Wanted: A course in ignorance

Today I shoved to the back burner my work on three essays resulting from our recent encounters in Costa Rica. (See last night’s post.)

Earthlink, my DSL provider, went dead for about six hours so I happily turned to books on this cold, damp Portland Sunday. I was fortunate enough to pick up Lewis Thomas’ “The Fragile Species,” one of my recent Hillsdale Book Sale acquisitions. I’ve mentioned Thomas (1913-1993) before. He’s best known for “Lives of the Cell.” Like it, “The Fragile Species” is full of insight.

Here’s just one example before I turn in for the night. Lewis, doctor, medical researcher and succinct writer, knew the virtue of humility in his profession, despite the public’s lofty expectations of and demands on it. In an essay titled “Becoming a Doctor,” Thomas recommends that the first two years of medical school make room for a “few courses in medical ignorance” — “so that students can start out with a clear view of the things medicine does not know.”

There is no better qualification for any professional, or for anyone for that matter, than to be aware of what one doesn’t know, and to freely admit it. Humanity would be well served by studying its ignorance.

How often in political campaigns do candidates admit to ignorance? We should think better of them, not worse, for such admissions.

Instead of an honest “I don’t know, but I’ll find out,” far too often we get evasion, question-begging or outright lies, and pay a terrible price for it.

No need to name names.

Browsing Bound Ink Blots

Going through books donated to the Hillsdale Book Sale (this Sunday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Watershed Senior housing building), I was drawn to an odd assortment of titles.

My attraction served as a kind of literary Rorschach test, circa Dec. 2007.

Here are the blots of ink I chose to browse.

A 1977 edition of “Playboy’s Book of Backgammon,” with a forward by none other than Hugh Hefner. To quote Hefner: “Backgammon is an oddly moral game. It punishes self-deception.”

A 1953 Landmark Books edition of “Thomas Jefferson, Father of Democracy” by Vincent Sheean. I vaguely recall reading this “young readers’” book when I was 11 or 12. Could this tidy little, illustrated volume with its big, scholastic type have been formative? Chapter 1: "He was over six feet tall when he was seventeen years old—a rather awkward boy, with carroty red hair and freckles, a pointed nose and chin. You would never have called him handsome, and yet...."

Two Lewis Thomas books, “The Medusa and the Snail” and “The Fragile Species.” You can never get enough of Lewis Thomas, the self-described “biology watcher.”

“Flu,” subtitle, “The story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused it.” By Gina Kolata, who's name sounds suspiciously like one of those exotic Hawiian drinks. Never mind. Thoughts of the 1918 flu pandemic take me back 20 years to one of those random English rambles that delivered me to a country parish graveyard, There I found myself staring at four rows of 16 military graves. The markers read that the graves belonged to Aussie soldiers who died in 1918 not in the horror of battle but in the agony of the Great Flu Pandemic.

“Oregon Geographic Names” by Lewis L. McArthur. 1984 edition. I’m surprise at how many times I have trundled down to the Hillsdale Branch Library to look up some nominal oddity in this book by my neighbor up the hill. What a treasure. From the “Hillsdale” entry: “The name Hillsdale has been in use since pioneer days, and is quite suitable for the place. Hill is from the old Anglo-Saxon hyl, and the Norse holl. Dale means a small valley. It comes form the same source as dell, and the German thal and Slavonic dol.” Now you know.

“An Army at Dawn” by Rick Atkinson, about the 1942-1943 North African campaign. I had read somewhere that this Pulitzer Prize winner was powerfully written. A dip into it did not disappoint. “September 1, 1939, was the first day of a war that would last for 2,174 days, and it brought the first dead in a war that would claim an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hours, or 19 a minute or one death every 3 seconds….”

“Poor Richard’s Almanacks” by Benjamin Franklin illustrated by, get this, Norman Rockwell. Coffee-table format. What price can you place on this: “If you’d know the Value of Money, go and borrow some”? Or “In the Affairs of this World Men are saved, not by Faith, but by the Want of it.”? The price of "Poor Richard" at the book sale, a Franklin-esque $2.

There’s more, but somehow that’s enough.

Reflections in Time's mirror

So Time magazine's cover says that "You" (who, me?) are the "Person of the Year."

According to Time, each of us deserves the recognition because we are empowered by the medium I'm using right now to reach you...and that you can use to reach me.

We are empowered by our new webs of connection.

But the fact is that once we log off, it's back to reality, and reality these days is a dangerous place.

War, terrorism, global warming and, yes, nuclear annihilation. You know the list.

Look into Time's cover, which is a literally a mirror. There is a warning there. Our focus on self and cyberspace may threaten the future of the planet.

Certainly this medium motives, educates, informs, mobilizes and inspires. It forges friendships and creates new communities, of a sort.

But it also diverts, distorts, deceives, demeans, trivializes and addicts.

The Internet will be what we make it through our choices as individuals, and as a society. What we say and portray, and read and see in cyberspace increasingly will determine what we do in the world beyond the margins of Time magazine's cover and the frames of our computer screens.

Will the web, with all its power and allure, engage us in or disengage us from the work we need to do?

A couple nights ago, I was reminded of our vulnerability as I was reading Lewis Thomas' "Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony."

Thomas was a research pathologist, medical school dean, and astute essayist. His essays often illuminated the "big picture" by looking at small things, including cells, insects and words.

He died in 1993, an eon ago as technology shapes time.

One essay in "Late Night Thoughts..." (the book was a score at the Hillsdale Holiday Book Sale), offers this about the state of pre-Internet humanity:

"So far, we have learned how to be useful to each other only when we collect in small groups — families, circles of friends, once in a while (although still rarely) committees. The drive to be useful is encoded in our genes. But when we gather in very large numbers, as in the modern nation-state, we seem capable of levels of folly and self-destruction to be found nowhere else in all of Nature....As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile to be trusted."

Thomas wrote that 20 years ago, but his words resonate with the questions I'm asking: Have we, as a species, matured in two remarkable decades? Will the Internet make the difference? Will our social and technological evolution be joined in time to save us?