COLUMN: Looking at the questions

From Amanda Bergson-Shilcock's, "A Few Good Words," Fall '99 From Amanda Bergson-Shilcock's, "A Few Good Words," Fall '99As a society, we tend to celebrate brilliantly insane free-thinkers -- after they're safely dead. It's easy to pat ourselves on the back for recognizing people such as anti-slavery activist Lucretia Mott. In retrospect, her role in redefining people-owning is obvious; her protests and testimony helped move slavery from a widely accepted system to a burning moral issue. Too often, that occurs simply because the new ideas are new, not because they are bad. Imagine how different our world might be if we evaluated ideas based on their value rather than their newness. For example, Joseph Lister fought an uphill battle in the 19th century to gain acceptance for his cockamamie idea of sterilizing surgical instruments with carbolic acid. It wasn't because people disagreed about how to go about sterilizing -- it was because the very idea of germs and contamination was unfamiliar. Today's Listers are people such as Larry Dossey, who is cracking open the wall between Western allopathic medicine and traditional, faith-based healing. It's an impressive achievement and Dossey's work with prayer and health reflects a re-envisioning as profound as Lister's. It is no insult to Dossey to say that the spirituality/health connection should have been widely acknowledged a long time ago. Yet although there is no lack of such minority views, they are often reduced to hammering at the outside. An earlier airing of Dossey's beliefs might have forestalled the past century of cordoning off our bodies from our souls. While overlooking holistic approaches, we have allowed the compartmentalization of the body to become routine. Now we are accustomed to buying products to treat symptoms (dandruff, headache) without addressing root causes. Laws explicitly permitting public breastfeeding are being proposed -- could we possibly need such laws if we had not already successfully separated the breast from the person? We take a strange pride in recounting Lister's struggle, as if it's a success story. But maybe it isn't. Maybe we would have adopted sterile techniques a lot sooner if Lister had been surrounded by a public committed to questioning assumptions. Who says cultural shifts have to come from iconoclastic radicals? We say so. The lone visionary is a familiar figure in American mythology and free speech is her weapon of choice. We seem to believe that unfettered speech coupled with a laissez-faire attitude will magically enable world-changing events to just happen. But this hands-off notion fails in two important ways. First, it doesn't stop people from self-censoring their ideas. Second, it doesn't provide a blueprint for approaching questions. This is important because a question like "How do I kill this disease?" is not the same as "How do I heal this person?" Our society is quite good at debating which answer is right but much less practiced when it comes to posing the questions. Yet even the simplest query elicits rapid mental calculations. What do I cook for dinner tonight? prompts a consideration of what food is in the fridge, the time and money I have to shop, what I like and dislike and my schedule. As often as not I'll change the question: Which restaurant will I eat at tonight? or perhaps, Who else in my family is free to cook? When we ignore non-standard answers to questions, we also ignore the possibility that another question is actually being answered. And, like Lister's fellow surgeons, we dismiss the possible worth of the other question. For any given issue, some viewpoints are more valuable than others. But shutting out all of the quirky ones is definitely harmful. The narrower our range of possible solutions, the slimmer the chance that one will actually work. If we really want progress, it's time to change the mythology. No more lone visionary challenging the system; now we're a patchwork whole.