Part the First: We Live in Pluto’s Republic. With apologies to the shade of Walt Disney, this was bound to happen eventually. From Corey Robin, who notes that at Texas A&M a philosophy professor must dispense with Plato in his course because the content will be in violation of this edict:
“No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance by the member CEO.”
In December, the chair of the philosophy department at Texas A&M reiterated these directives to individual members of the faculty teaching material that might fall afoul of these state rules. One of those faculty, Professor Martin Peterson, submitted his syllabus for Contemporary Moral Problems for review. It included Plato’s Symposium, which features several arguments about sexual love between people of the same sex, including older and younger men; hermaphroditism as the source of heterosexuality; and long disquisitions on the efforts of Alcibiades to seduce Socrates. It’s pretty racy stuff, and a touchstone of any discussion of sexual morality, which has been a concern of moral and political philosophy since, well, the ancients. Peterson’s chair responded that he had a choice: get rid of Plato from the syllabus or teach another course.
CEO? I am just going to assume it has the common definition and refers to the president or equivalent at each unit of the state university system in Texas. No surprise there. The background report is from the philosophy blog DailyNous.
The use of the term “advocate” in the policy is worth noting. It is a label for an inappropriate pedagogical approach (indeed professors should teach students, not lobby them) and it associates this inappropriate pedagogical approach with teaching about race and gender, insinuating that if students are hearing about race or gender in their course, it must be because their professors are doing something illicit.
I never could convince a friend’s literary agent that when I teach graduate students and medical students I don’t feel the need to indoctrinate them with my evil “liberal” disinformation. Trying to explain that I had never been a liberal was also futile. Anyway, first they come for Plato…But this is not the first such rodeo in College Station and it will probably not be the last. I wonder, though. What will happen with this dawn comes up like thunder about a hundred miles to the southwest in Austin? I suppose the philosophy students at the University of Texas can bop on over to the University of Austin for their philosophy, where the truth shall set them free under the leadership of this unbelievably august Board of Trustees. Or just go ponder the bats leaving the innards of the Congress Avenue Bridge to fly along the still waters of Lady Bird Lake (Colorado River of Texas). I have seen this in person several times and highly recommend it! And not a Niall Ferguson or Bari Weiss in sight.
I think Professor Robin is being a bit unfair to Porky’s and its sequels (yes, I watched the first, nearly forty years ago; I remember that my seventh-grade alter ego thought it was funny). But Porky’s as the politics of our time? Yes:
I say “from the very beginning of this latest round of conservative assault,” but the truth is, this has been obvious since forever. Just watch a silly movie like Porky’s II, which came out in 1983, and takes place in the Florida of the 1950s. The movie is about the effort of a high school drama company to put on a production of Romeo and Juliet, featuring a kissing scene between a white student playing Juliet and a Native American student playing Romeo. The local right is up in arms about the indecency of Shakespeare, and the movie goes from there.
Sometimes, increasingly often these days, I feel like we should stop talking about the right as if we were in some fancy dress-up costume drama of the European past, where we pore over the texts of the latest National Security Strategy as if it were some sort of holy grail, and instead look to idiot movies like Porky’s as our guide. Porky politics, that really is the alpha and omega of the current moment.
In the meantime, protect your precocious teens and college freshmen from Plato. Both Republic and Symposium might give them ideas. Chained up in a cave watching shadows on the wall while thinking of sex would lead to nothing good.
Part the Second: Dietary Guidelines, Again. You knew this was coming, too. Dietary guidelines have been a protean being since the middle of the twentieth century. What is potentially interesting about this is that the banner of the new guidelines is topped by “Eat Real Food” and cut out the added sugar. Does it make more sense to eat real food, including more dairy and meat? Yes. This was the recommendation when I was in elementary school in the 1960s. And that is exactly what we did – before the diabesity epidemic that took hold in the 1970s and 1980s, undoubtedly because fat and cholesterol were demonized and replaced in the diet by processed carbohydrates. From the current Secretary of Health and Human Services:
“Today marks a decisive change in federal nutrition policy,” said Kennedy at a press conference Wednesday, adding that the government had previously been “lying to us to protect corporate profit-taking, telling us that these food-like substances” like highly processed foods and refined carbohydrates “were beneficial to public health.”
Actually, the government was not exactly lying but Big Food is most interested in profits. Their only reason for being is to make their shareholders money (thanks again, Milton). Healthy food and food security are not part of their business plan. This is old news covered here many times, most recently last month. The new dietary guidelines are here. The key to a healthy diet is simple: Eat real foods in moderation, plants and animals. But the problem is the Food System does not allow it. Get back to me when the Current Secretary takes on Big Ag and Big Food with the alacrity and effectiveness that DOGE attacked USAID, and the good things it did across the world. And yes, we are all perforce aware that USAID was also a front for the Deep State. That did not matter to the hungry it fed and the sick who were treated courtesy of a soft American power that did work.
No one will be surprised that the scientists (I use the term loosely) responsible for the new guidelines are in the employ, one way or another, of Big Food: Panel behind new dietary guidelines had financial ties to beef, dairy industries. Regulatory capture is a professional sport in the United States and these people are all-stars destined for their hall of fame, which probably exists in a basement on K Street:
Reviewers’ ties to special interests, disclosed in a report published alongside the guidelines, is especially notable considering how administration officials have railed against conflicts of interest in the development of previous dietary guidelines.
“This is rife with conflicts of interest,” Lindsey Smith Taillie, a nutrition epidemiologist at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, said after reviewing the list of financial disclosures at STAT’s request. Multiple researchers assigned to work on the guidelines are well known for having strong advocacy positions on matters like meat and sugar, Taillie said.
Even Wednesday, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said during a news conference that his agency’s streamlined guidelines would replace the “corporate-driven assumptions” of past recommendations.
What matters most in American politics is that the experts are on the politicians’ side, whoever and whatever that may be. Business as usual in the Era of Citizens United (thanks again, Mr. Justice Kennedy). A few of the greatest hits here:
Heather Leidy of the University of Texas at Austin received grant funding from the Beef Checkoff, a marketing program funded by beef producers. She also sat on the scientific advisory board of the Egg Nutrition Center, and consulted for food giants such as Kraft Foods, PepsiCo, Hillshire Brands, and Kellogg’s…She, like others on the review panel, is affiliated with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Dairy Council. At least four of the nine panelists had recent financial relationships with beef or dairy groups.
Tom Brenna (also UT-Austin), another expert assigned to the task, consulted for the cattlemen’s beef association, and received a research grant from the group. He also gave a lecture at a meeting of the American Dairy Science Association, and traveled to the conference on the group’s dime… Brenna was also a consultant for Nutricia, a subsidiary of French yogurt giant Danone, and served as a paid expert on a panel for the company. He is also an adviser to the nonprofit Seafood Nutrition Partnership. Brenna also founded a probiotics company called Adepa.
Donald Layman of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is co-owner of a protein shake company, Metabolic, while Ohio State professor Jeff Volek is on the science advisory board of Simply Good Foods, the parent company to diet foot companies like Atkins and Quest.
Michael Goran of the Keck School of Medicine at University of Southern California previously served as a scientific adviser to infant formula companies Else Nutrition and Bobbie Labs, and also for a company that makes “gut health supplements” for infants and toddlers. He receives research funding from the Atkins Foundation, started by the people who created the popular low-carb diet of the same name.
Nothing to see here, move along. And the funny thing about this is that these university scientists, to a person, will deny that being on the payroll of Big Food affects their judgment. Of course, the same is true for physician-scientists who do “research” for Big Pharma. They are tough minded scientists who would never let lucre get in the way of their science. Funny thing about that. Eventually Big Pharma figured out that a 23-cent ballpoint pen and a stack of sticky notes branded on the edge of the stack works just as well as weekends at Pebble Beach when it comes to influencing the prescribing behavior of these people.
Part the Third. The Vaccine Mishegoss Continues. The Secretary of Health and Human Services continues to get his way on the vaccine front, and I do wonder what Senator Bill Cassidy, MD, of Louisiana thinks. From Science-Based Medicine:
As anticipated, RFK Jr. continues to be a wrecking ball on the American healthcare scene as HHS secretary. His latest move to undermine vaccines in any way possible is to reduce the number of vaccines on the routine vaccine schedule from covering 17 illnesses to covering only 11. This will have the predictable result of reducing vaccine compliance and increasing preventable disease.
How he is doing this is as important as what he is doing, so let’s take a closer look. First, the CDC recommendations are now divided into three categories – population-based, risk-based, and shared clinical decision making. The first category is what we already understand as routine vaccines to protect individuals and prevent the spread of infectious disease throughout the population. The second category, risk-based, essentially means that vaccines in this category are only recommended for people in a high risk population. The third category (which I suspect RFK would eventually want all vaccines in) means that there is no specific recommendation, just a discussion between doctors and patients.
Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, rotavirus, meningiococcal disease, influenza, and COVID-19 are all moved to the “shared clinical decision making” category, which effectively removes them from the list of recommended vaccines (although technically still “on the schedule”).
All this has been expected, too. It is outrageous. But what really gives the game away is the use of Denmark in making this very weak case. The Kingdom of Denmark may be about to lose Greenland to Stephen Miller’s perfervid delusions, but they will still have their universal healthcare system, and this makes all the difference in the world:
It is not hard to see, as many have, why Denmark is a horrible analogy to US health care. Denmark has a population of only 33 million, and they have universal health care with centralized tracking. So everyone is in the system and has access to routine preventive care. In such a system, something like shared decision making is much more viable. The US, by contrast, has 330 million people, with 27 million uninsured, no centralized healthcare database, and individuals frequently moving to different providers and insurance. So putting it on individuals to take the initiative to seek out a specific vaccine is likely not to work well.
Keep in mind, it only takes a drop in a few percentage points of vaccine uptake for some infectious diseases to spread much more easily (measles!). Such a drop also leaves millions of people unprotected, and is likely to result in significant morbidity and mortality. Vaccines are a preventative measure. They need to be part of routine care in order to be effective, and since every percentage point counts, they need to be as easy, cheap, and convenient to get as possible in order to maximize effectiveness. RFK’s new schedule will cause death and disease, the only question is how much.
Dr. Novella goes on to note:
RFK is worried (ostensibly) about the known and unknown hazards of vaccines, more so than is justified by the evidence. He is also less worried than he should be about the negative consequences of the diseases that these vaccines can help prevent. This is partly due to his poor understanding of medical science and clinical decision making (he is not an expert), but also due to the fact that he appears to be a full-fledged conspiracy theorist. He does not trust the system and does not trust experts. He thinks this gives him clearance to just substitute his own beliefs for the consensus of expert opinion.
Well, it is not just the Current Secretary of Health and Human Services who “does not trust the system and does not trust experts.” And that, alas, is largely on my tribe, who are still in the thrall of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. Unfortunately, very few of the members realize this, basically because they are just too damned smart to see the truth in front of their faces. Collective guilt is no more valid than collective punishment, but until we biomedical scientists as a group get a grip, this same old lethal nonsense will continue to wreak havoc. In the world of deep fakes enabled by algorithmic intelligence, I cannot see a way out of this crack. Suggestions from the best commentariat in the world are welcome!
Part the Fourth: Stone Age Poison Arrows: Another fault of my professional kindred is they think those who came before us were ignorant. This despite, among other things, Roman concrete that is as hard today as it was 2000 years ago (we can be thankful that Brutalism lay 2000 years into the future). As this Nature news article tells us, Oldest known poison arrows show Stone Age humans’ technological talents:
Traces of toxic plant compounds have been found on a handful of 60,000-year-old African arrowheads, providing the oldest chemical evidence that Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers used poison to bring down prey.
The finding, published on 7 January in Science Advances, adds to the growing picture of how intelligent and technologically advanced people were in this era. Making poisoned arrows is about as hard as following a “complex cooking recipe”, says study co-author Marlize Lombard, an archaeologist at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. “You have to add to it the danger of the poison, and planning to work with it without getting poisoned yourself, then you have to hunt and track the prey animal under difficult and dangerous conditions sometimes for a day or two.”
The paper is here: Direct evidence for poison use on microlithic arrowheads in Southern Africa at 60,000 years ago (open access):
Poisoned weapons are a hallmark of advanced hunter-gatherer technology. Through targeted microchemical and biomolecular analyses, we identified traces of toxic plant alkaloids on backed microliths from Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, excavated from a level dated to 60,000 years ago. The alkaloids buphandrine and epibuphanisine only originate from Amaryllidaceae indigenous to southern Africa. The most likely source is Boophone disticha (L.f.) Herb. bulb exudate, also associated with historically documented arrow poisons. To our knowledge, we present the first direct evidence for the application of this plant-based poison on the tips of Pleistocene hunting weapons. The discovery highlights the complexity of subsistence strategies and cognition in southern Africa since the mid-Pleistocene.
Just one more shout out to archaeology! Humans can be ingenious when they are not being obstreperous. And these hunters were active about 50,000 years before the monumental Göbekli Tepe was constructed, for whatever reason. I am reminded of the young student who asked our Anthropology 102 professor this question, “Dr. Hudson, how did those (little people in Africa) kill those great big elephants?” He stared at her for a moment and then turned around and wrote “B-A-L-L-S” on the chalkboard. This might get him defenestrated today, but everyone in the room laughed then, including the student who asked the question. Yes, it was balls, plus a discerning human intelligence that was no different from that of a present-day scientist, farmer, engineer, or architect. But something lacking in a politician or economist or the typical billionaire so often in the news today.
Part the Fifth: Leonardo’s DNA. Sometimes “can implies ought” leads to borderline silliness such as this:
In April 2024, microbial geneticist Norberto Gonzalez-Juarbe stood over an enigmatic drawing in a private New York City collection. Gently, he rubbed its centuries-old surface, front and back, with a swab like those used in COVID-19 testing. “It’s not every day,” Gonzalez-Juarbe recalls with a laugh, “that one gets to touch a Leonardo.”
Rendered in red chalk on paper, Holy Child shows a young boy’s head inclined slightly to the side, his features sketched with feathery strokes. Light pools softly around his cheeks and brow, dissolving the edges of his pensive face in a haze of sfumato. The late art dealer Fred Kline, who acquired the drawing in the early 2000s, had claimed stylistic features such as left-handed hatching, a trademark of Leonardo da Vinci’s, link Holy Child to the Renaissance master. But its authorship remains in dispute; experts say one of his students could have produced it.
Gonzalez-Juarbe’s swabs may have captured a biological clue. In a remarkable milestone in a decadelong odyssey, he and other members of the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project (LDVP), a global scientific collective, report in a paper posted today on bioRxiv (note: not reviewed) that they have recovered DNA from Holy Child and other objects—and some may be from Leonardo himself.
Of course, “may” also means “may not.” I have exceeded my word limit, but one more thing before we go. When these DNA sequences are deposited in the genomic databases as “Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA (H. sapiens, emphasis on the sapiens part in this case),” one of the aforementioned billionaires will hire a group of molecular biologists to pore over them with their most sophisticated bioinformatic tools. When they demonstrate that said billionaire shares a couple of SNPs related to something in the brain with the great man of the Renaissance, he will shout to the heavens and every living thing below, “Aha! I told you so!” And this will have been cheaper than buying this painting and hiding it on a yacht. So, he will have that going for him. Which is nice.
See you next week, God willing and the creek don’t rise.
Ever notice how the obesity crisis really kicks off in the USA when all-you-want serve-yourself soda beverage counters came into vogue?
Correlation isn’t always causation, but we’re talking about maybe 1,000 of the emptiest calories ingested by some attempting the Pepsi Challenge…
Diet Coke has hindered my ability to unite the people.
Funny a+
er… The Conversation gets it right. Denmark has a population of 6 million souls (as my wife keeps reminding me) not 33 million.
Indeed! Thank you. I should have caught that!
Little do they know, without Plato you can’t explain much of Christian history and thought.
Just to show you how bullshit identity politics is, I never once had these thoughts when reading Plato and trying to understand wtf everyone was talking about.
Except for the Cave one.
My feeble brain definitely understood that one.
Imagine if we all put down our screens and exited the cave?
Plato’s point is that reality lies beyond the material world, in a realm of ideal forms. Daft as a brush.
Thank you.
This is his concept of the Divine? Like we can witness beautiful things and experience glimpses of the Divine?
Thanks as always for your updates. On the Part the Second dietary guidelines, yes, they can affect institutional offerings, but do they really present any threat to the entrenched interests of corporate food producers? These products are designed to be addictive and are. A walk through a grocery store shows no shortage of sugar laden offerings. There are few beverages on the Starbucks menu that don’t provide most of a day’s sugar intake, even in the smallest size. And then there’s sodium…
Sodium or salt is a terrible danger if someone drops a hundredweight on your head.
Otherwise its a required nutrient.
I would certainly rank refined sugars way higher as a concern than salt.
…and it makes real food taste better.
Pre-sliced stuff (ham, cheese…) is full of sugar, well, starch. Used as conservative after slicing it works great BUT adds a lot of sugar to the diet. Starch = poly-glucose but the saliva has the enzymes that break it into glucose.
They also coat pre sliced anything with starch to keep things from sticking together. (Just try to find anything in the middle aisles of a grocery store with no corn based ingredients…. other than packages of salt, sugar or dried beans, nothing. Even bags of flour are “enriched” with folic acid, with the single exception of King Arthur’s south of the border.)
‘Pluto’s Republic’ good one that~
The stars at night, but no hermaphrodites,
Deep-sixed in the heart of Texas,
Seduction selection is wide and high,
Deep-sixed in the heart of Texas.
The in flagrante in bloom is like stinky perfume,
Deep-sixed in the heart of Texas,
Reminds me of, watch out who you love,
Deep-sixed in the heart of Texas.
Minor but major. The population of Denmark is six million, not 33 million. Small. Not comparabile at all to the U S of A, given recent reports of the Danes’ obsession with their seeming ethnic purity. And elimination of postal delivery of letters.
More on the Leonardo findings.
https://theleonardodnaproject.org/category/news/
Some of this is interesting in that it may help in determine authorship. But most Italian painters had botteghe — workshops, businesses. Tintoretto famously had a son and a daughter who were excellent painters, particularly the son. Many hand touched a painting.
So whose DNA is on a work of art may matter in knowing who made it. But looking for genes for Leonardo’s excellent vision is pointless: his vision is part of his training.
Es s Ce Tera:
Further, Plato was well placed in society, hardly the rebel, and a conservative.
Diogenes used to show up at Plato’s house and track dust on the rugs:
https://taloslabs.substack.com/p/diogenes-vs-plato-when-philosophy
I prefer Diogenes.
I beg to differ. Plato may have been an aristocrat, but it was this, I believe (along with Bernard Wlliams), that enabled him to be – unlike Aristotle – a genuine revolutionary. His polis was a revolutionary one. Gender equality in a notorious homoerotic patriarchy, power to be wielded only by those loathe to do so in a society notoriously infected by the urge for domination, the ruling “elite” the publicly supported communal living poor in a notoriously conspicuous wealth obsessed society, and on and on.
Now I like Diogenes too, but he was no revolutionary radical like Plato. He said he was a hero of “Nature” as opposed to slaves to “convention”, and thus he was a greater man and hero than them – this, of course, is simply his enactment of the Homeric ethic of heroism on grounds where he might win the contest (as with his witty exchange with Alexander, and Alexander’s response that if he could not be Alexander, he would be Diogenes). Further, Diogenes lived as he did because the existing polis let him so live and liked the show he put on.
What a great comment!
My political philosophy professor at LSU back in 2009 ish would never be able to explain Plato like this. He was an old marine and what he said never made sense to me.
I joined the military shortly after this class.
I remember slaving over The Republic as a first semester freshman and finding some of its ideas risible. The discussions and debates during lectures were great, though, and that’s part of the reason why, looking back, I can appreciate how important it was to be the very first required reading in a required course for all freshmen.
I joined the military after uni, but partually because the student loan repayment was very attractive to a poor immigrant like me :)
Indeed, Plato’s Republic is a fair bit more radical than many people think.
Having taught it in the past, my impression is that the most oft-read sections are Republic I and VII. The first book explores three different views of justice, including the famous discussion between Socrates and Thrasymachus, in which the latter argues that justice is only the self-interest of the those with power. And the seventh book includes the well-known allegory of the cave.
However, there are a number of other fairly unusual arguments in the Republic.
I.e., not only for gender equality, but also for the necessity of censorship in the education of the guardians, the necessity of the “noble lie” (in Republic III), the necessity of abolishing the traditional family among the guardians in favor of “wives and children in common” (in Republic V), of controlling their sexuality, and of organized “sex festivals” for breeding the guardians in which men and women are paired together by a rigged lottery — rigged to produce the “best” children (i.e., eugenics, as the “inferior” children are to be exposed to the elements, infanticide being a common practice in the ancient world, cf. Oedipus).
As wards of the city-state, the children are to separated from their biological parents and raised to understand all other children as their brothers and sisters, and all adults as their parents (also explored in Republic V). The age of the children will be carefully tracked as a means to avoid incest, but sexual relations between brothers and sisters would be allowed “if the lottery works out that way and the Pythian oracle approves”.
To institute this perfect city-state, moreover, it would be necessary to send some over ten years of age out into the countryside, in order to isolate the children from their present habits, the habits of the parents, and bring them up in their own manners” (this is described at the end of Republic VII).
I recall the philosopher Stanley Rosen commenting on Republic V and VII during a presentation: “what we’re talking about here is pretty much the killing fields under Pol Pot.” It is perhaps worth noting that Rosen was a Straussian and also studied with Alexandre Kojève.
Yes, Plato was a radical, if not “as we know it, Jim”. Still, the questions remains: did he, in the Republic, sketch the perfect realization of politics as politics – where this means for the common good, as he insisted was the animating point of politics as opposed to mere force and coercion. For he took politics to be a matter of fundamental equality, so that force and coercion might only be used to defend and articulate that equality – and then show,or realize, that such politics was – while the animating ideal of all that is politics – impossible?
I think maybe he did think politics was – as fully realized – impossible. In the Republic we get the Form of Politics, and as everyone knows, the Form makes anything what it is, but anything that is is always short of the form (a copy or imitation), not the real thing.
I think we should see Plato’s politics this way: In the Republic the Polis speaks (the voice of the common good in all its Forma(al perfection), the – 30 years or so later – we get the Laws. Now politics is described as possible for us, and only in a second best form.
And that second best form? Well, democracy, but one indexed to power and inequality in a way as close as we can get to the impossible animating ideal of politics the the Republic specifies.
So, in the Laws, it goes like this. All citizens are equal where this rests on the fa ctr that all citizens and their families have the basic means of respect worthy subsistence (in the Laws this means each household has enough land and resources and labor to be self-sufficient in the sense they can support themselves by themselves), but inequality is allowed (for land and labour and inclinations differ), but only insofar as is consistent with this fundamental equality. Thus in Laws Plato argues that above the basic self-sufficiency, we can allows for inequality, but the limit above the universal self-sufficiency is 4 X.
Thus if the basic self-sufficiency “wage” is $120000 a year, the richest can have, at most, $480000 a year. And if anyone brings to attention that someone has more, then they get that excess – and if the claim they have more is false, then they are punished to that amount.
In my humble view, we need to read Plato’s radical politics
(where this is understood as he understood, in terms of the Republic and the Laws) as a politics of utopian directed realism.
I think contemporary China is the closest modern approximation, if that is what you are after, and so if what you are after is – in Plato’s view – a matter of genuine politics, not brute force and coercion in the service of exploitation.
A new book by Marion Nestle (sic), a nutritionist at NYU, “What To Eat Now”, an update of her 2006 (?) “What To Eat” , seems to me to be crammed with sensible advice based on real data.
Is it that different from what we eat ‘then’?
Meat 3 times a week, fish on a friday and fresh veg the rest of the time seems to have worked for me.
KLG wrote an entire post on that book last year: :https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/12/what-to-eat-now-more-than-ever.html
Plato’s Symposium may have gotten the boot but it would be interesting if the book Lolita would have gotten the same treatment.
While I deplore censorship;
I hope these people will be as strict with grok and openAI’s erotic playthings.
> does not trust the system and does not trust experts.
> until we biomedical scientists as a group get a grip, this same old lethal nonsense will continue to wreak havoc.
First distinguish the system from the experts. The system (FDA) did nothing when the experts (Marion Gruber and Philip Krause) resigned in protest. The system keeps pushing statins and GLP-1s despite serious health concerns.
Janet got a second cataract fixed when she trusted the doctor and procedure. Science still works. People trust who they believe are experts. But the system provides the incentive structure that pays the biomedical scientists. Medical professionals are in the same boat but worse, they have the suffering sitting in front of them.
I don’t understand the intricacies of Bayh-Dole. But it seems the professionals are really the bottoms of their systems, despite the apparent status. Who makes the decisions on what gets published and produced are the chokepoint regulators in research. EMR’s are set up for insurance companies, not doctors or patients. But as long as the perceived distance between the workers and their bosses is less than between workers and patients/public, only an existential threat to their professional status will be enough to drive cooperation.
I am not sure I should even say this – but here it goes.
I have been teaching Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Hippocrates for decades to medical students. It is all about human nature, how we should deal with our patients with this wisdom of the ancients, etc. They really do have much to tell us about our world today. But strident posturing and more importantly certitude coming from either side, but especially the professors in this discussion, is not appropriate. The very first and foremost issue is that one must be pretty fluent in the ancient languages, their culture, and their context to even begin to understand the intricacies of what is being said, much less teach it.
I hate to say it – but in the past generation or two or so in our universities, the learning of the Greek ( Homeric, Attic and Koine) and the learning of Latin has really been diminished. Long gone are the days of mastery – now we are doing good to have the students doing a couple of semesters. I am not going to go into all the hows and whys – but it has been diminished and you can tell it instantly when you hear the level of discourse.
My approach has always been a more patient one, with almost an exegesis for the students when we are discussing a questionable issue or interpretation. It is imperative that one understands and recognizes that yes, there is actually a dispute about what much of this may have meant to the Greeks themselves and it is important to discuss all the possibilities.
So, as just one example, one of the more important passages in the ancient canon that has everything to do with human sexual behavior and how we relate to it as physicians is found in the First Epistle to the Corinthians from St Paul. Most specifically in the first section of the 6th Chapter. Because we do live in a Judeo-Christian heritage world, how this particular passage has been (mis) interpreted over the years is of vital importance. Every gay, transgender, lesbian, etc patient is living with the consequences at least to some degree daily.
In most modern English translations the most important verse comes out something like the following as I quote here – “Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God”
μαλακοί – or malakoi – the plural of malakos – means I guess what we could call a “soft” personality today – in the time of the King James translation – this was widely understood to be “effeminate”. It is possible that is the meaning to the ancient mind – but probably not very likely. When you take that word in the context of how it is used here and how it is used elsewhere – it is actually more of decrying men who are a) not taking care of their families, b) not keeping up with their intense activity to remain muscular and studly c) lazy, d) not fiercely protective of their community e) not standing up when they see bad things going on around them……….It could be anyone of these. It is in context in a passage that has other things listed that are not sexual – so again – it could be any one of them. A thorough discussion of this passage must include this detail.
ἀρσενοκοίταις – this one is even more fun to dive into – arsenokoitai – a compound word that St Paul appears to have made up on his own. It is not really found in other texts – and this is very easy to do in Greek and somewhat common – and St Paul was really good and really entertaining at this. A compound word – ἄρσεν – arsen – male – κοίτη – koite – bed – so we put them together…….MAN BED. Throughout Christian history this has been translated as homosexual sex. And the generations of gay men have had this thrown into their faces as condemnation of going to hell. And they live with it. And accordingly we as their physicians live with it. We have to deal with it and the often very self-destructive behavior that emanates from it. We must understand where these gay men are coming from and how to help them. —– Interestingly, St Paul may not have meant gay sex at all. And you must discuss this fact when you teach these passages. MAN BED – may very well have meant a very sexually aggressive man who was doing interns like Clinton or doing every teen in sight like Epstein. It may very well have meant a married man who dallies.
As an aside – It is very difficult to type Greek letters in modern typewriters, if I made mistakes in the Greek spelling above – it is my own fault.
I can go on and on and on – but I will not. My basic point is that you must have a visceral understanding of the language to begin to understand what was being said. And that comes from years of study and putting these words in their context.
So the religious exactitude coming from one side does not come from a good place. But I must say the opposite is true as well. The gender/queer studies people do the exact same thing – making stuff up and latching on to possible translations to make their narrative look better without bothering to explain or admit that there may be other viable interpretations. It is why I take stories like this one above with a good hard laugh. Smiling and laughing at the folly is all we can do now.
This kind of reminds me of the importance of what was meant, what was said, and what was heard, in any contemporary discussion. Then go back in time a thousand years, and be faced with that in another culture and language, and the challenge is vastly compounded.
Thanks for the Classics lesson, IM DOC.
The mark of a wise man is to know that he is NOT fact wise.
How true that becomes the older I get. Always more knowledge to learn to make me better!
My grandfather is a world famous classicist named Dr Joe Park Poe. He’s currently in a swank ass retirement home by Tulane off Broadway Ave. He had a stroke so his mind can’t process more than like 30 seconds worth of concentration. I will mention these Greek Words to him and see what his response is. He’s best friends with his old Latin 1 wheelock textbook and carries it with him everywhere in the wheelchair.
From bitter experience, junk drugs such as statins not being withdrawn apart from limited cases,depresses me.
They address a problem which might not exist, with a solution that does not work.
Coronary heart disease (CHD) rates in England and Wales between 1950 and 2005 were high and reasonably steady until the mid 1970s, when they began to fall. Recent work suggests that the rate of change in some groups has begun to decrease and may be starting to plateau or even reverse.
Statins introduced mid 1980’s jumping in front of a parade.