"Kept like a pet in an old hen coop
The mother didn't beat her and she gave her food"
Rasputina - The Snow-Hen of Austerlitz
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"The Lees were right after all, I thought. Lia's medicine did make her sick!"
Anne Fadiman's thunderous self-righteous quintessential intellectually dishonest declamatory climax to The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
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Reality is not a matter of tastes or preferences or hopes or beliefs.
When I was in my mid-teens in the '90s I caught an extended flight to visit my extended family and promptly picked up an extensive gut infection. With the benefit of hindsight, several recurring incidents, online lists and a mediocre "university" education, I can now guess the symptoms might be those of salmonellosis, but that's neither here nor there. (Well... to be honest, it was sort of... everywhere... but never mind.) It did leave me with one fond memory: my grandmother (an otherwise harsh, off-putting woman even at the best of times) sitting by my bedside pumping me full of weak mint tea to counteract dehydration, telling me it's a pity I was losing my vacation and "pulling on" my wrist to help the overwhelming nausea, heavily massaging the area low on my forearm above the wrist.
I can't remember what education grandma Mary had gotten back in the interbellum, in the Great Depression years. Fourth grade? Eighth, if she was lucky. She'd also have the local priest stop by, now and anon, and sprinkle the various rooms of the house with holy water. Not that it did much to banish the specter of Salmonella, mind you. The wrist massage thing I'm amused to find listed as the P6 acupuncture point, seems mainly used to address nausea-related ailments, and is the only example of acupressure sufficiently reiterated to make it past at least Wikipedia's rather lax citation standards. Damned if I know where my grandmother picked it up. Probably not Wikipedia. For my own part it helped my nausea, but I'll also freely admit to a whopping placebo effect in just having Granny take care of me. Though I can't remember with whom it originated, I'm reminded of a comment about "alternative medicine" - there's no such thing. If something works, it's medicine. If it hasn't been demonstrated to work, it's not.
On a completely unrelated topic, I was assigned The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down as a reading in an anthropology class many a year ago. (I'm older than my profile picture looks.) In fairness, I should hedge a bit and admit it's not an altogether bad text, providing some satisfying historical background on the Hmong and a plethora of colorful anecdotes about their integration in California, the sort which always make anthropology such a page-turner. Unfortunately, while its prima facie observations are perfectly valid, its ideological context and conclusions are nothing but the lowest breed of anti-intellectual postmodernism. This book did much to convince me that not only the humanities but the soft sciences as well have fallen to cheap, facile dogmatic vandalism.
Leaving aside the author's protestations of multifaceted, nearly impenetrable complexity, the basic story is gruesome yet uncomplicated. An epileptic child is born to uneducated parents, who despite having access to Californian-grade modern medicine, refuse to treat her and choose to allow her condition to worsen for years on end. According to Fadiman's own account, after years of severe and frequent seizures which might very well have proven preventable if her parents hadn't deliberately wanted to preserve her "holy" epilepsy, obfuscated and confounded her doctors at every turn and thrown away her medications, the poor girl's wracked and battered body finally succumbs to an opportunistic infection. In which final infection, the potentially immunosuppressant side effect of one of her medications MIGHT have played a role... thus prompting Fadiman's infuriatingly misleading statement at the start here.
Much of the text is given over to schmaltzy praise of the parents' feeding, grooming and hugging of their daughter, as well as pandering to the Hmong's particular brand of primitive superstitions in forced ingenuous glorification of the religious flim-flam by which her family tried to treat Lia's symptoms in lieu of actual medicine. I will concede that as mammals it does sound as though they had all the right instincts, to protect and groom and feed and pander to their offspring's demands. But epilepsy cannot be combated by mammalian instinct, nor by the scraps of habitual best practices which might be occasionally imparted by superstitious ritual. It provokes a conflict of intellect far beyond the arsenal of vulgar irrationality. And, if the parents' rural, third-world upbringing in the mid-20th century might excuse much of their confusion and ignorance, I feel no inclination to extend the same courtesy to a Harvard-overeducated moron like Anne Fadiman.
The entire book was written from a forced perspective holding primitivism in the same esteem as modern science. There's an inherent dishonesty to this attitude, as no-one who does so ever, conversely, demands of "alternative" philosophies the same evidentiary standards by which science has painstakingly won its seat as our species' benefactor. Any demands to "teach the controversy" are instead veiled demands for scientists to demean themselves by endless gratuitous concessions to irrationality. Throughout her text, Fadiman postures as an egalitarian but at every step it is only the Californian medical establishment whose flaws get criticized. If the Hmong refused to abide by the medication schedule, it's because the doctors didn't explain it clearly enough, despite the interpreters, printed lists and ideograms. If the child was physically wounding (to the point of drawing blood from) other children on the playground, it's the system's fault for putting her in foster care so she'd get her medication... not the fault of having been spoiled at home. We're invited to marvel at the cleverness of Hmong cheating on driving tests by embroidering answers into their sleeves, and so on and on, page by page, chapter by chapter. Here's just one of the more egregious passages:
"[The doctors] always spoke of Lia in the past tense. In fact, Neil and Peggy themselves frequently referred to "Lia's demise" or "what may have killed Lia" or "the reason Lia died." Dr. Hutchison did the same thing. He had asked me, "Was Lia with the foster parents when she died?" And although I reminded him that Lia was alive, five minutes later he said "Noncompliance had nothing to do with her death." It wasn't just absentmindedness. It was an admission of defeat. Lia was dead to her physicians (in a way, for example, that she was never dead to her social workers) because medicine had once made extravagant claims on her behalf and had had to renounce them."
Now before I expand on the context, remember this is a Yale professor with a Harvard education speaking. This woman occupies the pinnacle of what passes for Liberal Arts scholarship. Despite not being an anthropologist herself and the book being written in the '90s, it is still taught in anthropology classes today.
Lia Lee was born in 1982 and died in 1986. Her final grand mal seizure suffered during a Pseudomonas infection destroyed her higher brain functions and thus the self housed in those synapses. Now, as should happen, our existence as individuals is not intrinsic to our bodies' physical functioning. As long as the brain stem, the cerebellum and a few other primitive structures remain intact cells will continue to divide, the corpse will continue to breathe, pump blood, digest and excrete, despite the person who once inhabited it having long ceased to exist. This is the state Fadiman chose to misrepresent as "was alive" and to spin by some pop-psychological sleight-of-hand as a condemnation of science, as putative guilt on the doctors' part.
But wait, there's more!
In a morbid twist worthy of the Addams Family, Lia Lee's still reflexively breathing corpse persisted until thirty years of age. It was apparently cared for by her relatives until 2012. They propped the zombie up in their house, they continued to shove food into it, change its diapers and wash it and interact with it, for twenty-six years - indeed, a success and standard of physical care which would put any hospital nursing staff to shame. Presumably they were still waiting for the demon which absconded with her soul to make restitution.
If there's a better allegory for religion than wiping a corpse's ass all your life, I haven't found it. Merry Christmas, by the way.
What if the low, grinding headache which accompanied my gut infection had set off a seizure and killed me in my teens? Would my grandmother have wasted her money to bring in the priest week after week to mumble some pig-Latin and sprinkle my corpse with angel piss? I wouldn't put it past her; that woman was stubborn. But she was also practical. A warm blanket, wrist rubs and tea. Our traditions can't be all wrong on every point and we should be willing to extract the grains of truth from the mountains of superstitious gibberish heaped upon us by our forebears. But extract we must. Popping an aspirin is orders of magnitude more effective than chewing willow bark. I'm willing to consider the P6 acupressure point might possibly induce some therapeutic effect beyond Granny's home-made placebo... but it might also be the only such valid point to be made on acupuncture/pressure's behalf.
We can't carry out that crucial process of extraction, that winnowing of folkloric baggage, while impeded by charlatans in the soft-headed sciences who, for political or ideological reasons, fabricate false equivalence between reason and unreasoned impulses and conflate reality with superstition under the purloined moral umbrella of multiculturalism or open-mindedness. Those who cripple our intellect's ability to improve the world stand on the same side as those who willfully steal, murder and demolish, even if they feign the equanimity of an impartial sociological observer.
Reality is not optional.
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