Too many bachelors

The fear is that too many boys today means too many bachelors in the future, which also means too many unhappy, unattached men looking for a place to fit in. If this is true, researchers warn, it's not hard to predict a startling increase in violent activity that could affect overall social stability and derail China's economic progress.

It is a scientifically provable theory, said political scientist Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University. And it's backed up by what any high school graduate can recall: "When guys got together, did they sometimes do stupider and more reckless things than when they were alone?" she asked.

He paused for a moment. And then he began speaking to me, taking a new tack. "The thing about patients with CF is that they're good scientists," he said. "They always experiment. We have to help them interpret what they experience as they experiment. So they stop doing their treatments. And what happens? They don't get sick. Therefore, they conclude, Dr. Warwick is nuts."

"Let's look at the numbers," he said to me, ignoring Janelle. He went to a little blackboard he had on the wall. It appeared to be well used. "A person's daily risk of getting a bad lung illness with CF is 0.5 per cent." He wrote the number down. Janelle rolled her eyes. She began tapping her foot. "The daily risk of getting a bad lung illness with CF plus treatment is 0.05 per cent," he went on, and he wrote that number down. "So when you experiment you're looking at the difference between a 99.95-per-cent chance of staying well and a 99.5-per-cent chance of staying well. Seems hardly any difference, right? On any given day, you have basically a one-hundred-per-cent chance of being well. But"—he paused and took a step toward me—"it is a big difference." He chalked out the calculations. "Sum it up over a year, and it is the difference between an eighty-three-per-cent chance of making it through 2004 without getting sick and only a sixteen-per-cent chance."

He turned to Janelle. "How do you stay well all your life? How do you become a geriatric patient?" he asked her. Her foot finally stopped tapping. "I can't promise you anything. I can only tell you the odds."

In this short speech was the core of Warwick's world view. He believed that excellence came from seeing, on a daily basis, the difference between being 99.5-per-cent successful and being 99.95-per-cent successful. Many activities are like that, of course: catching fly balls, manufacturing microchips, delivering overnight packages. Medicine's only distinction is that lives are lost in those slim
margins.

Everyone has noticed the use, once again, of crisis-mongering. Three years ago, the supposed threat from Saddam somehow became more important than catching the people who actually attacked America on 9/11. Today, the mild, possibly nonexistent long-run financial problems of Social Security have somehow become more important than dealing with the huge deficit we already have, which has nothing to do with Social Security.

When archeologists looked through the ruins of the Western Settlement, they found plenty of the big wooden objects that were so valuable in Greenland—crucifixes, bowls, furniture, doors, roof timbers—which meant that the end came too quickly for anyone to do any scavenging. And, when the archeologists looked at the animal bones left in the debris, they found the bones of newborn calves, meaning that the Norse, in that final winter, had given up on the future. They found toe bones from cows, equal to the number of cow spaces in the barn, meaning that the Norse ate their cattle down to the hoofs, and they found the bones of dogs covered with knife marks, meaning that, in the end, they had to eat their pets. But not fish bones, of course. Right up until they starved to death, the Norse never lost sight of what they stood for.

In some cases, far stronger forces are at work in shaping secret lives. Many gay men and some lesbians marry heterosexual partners before working out their sexual identity, or in defiance of it. The aim is to please parents, to cover their own shame or to become more acceptable to themselves and society at large, said Dr. Richard A. Isay, a psychiatrist at Cornell University who has provided therapy to many closeted gay men.

Very often, he said, these men struggle not to act on their desires, and they begin secret lives in desperation. This eventually forces agonizing decisions about how to live with, or separate from, families they love.

Arif Alikhan, an assistant U.S. attorney in California, said the Internet has transformed those who in another era might have been petty thieves into major worries for law enforcement.