Dam(n) it!

Reading essays and books and online reports always remind me of the old days when I spent lots of time browsing the bookshelves at USC's libraries.  Coming from India where a single library with a few books was a sign of affluence, I was suddenly thrust into decadence at USC's libraries.  It was beyond my imagination that a university could have many libraries, and that every library could be filled with books and journals and microfiche and videos and whatever else that humans had invented to store information.

USC Doheny Library, summer 2009

It was also intellectually terrorizing to realize that I might not be able to make any contribution when so much had already been said about the human condition.  If all the great thinkers and lesser intellectuals, whose works were in the collections, hadn't figured things out, what were the chances that I would make a breakthrough?  

Intellectual humility has always fascinated me.  I have blogged about that here.  A lot.  Like this one in 2012 in which I quoted Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, who was known as Chandra and after whom a NASA named an important observatory satellite.  Or, like when I quoted Montaigne who said, Que sais-je? “What do I know?” was Montaigne’s beloved motto, meaning: What do I really know?

Years, decades, later, I developed and offered a seminar on the importance of intellectual humility.  I titled the course as "Intellectual boldness through intellectual humility."  In that, I essentially channeled my philosophy on education and life--to admit that I don't know.  The key, however, is to rise beyond that.  Emulate Benjamin Franklin and say, "I could be wrong, but, ..."

I don't know if students got it.  Get it? 😀

Anyway, reading essays and books and online reports never fail to remind me that there is so much to know, when I am far more interested in playing bridge online.  Today's exhibit: iatrogenesis.

There I was reading a depressing essay on how the extreme rains that followed extreme heat submerged a third of Pakistan under water.  As I wondered whether I should cut bait and get away from an essay that described a hopeless situation, I read this paragraph:

There is a term in medicine, iatrogenesis: illness that comes as the result of treatment (in Greek, “brought forth by a healer”). It can be an infection acquired in a hospital, or the nasty side effect of a prescription drug, or a superbug arising from the misuse of antibiotics—a medical riff, according to the Yale anthropologist James C. Scott, on the adage that the cure can be worse than the disease. Scott, who researches peasants and nonstate societies in Southeast Asia, is writing a book on the Irrawaddy River in Myanmar. He argues that modern management of rivers—for instance, the vast canal irrigation system that exacerbated flooding in Pakistan—has brought about the environmental equivalent of iatrogenic harm.

Imagine if engineers and financiers had had in them even an iota of intellectual humility.  They would have thought long and hard about constructing vast networks of dams and canals in order to tame the Indus.  (I wonder if the Army Corps of Engineers is required to think about iatrogenesis.)  Humanity might have then developed a different and better relationship with rivers and all the natural landscape that gives us life.  To quote Subramanyan "Chandra" Chandrasekhar again:

[There] seems to be a certain arrogance toward nature that people develop. These people have had great insights and made profound discoveries. They imagine afterwards that the fact that they succeeded so triumphantly in one area means they have a special way of looking at science which must be right. But science doesn’t permit that. Nature has shown over and over again that the kinds of truth which underlie nature transcend the most powerful minds.