Jack

And in Chinese, there’s no tense. There’s no past, present, or future. There’s yesterday I walk, today I walk, tomorrow I walk. It’s the same word.

Bill B

I offer a very quick narrative. Wilson is simply dusting off logical positivism in his presentation of Consilience. The notion of everything based on the scientific method is being passed down from the Vienna Circle. We have to remember that the Vienna Circle was emerging at the time when Hitler was coming into power. So, to say that what makes sense is only found in science is missing the point. Because what was making sense all over Europe were those horrible rallies, these grotesque statements. And so here is the Vienna Circle saying: We just need to be rational. Everything will be fine. Oh, by the way, I have to get the hell out of here and go to the United States because I’m a Jew, I’m a liberal, and they’re going to kill me. Guess what? Being Jewish and liberal means that the Nazis want me exterminated. This is not a rational world!

And so the liberal Jews come to the United States, and where do they get jobs? Not in the fancy universities like Harvard and Yale. There is a drop of antisemitism and a big dose of elitism in these institutions. Someone from Oxford or Cambridge? Yes!  From a European university where German is spoken and from a country where World War I was waged? Probably not. These immigrant professors get jobs at the emerging and rapidly expanding Midwest universities where the search is underway for faculty members: the University of Minnesota, the University of Illinois. That’s where most of the intellectuals escaping from the Vienna Circle go. Social scientists from the Vienna Circle invent behaviorism. They produce the MMPI, saying that here is a correct, statistically-based, rationally-based way to diagnose and categorize mental illness. This mentally ill person has a specific MMPI profile. That’s who they are as human beings. That’s classic positivism going nuts.  And Bill G, I think that’s kind of where medicine went in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.

Bill G

Well, what do people think about the approach that’s becoming more popular in health outlets like Kaiser Foundation News? They run this ongoing series, Bill of the Month, as a way to make the point about the brokenness of the economic system. They’re not putting out a bunch of graphs and statistics about the cost of care. They take an individualized narrative to show that somebody who went into the ER at Jeremy’s Institution with the sniffles, because they couldn’t get through to their primary care doctor, ends up with the third $3,000 bill and never gets seen by a physician. Is that how we should be constructing a narrative regarding how our healthcare is broken? Is a narrative effective if it drills down to publicize a lot of individual stories about how healthcare isn’t serving the needs of the people who are coming to us for care?