stimulant

It’s essential to keep in mind that when you’re trying to talk to somebody about a field that perceived as rapidly progressing, you need to be more vigilant about securing the timeliness of your credibility. Reading Illich’s Medical Nemesis, I found myself constantly questioning his conclusions, given their foundation upon statements like:

Awe-inspiring medical technology has combined with egalitarian rhetoric to create the dangerous delusion that contemporary medicine is highly effective. Although contemporary medical practice is built on this erroneous assumption, it is contradicted by informed medical opinion.

My instincts suggested, “Well, maybe now that’s no longer true. Think of all the progress we’ve made!” Of course, I was forgetting what I already knew; namely, that the aggregate benefit of our increasing level of health care has not been shown to have any effect. In fact, a number of studies establish the exact opposite.

In any case, I found it interesting that even as a receptive reader, the instincts with which a cultural emphasis on progress has programmed me dominated. It’s a concrete example of what’s so hard about getting people to question the assumption that what we call progress is progress, and is actually the direction in which we want to go. In particular, it strikes me as very similar to the friction I encounter when talking to people about the role of technology in education, or the difficulty people have when trying to draw attention to the metrics we use in assessing students, as opposed to the “effects” of pedagogy as measured by those metrics. Embedding assumptions in an otherwise (ostensibly) open debate is an awfully effective strategy.