For more than 40 years now I have had the privilege and honor of serving a number of professionals — physicians, educators, attorneys, engineers, ministers. Recently I had the opportunity to once again serve twenty-two physicians who are participants in the Physician Leadership College. As you might remember, gentle reader, my father was ‘an old-time country doctor’ and so was his father; they did it all — and, I might add, did it quite well. I would classify them as being ‘attending physicians.’ For them, being attending physicians went far beyond a ‘job description.’ Jacob Needleman in his wonderful book, ‘The Way of the Physician,’ writes that the role of the physician “was the last as well as the first great and honorable passion of man, the fusion of the search for understanding and the impulse to help and serve suffering humanity. . .”
I have known a number of ‘attending physicians’ and all of them remembered being moved by an ideal of who and what a physician is called to be. I also recall a number of them saying that they did not find any powerful models among their medical school teachers. When they did stumble upon one — a man (usually a man) of wisdom — the said person was unable to convey how they’d come by it. Many were competent, many were clever, some demonstrated great kindness and caring — but wisdom? Not many were seen to be wise.
Many of the other professionals that I have had the privilege of serving related similar experiences; they arrived with similar aspirations and experienced similar disappointment. They were searching and seeking for ‘something’ and that ‘something’ seemed illusive, if not unattainable. They all demonstrated a search to be of service in the world AND also sought to remain open to something beyond — many of them captured this ‘something’ in their concepts of ‘attention’ and ‘attending.’ It seems as if the systems that are charged with educating our professionals are failing to develop ‘this something’ in the fledgling professionals that leave their care. With its emphasis on memorization and reguritative examinations, current professional training (I call it ‘training’ not ‘development’) almost totally neglects the development of the student’s inner life — especially the questions “Who am I?” “Who am I choosing to become?” “Where am I going?” “Why am I choosing to go there?” and “What am I called to?” I am no researcher but it does seem to me that competition for admission to professional schools is now so intense that he who pauses to reflect on such questions risks being left behind, if not left out.
Physicians tell me that rather than enhancing a medical student’s human qualities that their professional training tends to de-humanize them. Now there is a trap here. Some believe that ‘humanism’ provides the answer. David Ehrenfeld, in his challenging book, “The Arrogance of Humanism” writes the following (he is addressing the humanists’ ‘War on Cancer’ [one can remove ‘Cancer’ and replace it with any number of ‘enemies’]. Ehrenfeld writes: “The society clever enough to perform sophisticated research on cancer is the society clever enough to invent sugar substitutes, children’s sleepwear ingredients, food coloring agents, and swimming pool test kits that may cause it.” This leads me to wonder about the deep assumptions upon which the work of professionals who claim to be humanists rests.
Humanists seem to be fond of attacking ‘religion’ for its untestable assumptions, but humanism contains untestable assumptions of its own. These are the deep assumptions and are rarely debated. If the following occurred in others, humanists would call them superstitions – or perhaps elevate them to ‘articles of faith.’ Consider the following humanist assumptions:
All problems are soluble by people.
Many problems are soluble by technology.
Many problems that are not soluble by technology are soluble by politics, economics, etc.
When the crisis appears, we will work together and arrive at a solution before it is too late.
[to be continued. . .]