Martinez Dettinger: Socrates hates writing and the BMI tells me why

 In Plato's Dialogue, Socrates rejects writing on the argument that it will ruin the memory capabilities of society, and inevitably make us all a little more intolerable. In Plato's Dialogue Socrates argues that through writing we offer people "the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." (274 c). Here, I think Socrates' point about writing can be blended very easily with the idea of fixed meaning becoming more prevalent in literate-dependent cultures. For example, in class we discussed a priest whose baptisms where all deemed void because he used the wrong word. Does the dependence on the exact written word actually affect the substance of the act? Socrates would argue no, and I would too. While I don't think dependence on writing will inherently make anyone's memory worse, in light of this class' topic I do tend to agree with Socrates that it can limit one's wisdom. I think becoming overly reliant on written information can limit one's wisdom in that it encourages us to take another person's interpretation of their experience or an event as something factual, when our own experience may not conform to theirs and it may donate value of its own. For example take the Body Mass Index. The BMI was created to study generalized information about population statistics, and it was predominantly created from statistics of predominantly European males in the 1830s. Adolphe Quetelet, the Belgian mathematician who created it, even stated in his study that the BMI has little to no bearing on measuring the individual health of a person. Now, however, in every doctor's office, the BMI is used to measure the health of individuals of every race, ethnicity, gender, age, etc. Rather than personal health being determined by whether or not a person feels healthy, is capable to the extent that is reasonable for their personal body, and feels happy, we use a written system standardized nearly 200 years ago in a place and culture in which none of us currently live. Surely it is more wise to personalize your individual health rather than rely on a written account that never sought to make a suggestion about individuals in the first place. 

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