world, when you yourself don’t watch a lot of television? Did the guy at the bait shop tell you that he watches a lot of tv and it appears to him that the gays and the blacks are taking over the world, and so you put that fact into your wallet, as good as gold?

Okay you know the what, and the where, a bunch of black officials assembled in Cleveland Ohio, but you don’t seem to know exactly when, and you don’t know why, and even though you acknowledge that it is not a scientific observation, and you don’t feel any need to do even internet research, you would like to offer this as proof that black people are taking over Cleveland. Is this a reasonable discussion point to put before reasonable people?

I saw a couple Albanian lesbian gun nuts standing on the corner of State and Madison, no wait, three of them, and so I have to assume that mayor Rahm is also an Albanian lesbian gun nut. Makes him look a little better in my eyes, even with that gun thing.

You know I came back to Chicago in 1987, thinking I would just be passing through, but now it is pretty apparent that I am not getting out of here alive. But anyway I had vivid memories of the winters of my youth and the three amigos at the end of the seventies, and I believe there was another big one in 1984, and I was expecting to get clobbered, but you know what, nothing much.

Nothing much since I’ve been here, oh the occasional blizzard, the occasional teens below zero, but you know that was all occasional, duck your head down for a few days and then it was over. I think the first snow hit the ground in mid December, and now on April Fools day you can still see piles of almost black snow against the edges of the parking lots, and it seemed like we were twenty degrees below average more days then we weren’t, and there was no January thaw, or February thaw, and no thaw to speak of in March. It was close to seventy yesterday, but we won’t get much above forty for the next ten days. But there you are a couple hundred miles and a bit east of us, so how can we compete with you?

Funny thing about us northerners, the way we sound like we are complaining, but we are actually bragging about our winters, the way fishermen do about the ones that got away. And it doesn’t impress our friends from the sweet sunny south one little bit, and they look at us over their mint juleps and ask us why we continue to live there, and we change the subject.