The depth of his folly
Harriet Hall on Charles Windsor as self-proclaimed Enemy of the Enlightenment:
Edzard Ernst has a new book out: Charles, The Alternative Prince: An Unauthorized Biography. I wrote a full book review that will appear in the next issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, but I wanted to give my readers on Science-Based Medicine a heads-up. Charles’ efforts to promote alternative medicine have been mentioned many times on SBM, but readers may not appreciate the depth of his folly. I know I didn’t, until I read this book. The full story has never been told until now.
Ernst uses Prince Charles’ own words to demonstrate his ignorance of science and medicine. He thinks conventional medicine is nothing but “pills and procedures”. At the age of 34, he had the chutzpah to lecture to the members of the British Medical Association on the power of spiritualism, urging them to follow their intuition rather than look for scientific evidence. He has always been intuitively averse to scientific materialism and was drawn to mysticism.
He has the chutzpah to lecture everybody on everything. He lectures architects on architecture, scientists on science, city planners on city planning. He thinks he’s much much much cleverer than he is. Dunning-Kruger to the max.
Perhaps the worst thing is that he is proud of being called “the enemy of the Enlightenment”. He is clearly anti-science. He calls for more research into alternative medicine, but he doesn’t mean what we mean by research. He doesn’t want research to ask “if” a treatment is effective, he wants it to demonstrate that it is effective, and that it would save money (which it would not).
He identifies as right about everything.
Postmodernism really is a powerful philosophy, isn’t it? Just imagine whatever you want, and that’s the way it is!
Makes me think of someone else, if I could just remember who. Slump? Dump? Flump? Chump? Maybe some of you could help me out…
Kind of appropriate that a royal would be an enemy of the Enlightenment given what an anathema monarchs are to one of its children.
It’s the original “post-truth”. On the face of it, a philosophy that denies the very existence of objective reality, or – if there is such a thing – denies that we can know* anything about it, doesn’t seem like a very promising starting point for supporting any belief system. After all, if nobody really knows anything, then neither do I. If nothing is true, then neither is my favorite piece of woo. On the other hand it’s pretty much the perfect philosophy for leveling the playing field: If I can’t make a coherent argument that my favorite piece of nonsense is objectively true, the second best option seems to be to deny that there are any objective truths at all, so at least I can tell myself that my woo beliefs are neither more nor less “true” (0=0) than anything else. Sounds very much like both Trumpism(/Putinism) and Gender Ideology, doesn’t it…
Once again, it’s tempting to think that people believe weird things because they are too trusty, naive, gullible etc. Yet when you look at most crazy belief systems (including the ones held by cults), there is no shortage of distrust, suspicion, cynicism, or even outright paranoia, going on. But it’s a very selective distrust that only serves to explain away any challenge to the fixed, sacred dogma at the core of the belief system (“That’s just what they want you to believe!”). In my experience conspiracy theorists are some of the most gullible and easily manipulated people on the planet. Make any accusation – no matter how far-fetched or implausible – against the people/groups they already hate, and the standard of proof doesn’t just go to zero, but more like minus infinity: “I am going to believe this even if all the evidence in the universe goes against me (all part of the conspiracy!), and if that means postulating technologies that don’t exist outside of science fiction (holograms of planes hitting the World Trade Center etc.), or attributing to my enemies a supernatural level of power and control, then so be it!”
* Even in the tentative scientific sense.