David Beresford Another Country During my peregrinations in search of a diagnosis – for the cramped handwriting and touch-typing blunders that were eventually diagnosed as Parkinson’s – I consulted an orthopaedic specialist. After tapping various joints and peering at me suspiciously, he pronounced the problem to be “writer’s cramp”. I asked him whether it was not Parkinson’s, upon which he drew himself up indignantly and declared: “I am an authority on writer’s cramp!” The diagnosis was not the only one of its kind. A chest specialist whom I consulted inadvertently – he was, if I remember rightly, standing in for a company doctor – carefully listened to my lungs, and finding no explanation there for my difficulties, advised me the problem was psychosomatic. Such experiences led me to the conclusion that one should choose one’s doctor carefully, for one will be choosing one’s diagnosis (see Concerning Existence Volume 15, Chapter 42, “Meditations in a Waiting Room”).
I was musing on this wisdom in my shower (I would emulate Archimedes’ principle by cogitating in the bath, but I am scared of drowning) when it struck me that the thought (on the perils of diagnosis, I mean) can be extended to learned men and possibly even learned women more generally. In an age when specialisation is the vogue – thanks to the inability of any single mind to encapsulate the exponential growth in knowledge – nobody has got around to pointing out to the myriad specialists we have spawned that theirs is not the only perspective on life. People like Thabo … ! Only the thought of the scandal it would have caused the neighbours restrained me from celebrating the thought by lurching out of the shower and shuffling down the road in the altogether crying, “Eureka!” As it was, in my excitement at the belief that I could be on my way to resolving what is known as the “Mbeki paradox”, I turned off the cold water mistaking it for the hot. It took several days to recover my nerve (I mention this as a warning to students that philosophic and scientific inquiry can be a painful business) and venture back into the shower in order to rediscover my train of thought. The hypothesis was as follows: the Mbeki paradox – how the medical establishment’s explanation for Aids is to be reconciled with the presidential account – could perhaps be answered by understanding that theirs is a medical diagnosis, while his is an economic diagnosis. A diagnosis, it must be appreciated, is merely a conceptual tool to enable an expert to tackle an illness, to arrive at a satisfactory treatment for a condition, an effective answer to a problem. The medical establishment has to deal with the problem of saving the poor buggers who arrive on their doorsteps croaking “help, I’m dying” in the various official languages. Close examination of the characters establishing that they are dying because they are infected by a retrovirus, the doctors deal with the problem by administering anti- retrovirals.
The president, on the other hand, is a trained economist who sees as his brief to attend to the ills besetting that entity which is South African society. Unlike the doctors, whose training is to see patients as individuals, his patient is society itself. It is the division between those who see organised society as a mere tool created by individuals to secure their collective interests and those who see it as an organic entity to be served by the individual.
Bringing his specialisation to bear on this patient (organised society as a whole) the president has perhaps diagnosed the problem – quite correctly – as poverty arising from an over-population of the under-educated. >From such diagnosis the treatment would seem to be self-evident: above all else avoid the further impoverishment of society. Let nature have its way. Allow the disease to run its course. Give the nervous patient lots of reassurance, confident in the knowledge that when the fever has passed it will be a leaner, healthier and altogether more glamorous creature fit to take its place among the community of nations (as opposed to the community of individuals).
There is nothing sinister about either approach, anymore than there was anything sinister about the orthopaedic consultant pronouncing me the victim of writer’s cramp, or the frustrated chest man blaming my over-heated imagination for my woes. “Give me a fulcrum and I will move the Earth,” said Archimedes. If he had been nnnaround a bit longer he nnnnnnmight have extended the nnnprinciple to: “Give me a place to stand and I will give you a nnndifferent perspective on things” – an observation confirmed by the Roman soldier who, seeing the great mathematician absent- mindedly nnnscribbling funny symbols in the dirt, decided he was playing silly buggers and chopped his head off. For simplicity’s sake I have condensed the above into what I have chosen to describe as a Hypothesis arising from the Mbeki paradox (ibid Chapter 43 “Thoughts under a Shower-head”), which says: Before choosing your doctor it is as well to ascertain who they think their patient will be.