Bet On Malady
We live in something of a meritocracy, and our rulers believe they are by far the most enlightened and well-informed people who ever lived. For that reason they feel entitled to make the aspirations of the present day, or what they consider such, the compulsory standard for public life. They view the claim that there are principles that transcend those aspirations as the sort of thing that led to 9/11, and treat the past as worth considering only as something to escape from or a foreshadowing of the glories of the present.
Nonetheless, a variety of conditions, from the state of education and the arts to that of political discussion, makes it evident that Western society is growing less and less able to think clearly and effectively. That’s a big problem, and one that’s hard to deal with, because it is difficult to cure oneself of mindlessness. Still, we should do our best to understand what’s going on.
A basic part of the problem is that the kind of meritocracy we have leads to stupidity. Its effect is that local and subordinate groupings are deprived of talent and respect, and the leadership at the top becomes unable to think or function outside established understandings. The people at the top mostly went to the same highly competitive schools, where they were all told the same things, and it’s taken all their effort and devotion to get where they are today. The result is that they’re absorbed in their social function and setting, and would find it very difficult to adopt an independent perspective if the desire to do so ever entered their heads.
The results are evident in our public life. How often do our leaders say or write anything that would be of interest if a different name were attached? Can anyone imagine Hilary Clinton thinking something she isn’t supposed to think? And to get to the bottom line, do our rulers give the impression that they know what’s going on or what to do about it?
Naturally, meritocracy isn’t the only culprit. There are other factors at work that also stem from the nature of a society ruled by technology and technocratic ideals. Their effect is that the understandings that guide thought are becoming increasingly nonfunctional:
Leave Malady Malady is ready to depart. Once we have everyone on the Lady Vengeance, we should inform her. Summon Malady We should talk to the figurehead of the Lady Vengeance in order to summon Malady back on the ship. Malady On Deck Malady has concluded her own matters, and can be found aboard the Lady Vengeance. The Mind Maggot works good, But teleporting Malady and dropping a Dome, or blocking the stairwell with your tankiest character works well. In addition, if you talk to the Lady Vengence and choose the option to free her, the ship itself will side with you in the fight and grant you and your allies a extremely useful buff that lasts the duration.
- Electronic diversions train people out of the habit of consecutive thought. Tweets, texting, and multitasking mean discussions never get to the point and are hardly discussions at all.
- Rejection of transcendent standards leads to denial of the good, beautiful, and true in favor of rhetoric and power. That means the subordination of thought to politics, propaganda, and partisanship.
- Bureaucracy, commerce, and the media absorb functions once performed by individuals, families, and tradition. Instead of the arts of life, which require thought, we have consumer goods, social programs, and industrially-produced pop culture. The result is that thought becomes less important as a day-to-day matter.
- Thought requires engagement with reality. Electronic entertainment and the distance between cause and effect in a complex globalized society mean people do not engage reality, while skepticism as to truth means they consider it theoretically impossible to do so.
- A technological approach to society means mechanical unity of components, and thought and discussion are not mechanical. Common histories, understandings, and commitments, as well as freedom of association, are necessary for complex and subtle activities such as scholarly inquiry and speculative thought, and technocracy disrupts such things.
- Thought depends on recognizing and applying patterns, and technology rejects pattern recognition in favor of simple relations of cause and effect. To make matters worse, relating individual cases to patterns means stereotyping and discrimination. Ideals of diversity and inclusiveness, which draw their institutional strength from the technocratic desire to turn people into interchangeable components, thus require suppression of the habits of mind that make thought possible.
- Thought also depends on standards of cogency, which are disfavored because they are at odds with diversity. People want to include marginalized voices, so they feel called upon to treat thoughts nonjudgmentally, as long as they are politically acceptable.
- In any event, standards require effort, so they’re at odds with consumerism, comfort, and lifestyle libertarianism, and the technological outlook makes those the goals of life. Such an attitude may help explain the recent startling decline of academic achievement among thoroughly assimilated Jewish and Japanese Americans.
If America and the West are getting stupider as a result of the basic nature and tendency of our society, including the measures that have been adopted to increase the intelligence with which it is run, we have to ask about the future. Some say that the no-nonsense Chinese will take over everything, others that genetic engineering will save the day, still others predict a period of general disorder, something like the Middle East but on a global scale.
It seems unlikely the Chinese will take over, since they have their own problems. For starters, selective abortion and the one-child rule mean they’re going to have a huge population of young men with no prospect of marriage, and an even huger population of elderly people with no one to support and look after them. Nor does genetic engineering look like a cure-all for stupidity, if only because the problems are mostly cultural and grow out of an understanding of man and society that reduces human life to an engineering problem. So the obvious outcome of present trends in the West is growing incoherence of thought, leading to nonfunctional public life and a retreat into inward-turning networks of survival. We’ve tried to turn Iraq into Minnesota, but it’s more likely we’ll turn Minnesota into Iraq.
What’s needed, then, is a basic change of cultural direction that allows better things to develop. That’s not impossible. Intelligence is more functional than stupidity, and cooperation works better than chaos, so why shouldn’t they have a competitive advantage?
What’s caused the problem is the habit of viewing the world exclusively as a mechanical system. That approach has been fruitful in the physical sciences, but it has no place for intelligence, meaning, or agency, so it defeats itself when applied to the world as a whole. It can deal with protons, but not with physics as a science carried on by intelligent human beings, so in the long run it undermines even science.
Man is rational, at least to the extent that if he drives intelligence and meaning out of his understanding of the world he will eventually drive them out of his way of life. What we need, then, is a fundamental change of understanding that makes intelligence and meaning integral to how things are. To be functional and stable the new understanding must be concrete enough to give determinate results, and to deserve confidence it must have a way that can be counted on to settle disruptive questions.
That sounds a lot like Catholicism. Things haven’t been going well for the Church lately, but we’re not the only ones with problems. In the long run basic principles determine results, so if we can remain true to what we are then even from a purely this-worldly standpoint we have advantages that the forces of secular modernity can’t match. The conversion of the Roman Empire became final when thinkers like Augustine found they needed the Church to make sense of life and the world. What works best wins out, so there are reasons to expect something similar to happen again.
Editor’s note: Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
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Dos2 Basatan Bet On Malady
In recent months, we're beginning to hear discussion on a subject that hasn't received much attention in the last twenty years: smallpox. This horrible infectious disease that once killed thousands was completely eliminated from the world population in 1978, after over a century of vigorous immunization programs. Its eradication was one of the greatest public health triumphs. However, the threat of smallpox being used as a biological weapon in terrorist attacks has rekindled discussion of the dreaded disorder, and resulted in vaccines in cold storage being prepared for use 'just in case'. Now seems like as good a time as any to reflect on exactly what we've been missing in the last few decades! |
Smallpox (variola) is a contagious, disfiguring and sometimes deadly disease caused by the variola virus. It's believed to have first appeared in northeastern Africa or the Indus Valley of south-central Asia nearly 12,000 years ago. Since then, few other illnesses have had such a profound effect on human health and history. There is evidence that a major smallpox epidemic occurred toward the end of the 18th Egyptian dynasty. Studies of the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses V (d. 1157 BC) indicate that he likely died of smallpox infection. From ancient Egypt, it appears that traders spread the disease to India. Smallpox was brought to the Americas with the arrival of Spanish colonists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Many historians argue that smallpox infection killed more Aztec and Inca people than the Spanish Conquistadors did. A smallpox epidemic in 1837-38 killed an estimated 20,000 Native Americans, and it is believed by many that an early attempt at biological warfare was made when smallpox-infected blankets were deliberately provided to Native Americans by British General Jeffrey Amherst during the French-Indian War (1754-1763). |
Woman with Smallpox with vaccinated infant |
The smallpox virus occurs in humans and in some circumstances in monkeys. Particles containing the virus are released into the air when an infected person coughs, sneezes or simply talks. They also may spread through direct contact such as kissing or through contaminated bed linen and clothing. Inhaling a single particle may be enough to cause infection. Because it's contagious, smallpox has the potential to spread rapidly. Unlike anthrax, which is not transmitted from person to person, a smallpox epidemic could conceivably start with a single infected individual. There's no known cure, but a vaccine can help protect against the disease. In fact, an aggressive vaccination program resulted in the complete eradication of the disease from the global population in the mid-1970's. (The last reported case of smallpox occurred on October 26, 1977 in Somalia.) So, enough about the history of the disease, you want to know all the gory little details, don't you? The first symptoms of smallpox usually appear 12 to14 days after you're infected, although the incubation period can range from 7 to 17 days. During this time, you look and feel healthy and can't infect others. Following the incubation period a sudden onset of flu-like symptoms occurs. These symptoms include: A few days later, the characteristic smallpox rash appears as flat, red spots (lesions). Within a day or two, these lesions become filled with fluid (vesicles) and then with pus (pustules). The lesions appear first on your face, hands and forearms and later on the trunk of your body. They're especially prominent on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet. Lesions also develop in the mucous membranes of your nose and mouth. The way the lesions are distributed is a hallmark of smallpox and a primary way of diagnosing the disease. When the pustules erupt, the skin doesn't break, but actually tears away from its underlying layers. The pain can be excruciating. Scabs begin to form 8 to 9 days later and eventually fall off, leaving deep, pitted scars. All lesions in a given area progress at the same rate through these stages. People who don't recover usually die during the second week of illness. Of course, simply receiving a smallpox vaccination would not guarantee immunity to the disease, as the vaccination reactions could be most nasty indeed! Here are just a smattering of the reaction images on the CDC website:
Bet you young people are happy to have been born after 1972, eh? (Old people like me probably still have an indented smallpox vaccination scar on their arm - if not worse!) It's worth reflecting on that scar and imagining a time when that one little pockmark would have been one of hundreds scarring your entire body... if you even survived. The miracles of science, indeed! |
Bet On Malady
The information above was mercilessly swiped from ACPOnline and UAB
The absolutely hideous modern images were culled from the Centers For Disease Control
and the World Health Organization websites.
The vintage images were culled from the Otis Historical Archives at the National Museum of Health & Medicine.
Bet On Malady Divinity 2
Special thanks to Barbara Turner for the suggestion and the CDC link!