On the Right and medical quackery

I'm listening to a 1978 interview of Susan Sontag by Studs Terkel on the topic of Illness as Metaphor.

At 39 minutes, Sontag notes that the extreme right has long been occupied by medical quackery:

"Laetril has very much been taken up by the John Birch Society."

She and Studs also talk about the morality and moralisation of illness, notably (at the time) TB and cancer.

Audio: https://studs-terkel-radio-archive-feed.s3.amazonaws.com/mp3/22912.mp3

Podcast: https://studs.show/feed.xml (XML feed)

#SusanSontag #StudsTerkel #Podcasts #Disease #Quackery #JBS #MoralisingPathology

@nina@neenster.org Also related: #MoralisingPathology ... probably ... isn't especially helpful.

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/b4bbef90e8c60138513c002590d8e506

We (collectively) realised that attributing disease and catastrophe to sin and morality did little to actually address them. I suspect much the same is true of social, psycholocial, economic, and other pathologies.

They don't occur because of evil intent, so much as evil predispositions are supported and encouraged by the system. Systemic change is necessary to address this.

@dlovell I'm ... not especially satisfied with the mens rea argument, though it is a bulwark of legal theory. I trend towaard a disease-theory-of-crime, if that's a thing, where criminal acts should be seen as a socially contextualised dysfuntion toward common weal.

There are cases where criminal disease very cclearly has causal origins in physical injury or disease, with the 1966 University of Texas Tower Shooting being a notable case:

On August 1, 1966, after stabbing his mother and his wife to death the night before, Charles Whitman, a former Marine, took rifles and other weapons to the observation deck atop the Main Building tower at the University of Texas at Austin, then opened fire indiscriminately on people on the surrounding campus and streets. Over the next 96 minutes he shot and killed 14 people (including an unborn child) and injured 31 others. ...

It has been suggested that Whitman's violent impulses, with which he had been struggling for several years, were caused by a tumor found in the white matter above his amygdala upon autopsy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Texas_tower_shooting

Environmental factors, notably lead exposure, childhood abuse and neglect, poverty, socially-constructed crimes or circumstances (powder vs. rock cocaine sentencing, "War on Drugs", physical vs. wage theft, disenfranchisement, discrimination) are all additional examples.

#MoralisingPathology seems slmost always to do more harm than good.

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/b4bbef90e8c60138513c002590d8e506

Yes, there are people who cannot function safely in society. Punishing them seems to do little to change this. Treatment may not be possible, but isolation seems reasonably effective.

@pluralistic There's the questio of why #MoralisingPathology is so prevalent. I suspect a few factors:

• History & philosophy. The social sciences laargely evolved from what used to be called "moral philosophy", and tends to have concepts of "good" and "bad" baked in. Even when they're "baked out", as with "positive economics", the end result ain't great.

• Religion. There's a long history of divine judgement, Just God, God's will, etc., baked into both popular maralising and language itself.

• Psychological simplicity. A worldview of "good and bad", black and white, is epistemically simple. It makes navigating complex realities easier, if not necessaarily more successful.

• Economic convenience. If problems are the fault of the afflicted, the obligation of bystanders or others to help is negated.

• The Golden Rule. Not "do unto others", but "For he that hath, to him shall be given". Mark 4:25, Mathew 13:12. "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power", Adam Smith. And power begets power. Both by relieving obligation and by denying necessities, inflating asset values.

4/

@pluralistic #MoralisingPathology is practice which failed for infectious disease and physical medicine.

Longer discussion: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/b4bbef90e8c60138513c002590d8e506

In part:

It fails for mental health and psychiatry. I suspect it fails at social levels as well: crime, politics, economics, culture. Not that bad things don’t happen (they do: they’re pathologies). But that treating them as moral failings … fails. Four thousand years of ethical medicine achieved little. Two hundred years of germ theory — and most of that by the very early 20th century — much. Public health measures account for about 85% of all longevity increase since 1850: solid waste disposal, sewage systems, clean water supplies, food purity laws, early vaccinations, and rudimentary safety practices. Antibiotics, imaging, organ transplants, cancer therapies, and other advanced treatments, comparatively little — expensive ineffectuality is the great shame of modern medicine. ...

Infectious disease made its breakthrough on the realisation that some infectious agent is transmitted via a vector to individuals exhibiting susceptibility within a population subject to therapies (there’s a great book coming out in the US this fall, The Rules of Contagion, (https://www.worldcat.org/title/the-rules-of-contagion/oclc/1184053568) by Adam Kucharski, addressing this). Each italicised term becomes a potential point of control and intervention. We can disrupt disease reservoirs, break chains of transmission, remove vectors, increase resistance (immunisation, nutrition, risk factors), provide supportive or immunological therapies (antibiotics, antivirals). Neither causes nor interventions are morally based.

Similar stories can be made for industrial hygiene, environmental regulation, weather forecasting, earthquakes, floods, climate, personal safety, or online security.

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/b4bbef90e8c60138513c002590d8e506

This goes by numerous other names. #BlameTheVictim is probably most common.

3/

@pluralistic #MoralisingPathology is the practice of treating some dysfunction as a moral failing.

It's why the Western US has been on fire:

Bernhard Eduard Fernow, a Prussian forestry official who married an American, came to the United States in 1876, and was soon naturalized. He headed the Bureau of Forestry, which was a small agency in the Department of Agriculture. ... [In Europe] fire was seen as a social problem, a problem of social order and disorder. Fernow looked at the American fire scene and declared that it was all a problem of "bad habits and loose morals." Well, that’s a great phrase. But it was totally inappropriate.

“California Is Built To Burn”"

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/fire-historian-on-the-west-coast-wildfires-california-is-built-to-burn-to-burn-explosively-a-44380d6a-b9e6-468c-9090-e7aad3a366b7

2/

@pluralistic Excellent thread, mostly annoys the heck out of me because you're wrapping up and bowing ideas I've been kicking around for a decade and more, betteer than I've been able to: #homelessness #MMT, #MoralisingPathology, #AssetInflation, #wealth, #poverty, #inequality, #WealthTax, #LVT, #capitalism, #postcapitalism, and more.

I'm going to amplify and extend a bit, you and readers may find this useful.

I'm going to break this out by themes.

1/