me:
>> By "unhealthy," I simply
>> was referring to unrealistic wishful thinking. Do you think that is a
>> healthy thing?
Doyle:
> I am referring to a common response in disability rights about 'health', in
> which medicalizing issues stands in for some more realistic analysis of
> social relationships.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I was simply using a metaphor
("unhealthy" to refer to self-defeating). I was not talking about
either medicine nor disability. These may be your constant concerns,
but they are not mine.
My views are not "common," so it's a mistake to use "common responses"
in reference to what I say. Instead of treating me as simply a
representative of a larger "common" herd, it's best to treat me as an
individual. (In general, that's a good idea: it's a mistake to treat
an individual worker as merely a representative of the abstract
proletariat, an individual woman as merely a representative of her
sex, etc.)
Even if my statements are normally infested with what you see as
"common" misconceptions, it's a mistake to treat _all_ of them that
way. It's best to give other people a break now and then, trying to
take people at their own words rather than imposing your categories on
them. It's best to avoid the PC crap of being obsessed with the use of
"incorrect" words. It's not words that matter as much as actions.
> Unrealism is not health based. Error is not health
> based....
As noted above, I never said they were. But unrealism and error _can_
be health-based. As far as I can tell, most or even all people with
schizophrenia also have unrealistic visions of reality. (If their
vision is realistic, that's another matter. But they often seem to
have a hard time functioning in even mundane situations, suggesting
unrealism on their part.)
Of course, as you suggest, ideology can have the same effect among the
so-called healthy people. Since "disease" can be more than physical or
mental, in fact, we might think of ideology as a social disease. If
so, error and unrealism are health-based, i.e., based in an unhealthy
society. So my use of the health metaphor wasn't that bad.
> The problem with health is that it is an unknowable normality. We can more
> easily find economic truth than health truth.
The orthodox approach is to take the structure of society as given, so
that "health" refers to maximal adaption to existing society. Of
course, most leftoids see our society itself as "sick," and I agree,
so that's totally inadequate. The usual alternative is to define
"health" in terms of the attainment of human potential, given social
institutions that do not block human development but instead encourage
it.
Obviously, we cannot _know_ the "health truth" (sic) given the
sickness of current society, but we can at least see some glimmerings
of health even in the here and now, so we can get a _good guess_ about
the direction of healthy human development. This in turn gives us some
idea about the nature of human health. It's unknown, but not
_unknowable_.
Of course, the true nature of human healthy development and health can
be known only in practice, by trying to transform the existing social
institutions. But without at least some prior notion of what's meant
by "health" to be tested in practice, we're battling in the dark.
(If there are no "glimmerings of health even in the here and now,"
BTW, we might as well give up. Society is so sick that it's corrupted
us all totally so we can never change it for the better.)
--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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