If you read Allen Esterson’s dissection of the April 22 ‘In Our Time’ on Freud, perhaps you were inspired to listen to the programme. Interesting, wasn’t it? The matter-of-factness, the confidence, with which the participants talked of Freud’s discoveries as if they were settled knowledge (or normal science, as one might say). As Richard Webster amusingly points out, it’s as if people sat around the Radio 4 studio agreeing on how flat the earth is. Just so. Or how pretty the fairies look as they dance around the lawn, or how alarming it is when the poltergeists throw the dishes and boxes of pasta onto the floor, or how long and tedious the trip to Alpha Centauri is … Read the rest
Girls Poisoned for Going to School
May 6th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonMilitants angry about Karzai government’s reversal of Taliban ban on female education.… Read the rest
Webster on Freud on Hysteria
May 6th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonNeurology had barely begun, so concussion was diagnosed as hysteria.… Read the rest
Richard Webster Listens to ‘In Our Time’
May 6th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonAs flat-earthers are to geography, so Freudians are to medical history.… Read the rest
Samuel Johnson Prize Shortlist
May 6th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonJohn Clare, the Gulag, Everything, East Germany, Africa.… Read the rest
Samantha Power Reads Hannah Arendt
May 6th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonWhy we still have trouble noticing when an abyss opens.… Read the rest
What Would Burke Think?
May 5th, 2004 10:44 pm | By Ophelia BensonThere is an article about Russell Kirk by Scott McLemee in the current Chronicle of Higher Education. I’ve meant to read some Kirk for awhile, but haven’t gotten around to it. I’ve also meant to read some Burke, but haven’t done much of that either. (Yes, I know; just never mind. I’m studying 7th century vaudeville, and that takes time.) Kirk was a Burkean conservative, not a libertarian cheerleader for capitalism nor a neoconservative.
… Read the restWhat Kirk extracted from Burke’s thought — and found embodied in the work of British and American figures as diverse as John Adams, Benjamin Disraeli, and T.S. Eliot — was a strong sense that tradition and order were the bedrock of any political system able
Other People Are Biased, But I’m Not
May 5th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThe idols of the tribe are alive and well, Michael Shermer points out.… Read the rest
Anti-Vaccination Panic
May 5th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonWhen immunization works, people forget how awful the disease is – and bad thinking takes over.… Read the rest
Myths, Damned Myths, and Psychoanalytic Case Histories
May 5th, 2004 | By Allen EstersonAllen Esterson comments on Melvyn Bragg’s radio programme on hysteria, “In Our Time”, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 22 April 2004.
Melvyn Bragg, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s long-running weekly series “In Our Time”, has an impressive record of encouraging practising scientists to make even abstruse scientific topics accessible to the radio-listening public. But when it comes to Freud and psychoanalysis it’s a different story. Whereas scientists are questioned closely about the origins of the ideas in their field, Bragg’s chosen experts on Freud (ne’er a dissenter among them) are given a free run to propagate their faith to the listeners, and manifest errors and dubious assertions are rarely challenged.
On 22 April 2004 the chosen topic was “hysteria”, and … Read the rest
Save Breath to Cool Porridge
May 4th, 2004 11:06 pm | By Ophelia BensonWe have an idea – don’t we? – that discussion is always a good thing, that more of it will work things out, that if we discuss our differences long enough and throughly enough, sooner or later we’ll resolve them. But of course that’s not true, it can’t be true – not on this planet, with this species. Consider a thought experiment. The lamb and the lion can speak, and can speak the same language. They sit down to discuss their differences. Would that resolve them?
I once heard Amos Oz say much the same thing, chatting on a local radio station (then I went to the bookstore where he was appearing, and got a stack of books signed). Americans … Read the rest
Catching Up With ‘No False Medicine’
May 4th, 2004 6:36 pm | By Ophelia BensonAmardeep Singh has been busy lately. I had been checking his blog every day and then things got busy, and now look at the result – I have to catch up!
There is for instance this very interesting post on Gandhi, in which Amardeep partly agrees but partly takes issue with Meera Nanda. He is reviewing her book for a journal, which will be something to look forward to.
… Read the restI’ve been reading Meera Nanda’s Prophets Facing Backwards this week (and even last week — it’s been slow). It’s an excellent book, which I would recommend to anyone thinking about questions of the history of science, secularism (in India and elsewhere), or postmodernism. I’m planning to write a proper review
Rise in Mumps Cases in Scotland
May 4th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonRise illustrates value of mass immunisation programmes, BMA says. … Read the rest
Save the Imaginary Beast!
May 4th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonSweden has a mythical lake-dwelling Something on its Endangered Species list.… Read the rest
Why Do Archbishops Still Get Attention?
May 4th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia Benson‘In a culture not characterised by respect…we are strangely reluctant to criticise irrational beliefs.’… Read the rest
US Losing its Edge in Science
May 4th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonEurope now the world’s largest producer of scientific literature.… Read the rest
A Tory Bohemian in Small-town Michigan
May 4th, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonBurkean, Kirkian conservatives are more communitarian than libertarian.… Read the rest
Busy
May 3rd, 2004 11:26 pm | By Ophelia BensonIt’s been a busy day – and a good one. Arts and Letters Daily linked to that wonderful article by Edmund Standing on postmodernist views of gender, for a start. And I posted another terrific article, this one by Allen Esterson. And various other odds and ends – such as this takedown of Kent Hovind in Flashback. I particularly like the quoted extract from his dissertation (with proper names altered because Hovind doesn’t allow his dissertation to be quoted, which is not normal scholarly practice, but he clearly has his reasons) –
… Read the restHe was born in 1809 and died about 1880. He was very anti-Christian and tried to influence anyone he could not to believe in God. He was very
Goodhart on Reactions to His Diversity Essay
May 3rd, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonSome of the responses seemed knee-jerk – as if he were attacking a religion.… Read the rest
Eagleton on Said as Humanist – of Some Sort
May 3rd, 2004 | Filed by Ophelia BensonSaid’s concern was justice, not identity.… Read the rest