Philosopher Robert Paul Woolff reprises a point I made a few days ago: Engineers, lawyers, doctors, medical reasearchers … all make profoundly consequential judgments every single day, judgments that can cost millions of dollars or, even, lives. Retreating into gallows humor is a commonplace way of dealing with the pressure.
It is often said that in the first year of Medical School, the students must start to think of themselves as doctors, just as the first year of Law School is devoted to getting the students to think like lawyers. Thinking of oneself as a doctor means, among many other things, adopting an utterly unnatural attitude toward the human body — an objectifying, de-sensitizing attitude that enables the newly formed doctor to engage in such activities as physical examinations and invasive operations calmly, routinely, scientifically, and without gagging or throwing up. One of the ways in which medical schools accomplish this is by setting the student to work, right at the beginning of the very first semester, dissecting a cadaver. If you can even allow yourself to think about it, there is something profoundly unnatural and unsettling about picking up a scalpel and cutting into a corpse. Those first cuts are bad enough, even with the rest of your cadaver team there to cheer you on, but imagine what it feels like to dissect a liver, a penis, an eyeball, a brain.
Doctors steel themselves for these experiences by breathing deeply, gritting their teeth, making crude locker room or funeral parlor jokes, and in every way they can denying the appalling reality of what they are doing.
At this exact moment in time there are people driving across bridges whose foundations I helped design, visiting parks downstream of earth-fill dams I designed, relying on critical infrastructure I helped design — sometimes with a chorus of yammering ignoramuses in the background. So I don’t begrudge professionals their insider sarcasms.
I do wonder, sometimes, why Joe Sixpack and Betty Homemaker, without benefit of any more education than a struggle with high school algebra, are so sure they know how professional people ought to do their jobs.
If this be elitism, make the most of it.