Words&Dirt

“Doc is the owner and operator of the Western Biological Laboratory.  Doc is rather small, deceptively small, for he is wiry and very strong and when passionate anger comes on him he can be very fierce.  He wears a beard and his face is half Christ and half satyr and his face tells the truth.  It is said that he has helped many girl out of one trouble and into another.  Doc has the hands of a brain surgeon, and a cool warm mind.  Doc tips his hat to dogs as he drives by and the dogs look up and smile at him.  He can kill anything for need but he could never even hurt a feeling for pleasure.  He has one great fear––that of getting his head wet, so that summer or winter he ordinarily wears a rain hat.  He will wade in a tide pool up to the chest without feeling damp, but a drop of rain water on his head makes him panicky.

Over a period of years Doc dug himself into Cannery Row to an extent not even he suspected.  He became the fountain of philosophy and science and art.  In the laboratory the girls from Dora’s heard the Plain Songs and Gregorian music for the first time.  Lee Chong listened while Li Po was read to him in English.  Henri the painter heard for the first time the Book of the Dead and was so moved that he changed his medium.  Henri had been painting with glue, iron rust, and colored chicken feathers but he changed and his next four paintings were done entirely with different kinds of nutshells.  Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it for you to a kind of wisdom.  His mind had no horizon––and his sympathy had no warp.  He could talk to children, telling them very profound things so that they understood.  He lived in a world of wonders, of excitement.  He was concupiscent as a rabbit and gentle as hell.  And everyone who thought of him thought next, ‘I really must do something nice for Doc.'”

––Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck, loc. 345-52

“The body of any large vertebrate animal contains billions of component cells, each performing a variety of roles.  Most stay primly in place throughout their life spans, providing chemical or structural services.  Others, such as red blood cells, roam all over the place, delivering nourishment or transporting waste.  Every day, your body comes under threat from contaminants and invading parasites.  Furthermore, throughout the organism, cells occasionally ‘go crazy.’  For some reason these rogues abandon selfless devotion to the whole, instead setting forth on a campaign of individual aggrandizement and unrestrained reproduction that is called cancer.

Whatever the nature of these varied threats, they are all errors that must quickly be overcome by an effective immune system, or else life’s delicate balance will be forfeit.  We all know how catastrophic it can be when the immune system becomes deficient, as in AIDS, or grows hyperactive, as in lupus or some forms of arthritis, mistaking the body itself for an enemy, attacking and savaging healthy organs.  For many reasons, immunology has become one of the most important fields of modern medicine.

Now, if some human engineer had been asked to design a strategy for defense and error correction, he or she might be tempted to create a central information center, with a master control program, constantly comparing the body’s current status with some ideal condition, and then sending out proxies with specific instructions to repair any deviation.  Such a hierarchical approach may sound logical.  (So logical, in fact, that it was used as the model for ‘planned’ economies such as the Soviet Union.)

But that is not the way living organisms do it.  Instead, our bodies throng with semi-independent agents, caroming randomly through the blood and lymph networks, sniffing for trouble like lone marshals of the old West.  Chief among these roving deputies are white blood cells, especially ‘T-cells,’ whose mission is to detect threats on the spot and emit a chemical summons for help, so that the problem can be counteracted before it gets out of hand.

T-cells are not generalists.  In fact, a human body come equipped with countless subtypes, each of them tuned to recognize just a narrow range of potential perils.  Every day, our lives depend on having an adequate variety of these little troubleshooters, and on having the right ones drift randomly toward each new danger zone, arriving in the nick of time.  For the most part, it is a startlingly effective technique for dealing with organic or cellular errors, one that is far more flexible than relying on central control.

This protection depends, above all, on having an unobstructed circulatory system.  One that lets these T-cells and other error-correcting agents into every corner of the body to deal with potentially mortal dangers as quickly as they occur.

How do immune systems relate to Project Censor?  Or to transparency, for that matter?  Recall the keystone epigram of this book.

Humans have found one fairly reliable antidote to error: criticism.

Elsewhere I discuss the great irony this poses.  Free speech and open criticism are good for a nation, helping it discover mistakes before they bring lethal consequences; and yet those qualities so threaten national leaders that kings, priests, oligarchs, and demagogues have always suppressed criticism to varying degrees.

Criticism might be viewed as a civilization’s equivalent of an immune system.  Moreover, it cannot be mandated or levied from some high source.  The capriciousness of human nature means that any central intervention, even by a well-intended ruler, will inevitably wind up squelching the most desperately needed criticism of all, a critique aimed at those on top.  Instead, a healthy immune system must be distributed, dispersed, and based on an almost random overlapping of function, so that if one agent fails to detect a festering problem, there is a good chance it will be uncovered by the next one to come bumping along.

Moreover, our bodies show yet another type of inherent ‘wisdom.’  Those swarming T-cells that go scurrying around looking to detect errors are not the same cells principally in charge of eradicating them.  A separation of roles between detection and enforcement is a principle that will come up later in this book.

Perhaps now we can see how all this is relevant.  In social terms, our contemporary neo-Western civilization already throngs with the human equivalent of T-cells, independent-minded persons who are well educated, skeptical, and driven by pumped-up egos to the point where their most devout goal is to find and reveal some terrible mistake or nefarious scheme.  This category enfolds a lot more than just news reporters, activists, and professional muckrakers.  Any of you reading this book can probably close your eyes and envision quite a few friends or colleagues whose personalities exhibit some of the following traits:

• strongly held opinions
• a belief that he or she can see patterns in some field of knowledge (such as the news) that others are too obstinate or ignorant to perceive
• a distrust of certain (or perhaps all) types of authority
• profound faith in his or her own unique individuality

Perhaps you recognize, or even proudly avow, many of these traits in yourself.  If so, it hardly makes you exceptional.”

––The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?, by David Brin, pg. 133-5