Category: Articles

In March 2006 I submitted to the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service Ombudsman a complaint about the numerous errors and misconceptions that permeate the PBS Einstein’s Wife website material and associated Lesson Plans purporting to present evidence that Mileva Marić made substantive contributions to (or even co-authored) Einstein’s celebrated 1905 papers on special relativity, the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion. PBS is currently considering the complaint, based on my detailed analyses of the Australian Einstein’s Wife documentary
[1] and of the PBS website material. (See Mileva Marić 1
and Mileva Marić 2.)

Gerald Holton, who played a major role in the inaugurating of the Einstein Archive, is one of several physicists who have concluded on the basis of the documentary evidence that, in Holton’s words, Marić “left no evidence of originality as a future scientist”.[2] Holton was a contributor to the “Einstein’s Wife” documentary, but was given no idea of the nature of the project. His view of the documentary is amply clear from the following message he emailed me on the subject:

I was glad to read of your interest in correcting the blatant perversion of the role of Mileva Marić in the Australian film, “Einstein’s Wife”. The essays on your websites should be required reading by all who have been taken in by this film – the NPR officials, the unsuspecting readers of the story on the PBS website, the viewers of this pseudo- “documentary”, the helpless teachers who might fall for this lie.

I suspect the Australian film crew and producers may well have known that they were producing a sorry fiction. For example, when they asked me to be interviewed for the film, they only said it was going to be (yet another) film about Einstein. If they had told me what they really were intending, I would of course not have agreed to appear, and would have told them how wrong they were.

The film’s falsification of Marić’s role in the work of Einstein, well explained in your postings and in other sources by knowledgable historians of science, brings to mind two points: One is that if such a false product were published by a scientist, he or she would be deprived of eligibility of further funding, and (in the USA) punished by the Office of Research Integrity. As the recent unmasking of the South Korean biologist who falsified data shows, the same derogation would also be appropriate outside the USA. Equally bad is that the falsification of Marić’s role is really an insult to her. As I wrote (page 191, Einstein, History and other Passions, H.U.P. 2000, in Chapter 8) on the relationship between Mileva and Albert :

“Ironically, the exaggeration of Mileva’s scientific role, far beyond what she herself ever claimed or could be proved, only detracts both from her real and significant place in history, and from the tragic unfulfillment of her early hopes and promise. For she was one of the pioneers in the movement to bring women into science, even if she did not reap its benefits. At great personal sacrifice, as it later turned out, she seems to have been essential to Albert during the onerous years of his most creative early period, not only as anchor of his emotional life, but also as a sympathetic companion with whom he could sound out his highly unconventional ideas during the years when he was undergoing the quite unexpected, rapid metamorphosis from eager student to first-rank scientist.”

Two other contributors to the documentary, Robert Schulmann, the historian associated with the Albert Einstein Collected Papers project, and the founding editor of the project, John Stachel, were likewise unaware of the nature of the documentary and have disassociated themselves from it. The skilful editing of the contributions by Holton and Stachel ensured that the final product contained nothing that contradicted the viewpoint being propagated, with one exception. This is in relation to what Stachel has described as his being “set up” [3] in the scene purporting (falsely) to demonstrate that the Soviet scientist Abraham Joffe had stated that the original manuscript of Einstein’s 1905 special relativity paper was co-signed by Einstein and Marić. (The means by which Stachel was set up is recounted in my article Mileva Marić 1.)

Stachel has himself published comprehensive refutations of the claims about Marić’s alleged contributions to Einstein’s publications.[4] Had the writer/producer of the documentary, Geraldine Hilton, and the PBS “Einstein’s Wife” website and classroom content production team been genuinely interested in a disinterested examination of the contentions about Marić they would have made a serious attempt to find and report the published analyses of the principal claims by Stachel and Holton. The remarkably poor level of the research undertaken for this project is illustrated by the following statement on the PBS web page About Einstein’s Wife, “The West’s first hint of Marić’s existence came with a 1983 German translation of a Yugoslavian biography”, the falseness of which can be ascertained merely by visiting one’s local library and examining any biography of Einstein published prior to 1983.

It is ironic that a project that is the antithesis of principled historical research should be commended by PBS on this same webpage as “designed to encourage students to explore issues related to science, social bias [and] history”. Such is the appallingly low level of scholarship involved with this project that no amount of modification of the “Einstein’s Wife” website material and school lesson plans, or the addition of caveats, can redeem them. The only principled course of action for PBS is for them to announce that they are withdrawing the website and repudiating the “Einstein’s Wife” documentary.

I shall end with a challenge from John Stachel, the physicist who has done most to examine and refute the Marić “collaboration” contentions, addressed to two of the most prominent proponents, Senta Troemel-Ploetz and Evan Harris Walker.[5]:

Albert Einstein corresponded with his friend Michele Besso for about fifty years. Einstein’s letters to Besso are filled with scientific references, many more and in much greater detail than in his letters to Marić. (For whatever reason scientific comments are almost entirely lacking in Einstein’s letters to Marić after their marriage.) Besso’s letters to Einstein are similarly filled with scientific comment. (The Einstein Besso correspondence has been published in German with a French translation, so these claims are easily checked.) Besso is also the only person Einstein thanks for help in his 1905 paper on special relativity. Yet Besso never wrote an important paper in physics, and his efforts at collaborative research in general relativity with Einstein came to naught. Late in his life, Einstein chacterized Besso as an “eternal student.” What does this mean? To me, it means that Besso was capable of understanding things that Einstein explained to him and of asking intelligent questions that could help Einstein develop his own ideas (Einstein’s ideas, that is) – but that Besso was not capable of any creative effort of his own. This is what I mean when I say that Besso acted as a sounding board for Einstein.

Now I challenge Walker and Troemel Ploetz: On the strength of the Einstein-Besso letters, and the reference to Besso in Einstein’s 1905 relativity paper, do you want to claim that Besso was the creative force behind Einstein, or even an equal scientific partner in any of his creative work? If so, please explain why you feel that Besso was, and where this leaves Marić. If not, please explain why you feel that there is a stronger case for Mileva Marić than for Besso. In her case, we have no published papers; no letters with a serious scientific content, either to Einstein or to anyone else; nor any other objective evidence of her supposed creative talents. We do not even have hearsay accounts of conversations she had to anyone else that have a specific, scientific content, let alone a content claiming to report her ideas. (If you believe any of these assertions to be wrong, please cite the evidence for your belief.)[6]

NOTES

1. The PBS website states: The documentary is a creation of Melsa Films Pty., Ltd., produced and developed in association with Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). “Einstein’s Wife” was created by a multi-national production team, including: this one

2. Holton, G. (2000). Einstein, History, and Other Passions: The Rebellion Against Science at the End of the Twentieth Century. Harvard University Press, pp. 170-193.

3. Personal communication.

4. Stachel, J. (2002). Einstein from ‘B’ to ‘Z‘, Boston/Basel/Berlin: Birkhauser, pp. 26-38; see also Stachel, J. (ed.) (2005). Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics. Princeton University Press, pp. xlv-lxiii.

5. Troemel-Ploetz, S. (1990). “Mileva Einstein-Marić: The Woman Who Did Einstein’s Mathematics.” Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 13, No. 5, p. 419.
Walker, E. H. (1989, 1991). Letters to Physics Today, February 1989 and February 1991.
For a response to Walker’s 1991 letter, see this

6. Stachel, J. (2002). Einstein from ‘B’ to ‘Z’, Boston/Basel/Berlin: Birkhauser, p. 36.

References

Martinez, A. A. (2005). Handling Evidence in History: The Case of Einstein’s Wife. School Science Review, March 2005, 86 (316), pp. 49-56.

Esterson, A. Mileva Marić: Einstein’s Wife

Addendum: Evan Harris Walker

One of the main proponents of the thesis that Einstein’s 1905 papers were co-authored by Mileva Marić, and a key contributor to the “Einstein’s Wife” documentary, is Evan Harris Walker, president of the Walker Cancer Research Institute (also known as the National Cancer Research Center). Walker’s significance in the debate is, on the surface, enhanced by the fact that he holds a Ph.D. in physics. However, John Stachel, foundation editor of the Albert Einstein Collected Papers project, has written in relation to a letter Walker published in the February 1989 issue of Physics Today[i] that “Evan Harris Walker has created a ‘speculative picture’ that has more the flavor of a Hollywood script than of a serious evaluation”,[ii] and has argued that if he had to judge him solely on the basis of this letter he “would have to conclude that he is a fantasist, who judges reality on the basis of his own ideas”.[iii]

Further support for this view of Walker comes from his assertions in the “Einstein’s Wife” documentary in relation to the fact that Marić attended a short course given by Philipp Lenard during the 1897-1898 winter semester at the University of Heidelberg. The subject is introduced in characteristically misleading fashion. After information has been provided about the physics of the photoelectric effect, the narrator follows on with the statement: “Mileva is enthralled and keeps Einstein abreast of this brave new world.” As we shall see, the implication that Marić heard about the photoelectric effect from Lenard at that time is nonsense. There then follows Maric’s reading the following passage from a letter she wrote to Einstein in late 1897:

“It really was too enjoyable in Professor Lenard’s lecture yesterday; now he’s talking about the kinetic theory of gases. It seems that oxygen molecules travel at a speed of over 400 m per second, and after calculating and calculating, the good professor set up equations, differentiated, integrated, substituted, and finally showed that the molecules in question actually do move at such a velocity, but that they only travel the distance of 1/100 of a hair’s breadth.”[iv]

The absurdity of citing this brief account of a topic in the kinetic theory of gases as evidence that Marić was keeping Einstein abreast of cutting edge physics such as the (yet to be performed) experiments of Lenard’s on the photoelectric effect serves to demonstrate the scientific ignorance of the writer/producer of the documentary, Geraldine Hilton. But let’s now examine what Walker has to say in the documentary:

“When Albert and Mileva were publishing they took the data Professor Lenard had developed and developed a theory which forms part of the foundation of quantum mechanics. Very very significant that she was the one with Lenard. It suggests that indeed she brought back much more than herself to Albert Einstein.”

In short, Walker contends that the fact that Marić spent a semester at Heidelberg University during which she attended lectures given by Lenard is “very significant”, sufficing to indicate that Einstein and Marić together “took the data Professor Lenard had developed” to produce a paper which pioneered quantum theory.

Walker’s allusion to “a theory that forms part of the foundation of quantum mechanics” is to Einstein’s celebrated 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect. But Lenard didn’t publish on his experiments on the photoelectric effect until 1900, and in any case, the lectures of his that Marić attended comprised nothing more than a four-hour course on Heat Theory and Electrodynamics.[v] In fact we know precisely when Einstein first knew about Lenard’s first experimental work on the photoelectric effect. In May 1901 he reported to Marić that he had just read “a wonderful paper by Lenard on the generation of cathode rays by ultraviolet light”.[vi] (Incidentally, Einstein’s revolutionary 1905 paper actually provided a theoretical explanation for the later experimental results obtained by Lenard on which he published in 1902.) It is evident that nothing Mileva might have told Einstein about Lenard’s 1897-1898 lecture course could have had any bearing on his extraordinary achievement in 1905.

So what can we conclude from this? Walker has taken the bare fact that Marić attended a short course given by Lenard at Heidelberg University and constructed a scenario which has her bringing back information which led to the revolutionary paper on the photoelectric effect published seven years later! Here we have a clear indication that from information of zero evidential value Walker is able to concoct a story “that has more the flavour of a Hollywood script than of a serious evaluation”, thereby providing further vindication of Stachel’s verdict on the value of Walker’s contentions about Marić’s alleged role in Einstein’s work.

Walker Cancer Research Institute

That Walker is no stranger to excessive claims is shown by the contention on the Walker Cancer Research Institute website
that the organization can take some credit for the fact that in the decade 1988-1998 “cancer rates have declined by 0.7%”. On the basis of the fact that this decade “corresponds” to the period that the Institute had been sending out to the public “notices calling for people to take specific steps to reduce their risk of cancer, notices to people that other organizations largely ignore”, they state that “We at the WALKER CANCER RESEARCH INSTITUTE, INC. believe that we have contributed significantly to this downturn in the incidence of cancer”.[vii]

NOTES

(i) Physics Today, February 1989, pp. 9-11.

(ii) Physics Today, February 1989, p. 13.

(iii) Stachel, J. (2002). Einstein from ‘B’ to ‘Z’. Boston: Birkhäuser, pp. 26-29.
See also: this.

(iv) Renn, J. and Schulmann, R. (1992), Albert Einstein, Mileva Marić: The Love Letters. (Trans. S. Smith), Princeton University Press, p. 4.

(v) The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 1 (eds. J. Stachel et al), Princeton University Press, 1987, p. 59, n.7. The source is the University of Heidelberg records, Anzeige 1897 (CPAE, Vol. 1, p. 391).

(vi) Renn & Schulmann (1992), p. 54.

(vii) ’Achievements’
More information about the Walker Cancer Research Institute can be found here.

What is the difference between science and pseudo-science? The criterion by which our current practices distinguish the two is falsifiability, but what is inherently valuable about falsifiable hypotheses? Presumably, the goal of science is the discovery of truth. If an unfalsifiable method predicted data more reliably than a falsifiable one, shouldn’t we adopt the unfalsifiable method? Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, is untroubled by this puzzle or myriad similar puzzles. Or perhaps he has solved them all. That would at least justify the oracular certainty with which he proclaims, in the first sentence of his choleric review of philosopher Daniel Dennett’s new book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (“The God Genome,” NYT, 2/19/06), that “The question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question.” Wieseltier seems to believe that only a superstitious dogmatist could possibly deny that statement, and he has a debate-stopping epithet for such a view: “scientism.”

Surely, being an anti-dogmatist, Wieseltier would not object to having his own beliefs subjected to scrutiny. Determining what counts as a scientific question is just as problematic as determining what counts as science. Since Dennett’s project is an evolutionary account of the origins of religious belief, Wieselter might be content with giving the precise statement of his thesis as, “The question of the place of science in human life is not a biological question.” Perhaps so. What about, “The question…is not a question of chemistry”? That seems surer. “…not a question of physics.” We stand on firmer ground still. Consider, however: “The question of the place of science in human life is not a question of cognitive science…of clinical psychology…of sociology…of anthropology.”

Suddenly the thesis no longer goes down like honey — it loses some a priori pull, as philosophers say. What is happening is that the languages of individual sciences become more compatible with questions concerning human life and its values the more that their subject matter is experienced and practical rather than abstract and fundamental. But applied science is not fundamental science; fundamental science is, and what makes a science fundamental is that its truths make the truths of all other sciences true. Sugar doesn’t make coffee sweet if e doesn’t equal mc2. Nor, if the laws of physics fail, does Bloomsday celebrate Ulysses or any priest give spiritual guidance to his flock. (What’s left? The truths of logic.) We use different scientific languages to suit different purposes, but there is no metaphysical difference between what each scientific language describes — it’s all just the same fundamental reality. Any bearing that a truth of one science has on a question is a bearing all science has on that question. So either no scientific practice can inform its own value in human life to any degree or else Wieseltier’s indubitable truism about the role of science in human life not being a scientific matter is simply false.

Don’t take my word for it. Ask David Hume, who wrote the following in the introduction to his Treatise of Human Nature: “’Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature; and that however wide any of them may seem to run from it, they still return back by one passage or another. Even Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion are in some measure dependent on the science of Man.” (His italics, incidentally.) Hume reverses the terms of debate; on his view, the special sciences should inform the practices of the theoretical sciences (he would have suspected a modifier like “fundamental” of invoking sinister metaphysics). Notice that Hume simply takes it for granted that mathematics and theology, as well as physics and ontology, both subsumed under the old concept of “natural philosophy,” belong to the same category of inquiry. Calling science by different names doesn’t change its essence.

One plausible way to understand the origins of what has come to be known as “analytic philosophy,” and has become the hugely dominant mode of doing philosophy in the English-speaking world, is as a way of both systematizing Hume’s insights about the relation of science to human experience, and then carrying out Hume’s programmatic imperatives. On the systematic front, the great Harvard empiricist W.V.O. Quine, in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” an essay still fresh and relevant some five decades after its publication, constructed a philosophical theory of why trying to draw metaphysical boundaries between different domains of knowledge is futile (Wieseltier wasn’t the first to try). He concludes:

Ontological questions, under this view, are on a par with questions of natural science. Consider the question whether to countenance classes [e.g. the class of red things] as entities. This…is the question whether to quantify with respect to variables which take classes as values. Now [Rudolf] Carnap [a leading logical positivist] has maintained that this is a question…of choosing a convenient conceptual scheme or framework for science. With this I agree, but only on the proviso that the same be conceded regarding scientific hypotheses generally.

The upshot is that classifying a question as scientific, or not, is an extrinsic matter of choosing a conceptual scheme, and the factors weighing on such a choice are nothing but our subjective preferences about what we hope to achieve with our framework. And this is just Hume’s view paraphrased more generally and formally. In short, science is a human practice, and the claim that its role in human life is not a scientific matter is either an absurdity or a tautology.

The empiricist portrait of the world that Quine inherited from Hume has proven to be compelling to more contemporary philosophers than any other. One of its adherents happens to be Daniel Dennett. By a mistaken interpretation of Hume, based on downright embarrassing scholarship (more on that later), Wieseltier manages to unload a rhetorical artillery barrage on empiricism itself; Dennett is just collateral damage. Underneath the rhetoric and far out of proportion to its volume, Wieseltier has two arguments to make against naturalism. (To be sure, ‘empiricism’, ‘naturalism’, and if one must, ‘scientism’, denote distinct if related concepts. But Wieseltier respects neither these conceptual distinctions nor any others. This is his language game we’re playing.)

Wieseltier’s first argument attempts to prove that naturalism is necessarily committed to biological reductionism, and therefore false, though the last inference doesn’t quite follow. Affirming two observations from Dennett, to the effect that human beings are animals, but that we also have “creeds” and other features that make us different from other animals, Wieseltier quotes Dennett once more: “But it [our difference] is itself a biological fact, visible to natural science, and something that requires an explanation from natural science.” Then comes the victorious thunderclap:

As the ancient rabbis used to say, have your ears heard what your mouth has spoken? Dennett does not see that he has taken his humanism back. Why is our independence from biology a fact of biology? And if it is a fact of biology, then we are not independent of biology. If our creeds are an expression of our animality, if they require an explanation from natural science, then we have not transcended our genetic imperatives. The human difference, in Dennett’s telling, is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind — a doctrine that may quite plausibly be called biological reductionism.

Indeed, whose authority, if not that of the ancient rabbis, is one inclined to draw upon in determining the boundaries of scientific inquiry? If Wieseltier is familiar with the move in analytic philosophy from reductive to non-reductive forms of physicalism and naturalism, he does not say so. But if it were true that features of the world like rationality and belief could be real and irreducible to biology only if no scientific fact explained their existence, then either rationality and belief are just “expressions of our animality” or else some kind of Cartesian substance dualism is true. So if Wieseltier is right that naturalism entails reductionism, he has an either/or choice to make, between becoming a biological reductionist himself or upholding a truly preposterous metaphysics in order not to take back his humanism. (In which case, who is it exactly who believes in a superstition?)

Fortunately for Wieseltier, it need not come to that. The reason to reject fully reductive naturalism, first of all, is not that it would entail unpleasant consequences for our beliefs about having “transcended genetic imperatives” — a truth isn’t any worse off for our uneasiness with it — but because the empirical verdict on full-blown reductionism is already in, and it doesn’t work. Even the most promising candidates for reduction classes and “bridge laws” (as Ernest Nagel called them) turned out to be woefully inadequate to the task. So the claim that all explanation is natural needs to be refined. Non-reductive naturalism is perfectly willing to concede that some truths do not have an ultimate explanation that can be expressed scientifically, but does not concede, and in fact whole-heartedly repudiates, the notion that any truths are not completely dependent on scientific truths. There can be, and undoubtedly are, infinitely many truths — mental, moral, political, aesthetic — that science cannot explain, but a complete statement of the truths that science can explain fully determines all the others.

“Determination without reduction,” as the motto goes, turns out to provide a compelling picture. It respects both our intuitions that, as Dennett puts it, “we are different,” as well as our intuitions that there are no Cartesian minds floating around independent of the laws of physics. Try this thought experiment: Suppose two individuals situated in the same environmental and social contexts are subatomic particle-for-subatomic particle duplicates of one another, hence all their physical properties and their neuronal histories are identical. Is it not obvious that they would have qualitatively identical memories, beliefs, and hopes? In other words, they would in fact have qualitatively identical minds, minds that are no worse off, nor any less real, for being dependent on brains and bodies. The only unreal minds are the ones that are independent of bodies — they don’t exist.

There are thus two ways to construe Dennett’s proposal to explain the existence of humanity’s difference-making creeds through natural science. On one hand, one might emphasize the element of explanation, and conclude that Dennett is simply proposing a reduction of those creeds to biology. If so, Dennett is a biological reductionist. Alternatively, one might emphasize Dennett’s ostensible realism about those creeds. In that case, the object of his explanatory proposal is the subset of physical facts that determines the fact that those creeds exist; and such a proposal is paradigmatic non-reductionism. In no case is Dennett’s doctrine one that “may quite plausibly be called biological reductionism.” It either simply is or is not. Dennett, to be sure, is guilty of equivocation on this point; some of his writing suggests the first construal is the correct one, some of it suggests the second. But what does that matter in the end? If cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and any other relevant fields could discover the set of facts among the physical ones that is coextensive with the set of facts relating to human mentality and rationality, science might then be able to discover regularities and laws applying to those facts and not others. The sort of research Wieseltier opposes could give us deeper insight into what it means to be human than we have ever imagined possible. This is what it takes to be a humanist?

So much for the notion that naturalism entails reductionism. Wieseltier does not acknowledge his debt to the true author of his second argument against naturalism, but the distinguishing features of a subtler approach to philosophy are readily apparent. Rather than claim on the basis of a few armchair reflections that a probable majority of practicing philosophers subscribe to belief in a contradiction so glaring that it flabbergasts the ancient rabbis in their graves, Alvin Plantinga, in his “evolutionary argument against naturalism,” brought to light a deep, subtle inconsistency for which naturalism has no easy or fully satisfactory answer. There is, however, a steep theoretical price to pay for following Plantinga’s argument to its end, a price too steep for many people upon taking its full measure. Plantinga, to his credit, has the courage of his convictions, an attribute conspicuously absent from Wieseltier’s strategy of co-opting Plantinga’s rejection of naturalism while avoiding its consequences.

Wieseltier poses the argument as a rhetorical question: “[I]f reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection?” So far, there is only a naked appeal to intuition, an appeal that neither would nor should move any naturalist. The first axiom of naturalism is that reason is a product of natural selection and we can have confidence in it anyway. But Plantinga’s argument, fully developed, can move past an intuitive stalemate. Here is a capsule summary: Modus ponens (if p then q, p, therefore q) and modus tollens (if p then q, not q, therefore not p) are the two atomic forms of inferential reasoning, the building blocks of deduction. Now Plantinga and naturalists both believe that we have a priori knowledge of the validity of inferential reasoning, but the naturalist has the additional belief that inferential reasoning is the product of evolution through natural selection. However, to have a priori knowledge of the validity of inferential reasoning, one would have to have a deductive argument to that effect. And any deductive argument for the validity of inferential reasoning produced by naturalistic evolution would entail recourse to modus ponens or modus tollens, hence begging the question. So the only argument left for the validity of inferential reasoning produced by naturalistic evolution would be an inductive argument. Which would mean that we cannot have a priori knowledge of the validity of inferential reasoning; so naturalism ends in a reductio ad absurdum, on pain of abdicating a claim to a priori knowledge of the truths of deductive logic.

The trouble with Plantinga’s argument is that it is too powerful. His alternative to naturalism is supernaturalism, and he bases his claim to a priori knowledge of the truths of logic on receiving them from God. Very well, but what is the argument for the a priori validity of inferential reasoning given by God? And will it invoke modus ponens or modus tollens? Plantinga believes that the special nature of God lifts the standard constraints on the acquisition of a priori knowledge. But that is a leap of faith, not a rationally justified belief. The evolutionary argument against naturalism exposes the fact that to have any epistemology at all — that is, to have any theory of explanation — one must assume the axioms of that epistemology as primitives. The alternative is nihilism about the possibility of explanation.

The first philosopher to appreciate the problem of induction fully was not a Christian apologist like Plantinga, but the consummate atheist David Hume, who casts his shadow over any discussion of naturalism and the limits of naturalistic explanation because it is his epistemology that provides the theoretical foundation of the actual practice of science. To enter into the discussion, therefore, a working knowledge of Hume’s epistemology is absolutely indispensable. The root source of all of Wieseltier’s trouble is that he gets Hume’s epistemology completely, utterly wrong, and the cause of that error in turn is that, undeterred by a surfeit of biographical evidence and a consensus in Hume scholarship to the contrary, Wieseltier attributes to Hume a belief in the existence of God on the basis of an argument that contradicts the essential character of Humean philosophy. “His God was a very wan god,” asserts Wieseltier, understating matters to the point of absurdity. “But his God was still a god; and so his theism is as true or false as any other theism.” The meager evidentiary basis of that claim is a single sentence outside either of Hume’s two major philosophical works:

The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion. (The Natural History of Religion).

It does look fairly convincing on first glance that Hume both believed in the existence of God, and held that belief on the basis of an argument from design. Indeed, passing off this remark without further consideration of the major themes of Hume’s corpus is so suspiciously convincing that it precludes the possibility that it is just an honest mistake. Quite simply, either Wieseltier has been defrauded himself or he is attempting to defraud his readers. For in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, nearly universally regarded as Hume’s masterwork, and again in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he gives a devastating counterargument against affirming the existence of God from observations about design. Though Hume’s argument against theism-from-design has been cleaned up and formalized over the centuries, it has never been substantively improved upon.

Would Wieseltier have us believe that the man who constructed the definitive rebuttal to the argument from design nevertheless upheld the argument from design himself? Does Wieseltier believe Hume was a schizophrenic? Not even schizophrenia could make the notion of Hume-the-theist remotely plausible: Hume’s general methodological principles provide rules for rebutting all arguments of the type of which the argument from design is a token, and they also helpfully reveal what is actually going on in the passage from The Natural History of Religion. In contemporary philosophical discourse, “Humeanism” denotes the doctrine, as described by the metaphysician David Lewis, that “all there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing and then another.” The foundation of Hume’s epistemology is the denial of necessary connections anywhere in nature. In the Enquiry he sets out to demonstrate that all we can ever have knowledge of is the conjunction of one event with another; reason then applies the concept of causality to our experiences and tries to deceive us into thinking that causality is something real, “out there,” rather than a cognitive illusion:

The bread, which I formerly eat, nourished me; that is, a body of such sensible qualities was, at that time, endued with such secret powers: but does it follow, that other bread must also nourish me at another time, and that like sensible qualities must always be attended with like secret powers?

“No,” goes the answer resoundingly. The evident dependence of the existence of causality on the necessary constancy from one moment to the next of invisible “secret powers” should tip us off to the fact that nothing makes it so that uniformities in nature are necessarily so. Belief to the contrary is based on phantoms in the minds of those whom reason has successfully misled. So Hume does not think there is any justification for inferring the necessary existence of cause-and-effect relations from observing nature. The suggestion that Hume believed God’s existence could be inferred from the same method is farcical.

What sense, then, can we make of the solitary line Wieseltier takes as dispositive of Hume’s theism? Quite the opposite, in fact, of what Wieseltier takes away from it. Consider precisely what it is Hume says: No “rational enquirer” can suspend his belief in theism and religion. But Hume is not, in his own idiom, a “rational enquirer”; he is the champion of empiricism, and rationalists are his philosophical antagonists. Of course a rationalist of the sort Hume is criticizing cannot suspend belief in God. Rationalism takes as indubitable the postulate that what pure reason makes out of perception is reality. Anyone laboring under that false doctrine, and who perceives nature as bearing marks of design, would be powerless to resist fallacious inferences from the appearance of design in nature to the reality of the existence of God. In a line from the Treatise I would find it hard to believe Wieseltier has never come across, Hume makes his thoughts about the role of reason overt: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” The rationalism Wieseltier believes is common ground between himself and Hume is in other words the precise object of Hume’s intellectual scorn. Hume is not affirming the argument from design, but laughing at those who do.

There are, of course, alternatives to Humean science, and Plantinga points the way to one. Call it Kierkegaardian science — believe in God and, by virtue of the absurd, the science will follow. Aristotle’s science dominated most of the history of Western civilization, until Galileo and Copernicus embarrassed its geocentrism, Newton embarrassed its mechanics, and Darwin embarrassed its notion of biological species as eternal and unchanging. But the undoing of Aristotelian science is its method, not its conclusions. A science according to which penicillin cures bacterial infections because it possesses an antibiotic virtue is not a science capable of discovering penicillin in the first place. Moreover, it takes Kant, not Aristotle, to provide a principled basis for erecting the sorts of walls between science and philosophy and between individual sciences that Wieseltier proposes. The theoretical cost of doing so is accepting Kant’s theory that space and time are nothing more than “forms of sensible intuition,” and consequently that not even the images captured by the Hubble telescope advance us one inch towards an understanding of “things in themselves,” i.e. true, transcendental reality. Wieseltier wants Kantian science without Kantian metaphysics, a possibility ruled out not by the sinister scientistic machinations of the likes of Dennett, but by the minimal requirements of intellectual defensibility.

However, the science Wieseltier actually lends his support to is nothing so dignified as Kant’s, but the only science that could result from the self-parodying rationalism he mistakenly attributes to Hume (and here is where the political implications of Wieseltier’s arguments become apparent). There is unfortunately no shortage of bullies who claim to have proved, on the grounds that it seems to them that “nature bespeaks an intelligent author,” that such an author necessarily exists. The name of that peasant revolt against knowledge is “intelligent design theory,” and Wieseltier, for all his erudition, is its oblivious footsoldier. “[W]hy must we read literally in the realm of religion,” wonders Wieseltier, approximating candor, “when in so many other realms of human expression we read metaphorically, allegorically, symbolically, figuratively, analogically?” What a silly question. Of course we may read any way we choose to, and no one has suggested otherwise. All that naturalists ask is that we not mistake our right to read metaphorically for the power to make metaphors into literal truth by believing in them strongly enough. The occasional stridency Dennett displays in reminding us that the universe is indifferent to our thoughts about what it should be is nothing compared to the metaphysical hubris involved in self-righteously refusing to pay heed to those reminders.

Such hubris, on Oedipus’ part, was tragic; on Wieseltier’s part it is farce. “There are concepts in many of the fables of faith, philosophical propositions about the nature of the universe.” The claim is dangerous nonsense even ignoring the elementary confusion of concepts and propositions (a freshman in introductory philosophical semantics wouldn’t get off so easily). Propositions expressed in fables are categorically not propositions about the nature of the universe; they are at best mimetic representations of the universe. This is why Wieseltier’s charge that Dennett’s book repudiates philosophy comes to nothing but vocus flatus in the end, and why his nihilism is not essentially epistemological, but ontological. For philosophy begins, as Heraclitus and Parmenides knew, with the distinction between appearance and reality, the fundamental and everything else. By imprecating that distinction, Wieseltier’s “humanism” abolishes the very possibility of a distinctly human being, simply because it abolishes the necessary conditions of any being at all.

Daniel Koffler recently
graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in philosophy, and is currently
working on a book about academic cults of personality, tentatively entitled
Contagion of the Gown.

Brigham Young University is in the news at the moment because its philosophy department decided not to renew the contract of an adjunct instructor after he wrote a newspaper editorial in favour of same-sex marriage. The instructor received a letter from the chair of the philosophy department informing him of the decision shortly after his editorial ran in the Salt Lake Tribune. Inside Higher Ed reported, ‘Carri Jenkins, a BYU spokeswoman, said the choice not to rehire Nielsen came from the department, which has the authority to make personnel decisions on part-time faculty. “The department made the decision because of the opinion piece that had been written, and based on the fact that Mr. Nielsen publicly contradicted and opposed an official statement by top church leaders,” Jenkins said.’ This story is of great interest to us, because the questions raised by BYU’s policy make an appearance in chapter 7 of Why Truth Matters.

But consider also some of the events which have been played out in recent years at Brigham Young University (BYU), which has its main campus in Provo, Utah. BYU, founded in 1875 by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) – that is, by Mormons – is an explicitly religious institution. Its mission statement makes it clear that it exists in order to enrich its students – as it sees it – in the Mormon faith:

The founding charge of BYU is to teach every subject with the Spirit. It is not intended “that all of the faculty should be categorically teaching religion constantly in their classes, but…that every…teacher in this institution would keep his subject matter bathed in the light and colour of the restored gospel.”

It is more than a little difficult to imagine quite what this means when it comes to subjects like accountancy and computer engineering. But it is immediately clear that BYU, and indeed other colleges and universities which are founded on religious precepts, differ significantly from their secular cousins. No doubt it is tempting to suppose that this difference necessarily undermines any claim which such institutions make that education and research are about the pursuit of truth. However, this would be to oversimplify; it is quite possible for people to carry out perfectly respectable research, in certain delimited fields, even if they believe that the moon is made of semi-skim yogurt and that a giant pumpkin is God. Religious institutions don’t throw truth out of the window altogether. Their policy is more selective; they keep the bits they like, and discard those they don’t.

Faculty at BYU are aware that their academic freedom is limited in quite specific ways. The BYU policy on academic freedom is set out in a document which was approved by the university’s trustees in September 1992.[1] It is based on a distinction between “Individual Academic Freedom”, which refers to the “freedom of the individual faculty member ‘to teach and research without interference,’ to ask hard questions, to subject answers to rigorous examination, and to engage in scholarship and creative work”; and “Institutional Academic Freedom”, which holds that it is “the privilege of universities to pursue their distinctive missions”. Bringing these two things together leads BYU to its policy on academic freedom:

It follows that the exercise of individual and institutional academic freedom must be a matter of reasonable limitations. In general, at BYU a limitation is reasonable when the faculty behaviour or expression seriously and adversely affects the university mission or the Church.

The policy document offers three examples of the kinds of things which staff aren’t permitted to say to students or in public: (a) something which contradicts or opposes LDS Church doctrine or policy; (b) something which deliberately derides or attacks the LDS Church or its leaders; and (c) something which violates the “Honor Code”[2].

It’s obvious that such a policy is bound to result in problems. Scholars working in the humanities or the social sciences are very likely to be inquiring into subjects that could bring them into conflict with the specified limitations on academic freedom. This is especially the case since the limitations are vague enough so that what the BYU authorities consider to be a violation might vary over time, and from case to case, and that faculty might not be clear anyway that particular views or activities are unacceptable.

It is important to make it clear here that there is no evidence that BYU staff are dissatisfied either with the university’s strongly religious nature, or with the fact that their academic freedom is necessarily limited. This is not surprising; some ninety-five per cent of faculty are members of the LDS Church, and also, as a condition of their employment, “temple worthy”, a status attained by only about one in five Mormons. The problems have arisen rather because of the perception that the specified limitations on academic freedom are applied with too much zeal; in particular, there is the suspicion that the policy on academic freedom is used in order to silence viewpoints which are unorthodox only on the strictest interpretation of Church doctrine, even though this is not justified by the letter of the policy. This point is perhaps best illustrated by the case of Gail Hurley Houston, who between 1990 and 1996 was an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at BYU.

Professor Houston’s story is quite complicated. Indeed, it is the subject of a sixty-two page report by BYU administrators, which itself was the result of an investigation by the American Association of University Professors, which for its part culminated in an eighteen page report.[3] The essence of the story, though, is that Professor Houston’s application for tenure (which went forward, as is standard, as she approached her sixth year of employment at BYU) was denied, despite its being supported by her departmental colleagues, her departmental chair, and two of the three requisite tenure committees. It was rejected at the last stage in the tenure process by the University Faculty Council on Rank and Status; the decision to deny tenure was then confirmed by an Appeal Panel hearing in August 1996.

Houston’s application for tenure was not denied on the grounds of the quality of her scholarship. It was denied because in the eyes of the BYU administration she had engaged in “a pattern of publicly contradicting fundamental Church doctrine and deliberately attacking the Church.”[4] Thus, she was informed that the negative recommendation was because of

the number and severity of occasions when your actions and words on and off campus…were perceived as harmful to the tenets held by the Church and the university. We feel that not only have these activities failed to strengthen the moral vigour of the university, they have enervated its very fibre.[5]

The BYU administration identified a number of specific occasions where they thought her behaviour had transgressed the boundaries set out in the policy on academic freedom. Perhaps most significant were two instances where she suggested that it is appropriate for Mormons to pray to the “Heavenly Mother” as well as to the “Heavenly Father”. The BYU authorities pointed out that she had previously had a warning that such conduct was a clear violation of Church doctrine, and therefore, that it was unacceptable, but that she had subsequently repeated the offence. There were also concerns that she had publicly advocated extending the priesthood to women, again in clear violation of Church doctrine.

It would be easy to dismiss these worries on the grounds that they are a function of a deeply ingrained sexism which is characteristic of the Mormon religion. However, whilst this is probably true, it nevertheless isn’t clear that the BYU administrators behaved in quite the arbitrary manner that some commentators have supposed. In other words, there is at least an argument that both the following things are true: Professor Houston was the victim of religious intolerance rooted in a sexist theology; and the BYU administrators correctly applied the terms of their policy on academic freedom.

There is an interesting point here, linked to some of the themes we explored in chapter 5, about how tempting it is to assess this kind of dispute in terms of viewpoints which are rooted in prior political and ideological commitments. Thus, for example, it would be easy for the authors of this book, in line with their atheism, to declare an anathema on BYU, its arguments and works; that is, to decide in advance that the justification it offered for denying tenure to a feminist scholar was necessarily going to be flawed. But if you look closely at the arguments involved in the issue, the matter is not as straightforward as that.

Consider, for example, the issue of Houston’s prayers to a “Heavenly Mother”. The report of AAUP found that BYU had not made their case on this issue, because Professor Houston’s statements about her visions of a Mother in Heaven were a “description of a personal vision,” and did not constitute public advocacy of belief as the administration charged.[6]

This is pure sophistry. BYU’s addendum to the AAUP document was right when it said:

The AAUP’s argument that Professor Houston did not “advocate” praying to Heavenly Mother is specious. She publicly announced that she engages in the practice of praying to Heavenly Mother and described what a wonderful experience it is. She even described what Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother say to her in such prayers…The clear message of her public statements was that it is appropriate to pray to Heavenly Mother, that it is a wonderful experience, and that Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother accept and respond to such prayers.[7]

However, and it is an important however, the fact that it is at least arguable that BYU acted within the terms of its own policy on academic freedom in the case of Professor Houston, albeit on the basis of the strictest interpretation of that policy, does not mean that there is no institutional pressure at BYU on faculty. The evidence is that there is institutional pressure; that a significant minority of academics fear precisely that they will fall foul of a strict interpretation of the policy on academic freedom; and, in particular, that feminist scholars tend to attract the often unwelcome attention of the BYU authorities.

Thus, for example, the AAUP described a visit to the BYU campus at Provo as follows:

Many faculty members shared in some detail the narratives of their problems with academic freedom, reappointment, promotion, and tenure, frequently producing documents but asking that their names and identifying circumstances not be included in this report. At least two cases are in litigation against the university. Some cases involve issues of personal conduct that are under investigation and others focus on academic research that raises concern with the administration. Several creative artists in different fields told of pressures to alter works to meet unclear administrative agendas…Numerous women, some in groups and some alone, spoke to the investigating committee about the hostile climate for women on campus.[8]

Reading this, though, one is led to wonder quite what they expected. Religious doctrine is always contested; therefore, disputes about academic freedom are inevitable given the existence of a policy which prohibits overt doctrinal heterodoxy. But it must be said that for a professor at a religious university to complain about this situation is a little bizarre. It comes with the territory. If you’re working within the confines of a revealed truth, then there’s a lot you can’t say. Indeed, with regard to BYU’s antipathy towards certain kinds of feminism, it is not unreasonable to ask, though it certainly isn’t politic, what exactly feminist scholars think they are doing working there in the first place? After all, the LDS Church is hardly covered in glory when it comes to its record on the rights of women.

The situation at Brigham Young University, then, is fundamentally about religion, and the pressure which the requirement for doctrinal orthodoxy, both in words and practice, exerts upon the faculty. Religion and the pursuit of knowledge, even a religiously circumscribed ‘knowledge’, are uneasy bedfellows, so it is entirely to be expected that the university faculty and administration get along with each other only uneasily.

1. http://www.byu.edu/fc/pages/refmapages/acadfree.html, accessed May 21 2005.

2. See http://campuslife.byu.edu/honorcode/, accessed May 21 2005.

3. “Academic Freedom and Tenure: Brigham Young University”, Academe, Sept-Oct 1997, pp. 52-71.

4. ‘The Issue of Academic Freedom: An Interview with Jim Gordon”, Brigham Young Magazine, Winter 1997.

5. Cited in “Academic Freedom and Tenure: Brigham Young University”, Academe, Sept-Oct 1997, p. 52.

6. Ibid., p. 65.

7. Ibid., p. 70.

8. Ibid., p. 67.

On the day after Christmas, 2004, as everyone knows, a major earthquake and tsunami devastated coastal regions around the Indian Ocean, killing as many as 300,000 people outright and dooming countless others to misery, heartbreak, and early death. Thanks to video cameras and the satellite transmission of images, that event penetrated the world’s consciousness with an immediate force that amounted, psychologically, to a tsunami in its own right. The charitable contributions that then poured forth on an unprecedented scale expressed something more than empathy and generosity. They also bore an aspect of self-therapy—of an attempt, however symbolic, to mitigate the calamity’s impersonal randomness and thus to draw a curtain of decorum over a scene that appeared to proclaim too baldly, “This world wasn’t made for us.” No greater challenge to theodicy—the body of doctrine that attempts to reconcile cruelty, horror, and injustice with the idea of a benevolent God—had been felt by Western pundits since the great Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of November 1, 1755.

On that earlier occasion, mainstream Catholic and Protestant faith received a lesser blow than did Enlightenment “natural theology,” which, presuming the Creator to have had our best interests at heart when he instituted nature’s laws and then retired, made no allowance for either Satanic influence or divine payback for wickedness. God’s indifference, it then suddenly appeared to Voltaire and others, was more complete than any deist had dared to conceive. As for the clerics of the era, they welcomed the disaster with unseemly Schadenfreude as a useful topic for sermons. “Learn, O Lisbon,” one Jesuit intoned, “that the destroyers of our houses, palaces, churches, and convents, the cause of the death of so many people and of the flames that devoured such vast treasures, are your abominable sins, and not comets, stars, vapors and exhalations, and similar natural phenomena” (Leon Wieseltier, “The Wake,” The New Republic, January 17, 2005, p. 34).

The same opportunity was seized in early 2005 by Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and even Buddhist fear mongers, and they were joined by, among others, Israel’s Sephardic chief rabbi, who proclaimed, “this is an expression of God’s great ire with the world” (Wieseltier 2005). But two and a half centuries of increasing scientific awareness had made for a significant difference in lay attitudes. Now the rabbi’s callous words—Leon Wieseltier rightly called them “a justification of the murder of children”—met with widespread revulsion. By 2005 only an unschooled person or a blinkered zealot could fail to understand that a thoroughly natural conjunction of forces had wiped out populations whose only “sin” was to have pursued their livelihood or recreation in lowlands adjacent to the ocean.

Theodicy, in this altered climate of opinion, would have to take a subtler tack. Just such an adjustment was made with considerable suavity by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in a Sunday Telegraph article of January 2, 2005:

The question: “How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?” is . . . very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren’t—indeed, it would be wrong if it weren’t. The traditional answers will get us only so far. God, we are told, is not a puppet-master in regard either to human actions or to the processes of the world. If we are to exist in an environment where we can live lives of productive work and consistent understanding—human lives as we know them—the world has to have a regular order and pattern of its own. Effects follow causes in a way that we can chart, and so can make some attempt at coping with. So there is something odd about expecting that God will constantly step in if things are getting dangerous.

Thanks to the Sunday Telegraph’s provocative headline, “Of Course This Makes Us Doubt God’s Existence,” Williams’s opinion piece raised many an eyebrow, enhancing the archbishop’s well-cultivated reputation for theological brinkmanship. On a careful reading, however, his essay appears in a truer light as a traditional exercise in Christian damage control. “Doubt God’s existence”? Hardly. It sufficed for Williams that “we are told” about the Lord’s plan to allow the world “a pattern of its own”—one that, if it occasionally puts us in harm’s way, does so only because the fashioning of a law-abiding cosmos struck the Almighty as the best means for us humans to achieve “productive work and consistent understanding.” A more complacent expression of anthropocentric vanity would be hard to imagine.

Having made a conciliatory feint toward heretical thoughts, the prelate went on to slam the door on unbelievers by suggesting that only “religious people” can care about the loss of individual lives within a mass die-off. Through their prayers, Williams related, pious folk “ask for God’s action” to assuage the suffering of the maimed and the bereaved. But wait: hadn’t the writer just conceded that it’s useless to plea for any intervention against nature’s laws? That point, we now realize, was only a rhetorical stratagem for exempting the recent tsunami from inclusion among motivated supernatural deeds. The God who had been paring his fingernails when the hundred-foot waves came ashore was now presumably back at his post and ready to be swayed by spoken and silent prayers that would waft toward heaven, even though they lacked any known physical means of doing so.

The point of Williams’s essay was not to question theology but to reassert it in the face of other people’s misgivings. Viewed from the archbishop’s interested angle, the upheaval of earth and ocean served as a trial of faith whose outcome was assured: “The extraordinary fact is that belief has survived such tests again and again—not because it comforts or explains but because believers cannot deny what has been shown or given to them.” Although many harsh experiences “seem to point to a completely arbitrary world,” convictions about divine mercy will remain in place, because those convictions “have imposed themselves on the shape of a life and the habits of a heart” (Williams 2005, p. 22).

My aim in telling this story is not to scoff at apologetics for otherworldly belief, though I do regard them as uniformly feeble, but to call attention to a clash between two intellectual currents. One is scientific empiricism, which, for better or worse, has yielded all of the mechanical novelties that continue to reshape our world and consciousness. We know, of course, that science can be twisted to greedy and warlike ends. At any given moment, moreover, it may be pursuing a phantom, such as phlogiston or the ether or, conceivably, an eleven-dimensional superstring, that is every bit as fugitive as the Holy Ghost. But science possesses a key advantage. It is, at its core, not a body of correct or incorrect ideas but a collective means of generating and testing hypotheses, and its trials eventually weed out error with unmatched success.

When the Archbishop of Canterbury mentions “effects [that] follow causes in a way that we can chart,” he writes as an heir, however grudging, of the scientific revolution. But when he reads the Creator’s mind at a remove of more than fourteen billion years, and when he implies that some prayers stand a good chance of being answered, empiricism has given way to lore supported only by traditional authority. That is the kind of soothing potion that people quaff when they either haven’t learned how to check the evidential merits of propositions or would rather not risk the loss of treasured beliefs.

If you were to ask the archbishop whether he subscribes to Darwinian scientific principles, I am sure the answer would be yes. So, too, in 1995 Pope John Paul II famously granted that evolution is now “more than a theory.” But since the late pope proceeded at once to airbrush humankind from the evolutionary picture and to reassert for our species alone the church’s perennial creationist legend (see Follies of the Wise p. 277), it is clear that he was no Darwinian in any meaningful sense. And the same must be said of Rowan Williams. In calling the recent tsunami an entirely natural event he was invoking plate tectonics, a branch of geology whose range of application extends backward by several billion years; but if he were at all sincere about adjusting his perspective to that time frame, he could hardly have gone on to assert that nature’s laws were fashioned for the benefit of Homo sapiens, a great ape whose entire period of existence has occupied not even a nanosecond of the cosmic hour.

Such inconsistencies, when they are pointed out so baldly, look craven and inexcusable. But that judgment isn’t shared outside intellectual circles, and even within them one hears influential voices protesting the encroachment of science on intuitively held truths. Conservatives who aren’t already observant believers tend to feel protective toward religion because, in their judgment, it is the only guarantor of precious values that are jeopardized by rampant libertinism. And although theory-minded leftists and radical feminists have no investment in theism, many of them associate science with a masculinist, capitalist, imperialist rapacity that has brutalized Mother Earth; and on these and other grounds some progressives feel entitled to discount any scientific results that contradict the felt verities of ideology.

In addition, some scientists and philosophers who are privately indifferent or hostile to transcendent claims nevertheless seek an accommodation with them. They do so from the best of motives, in order to stem the infiltration of bumpkin “creation science” or its slick city cousin, “intelligent design,” into biology curricula. Their hope is to show that scientific research and education have no bearing on issues of ultimate meaning and hence needn’t be feared by the pious. To that end, they emphasize that science exemplifies only methodological naturalism, whereby technical reasons alone are cited for excluding nonmaterial factors from reasoning about causes and effects. Hence, they insist, the practice of science doesn’t entail metaphysical naturalism, or the atheist’s claim that spiritual causation is not only inadmissible but altogether unreal.

In one sense this is an impregnable argument. Even when science is conducted by ardent believers, it has to disregard theological claims, because those claims typically entail no unambiguous real-world implications, much less quantitative ones, that might be tested for their supportive or falsifying weight. The allegation that God was responsible for a given natural fact can’t be either established or refuted by any finding; it is simply devoid of scientific interest. And thus it is true enough that scientists stand under no logical compulsion to profess metaphysical naturalism.

Quite obviously, however, trust in the supernatural does get shaken by the overall advance of science. This is an effect not of strict logic but of an irreversible shrinkage in mystery’s terrain. Ever since Darwin forged an exit from the previously airtight argument from design, the accumulation of corroborated materialist explanations has left the theologian’s “God of the gaps” with less and less to do. And an acquaintance with scientific laws and their uniform application is hardly compatible with faith-based tales about walking on water, a casting out of devils, and resurrection of the dead.

Metaphysical naturalism may be undiplomatic, then, but it is favored by the totality of evidence at hand. Only a secular Darwinian perspective, I believe, can make general sense of humankind and its works. Our species appears to have constituted an adaptive experiment in the partial and imperfect substitution of culture for instinct, with all the liability to self-deception and fanaticism that such an experiment involves. We chronically strain against our animality by inhabiting self-fashioned webs of significance—myths, theologies, theories—that are more likely than not to generate illusory and often murderous “wisdom.” That is the price we pay for the same faculty of abstraction and pattern drawing that enables us to be not mere occupiers of an ecological niche but planners, explorers, and, yes, scientists who can piece together facts about our world and our own emergence and makeup.

Here it may be objected that myths, theologies, and theories themselves, as nonmaterial things that can nevertheless set in motion great social movements and collisions of armies, confound a materialist or metaphysically naturalist perspective. Not at all. We materialists don’t deny the force of ideas; we merely say that the minds precipitating them are wholly situated within brains and that the brain, like everything else about which we possess some fairly dependable information, seems to have emerged without any need for miracles. Although this is not a provable point, it is a necessary aid to clear thought, because, now that scientific rationality has conclusively shown its formidable explanatory power, recourse to the miraculous is always a regressive, obfuscating move.

The present book, however, isn’t meant as a sustained attack on religion or as a brief for everything that bears the name of science. Rather, it brings together my recent encounters with various irrational manifestations, some of which in fact are nominally scientific. I have begun with metaphysical issues here because the human penchant for disastrously confusing fantasy with fact is most plainly seen in the impulse to ascribe one’s own concerns to divine powers and then to harden one’s heart against unbelievers. Although the follies discussed in my chapters are mild when judged against the total historical record of homicidal zeal in the service of misapprehensions, they display most of the features that characterize religious fanaticism, such as undue deference to authority, hostility toward dissenters, and, most basically, an assumption that intuitively held certitude is somehow more precious and profound than the hard-won gains of trial and error.

Like the Archbishop of Canterbury, who allows “habits of the heart” to overrule canons of evidence, many spokesmen for entrenched interests subscribe to a two-tiered conception of truth. They make a token bow to empirically grounded knowledge, but they deem it too pedestrian for mapping the labyrinth of the soul or for doing justice to the emotional currents coursing between interacting persons. Instead of merely avowing that the subjective realm is elusive, however, they then advance their own preferred theory, which is typically sweeping, absolute, and bristling with partisanship.

This book means to suggest, through sample instances in a number of subject areas, that there is no such thing as deep knowledge, in the sense of insight so compelling that it needs no validation. There is only knowledge, period. It is recognizable not by its air of holiness or its emotional appeal but by its capacity to pass the most demanding scrutiny of well-informed people who have no prior investment in confirming it. And a politics of sorts, neither leftist nor rightist, follows from this understanding. If knowledge can be certified only by a social process of peer review, we ought to do what we can to foster communities of uncompromised experts. That means actively resisting guru-ism, intellectual cliquishness, guilt-assuaging double standards, and, needless to say, disdain for the very concept of objectivity.

My mention of experts, however, can’t fail to turn a spotlight on my own qualifications, if any, for passing judgment on such diverse and contested matters as natural selection, human motivation and its development, psychological tests, hypnosis, UFO reports, and recovered memory, to say nothing of theosophy and Zen Buddhism. I do lack the requisite background for adding substantive contributions to any of those topics. But Follies of the Wise makes no pretense of doing so. I regularly defer to specialists who are conversant with the state of their own discipline and who have already laid out powerful critiques of ill-conceived theories and unworthy dodges. And where the specialists disagree among themselves while honoring the same stringent rules for exposing mistakes, I never venture an opinion.

The question, of course, is how an outsider can be sure that one school of thought is less entitled to our trust than a rival one. In many instances such confidence would be unwarranted. Certain indicators of bad faith, however, are unmistakable: persistence in claims that have already been exploded; reliance on ill-designed studies, idolized lawgivers, and self-serving anecdotes; evasion of objections and negative instances; indifference to rival theories and to the need for independent replication; and “movement” belligerence. Where several of these traits are found together, even a lay observer can be sure that no sound case could be made for the shielded theory; its uncompetitiveness is precisely what has necessitated these indulgences.

But then another doubt looms: if bad practices are so conspicuous, why should I or anyone else need to harp on them? At least two reasons come to mind. First, strong factions within such practical endeavors as psychotherapy, projective testing, and social work remain wedded to dubious and harmful notions that are tolerated or even advanced by mainstream guilds. The outrage that some of my essays encountered when first published attests to the challenge they posed to rooted assumptions. And second, charismatic trend setters in the academic humanities have shown themselves to be credulous about scientifically disreputable notions. Although I can’t hope to inhibit such high fliers, perhaps I can encourage some of their potential followers to see that real interdisciplinarity requires vigilance against junk science.

Beyond any social utility these chapters may possess, it suits my temperament to study indefensible pretensions and to note how they cause intelligent people to shut off their critical faculties and resort to cultlike behavior. Sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling, such deviousness strikes me as quintessentially human behavior. But I don’t mean to set myself apart as a paragon of reasonableness. Having made a large intellectual misstep in younger days, I am aware that rationality isn’t an endowment but an achievement that can come undone at any moment. And that is just why it is prudent, in my opinion, to distrust sacrosanct authorities, whether academic or psychiatric or ecclesiastic, and to put one’s faith instead in objective procedures that can place a check on our never sated appetite for self-deception.

Several decades of untranquil experience in the public arena, however, have led me to anticipate only limited success in getting this point across. To put it mildly, the public in an age of born-again Rapture, Intelligent Design, miscellaneous guru worship, and do-it-yourself “spirituality” isn’t exactly hungering for an across-the-board application of rational principles. And the culturally slumming, trend-conscious postmodern academy, far from constituting a stay against popular credulity, affords a parodic mirror image of it. That is the condition I illustrate in Chapter 11, on tales of UFO kidnapping: for opposite reasons, guileless “abductees” and supercilious Theory mongers show the same imperviousness to considerations of mundane plausibility.

A student who signs up for a literature major today, having never been encouraged to think independently and skeptically, may graduate two years later without having made any headway in that direction. That is regrettable enough. But if the student then goes on to earn a Ph.D. in the same field, he or she will probably have acquired a storehouse of arcane terms and concepts allowing that disability to appear both intellectually and politically advanced. Here is tomorrow’s tenured professor, more impervious than any freshman to the “naive” heresy that theories can be overturned by facts.

The inclusion in this book of my best-known essays, “The Unknown Freud” and “The Revenge of the Repressed,” brings to mind an especially ironic consequence of my attempts to promote impersonal standards of judgment. As I will have several occasions to mention below, advocates of psychoanalysis from Freud to the present day have responded to the movement’s critics by largely ignoring scientific, medical, and logical challenges and focusing instead on the critics’ own alleged defects of personality. The result in my case is that I owe such name recognition as I possess mostly to Freudians and their cousins, the recovered memory therapists, who have wanted me to personify the mechanisms of repression and denial and the mood of oedipal rage that must surely lie behind my malicious attacks.

Thus I awoke one day in 1993 to find myself notorious. The difference was made not by what I had recently written (I had been making essentially the same case from 1980 onward) but by where it had appeared: in The New York Review of Books, which, rightly or wrongly, the analysts had regarded as their haven. Though my intention all along had been to alert the public to thirty years’-worth of important revisionary scholarship by others, I now began to see myself characterized as “the foremost critic of psychoanalysis.” It was the Freudians themselves who gladly awarded me that role, the more handily to dismiss all reservations about their craft as the symptoms of one man’s neurosis.

My life has rarely been dull over the past dozen years, and for that
I must thank my Freudian adversaries. As this book attests, however,
psychodynamic theory has by no means constituted my sole concern.
If the topic nevertheless keeps surfacing at unexpected moments in this
book, that is because psychoanalysis, as the queen of modern pseudosciences,
has pioneered the methods and directly supplied some of the ideas informing other shortcuts to “depth.”

Intellectually and culturally, the West in the twentieth century did dwell largely in Freud’s shadow, but no portion of his legacy is secure today. At such a juncture, I believe, it is important to think carefully about how and why the opinion-setting classes were led astray. What we need is not a new secular god to replace Freud but a clear realization that we already possess, in our tradition of unsparing empirical review, the tools we need to forestall another such outbreak of mass irrationality.

This article is the introduction to Follies of the Wise, Shoemaker & Hoard 2006. Copyright Frederick Crews.

Awaaz – South Asia Watch urges Asia House, London to re-open the exhibition of the work of renowned Indian artist, MF Husain. Awaaz condemns the forced closure of the exhibition following violence, harassment and intimidation by fundamentalists claiming to represent the views of British Hindus. The fundamentalists who vandalised the paintings reflect the authoritarian ideologies and tactics of militant Hindu Right groups in India.

In India, organisations such as the extremely violent Bajrang Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other organizations linked to the fascist-inspired Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) [1], have repeatedly attacked MF Husain and other artists, filmmakers, intellectuals and cultural practitioners. In 1998, Hindu Right groups attacked and ransacked Husain’s Bombay home, one of several such attacks on the artist and his work. Hindu Right groups have regularly attempted to undermine the freedom of thought and expression enshrined in the Indian constitution and reflected in the vibrancy of Indian culture.

In Hindu traditions there is an extensive history of wide and diverse representations of the sacred deities, including nude, erotic and other depictions. Hinduism has never possessed a concept of censorship or blasphemy of the kind that authoritarian groups wish to promote. A key reason the exhibition is being attacked is because MF Husain is a Muslim. Groups involved have used religious claims to mask a political agenda that owes to the Hindu Right, an agenda which has caused considerable violence and misery in India since the 1980s.

Hindu Right groups in Britain have previously used tactics of intimidation to attempt to prevent films on the 2002 Gujarat carnage being shown in London. Contrary to any Hindu tradition, they have also appointed themselves to police in an authoritarian way the representation of Hindu deities and icons in the UK.

The Hindu Forum of Britain and Hindu Human Rights accuse Asia House of not ‘consulting’ with them before putting up the exhibition. But they are not democratically-elected representatives of Hindu populations or opinion in the UK and represent little beyond their limited and chauvinistic political agendas. The Hindu Forum of Britain has actively supported or defended the RSS’s UK projects as well as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. The Hindu Forum of Britain has attempted to present these as ordinary religious organizations, whereas they are in fact political organizations of the Hindu Right.

We urge Asia House not to give in to the bullying and intimidation tactics of Hindu fundamentalists and to reinstate the exhibition of works by one of the subcontinent’s most acclaimed artists. Asia House must reject the intolerance, narrow-mindedness and political interests of the Hindu Right. By re-opening the exhibition, Asia House will genuinely honour the rich and diverse traditions of expression arising from Hinduism and from India.

Note

1. The RSS was created in the 1920s as a semi-paramilitary movement and its origins were inspired by Italian Fascism and German Nazism. The assassin of M.K. Gandhi was a former RSS member. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) is the RSS’s religious front and has been repeatedly indicted for acts of violence and hatred in India over several decades. The ideology of the RSS and its vast network of organizations is Hindutva, an intolerant worldview of Hindu supremacy, anti-minority hatred and an exclusive ‘Hindu nation’. The RSS and VHP have an extensive network of branches in the UK, organised through the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) and the VHP UK. The National Hindu Students Forum, which has opposed the exhibition, is also very closely associated with the HSS.

For further Information contact: Awaaz Secretariat on: (+44) 020 8843 2333 or email contact@awaazsaw.org

Awaaz – South Asia watch is a UK based South Asian secular network committed to challenging all forms of religious hatred and intolerance. Awaaz – South Asia Watch is a project of The Monitoring Group.

Time to step back, back from the reviewers, the fuming bishops, the evangelicals struggling to keep pace with a history they never learned, back from the lawsuits, the dud movie that sent Francophiles and Paneuropists sniggering into the fragrant Cannes night. It’s time to blame the real culprits for this most recent outbreak of Malaria Americana: But who? The self-effacing New England prep school teacher with a knack for churning out a thousand words an hour? His co-conspirator wife, Blythe Newlon, said to be an art historian, though she has no degree in the subject and has never worked in the field? The 80,000 yahoos per week who buy the book and come away thinking “So, that’s the way it happened.”? The millions of catachrestics who haven’t read a book, religious or otherwise, since middle school, but will see the move just to make up their minds?

I envy Dan Brown. Not for the money he’s made, though I would trade his cash flow for mine any day. I envy him because he has succeeded by accident, and in the course of 489 pages (Anchor paperback) of some of the worst pulp fiction and dialogue ever fashioned, in proving Barnum’s last theorem: “More people are humbugged by believing nothing, than by believing too much.” The Da Vinci Code, in other words, succeeds gigantically because it is playing to a world in which Brown knows a lot of wrong things, but no one, neither fans nor critics nor detractors, knows very much more. The success proves the Economic Correlate of Barnum’s last theorem: “Every crowd has a silver lining.”

In the religious conspiracy sweepstakes, Brown has won where others have lost because he has inadvertently tapped into the confusion of modern Christianity. An analogy: In 1972 a real life Dr. Robert Langdon was asked by the government of Yemen to investigate a puzzling manuscript find: The pages were written in the early Hijazi Arabic script, matching the pieces of the earliest Qu’rans known to exist. There were also versions very clearly written over even earlier, faded versions. What the “Yemeni Qu’rans” indicated was an evolving text; what they proved is that the Quran as we know it today, and despite orthodox Muslim teaching on the topic, does not date from the time of Muhammad. What a book that would make! what a movie! But it’s not going to happen, and it’s not going to happen because Muslims are not especially confused about what they believe. Message: Real discoveries of great historical significance do not create fan clubs. Gerd Ruediger Puin is not a name on everyone’s lips.

The Da Vinci Code, as anyone knows who has been following the paper thin discussion of the “sources” mentioned in the book, draws on the so called Coptic Gnostic gospels – ones attributed to Philip, Mary Magdalene, Thomas, and (alas, poor) Judas, to name but a few of the notables to whom these pseudonymous (read: forged) documents were ascribed by the very weird culties who traversed upper Egypt and Syria until well into the fifth century. Most Christian believers have never heard of the gnostics. That is as it should be since the bishops of late antiquity spent a great deal of ink and energy trying to shut them up. As the distinguished New Testament scholar Joseph Fitzmyer once wrote, think what you will of the early bishops: at least they had the sense to know madmen when they saw them. And the heretics’ (unfashionable term) attempts to squeeze their bizarre theosophical teachings into a Christian mould give us the peculiar, historically worthless and not even remotely readable contortions called the gnostic gospels. If ever a class of literature was valuable only because it reveals the religious absurdities of which the human spirit is capable, the gnostic gospels are it. So, do not blame a religiously illiterate public. Not even the schoolmasters of the Reformation blamed the early Catholic Church for saving orthodoxy from the intellectual rabies of Gnosticism.

And don’t blame the poor priest interviewees who are being asked whether the Church really kept these things secret, and end up hemming and hawing with unconvincing “Well, yes sort of but….” Nuance is not a selling point when a billion people have just learned that there are ancient stories about Jesus having sex with Mary Magdelene (false) or survived the crucifixion (false: the gnostics believed he didn’t have a body, hence never died). The Evangelicals are better off; for them church history begins with the birth of Jesus, ends with the Acts of the Apostles, and then skips frames to the twenty first century where, no thanks to the Catholics, the Bible has been marvelously preserved. It is easy for fundamentalists, however the discussion is sliced, to reject Da Vinciism outright since “this isn’t about the Bible.” Who in surfing past innumerable “expert” interviews and schlock specials on the “truth” behind the Da Vinci code has not noticed that the clueless Protestants seem to be standing on a rock, Word of God aloft, while the Catholics are caught shuffling ancient papers as the flood water encircles them?

That leaves the secularists, who seem to be speaking in unknown tongues about the matter. Of course, some would argue, why should there be a “humanist” position on Da Vinci? Why should smart people care about dumb books? People who don’t believe in God can scarcely be bothered to worry about Jesus. But the humanists I know have been passionately interested in the unfaithing potential of the controversy, with the result that they vie with the Catholics for the Numbness of Nuance award. Always happy to see rocks thrown at nonsense (than which there is none greater than the ossified dogmas of Catholicism) the shortsighted atheist few had not counted on Da Vinci creating a new form of superstition, a Religio Da Vinci that blends historical implausibility with a modern passion for intrigue and a postmodern indifference to truth. Magic, codes, rings, and cryptographs, naifish spirituality, the occult, and the unbelievable are the pillars that prop up the symbolic roofs of Narnia, Middle Earth, and Hogwarts Academy. In tapping into a rich vein of early Christian eccentricity famous for its contempt for the historical Jesus, Brown has been able to mine the riches of a darker period, our own, known for its historical illiteracy.

But a question is nagging: Who’s to blame? We are to blame: the scholars of early Christianity who discovered some twenty years ago that Barnum was right – about crowds, I mean – and that there is a small treasure to be made from exploiting the public appetite for the sensational. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947, scholars were ponderously slow in reaching conclusions about their significance. The gnostic gospel codices, discovered two years earlier at Nag Hammadi (Egypt), created no such stir, partly because fewer people read Coptic than Hebrew: It took twenty years to assemble teams to translate them, and until the late seventies to produce a serviceable translation into English. Serious scholars (I have too many friends to name names) impressed with the antiquity of the gnostic sources nonetheless greeted their content with the yawning indifference that accorded with their reputation in the church fathers. Younger scholars – myself included, then – looking for the rush of excitement that always accompanies academic immaturity, made extravagant claims for them, including the desperately silly suggestion that they are as old as the canonical gospels – or even earlier. Almost all the news reports on Da Vinci mention “sources” from the second century; the manuscripts discovered in Egypt have been reliably dated to the late third and fourth century.

Whatever the outcome of paleographical and manuscript disputes – discussions in which even most New Testament scholars are incompetent to participate – the disservice of overstatement has now set the tone for a whole generation of largely American academic tabloid-mongering. Dan Brown, like the people who now read his impossible detective history of the Jesus dynasty, is only serving a dinner prepared by feckless scholars who seem to see the difference between fact and fiction as a matter for a CNN viewer poll.

I once cringed to read Robert Heinlein’s judgement, that, “The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.” Yet what hope is there even for the fuzzy subjects if specialists market their wares with an indifference to “certainty” – imperfect as it may be in history – and a contempt for judgement? And what hope for the fuzziest of thinkers outside the academy when scholars at some of our best universities convince themselves that their badly reasoned judgements are as good as true because they conform to a social matrix in which truth is a negotiation about facts. The Da Vinci Code says nothing so loudly as that the academy, which once rewarded caution as much as originality, has arrived at Hannah Arendt’s endpoint, where the choice is between the original and the irrelevant, and where what passes for learning “is the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.”

We can hardly blame Dan Brown, Dan Brown’s wife, Opus Dei, Leonardo, the marginalized evangelicals, the stammering Catholics, and the voiceless humanists for this state of affairs. It involves all of us.

R. Joseph Hoffmann is Senior Fellow & Chair of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion at the Center for Inquiry, Amherst, NY

There are some historical stories that are so compelling that no amount of scholarly refutation seems to undermine them. One such is the familiar tale that early in Freud’s career as a psychotherapist most of his female patients told him they had been sexually abused in childhood, generally by their father. On 7 May 2006 New Zealand National Radio broadcast a programme devoted to Freud in which this story was taken as historical fact. Most of the programme was devoted to two interviews, one with Jeffrey Masson, the other with Eric Kandel, a professor of Physiology & Cellular Biophysics at Columbia University. As one would anticipate, Masson was asked about the events that made his name familiar to a wide public, and he poured forth his thesis that Freud was wrong to renounce those early clinical claims, for all the world as if fundamental elements of it had not been shown to be erroneous. Let’s look at just a few of these. [1]

It should first be noted that Masson never spells out the so-called “seduction theory” that Freud claimed to have clinically validated in 1896, as this in itself suffices to puncture some of his contentions: An essential precondition for hysterical and obsessional symptoms in adulthood is an unconscious memory of sexual abuse in infancy. Readers of Masson’s accounts would have no idea that Freud’s clinical ‘findings’ reported in 1896 were that he had uncovered memories of sexual abuse in every single one of his current patients, and that the abuse was in infancy, mostly below the age of four. Nor would they know that it was essential that the memories be repressed, i.e., they were unconscious, and inaccessible to the individual concerned. These points in themselves undercut the notion that Freud found himself the recipient of accounts of childhood sexual abuse from his female patients at that time. Moreover, contrary to the implication of Masson’s inveighing against the brutal fathers abusing their daughters, one third of the patients on whom Freud reported in his 1896 papers were men, and fathers were not mentioned among the wide variety of categories of putative abusers.

Given that Masson has obviously read the 1896 papers, it is pertinent to ask why he never mentions the six obsessional patients cited therein. Perhaps it’s because their story would give too much away about Freud’s clinical methodology, and undermine his (and Masson’s) claims about what he had uncovered among the rest of his patients. According to Freud, in the case of his six (male) obsessionals he had not only uncovered unconscious memories of “passive” sexual abuse in infancy, but also an “active” experience of sexual abuse around the age of eight perpetrated on a younger girl, usually his sister. Now this is particularly odd, because only a year before he wrote the first of the seduction theory papers, he had published an article in which had reported on some eleven cases of obsessional neurosis which he had subjected to “psychological analysis”, and in not one of them did he report sexual abuse at the root of the patients’ symptoms. So what intervened between these reports and the remarkable clinical findings he was to announce in 1896?

The answer is that in October 1895 he reported to his friend and colleague Wilhelm Fliess that he had arrived at a theoretical explanation of the psychoneuroses: “Hysteria is the consequence of a presexual sexual shock. Obsessional neurosis is the consequence of a presexual sexual pleasure, which is later transformed into [self-] reproach.”

Now if the obsessional patients had repressed memories of an active sexual abuse experience providing sexual pleasure, Freud needed to explain why young boys (around the age of eight) would perpetrate such an act on their infant sisters. The answer he came up with was that the young boy himself must have experienced sexual abuse in infancy, and that he repeats on the infant girl “exactly the same activities that the adult had performed on him”. Within a mere four months of reporting his theory to Fliess he wrote papers in which he claimed to have uncovered repressed memories of precisely these two kinds of experiences for all his cases of obsessional neurosis.

This would seem to be a remarkable achievement in such a short time, so it is of more than passing interest to enquire how Freud could have accomplished this feat. He gives a clear indication in the only example of a specific case for which he presents some detailed information of his analytic methodology in the three papers of 1896. He provides “a psychical analysis” of the bedtime obsessive rituals that a patient had developed as a boy, which included obsessive tidying up his room, the bed being pushed against the wall, chairs placed just so, pillows arranged in a particular way, and the patient’s kicking his legs out a certain number of times before lying on his side in the bed. Freud tells us that the meaning of the ceremonial “was established point by point by psycho-analysis”. Years earlier, according to Freud, a servant-girl had taken the opportunity, while putting the little boy to bed, to lie down on him and abuse him sexually. This could be seen by analyzing each of the elements in the ritual: The placing of the bed and chairs was so that “nobody else should be able to get at the bed; the pillows were arranged in a particular way so that they should be differently arranged from how they were on the evening; the movements of the legs were to kick away the person who was lying on him; sleeping on his side was because in the [abuse] scene he had been lying on his back”, and so on.

In his introductory words to the 1896 “Aetiology of Hysteria” paper Freud explains that he has found a method of arriving at the aetiology of psychoneuroses which is analogous to that of “a forensic physician who can arrive at the cause of an injury, even if he has to do without any information from the injured person”. Thus he tries “to induce the symptoms of hysteria to make themselves heard as witnesses to the history of the origin of the illness”, making his start from the principle that the symptoms of the patient’s “are being reproduced in his psychical life in the form of mnemic symbols”. In other words, Freud believes that there is an originating traumatic event, the memory of which is repressed, but which sooner or later expresses itself in neurotic symptoms. And the memory must be unconscious: “Only so long as, and in so far as, they [the memories of the infantile sexual experiences] are unconscious are they able to create, and maintain hysterical symptoms.”

Part of Freud’s task is therefore to treat patients’ symptoms as symbolical representations of the original event, to infer what that event must have been, and to endeavour to induce the patient to “reproduce” the experience the memory of which has been repressed. Thus he claims that a male patient’s paralysis of the legs was caused by his being forced as a small child to “stimulate the genitals of a grown up woman with his foot”. How he could possibly know that such an event, even presuming it to have happened, was the cause of paralysis of the legs some two decades or more later Freud makes no attempt to explain. But to return to the obsessional patients.

Freud was convinced that with his seduction theory he had arrived at what he called a “source of the Nile” explanation for the psychoneuroses. Having also absolute confidence in his analytic interpretative technique, including the symbolic interpretation of symptoms, he takes the obsessional bedtime rituals outlined above and constructs a scene of infantile sexual abuse out of them. This is the essence of what he describes as analytically “tracing back” to the unconscious memories at the root of the symptoms, and his confidence in his procedures is manifested by his saying that “the meaning of the ceremonial was easy to guess”. Given such a clinical methodology one can begin to understand how it was that, although prior to October 1895 he had reported not a single finding of infantile sexual abuse, some four months later he was claiming to have uncovered unconscious memories of such abuse for every one of his current patients.

Now although Freud twice intimated he would provide his colleagues with the details of his analyses of the cases on which he reported in 1896, he never did so. In other words, the clinical evidence for Freud’s remarkable claims in his 1896 papers has never been provided for inspection. Despite this extraordinary state of affairs, so compelling were his later reports of the episode that for much of the twentieth century they were taken as historical fact, and recycled by all and sundry. Even now, as was heard in the New Zealand radio programme, Professor Eric Kandel of Columbia University believes in the story implicitly – but more of that later.

Incidentally, when Freud came to explain (away) his “source of the Nile” clinical claims in terms of supposed unconscious fantasies (produced to “fend off” memories of infantile masturbation, in his first accounts, and of Oedipal impulses in his later ones), he never mentioned the remarkable ‘findings’ for his obsessional patients. And this is hardly surprising. Even Freud, with his extraordinary imaginative powers, would have been hard put to explain those in terms of his unconscious fantasy theory. Better to say nothing, and hope no one will notice. And, astonishingly, no one did!

Now on to peripheral matters. Masson strongly suggests that Freud abandoned the seduction theory (“consciously or subsconsciously”) because of the outraged reactions of his colleagues to his 1896 clinical claims. But his story of Freud’s ostracism by his colleagues is as erroneous as his central thesis, as is demonstrated (among other evidence) by the fact that soon after Freud gave his supposedly notorious “Aetiology of Hysteria” lecture in 1896 he was unanimously nominated by a committee of six senior professors for a position of Professor Extraordinarius at the University of Vienna, having been earlier proposed by professors Nothnagel and Krafft-Ebing. At a subsequent meeting of the Medical Faculty of the University the nomination was approved by a two to one majority, with Freud getting more votes than all but one of the ten approved candidates. Furthermore, between the years 1898 and 1905 the eminent psychiatrist Theodore Ziehen published four of Freud’s papers in the influential journal he edited, and the equally eminent Leopold Löwenfeld maintained an amicable correspondence with Freud in this period, and was instrumental in the publication of a shorter version of Freud’s celebrated volume on dreams in 1901. (A comprehensive refutation of Masson’s “ostracism” story is provided in my 2002 History of Psychology article listed in the bibliographical references below.)

Masson’s contention that Freud abandoned the seduction theory to placate his colleagues (who actually were not outraged, merely – with good reason – highly sceptical of his claims) is refuted by the fact that he had given up the theory several years before his first public intimation that he had done so in a paper published in 1906. Here is what Freud wrote to Fliess in January 1899: “To the question ‘what happened in earliest childhood?’ the answer is, ‘Nothing, but the germ of a sexual impulse existed’.” In other words, he is saying he has finally concluded that there were no actual infantile sexual abuse experiences, and that his analytic ‘findings’ can be explained by the occurrence of manifestations of infantile sexuality. A couple of weeks later he alluded to two cases for which he had concluded that there was no infantile sexual abuse. Masson himself writes in his editorial notes to the letter in question that at this time Freud’s belief was “that he had discovered that the key to neurosis lay not in real events (such as seductions) but in fantasies (for instance of seduction by the father)” – though for the two patients mentioned in this letter Freud does not say that they had sexual abuse fantasies.[2] Thereafter Freud made not a single mention of early childhood sexual abuse in his letters to Fliess, nor in his publications in that period – he had abandoned the theory completely.

But if he had given up the theory to ingratiate himself to his colleagues, as Masson suggests, why on earth would he wait another six years before telling them?

How does Masson get round these awkward facts? What he does is to stretch the period for the abandonment of the theory, conveniently inventing a “critical period” for its renunciation between 1900 and 1903 (in The Assault on Truth), or between 1897 and 1903 (on the New Zealand radio programme). This doesn’t quite close the gap, but who’s going to notice a discrepancy of a couple of years or so? But the truth is that Masson doesn’t provide a scrap of evidence to indicate that Freud entertained the theory beyond 1899, and is endeavouring to maintain credence for his suggested motive for Freud’s abandoning his theory by what is effectively a sleight of hand. That Freud maintained public silence (other than telling Fliess) for some six years after finally abandoning the seduction theory blows Masson’s explanation for Freud’s renouncing it out of the water. [3]

What about Eric Kandel, the other interviewee on the new Zealand radio programme? He is offended on Freud’s behalf that Masson should suggest that Freud lacked the courage to continue to maintain his seduction theory. (It must be said at this point that neither Kandel nor Masson shows any sign that they understand what the theory actually was – their words imply only that it was in some way about many of Freud’s female patients supposedly telling him they had been sexually abused in childhood by their father.) Kandel accepts that “some of those women may very well have been sexually abused”, but essentially comes down on the psychoanalytic side of the fence. He thinks that Freud was right to eventually come to recognise that many of the (supposed) stories the patients told him were untrue, and expresses understanding of Freud’s having been misled: “These women had convinced themselves that it was so”; “If you come into my office and you say you were sexually abused the first thing I do is believe you.” He excuses Freud’s having first believed their stories on the grounds of his therapeutic inexperience (though he was forty years old by then, and had been in private practice for some ten years).

From his statements just quoted it is evident that Kandel doesn’t have a clue about what happened with Freud in this period. He is simply repeating ‘facts’ that he picked up from the time early in his
career when he developed a strong interest in psychoanalysis, and which he,
along with all psychoanalysts at that time, accepted credulously despite
the blatant anomalies in Freud’s several inconsistent accounts of the
events in question. When Kandel read in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933) Freud’s stating that “In the period in which the main interest was directed to discovering infantile traumas, almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father”, did he not wonder why it should have been only during the short period when Freud was actively seeking infantile sexual traumas that almost all his female patients (allegedly) told him they had been subjected to paternal sexual abuse? Had he done so, he might have started comparing the differing retrospective reports Freud published (in 1906, 1914, 1925, and 1933), and, above all, also checked them against the original 1896 papers. There he would have found that, far from his patients having “told” Freud about sexual abuse experiences, he reported that “they have no feeling of remembering” the infantile “sexual scenes” he tried to foist on them, and that they “assure[d] him emphatically of their unbelief” that they had actually experienced them.

So how did Freud pull the wool over people’s eyes? I have attempted to explain how he did so in a comprehensive article published in History of Psychiatry in 2001 (see reference below). In the end it boils down to his exceptional gifts as a story-teller and (especially in his first retrospective report of the episode) to his canniness. In his first retrospective report (1906), contrary to general belief, he didn’t acknowledge he had erred in his 1896 findings. He claimed that “by chance” (!) his patients at that time happened to include a “disproportionately large number of cases” in which there had been “sexual seduction by an adult or by older children”. The unconscious fantasy theory he was also postulating was applicable, he implied, mostly to individuals he had dealt with “since then”. Aside from a couple of extenuating falsehoods, he simply omitted to mention previous clinical claims that conflicted with the theory that was to displace the one he was now publicly abandoning. Then in his next report (1914) he makes no mention of any authentic cases of childhood sexual abuse, and writes that “analysis had led back to these infantile traumas, and yet they were not true”. At this stage his two published accounts had not singled out fathers as the putative assailants, either in the supposedly “large number” of genuine cases (1906) or in patients’ supposed “seduction phantasies” (1914). That came in 1925, by which time he had at last begun to psychoanalytically explore the sexual lives of infant girls. So now fathers appear as the “seducers” in repressed “wishful phantasies” arising from the Oedipal impulses of the infant girl, leading to his final report (1933), the one that for so long has been taken as historical fact.

Sketching out the story like this cannot convey the extraordinary persuasiveness of Freud’s accounts. For example, in 1914 he tells how he had been reluctantly drawn into exploring the seduction theory patients’ early life: “one hoped at last to be able to stop at puberty… But in vain; the tracks led still further back into childhood and into its earlier years.” Who would ever have thought from this that he first alighted on the theory of unconscious memories of infantile sexual abuse and then strenuously sought ‘evidence’ for it in the face of protestations from his patients? [4] By such means he deceived generations of readers, and initiated the dissemination of a false account of a seminal episode in the history of psychoanalysis that became universally accepted throughout much of the twentieth century. Only in the wake of the mounting evidence from long overdue historical research that much of the received history of psychoanalysis, and of Freud’s accounts of his clinical experiences, was grossly misleading has the recognition that this is also the case with the seduction theory episode been consolidated. But for the most part academics and others who have easy access to the media, such as Eric Kandel, have failed to acquaint themselves with the Freud scholarship of recent decades, and are still telling the general public the same old stories they learned long ago.

NOTES

1. For comprehensive refutations of Masson’s account of events, see the bibliographical references below. He shows no evidence of having actually read any of the scholarly articles rebutting his thesis, though he purports to know what they say, presumably on the basis of secondhand reports.

2. By mentioning fathers here Masson is imposing his own notions onto the situation. The seduction theory did not require the abusers to be fathers, and they were not mentioned in the categories of assailants listed in the 1896 papers. Even after Freud came up with a paternal version of the theory in December 1896, in only a minority of the cases for which Freud claimed to Fliess in 1897 that he had uncovered infantile sexual abuse were the supposed culprits fathers.

3. Some psychoanalysts have argued that since Freud still occasionally mentioned the occurrence of traumatic childhood sexual abuse in his later writings he never completely abandoned the seduction theory, thereby demonstrating that they fail to understand it.

4. In 1896 Freud wrote: “They are indignant as a rule if we warn them that such [infantile sexual abuse] scenes are going to emerge.”

References

Cioffi, F. (1974). Was Freud a liar? The Listener, 91: 172 4. (Reprinted in F. Cioffi, Freud and the question of pseudoscience (pp. 199-204). Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1998.)

Eissler, K. R. (2001). Freud and the seduction theory: A brief love affair. International Universities Press.

Esterson, A. (1993). Seductive mirage: An exploration of the work of Sigmund Freud. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court.

Esterson, A. (1998). Jeffrey Masson and Freud’s seduction theory: a new fable based on old myths. History of the Human Sciences, 11 (1): 1-21.

Esterson, A. (2001). The mythologizing of psychoanalytic history: deception and self-deception in Freud’s accounts of the seduction theory episode. History of Psychiatry, xii: 329-352.

Esterson, A. (2002). The myth of Freud’s ostracism by the medical community in 1896-1905: Jeffrey Masson’s assault on truth. History of Psychology, 5 (2): 115-134.

Freud, S. (1953-74). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (ed. and trans. by J. Strachey et al.). London: Hogarth Press.

Israëls, H. and Schatzman, M. (1993). The seduction theory. History of Psychiatry, iv: 23-59.

Masson, J. M. (1984). The assault on truth: Freud’s suppression of the seduction theory. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Masson, J.M. (ed. and trans.) (1985). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Scharnberg, M. (1993). The non-authentic nature of Freud’s observations. Vol. I: The seduction theory. Uppsala Studies in Education 47. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.

Schimek, J. G. (1987). Fact and fantasy in the seduction theory: a historical review. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 35: 937-965.

Since September 11, 2001 literally dozens of books have appeared asking the question (many attempting to answer it) ‘Is Religion Violent?’ In particular the authors and commentators ranging from Bernard Lewis in What Went Wrong? to Mark Juergensmeyer in Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence are asking whether the monotheistic religious traditions in general and Islam in particular are more prone to violence than, say, Buddhism, Shinto and Scientology. Almost all of these books–including one I recently edited, spaciously titled The Just War and Jihad[1] – answer the question with an unhelpful, “It depends on what you mean by violence,” as if September 11th were not instruction enough, or “What do you mean by “religious violence,” as if the men and women now known in the popular press and by the populace at large at “terrorists” were agnostic visitors from a distant planet, or perhaps a band of renegade Rotarians having a bad day. We are enticed to see the events in New York, Indonesia, Madrid, and London, or the ongoing “insurgency” (read: unwon war) in Iraq, as the work of “extremists” – enemies of progress, or haters of modernity, or perhaps as heretics who stand outside the status quo of contemporary Islamic theology. At all events, we are asked to see their acts as Un-Islamic, the distaff of the way in which violent Muslims regard other Muslims—that is, as Un-Islamic. If there are parallels between this state of perpetual aspersion and other infra-religious hostilities – between once born and twice born Christian for example – they are imperfect, feeble even. Islam’s inability to decide what Islam is, who defines it, and how it relates to the world, the flesh and the devil is exquisitely contradictory and perfectly nonsensical. It has no real parallels in other religious traditions, and the parallels sometimes asserted to exist don’t.

According to la penséee du jour the “terrorist” (Islamic fundamentalist, extremist) is a nonconformist who misunderstands the real meaning of the term jihad – a struggle not against people who don’t share your views (the argument runs) but an inner struggle for spiritual perfection. This opinion was canonized in 2002 when Harvard College bestowed the honor of delivering a commencement address on a certain Zayid Yasin, a former president of the Harvard Islamic Society, who expostulated thus:

. . . Jihad, in its truest and purest form, the form to which all Muslims aspire, is the determination to do right, to do justice even against your own interests. It is an individual struggle for personal moral behavior. Especially today, it is a struggle that exists on many levels: self-purification and awareness, public service and social justice. On a global scale, it is a struggle involving people of all ages, colors, and creeds, for control of the Big Decisions: not only who controls what piece of land, but more importantly who gets medicine, who can eat.

Jihad, performed rightly, is the same sort of activity one would expect of a Peace Corps volunteer or Médecins sans Frontières, only strangely different in its way of achieving humanitarian goals. But this sort of nicety—or naiveté—has a price. In the name of goodwill and universal sister/brotherhood, it is becoming harder for politicians and the press to see violence as something Islam needs to fix, and hence harder to fix blame, lest the protestations of an elusive and moderate “mainstream” begin to ring hollow–as in my view they already have. The argument for an essential or core goodness in religious traditions that have gone seriously askew or are seriously threatened is an old habit, indeed not so much an argument as a survival instinct, a reflex, in religion; Christianity has been doing it for almost two millennia—since the time of Tertullian in the 2nd century—Judaism for longer, at least since Nehemiah first slaked the thirst of the Persian king.

In arguing that what the world is witnessing is an aberrational form of Jihad, moderate Islamic scholars and observers (whose views are widely detested by many other Islamic scholars and observers) are falling into line with what is now the catechetical tradition: a partitioning of Good Islam from Bad Muslims. Unfortunately, the textual tradition supporting the separation of Islam from its most vocal adherents is thin–so thin indeed that Daniel Pipes has written. “It is bin Laden, Islamic Jihad, and the jihadists worldwide who define the term, not a covey of academic apologists. More importantly, the way the jihadists understand the term is in keeping with its usage through fourteen centuries of Islamic history. In pre-modern times, jihad meant mainly one thing among Sunni Muslims, then as now the Islamic majority. It meant the legal, compulsory, communal effort to expand the territories ruled by Muslims.” It did not mean “inner struggle.” It meant violence in pursuit of religious and political goals.

In order to understand the nature of violence in Islam, it’s useful to distinguish the forms it takes. Almost everyone in the west now knows the “extrinsic” form, violence directed by certain groups of Muslims against westerners (Crusaders), or their sympathizers, or those under a ban, like Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasrin, declarations of war against the “Zionist entity” or “the great Satan Bush” and his minions. The distinctions in motive between a suicide bomber on the streets of Tel Aviv or Baghdad and the organizers of the World Trade Center attack are comparatively minor save for numbers. Behind it all is a profound sense of alienation, reflected in the need to humiliate the offenders. The cultural “otherization” – the radical and humiliating derogation of a group based on racial or religious stereotyping – of which Edward Said accused the West in its understanding of the Middle East – cannot begin to match the otherization which the madrasa, the mosque, and the Islamic faculties of theology impose upon the west as a matter of educational correctness. And otherizing – the tendency to see what is uncommon in one’s own culture as a hateful menace to be dealt with as religion requires–is the chief source of extrinsic violence in Islam. It is a staple of the rhetoric of Al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt, of the newly legitimated Hamas in Palestine, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. It is not a minority view but a view which attracts thousands of the faithful, many of them young, only some of them poor or uneducated, and most of them angry, to choose struggle – the unnuanced form of jihad–and homicide bombings and various other lethal strategies as the highest form of virtuous activity.

The causes of extrinsic violence seem fairly simple to itemize: while George W. Bush appears to think it all has something to do with “hating freedom” and jealousy of the West in the Islamic world, it is apparent in bin Laden’s famous 1998 fatwa against the west, that the source of hostility is an inculturated suspicion of what Americans mean by freedom, what America does with freedom, and the way in which the United States and its allies conspire to spread their brand of freedom throughout the region, “All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims. … Nothing is more sacred than belief except repulsing an enemy who is attacking religion and life.” If the case bin Laden outlines in the fatwa had been framed in the 13th century, it would have been seen as the a solid case of the jus ad bellum, a call to a just war based on the violation of religious and territorial sovereignty. In fact a comparison of Pope Urban II’s language in his 1095 “fatwa” against the Muslims in his Deus vult! (God wills it!) with bin Laden’s language yields interesting information about causes and mindsets.

Extrinsic violence in Islam is not arbitrary. It is logical, targeted, and spiritually significant. It has its price–the possibility of death–but also its rewards, the promise of the martyr’s crown: “Almighty God said ‘O ye who believe, give your response to God and His Apostle, when He calleth you to that which will give you life. And know that God cometh between a man and his heart, and that it is He to whom ye shall all be gathered.” The words might come from a Christian bishop of the 12th century; in fact they come from bin Laden himself, reminding the ummah that martyrdom is not optional when faith is threatened. And the concept of ummah, like the concept of jihad itself, is tied to the most emotive of Islamic concepts–that of individual duty: fard ’ayn . I submit that no surviving religious dogma in the west–not the trinity, not the divinity of Jesus, not even the saving power of God, has the solidifying and militating power of the term ummat al-mu’minin – togetherness, unity. Perhaps the word “Catholic” once had this solidifying power, though its import seemed to hinge more on global extent of doctrine and authority than on a natural oneness. In any event, extrinsic violence is the natural consequence of this emotional appeal to unity and natural relationship.

Some will say this sounds like an equivocal endorsement of Islamic violence, or an excuse for sin in the name of understanding. Rather, it’s an attempt to suggest why the view that Islam is a peaceful religion, “except for a few extremists…” is jejune and analytically impoverished, and why politicians and commentators must adjust their view before they frame their policies. Historically, Islam has experienced respites from violence…when. When it has been permitted rest from the challenges of foreign economic and religious dogma, When it has felt secure in its geographical dominion over the prophet’s lands, the dar al islam. When it has been able to trade and deal as an equal partner with nations that do not flaunt the superiority of unbridled secular modernity over the cultural backwardness of the Arab world. These “Whens” have been few and far between, penetrated since the 18th century by first an opulent Ottoman then European hegemony over the region, then by incursions as unnatural as the creation of he state of Israel (“A Land Without People for a People Without Land”- Les mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne! ) to the impersonal assaults of western music, satellite television, pornography, and above all, the internet. It is the infracultural, often interpersonal conflict–not eo ipso a culture war–between wanting more and feeling that having more, especially more of the wrong thing, is sinful that explains a self-directed anger that can only be directed outward–at the other, and the other is always the Devil to be destroyed. It is spiritual dissonance. And it is this spiritual dissonance that leads to the dichotomous approach to the world: an all-wrong West, a once-pure Islam, locked in an ongoing battle of cosmic proportions and enormous consequences. Christians have not thought this way since St Paul’s day (try 2 Corinthians 10:3-5), and thus hardly understand the stakes. The stakes are not merely political. They are eschatological.

But to understand extrinsic violence, one needs also to be aware of another sort of violence in Islam, one which poses no threat at all to westerners and unbelievers but which helps to explicate the other form. Intrinsic violence in Islam is a ritual occurrence. In 1990 over 1400 pilgrims making the obligatory hajj to Mecca were killed. In 2006, despite the Saudi government’s efforts to deal with the millions who make their way to Mecca, maintain the tourist base, and divert world attention from the perennial tragedy that is pilgrimage, 345 pilgrims met their death in the so-called “stoning ritual.” on the last day of hajj. Forty-thousand security forces stood by helplessly. The son of an American Muslim participating in the ritual was reported to say, “If one person trips, the push from the crowd behind will cause the people to either trample over the guy or fall down and be trampled by others.” The urgency of completing the ritual is accompanied by unimaginable tension—a fear of failure, of not “doing things properly.” Abdullah Pulig, an Indian street-cleaner, told the BBC, “I saw people moving and suddenly I heard crying, shouting, wailing. I looked around and people were piling on each other. They started pulling dead people from the crowd,” and Suad Abu Hamada, an Egyptian pilgrim, told the agency he heard screaming and “saw people jumping over each other”. The narrow bottle-neck leading to the al Jamarat has been called “the road of death” because of the hundreds who have died there.

The pilgrims were returning from the via Mina after performing the Tawaf al-Wada, a farewell ceremony that involves walking around the Kaaba – a cube-like building in the centre of Mecca’s Great Mosque – seven times. The stoning ritual (rami) is the riskiest portion of the Hajj: in a narrowing passage, all the pilgrims must pass a series of three “pillars” (actually the remains of walls) called al-Jamarat representing the devil (more precisely where Satan tempted Abraham to renege on the sacrifice of his son) and which the faithful pelt with stones to purge themselves of sin. As worshippers jostle to try to target the stones, weaker pilgrims to fall under foot. The loss of life, while tragic, perhaps even preventable, and certainly violent, is ambiguous. Press reports of the violence naturally focus on the human toll, consequences, leaving the global audience puzzled about the causes and the Muslim perception of recurrent tragedy.

Assessments of the catastrophe range from blaming the Saudi government for its inability to control the crowds, to blaming overzealous pilgrims for the spiritual gluttony that leads them to trample fellow pilgrims in the interest of a higher duty: “This was fate destined by God,” a pilgrim by the name of al-Turki is reported by the AP to have said. And Sobac Retok, in a letter to the BBC, “Everyone dies eventually. To be taken when ones faith is strong is an honour.” “Look at it this way,” wrote Mohammad Malik, a German pilgrim: “Allah has taken your brethren at the most majestic moments in life, almost a blessing.” Hundreds of “verdicts” include the suggestion that the death of almost four hundred people was a triumph of faith, a martyr’s fate. Just as a faded sense of cosmic eschatology makes it hard for the westerner to understand the deeper sources of extrinsic violence, the intrinsic violence of the ‘rami is something pilgrims to the Vatican or Salt Lake City will have difficulty comprehending. Even the martyrdom cults of Christian antiquity provide little instruction, since the sacrifice of a Perpetua or a Stephen was intentional, not accidental – just as Christian martyrdom, as far as we know, and self righteous as it may have been, was a private choice, not a militant action designed to do as much damage to your enemies as possible.

But there is a link between the two forms of violence in Islam. It is a link that western religions recognize but have never made the centerpiece of their doctrine. In its core myth, Christianity pays lip service to a greatly enfeebled Satan. Once Lord of this World, he is consigned (as in the mythology whence he came) to the nether regions where his ability to do harm is minimal. It is an eccentricity of the Christian myth (as René Girard saw) that the practical, bloody violence is done to the Son of God as a declaration that violence has had its day. But even that violence, the violence of the cross and death itself – always associated with the devil’s prerogatives – is thought to be undone in the resurrection. Death (evil) Paul says has lost its sting; the grave has lost its victory. Christianity for all its wars and errors imagined its God as forsaking violence and incapacitating evil through a stratagem. It imagined its savior as becoming – to use the theological vocabulary -the victim of the violence (“the lamb of God”) which was merited by others. The cosmic eschatology of Christianity saw evil, sin and death as mystically defeated; and insofar as they still had power, it was because people were still, as a matter of will or choice, individually capable of violence against God – sin.

Islam however in its theological eclecticism disliked myth and possessed only such ritual as expressed the believer’s subordination to the will of God. Muhammad, when he acted, acted in this God’s name. The ummah, when it acts, acts in this God’s name, and often violently because it lacks the restraining power of a mythic figure and the mimetic feature which sees God as needing no helpers. Indeed, if it is a cardinal belief of Christianity and Judaism that God needs no help, then it is the feature that most distinguishes Islam from the other Book Religions that the Prophet’s God sees a failure to help, to be less than the AAnsar al-Islam as shirk. And just as Islam rejected the belief that Jesus died violently on the cross (Surah 4:156-159), Satan remains to be subdued, whether in the form of three stone pillars or in the form of an unbelieving Modernity that rejects Allah and loves evil. The rationalized form of violence in Christianity—its myth of a crucified God and a subdued devil—created social mechanisms for coping with (ameliorating, Girard would say) injustice, deceit, viciousness–sin The Koran does not understand evil as something that happened once upon a time, something to be dealt with by a savior. After all, the concept of “savior” is to “prophet” what liberation is to declaration. Both extrinsic and intrinsic violence in Islam derive from its core mythology of a God who asks more than “faith” in the power of the savior to save. Far from being able to appeal to a traditional record, a core myth, a Good Islam that transcends the Bad Muslims who act violently in the name of God, the mythology of Islam is being created day by day.

[1] The Just War and Jihad: Violence in the Monotheistic Traditions (Amherst: Prometheus, 2006).

R. Joseph Hoffmann is Senior Fellow & Chair of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion at the Center for Inquiry, Amherst, NY

Productivity is an economic term that, like others, has more than one meaning. First, there is overall productivity, meaning the collective ability of a society to produce goods and services. Second, productivity is used to explain the distribution of incomes within a society, where productivity is taken to mean the relative contribution of each of the so-called factors of production, land, labor and capital, to the production process. These two aspects of productivity are inextricably linked in the U.S. mixed economic system.

Efforts to measure productivity in the second sense are chimeras. Productivity is the result of mixing machinery, human effort, and community knowledge. Productivity does not exist independently of any or all of these. If a woman uses a wheelbarrow to move bricks, what part of the result can be attributed to the woman’s exertions and what part to the wheelbarrow? Since it is impossible to measure independently the contributions of each to their combined output, economics uses the mechanism of prices to make this transition.

But this means that the only way to determine a laborer’s wage is to know it in advance. The only way to determine the rent of land is to know it in advance. By working backwards, it is concluded that the payments to the factors of production prove what their relative contributions are. If it were not so, their payments would be different. This is circular and tautological. Alleged productivity is used to rationalize what the individual actors in the economic drama are paid.

The distribution of incomes is not determined by productivity but by power relations and institutional arrangements of societies. Centuries ago, princes received huge amounts of the community product, while doing no productive work themselves. Their relatively greater income was acquired because they had the power, both legal and physical, to command tribute from their vassals. The penalty for not paying the prince his due could be the loss of one’s head.

Today, ownership and control of productive assets, with the resulting ability to command a disproportionate share of society’s income and wealth, still is enforced by law and social privilege. The “free private enterprise system” is slavishly credited with the overall production of the society and with the determination of individual rewards. Today the penalty for not paying the princes of corporations their due is the loss of one’s job.

Several decades ago, corporate CEOs in the U.S. were paid 40 to 60 times what the assembly line workers received. Whether they were worth 40 to 60 times more than the line worker then is an open question.

Today these same CEOs routinely are paid from 400 to 600 times more than an assembly line worker. Is it possible that CEOs became ten times more productive than they were 20-30 years ago? That would imply an annual growth rate in CEO productivity of almost 17%. The annual overall rate of growth of productivity averaged only a little more than one percent.

In 2005, the incomes of the CEOs of the 100 largest U.S. corporations grew by 25% while average U.S. worker pay increased by only 3%. Is it possible the CEOs are 400 to 600 times more productive than assembly line workers? The myth of productivity would tell us they are or they wouldn’t be rewarded so handsomely. The myth of productivity would tell us the CEOs were extremely productive in 2005.

What changed to permit this sweeping increase in the pay of CEOs were the institutional factors which determined what CEOs get paid by their Boards of Directors. Principal among these was the greater importance assigned to increasing the value of the corporation’s stock. CEOs who orchestrated acquisitions and mergers that temporarily inflated the price of company stock, or cut costs by firing 1,000s of workers were themselves handsomely rewarded with special bonuses, stock options, golden parachutes and lavish company perks. Overpaid CEOs gave corporations bragging rights in the world of big business.

Several years ago when the corporate CEO pay bubble burst, a number of the most “productive” of these individuals were prosecuted for defrauding their own stockholders and violating federal securities laws. A handful actually went to prison and the trial of two of the most prominent is currently underway in the Enron case. The obligatory calls for curbing these excesses were made by persons in authority. Notwithstanding, bloated corporate pay is again on the increase, while wages for most workers lag far behind.

One of the ways used to divert attention from the huge disparities in income distribution is to encourage growth and an ever larger output of goods and services. If everyone’s income is growing, so the argument goes, everyone is better off and the relative shares of different actors become less important.

It is contended that the wealthier income recipients deserve their extraordinary incomes not only because they are more productive than others, but because it is through their frugality and investment that growth takes place. It is allegedly this growth that is responsible for everyone being better off, through the so-called trickle-down theory.

Those who object to the trickle-down theory on the grounds they don’t like to be dripped on have a different explanation. In reality growth is financed by mega lines of credit for corporations from mega banks, by public assistance such as the use of local government taxation to pay for buildings to be used by private businesses, by tax abatements to lure new or relocating industries to communities, and by the issuance of new or additional shares of stock. Initial public offerings (IPOs) abound for new companies, and are quickly bought up by thousands of small investors, as well as institutional investors that pool the assets of millions of individuals.

There is another reason why inequality in the distribution of income serves to promote
ever-greater growth. Striving to keep up with one’s neighbors, friends and associates is effectuated through the mechanism of competitive consumption. Individuals and families are urged, through high pressure promotional devices (billions are spent annually on highly persuasive advertising) and social pressure, to maintain material standards of consumption as high as they can possibly attain, even if it means incurring huge debts.

U.S. consumers now are burdened with more than nine trillion dollars of debt. The average balance for those who carry credit card debt is $12,000! Additionally, the rate of interest on these unpaid balances ranges from 12 to 22 percent.

To continue to service this debt and to permit the ever increasing consumption levels of all but the poorest in the society, there must be a constant increase in overall productivity, i.e. the maintenance of a high rate of growth. It is a treadmill of our own design.

Industrial nations such as the United States produce more than an abundance of material goods, sufficient to enable the entire population to live materially comfortable lives, to enjoy productive, fulfilling work, to become engaged in community activities and to contribute to the eradication of world poverty, the real kind. There simply is no instrumental reason why this cannot be realized.

The only reason this promise is not realized is because of the power of man-made institutions to prohibit or inhibit its occurrence. Factories are not closed and workers laid off because it is no longer technologically feasible to operate the plant. They are closed for business reasons, for purposes of pecuniary enhancement, of the corporation and/or the CEO. It has nothing to do with the real productivity of either the workers or the machines they use in their work or the CEOs. That and the uneven distribution of income is the myth of productivity.

Presently, there can be severe economic and socio-psychological consequences when a factory is closed and hundreds or thousands of workers are laid off. In smaller, company towns, the closing of the local plant may literally mean the demise of the community. The United States is dotted with ghost towns that suffered this fate.

When factories are closed in larger communities, there is a ripple effect that has consequences for the entire community. Community income declines, other businesses suffer decreased demand, often resulting in additional lay-offs, fewer dollars flowing into the community from outside purchases, and a general negative economic impact. It is a cumulative process, and while it may not be fatal, it can have profound impacts on individuals and families, the local economy, government services, education, and quality of life.

With only five percent of the world’s population, the U.S. consumes more than 40 percent of the world’s resources used in any given year. This high mass consumption far exceeds any reasonable economic needs of the populace, but is continued because of the competition fostered by economic and social institutions. With the present institutional arrangements of society it is impossible for society as a whole to get off the high mass consumption treadmill, without fundamental changes in values and economic and social institutions.

Such changes cannot take place voluntarily, person by person, because we all are products of our environment and the constant pressures to “live better.” The current economic machine depends on high mass consumption to keep it running. Without changes in the system of rewards, any sudden rapid decrease in consumer spending would result in severe economic dislocation and depression.

If there are to be meaningful economic changes, it will require public education, public intervention, collective social direction and guidance, and relief from the enticements of private economic interests, especially the advertising industry. Advertising must become informative only, not misleading and designed to create wants where none previously existed.

With the tightening of the environmental noose and the inexorable depletion of the planet’s natural resources the continuation of consumerism such as that found in the United States and other capitalist nations will not be possible. Decisions about greater equality and reduced demand either will be made by us or for us. We need the planet. The planet doesn’t need us.

Jim Cornehls – Copyright: 2006

Jim Cornehls is Professor and Director of the Law and Public Policy Graduate Certificate Program at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Fresno, CA: Following hard on the heels of the commercial success of the Da
Vinci Code and forty three books about Mary Magdalene, news of the finished
translation of a gospel attributed to Judas Iscariot, known to history as the
betrayer of Jesus, received mixed reactions in the scholarly and religious
communities last week.

Vatican spokesman Archbishop Heiko Vitali wasted no time in dismissing the
discovery as yet another example of how scholars are willing to believe
“proven heresies.”

“What do we know about Judas? That he was a liar. So even if this gospel came
from his hand–as I’m sure it did not–it would be just another big lie,” said
Vitali.

His sentiments were echoed by the head of the Evangelical Christian Alliance
Dr. Luke Hazard, who said, “If there is a gospel of Judas it must have been
written by a Jew. What does that tell you?”

The international team of scholars working on the translation were quick to
point out that this may not be the same “gospel” of Judas mentioned in the
second century by St Irenaeus.

Dr. Walter Johns, head of the team has released a sample of the committee’s
translation with the caution that “The translation may not be perfect, and the
whole [thing] raises as many questions as it answers.”

The following is reprinted from the Committee’s Interim Translation Report,
released on April 3.

The Gospel According to Judas

Translated from the Coptic by Professor Melvin Snarkelsdrochk

The Secret Gospel of Judas Barabbas Miriam Jacob Thomas, also called James,
son of Joseph, Lover of the Lord.

He who reads these words is not far from the kingdom. On the other hand, he’ll
need photo ID and two other forms of identification to pass through security.

And Judas spoke and said

Lord when will you show us the Kingdom?

And Jesus spoke and said.

If I showed you, you would not believe, and if you believed I would not show
you.

And Judas and Peter wondered in their hearts what manner of syntax this might
be.

Then spoke Judas, waking, and said unto Peter:

Do you know what the world says about him?

And Peter answered,

Yes, that he is the Mikado.

And Judas was wroth and spoke unto Peter saying,

No, that he is the Messiah.

And said Peter, yawning,

Right, that’s Jewish isn’t it?

Mary Magdalene said to Judas, who played much with his purse,

Scorn him not, Judas, because in two thousand years, more or less, there will
come one like a prince of the apostles who shall show men the Secret Wisdom.

You mean Ratzinger said Judas?

And Mary spoke:

How little men know of the secret path. I mean Dan Brown. My whole future
depends on him.

And Judas sighed in his spirit and said,

Cephas says vile things of you and the Lord. He says you have [known] each
other.

And Peter said:

Actually, since we’re speaking Aramaic, Mikado and Messiah do sound sort of
alike.

Jesus came close to Judas and said into his left ear,

Until you make the outside like the inside and the inside like the outside you
will never understand the secrets of the kingdom.

Mary, also called Magdalene, not to be confused with Mary the mother of Jesus,
Mary the Mother of James and Joses, the Other Mary, or Salome whose middle
name was Mary, said,

Lord why do you whisper so. Do you love Judas more than me?

Jesus said,

Fish got to swim and birds got to fly. You are not far from the Truth.

And from that day Mary left the company of apostles and became a votary public
and delivered a son, also named Jesus, and laid him in a manger because there
was no room for them at the inn.

Jesus said,

A sower went out to sow a field and some of the seed fell into foxholes. And
some of the seed fell into bird’s nests. And some of the seed the sower sowed
not. And the foxes ate the birds. Let him who has ears to hear, hear!

And Peter said,

We hear you you!

And Judas said,

Unfortunately.

Jesus said,

You are far from the kingdom, because your ears are stopped and yours beards
full of crumbs from eating too much the repast of this World.

Peter was troubled and said,

I wish.

Judas said,

Lord: What sign can you give us that you are the Expected One? I mean
something concrete.

Jesus was wroth when he heard Judas’s question and did bitch slap Judas and
said,

You of little faith, The kingdom is not coming with signs. You can’t get there
from here, nor from Phoenix. Witchita is closer, but still not it.

Peter said,

Now I get it, thanks!

Thomas and John who did hold hands and smirk effeminately the while Judas said
ouch turned to Jesus and said,

Is Mary gone? We wish. What time is it?

And Jesus smiled at the pair and said,

The keys of the kingdom come to him who waits, him who asks, and him who says
nasty things about the Woman.

And Thomas said,

What time is it, because I have a manicure at 2.30.

Jesus said,

It is late in the day. When the dawn kills the moon the kingdom will come as a
thief in the night to destroy the fig tree.

Judas said:

Now that really makes no sense at all.

And Peter, saddened, said.

It does to me. I love figs. I will miss the trees.

Jesus said:

I am now going to my father’s house where you can not come. Not today, anyway.
They will come seeking me like a dog among thieves and I really don’t want to
be around for that. The spirit is willing but few are chosen.

Judas said,

The boys and I will sort your sayings out later. They need a lot of work.

Jesus said,

But I will return. And we’ll resume our lessons when the heat is off.

Judas said,

No, no. You stay right where you are. There are some guys on the Council I
want you to meet. I’ll just go get them, shall I? Kisses ’til then.

But privily to himself Judas said,

Or maybe I’ll just go hang myself.

R. Joseph Hoffmann is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Wells College and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Inquiry International.

Charaka Samhita, the ancient textbook of Ayurveda (third or second centuries BCE), doesn’t mince words when it comes to the subject of quacks. Charaka, the legendary healer from India’s antiquity and the editor of the Samhita (compendium) that bears his name, calls them “imposters who wear the garb of physicians… [who] walk the earth like messengers of death.” These fake doctors are “unlearned in scriptures, experience and knowledge of curative operations…. but like to boast of their skills before the uneducated…” Wise patients, Charaka advises, “should always avoid those foolish men with a show of learning … they are like snakes subsisting on air.”

These words, written more than two thousand years ago, bring to mind those who like to play doctor on Indian TV these days. The most famous of all, Swami Ramdev, doles out medical advice to millions of Indians who tune into his TV show, attend his yoga camps and buy his Ayurvedic drugs. He offers “complete cure,” “in weeks, if not in days,” of “diseases from A to Z,” from “common cold to cancers,” including cholera, diabetes, glaucoma, heart disease, kidney disease, leprosy, liver disease….so on and so forth. There is practically nothing that his method of Divya Yoga, alone, or in combination with his Ayurvedic formulations, does not promise to cure. And all his “miraculous” cures are not merely “confirmed by science,” but are, indeed, “science in its purest form.” (All quotations are from the official website of Swami Ramdev.). The swami is not alone in making such fantastic claims. Yoga and Ayurveda are being mass-marketed to India’s growing middle classes as never before. Putting on a “show of learning” by “wearing the garb” of healers and scientists seems to improve the sales-pitch.

The recent exposé of false labeling of drugs and exploitation of workers at the Swami’s Haridwar-based pharmacy created a huge uproar, laying bare the limitations of all parties involved. But all the noise and sloganeering is drowning out the real questions that must be asked not just of Ramdev, but of all traditional or alternative medicines: How effective are these medicines in curing the diseases they claim to cure? Can their medical claims pass the muster of rigorously conducted clinical tests? Even if the label on the bottle scrupulously identified each and every ingredient, the question still remains if the drugs are effective and safe, when measured by the standards that apply to conventional, “allopathic” medicines.

THE FACTS OF the controversy regarding Swami Ramdev are well-known. In April 2005, Swami Ramdev’s Divya Yoga Mandir Trust fired 115 workers who had been protesting against poor wages and deplorable working conditions. These workers complained of having to collect and manually grind human skulls and bones, otter (udbialo) testicles and antelope horns – work that Brahmins amongst them found polluting. Acting on these complaints, Brinda Karat, Communist Party leader, Member of Parliament and feminist, sent samples of two formulations meant to treat epilepsy and sexual weakness to relevant government authorities for testing. In January 2006 the results came out positive: the samples were found to contain human and animal DNA. The Swami’s “herbal medicines” had been delivering something not very herbal to countless consumers, many of whom happen to be fastidious vegetarians.

What happened after that was a spectacle to behold. Incredibly, the same Swadeshi-Hindutva-vegetarian gang that attacked McDonald’s eateries in Mumbai upon discovering a small amount of beef flavoring in their fries sold in the USA (but not in India), saw no problem with ingesting drugs containing roasted and powdered human skulls. Equally incredibly, Karat, the Communists, and other left groups – lifelong critics of neo-liberal globalization and multinational companies – were accused by Ramdev and his allies as puppets of multinational pharmaceutical companies who, apparently, felt threatened by the growing popularity of yoga and Ayurveda. Rather than answer questions about his own deceptive practices, Ramdev, with the help of his allies, succeeded in putting the Left on trial.

And when the subject is Ayurveda and yoga, can Hindu nationalists be far behind? Predictably, many members of the Hindutva parivar rose to defend the Swami as a symbol of Hinduism and the Indian nation. They equated Karat’s criticism of Divya Yoga Pharmacy’s dubious labeling practices with criticism of the ancient and glorious Hindu civilization itself. Uma Bharati’s jab that “Communists have attacked Ramdev because they have always been against the nation,” was typical of the Hindutva camp. Karat and her allies were left to defend their Swadeshi credentials by professing high regard for yoga, Ayurveda and traditional knowledge in general. The debate got framed entirely in terms of defense of the nation and its traditions, with no room for raising any questions about the objectivity of the medical claims that were being made on behalf of the traditional healing practices.

In the middle of it all, the regulatory agencies of the government of India were found sleeping at the wheel. Despite endless repetitions of pious intentions for “ensuring affordable AYUSH drugs that are safe and efficacious,” and providing “scientific validation” of traditional medicines, the government does not have much to show for itself.[1] Today in India, anyone can walk up to his or her neighborhood drug-store, or even the grocer, and buy Ayurvedic medicines containing any of the 25 ingredients (including red oxides of lead and mercury, arsenic, copper sulfate, snake poison and cannabis) which are supposed to be “taken under medical supervision.” The new safety measures and the so-called “golden triangle” research initiatives the government has announced in recent years are driven largely by export markets, and ignore the issues of safety, effectiveness and good manufacturing practices at home.

IN THE END, the great Ramdev-Karat controversy turned out to be a storm in a teacup. Swami Ramdev is well within the Ayurvedic tradition in using ingredients derived from humans and other animals.

The Ayurvedic tradition considers all substances, whether they come from animals, vegetables, or the earth (i.e. minerals) as medicines, provided they are applied in a proper way and for specific purposes. The ancient doctors recommend the use of the following as ingredients in medical concoctions: bile, fat, marrow, blood, flesh, excreta, urine, skin, semen, bones, tendons, horns, nails, hoofs, hair, bristles and pigments obtained from a variety of animals, depending upon the ailment. This follows as a logical consequence of the Ayurvedic philosophy that like-nourishes-the-like: flesh is nourished by flesh, blood by blood, fat by fat, bones by cartilage, marrow by marrow, semen by semen, fetus by eggs…and so on. Various classics of Ayurveda recommend a variety of medical treatments which make liberal use of animal products, including cow urine cooked in ghee for treatment of epilepsy, skull bones mixed with cow’s urine as a cure for ulcers, and beef, to quote Charaka Samhita, for “rhinitis, irregular fever, dry cough, fatigue, heightened digestion, and wasting of muscles.” Contemporary ayurvedic medicines routinely –and legally – use 75 ingredients derived from animals, in addition to 2,500 ingredients of plant origin, and 150 ingredients derived from processed and/or unprocessed minerals (including heavy metals like mercury, lead and arsenic, well-known for their toxicity).

So it turned out that on the issue of non-vegetarian ingredients, Ramdev was on the right side of the tradition after all.

At the end of the entire Ramdev-Karat ruckus, the Swami could be faulted only for not labeling his products properly. But here the Drug and Cosmetics Act (DCA) of 1940 that regulates traditional medicine sends contradictory signals. On the one hand, it exempts Ayurvedic, Siddha and Unani medicines from listing all the ingredients as long as they include a reference to the recipe used in any of the 56 DCA-approved ancient texts on its label. On the other hand, the government has recently started demanding full disclosure of all ingredients. This confusion over labeling is not a trivial matter, for consumers have a right to know what goes into the drugs they depend upon to take care of their ailments. Karat and the workers of Divya Yoga Trust have brought an important issue to light.

BUT PROPER LABELING should be the beginning, not the end, of a serious investigation of the medical claims that are routinely made for Ayurvedic remedies and yogic asanas.

Let us imagine that by some miracle, each and every one of the 400,000 licensed Ayurvedic doctors in India begins to abide by the new law requiring full disclosure and good manufacturing practices. Let us stipulate that all the loopholes have been closed and that all Ayurvedic preparations, meant for export or for sale at home, come with detailed information of traditional and botanical names of all the herbs, the names and amounts of all animal and mineral ingredients, the traditional recipes according to which they are made, the batch number, the date of expiry, the risks and contra-indications. Let us also imagine that every Ayurvedic drug manufacturer faithfully follows every minute detail of the traditional formulae approved by the Drugs and Cosmetics Act. (This is not to deny that there are some enlightened Ayurvedic institutions in the country that are already providing all the information and following good manufacturing practices. But old and highly respected institutions like Arya Vaidya Sala of Kottakkal, Kerala, are exceptions that prove the rule.)

The unanswered question is this: Is full disclosure enough? It is of course necessary, but is it sufficient? Unless the ingredients and methods followed by traditional Ayurvedic books themselves have been subjected to rigorous clinical and laboratory tests, mere disclosure and good manufacturing practices can not ensure that the drugs are effective and safe. Without an objective understanding of the fundamentals of Ayurveda, and without rigorous clinical tests of the ancient Ayurvedic formulations, we may end up faithfully replicating many of their limitations and dangers, as well as many of their possible benefits.

The simple truth is that there is a lack of good quality research on the fundamental bases of Ayurveda. Even staunch supporters of traditional medicine like M.S. Valiathan admit that “clinical studies that would satisfy the liberal criteria of WHO have been alarmingly few from India, in spite of patients crowding in Ayurvedic hospitals.” (India generally follows WHO standards which do not demand stringent clinical tests for those traditional medical systems which have long historical traditions behind them.) The general consensus of international experts, to quote from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) in the USA, is that “most clinical trials of Ayurvedic approaches have been small, had problems with research designs, lacked appropriate control groups, or had other issues that affected how meaningful the results were.” Indeed, the poor quality of research is part of the reason why Ayurveda was not included in recent reviews of traditional medicine either in the more technical New England Journal of Medicine, or in the popular Time magazine.

It is true that the attraction of cornering a bigger share of the huge (and growing) global market in herbal medicines is eroding the long-standing resistance to applying modern standards of clinical research to traditional medicine. There is much talk about developing “evidence-based” support for the claims of traditional medicine among flagship Ayurvedic companies including Dabur, Zandu, Himalaya and others. Indeed, even Swami Ramdev glibly invokes “double-blind studies” as evidence for the scientific nature of the Divya brand of ayurvedic drugs he sells. Inspired by the CSIR chief Dr. R.A. Mashelkar’s recent call for “building a golden triangle between traditional Indian medicine, modern medicine and modern science,” the Indian government has started funding collaborative research between scientists, modern medical doctors and Ayurvedic practitioners.[2]

This new willingness to seek scientific evidence can be a very good thing if, and only if, it is done in a genuine spirit of skepticism which can overcome the deep-seated – and often nationalistic – tendency of Indian researchers to look only for evidence that confirms the truth of our ancient knowledge. A brief look at the problem of confirmation bias in Ayurvedic research can give an idea of the problems that need to be overcome for the new and expensive “golden triangle” research initiatives to succeed.

THERE SEEMS TO be a curious split running through the development of Ayurveda in the modern era. On the one hand, we hear repeated promises from Indian policy-makers and AYUSH bureaucrats for “massive research and development” for the purpose of finding scientific evidence for how and why Ayurvedic drugs work. On the other hand, we hear repeated claims from traditional healers and modern gurus alike that no amount of research can alter or refute the “Eternal and Absolute Truths” of Ayurveda which were supposedly revealed to the Vedic seers at the very “beginning of time.” Even AYUSH, the government agency responsible for scientific research, describes Ayurveda as having “originated with the origin of the universe itself.” (What could this possibly mean?)

The desire to appear scientific while desperately seeking to affirm pre-scientific traditions has led to a deep and wide-spread confirmation bias in research on traditional medicine and other traditional sciences. That is to say that those studying ayurvedic remedies tend to look for and notice only what confirms their existing beliefs, while they either do not look for, or ignore and explain away the evidence that contradicts their beliefs. While this kind of advocacy “research” is good for stoking Indians’ national pride, it has prevented an honest sifting of the grains of truth from the obsolete and false ideas that exists in India’s traditional sciences. All sciences, including modern science and modern medicine, tend to accumulate fallacies and dogmas with time. All scientific knowledge – whether it is comes out of the Holy Vedas, the Holy Koran or the Holy Bible, or whether it comes out of the world’s most advanced laboratories – requires constant testing and self-correction.

Indian scientists have tended to use the supposedly “holistic” nature of traditional Vedic sciences to reject the central pillar of modern medicine, namely, double-blind clinical studies. Double-blind studies are designed to ensure that the reported benefits of a medicine are actually coming from the active ingredients of the medicine itself, and not from the biases of the patients and doctors. These studies require drugs and medical procedures to be tested in randomly selected test and control groups, in which neither the subjects nor the researchers know who is getting the drug and who is getting a placebo (i.e., a treatment that looks and feels like the drug being tested, but lacks the active ingredient.) It is true that it is harder to find placebos for some Ayurvedic practices (enemas, for example). In such situations, single-blind studies, in which only the researchers do not know who is receiving the treatment and who is not, are acceptable.

But the problem of finding acceptable placebos is not insurmountable. Indeed, Chinese medicine, no less holistic than traditional Indian medicine, has been able to open up to stringent, FDA standards of double-blind tests for many of its traditional remedies. Even acupuncture which – like Ayurvedic massage and yoga – was long considered to be beyond the scope of placebo-controlled double-blind studies, has now been subjected to rigorous scientific tests, using control groups who get fake acupuncture from needles which feel like real acupuncture needles, but do not actually penetrate the skin. The result: real acupuncture was found to be no better in its ability to reduce pain than fake acupuncture from fake needles. If Chinese medicine can overcome its confirmation bias and open its holistic traditions to rigorous test, there is no reason why India should not, or can not. If acupuncture, the most revered component of traditional Chinese medicine can be put to rigorous testing – and found to be no better than a dummy treatment – there is no reason why controlled trials for yoga and parnayam cannot be designed.

Having avoided double-blind tests for so long, traditional Indian medicine has a big problem at hand. The problem is that traditional medical formulae and recipes, many of them thousands of years old, have never been put to a systematic test for safety and efficacy using the best available scientific knowledge, methodology and instrumentation. Their claims for curing diseases are entirely based upon traditional lore, anecdotal evidence and the authority of gurus and other “holy” men and women. Intellectuals and scientists in India have been too ready to simply find analogies and fanciful equations between advances in modern biology with the traditional concepts of body and disease. As a result, many obsolete and even harmful chemicals, methods of diagnosis and procedures still continue to be prescribed. What is worse, many of them are presented to the public as if they have been validated by advances in modern science and medicine. As Dr. Mashelkar recommended in his famous “Golden Triangle” speech cited before, there is a need to “trim” Ayurvedic products so that we can rationally understand what works and what does not, what is healthful and what is harmful, what is living and what is dead in traditional Indian medicine.

This issue of scientific evaluation of the medical claims of Ayurveda is extremely important. Unlike in the West where traditional Indian and Chinese medicines are used by a small minority of relatively wealthy yuppies, ex-hippies and New Agers who have access to conventional doctors and hospitals, it is mostly millions of poor, especially in rural areas, who depend upon traditional medicine as their primary, and often the only, source of health care. According to the official AYUSH data, close to 80 percent of India’s people use Ayurveda through 361, 881 registered ayurvedic medical practitioners, in 14,252 dispensaries and 2,189 hospitals in the country. The West can afford to indulge in “alternative medicine” sold as dietary supplements which need not meet the tough standards of clinical tests for conventional drugs. (This unregulated market is not without serious problems in the West either: there have been fatalities among those using herbal weight-loss products and drug reactions with scientific medicines are becoming routine.) But the already under-served and poor consumers of traditional medicines cannot afford to take chances. Efficacy and safety of these traditional medicines is literally a matter of life and death.

UNFORTUNATELY, RATIONAL, EVIDENCE-BASED evaluation is nowhere in sight in the kind of popular mass-marketing of Ayurveda practiced by Swami Ramdev and other peddlers of traditional medicine and yoga in India and in the West. Indeed the many miraculous cures that Swami Ramdev promises, and the “scientific evidence” he cites for them, offer a window into the dismal state of scientific understanding of Ayurveda. Let us look at some cases including, but not limited to, Swami Ramdev.

The first example comes from Swami Ramdev himself. According to the media reports, the famous udbilao (otter) testicles that the workers at Divya Yoga Pharmacy were made to collect and crush were meant for a poly-“herbal”-mineral formula sold under the name “Divya YauvanamrataVati.” Ramdev’s pharmacy advertises it as a tonic for enhancing men’s “staying power” and for “increasing sperm” – a cure for what is politely described in India as “sexual weakness.

The otters’ humble contribution to men’s sexual prowess is, of course, not included in the ten ingredients listed for Yauvanamrata Vati. This omission was the source of the Ramdev-Karat controversy. But one of the ingredients that is disclosed is “swarna bhasam,” or a herbal ash made out of gold. This swarna bhasam is not without its own set of problems and needs a closer look.[3]

On closer inspection, Swami Ramdev’s YauvanamrataVati looks like a form of “Ayurvedic Viagra.” There is a booming global market, mostly on the internet, for herbal substitutes for Viagra, all promising to enhance men’s sexual experience. These products have two things in common: they all contain gold bhasams and, as a result, they are all quite expensive. Swami Ramdev’s trademarked Divya Yuavanamrata sells for Rs 210 (about 5 US dollars) for just 5 grams, about the size of a tablet of aspirin. Divya Yoga pharmacy also sells gold bhasam separately, as Divya Swarna Bhasam for 1,600 rupees (about 40 US dollars) for a gram. (His pharmacy sells an even more expensive bhasam, this one made out of diamonds and selling for 2,000 rupees, about 50 US dollars, for a gram. This “Heerak bhasam” is supposed to cure cancers.)

Swami Ramdev makes grand claims for his gold bhasam. When taken as a part of Yauvanamrata Vati, it is supposed to cure sexual weakness, but when taken alone, it is supposed to “work as a miracle in TB, chronic fever and nervous debility,” and it is supposed to be useful in cases of “poisoning, … gout, kalagar (sic) fever (probably kala-azar) fever and mdaria fever (sic)” and it is supposed to purify blood and remove toxins.

The problem is not one of these claims is substantiated by properly gathered and tested scientific evidence. It is true that Charaka Samhita recommends the use of gold, along with five other metals (silver, copper, lead, tin and iron) and minerals like arsenic, antimony, sand, lime and red chalk as having medicinal value. It is also true that tantric alchemy, which equates gold with immortality, has left its influence on Ayurveda. And it is fair to surmise that these complex herbal-mineral bhasams must have shown some medicinal value over the centuries, for if they brought no relief at all, it is hard to explain how they could have survived the test of time.

But this traditional lore is all we have. There is no clinical evidence backing any one of the claims, nor is there any causal explanation of how and why gold in this particular bhasam form has all these curative properties. The only well established use of gold in modern medicine, as far as clinical studies have been able to establish, is for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. According to Dr. P. Viswanathan, an Ayurvedic physician at Kottakkal Arya Vaidya Sala Agency in Hyderabad, who was consulted for this essay, “ Gold bhasams are useful in auto-immune diseases. Gold is also used in modern medicine for arthritis. I think there is no substance in the various claims being made for gold bhasams. I think gold bhasams being used for sexual power is just a marketing strategy.” Selling expensive, gold-laced drugs, with promises of “miracle cures” for “tuberculosis, chronic fever, nervous debility,” without adequate evidence, is unethical, to say the least.

While gold bhasam, alone and/or in brand-name drug formulations, is being sold at exorbitant prices and extraordinary claims about its curative powers are routinely made, no one seems to know if it is gold or the herbs, or the undisclosed otter testicles, or something else entirely that is doing the healing (if there is any). Perhaps the Yuyanamrata vati that Swami Ramdev sells would be as effective (or ineffective) in curing impotence with gold as without it? Perhaps it is the otter testicles men should be consuming, instead of the gold and/or the herbs? We simply do not know. Such studies have not been done. After years of promising “scientific validation” we are no closer to knowing to what extent these medicines actually work, what their active ingredients are, and what side-effects do they have.

If these cures are real, it is high time to demonstrate their effectiveness and study their side-effects. If we are able to demonstrate any effectiveness, then it is high time to demonstrate what the active ingredient(s) is/are and how it/they work. (Isolating the active ingredient is not a sign of “Western reductionist science.” It is useful in eliminating ingredients that may be harmful, expensive or simply useless.) And if we fail to demonstrate the effectiveness and safety of the drugs, then it is high time to stop prescribing them to people who are ill and suffering. Government oversight has to extend to the scientific validity of the claims being made for Ayurvedic medicines, and not just to proper labeling and good manufacturing practices.

THE SUBJECT OF gold bhasams brings us to the next issue of concern, namely, heavy metals. The 2004 study published in the Journal of American Medical Association found significant levels of toxic heavy metals such as mercury, lead, and arsenic in 20 percent of Ayurvedic preparations that were made in India for sale in America (see figure 1). The situation is far worse in India where 64 percent of sample collected were found to contain significant amounts of mercury, arsenic and cadmium. (See table).

In the wake of the bad publicity created by the JAMA report, the Indian government has started requiring all export quality drugs to certify that their heavy metal content is within the acceptable limits. Ironically, drugs intended for domestic consumption are to remain free from such requirements, at least until the time that more testing labs are established.

It is in the attempt to explain and control the toxic levels of heavy metals that the lack of rigorous science shows up. Some of the contamination could no doubt be due to environmental pollution and “unsatisfactory agricultural and cultivation practices,” as AYUSH has tried to explain. But at the same time, by agreeing to initiate chemical analysis and animal studies for toxicity of eight bhasams, AYUSH has tacitly admitted that the problem could be integral to these medicines themselves. (According to Dr. P. Viswanathan, an Ayurvedic doctor practicing in India who provided background information and expert opinion for this essay, all eight formulations contain heavy metals which are known for their toxicity. The formulations include: Kajjali, a powder of mercury and sulfur; Rasmanikya, a tri-sulfide of arsenic; Nag Bhasama, a bhasam of lead; Rasasindoor, a bhasam containing mercury and sulfur; Basantkusumkar Ras, Arogyavardhini Vati, Mahayograj Guggul and Mahalaxmi Vilas Ras, the last four containing mixtures of all common bhasams. The last four medicines are extensively used for diabetes, liver disease, arthritis and respiratory diseases.)

The presence of mercury, arsenic and lead in ayurvedic preparations is not surprising. There is a long tradition in Ayurveda, as well as in tantric and Siddha alchemy, for ingesting mercury and gold for medicinal purposes. Charaka and Susurta Samhitas permit the use of mercury, but for external use only. Vagbhatta (6th -7th century AD) recommends internal uses of mercury for therapeutic ends. Marco Polo in the late 13th century reportedly met “ciugi” (yogis or jogis) who apparently lived long and healthy lives because they consumed a drink made of mercury and sulfur. The French traveler Francois Bernier who visited India at the close of the 17th century has left behind a record of Hindu holy men who knew how to make gold and prepare mercury for health purposes. In this Siddha alchemical tradition that Marco Polo and Bernier observed, mercury and gold were considered elixirs of life which could confer immortality. The Ayurvedic tradition incorporated many of these alchemical ideas over time. Gradually complex processes of making bhasams evolved through which mercury, gold, arsenic, lead and precious stones were first purified by repeatedly heating and cooling them in herbal extracts (a process called sodhana) and then grinding them with herbs and heating them in closed earthen crucibles by burning cow dung cakes (a process called bhasmikaran).

There is thus a long and well-respected tradition of using heavy metals in Ayurveda. But, after so many years of promising us scientific account of Ayurveda, we know practically nothing about what happens to these metals when they are subjected to the traditional processes of sodhana and bhasmikaran. We constantly hear assurances from the proponents of Ayurveda that the process of turning heavy metals into bhasams detoxifies them and makes them harmless. The message is that if the manufacturers faithfully followed the instructions in the classic Ayurvedic texts, there would be no problem of toxicity.

But we are supposed to accept these assurances of faith alone, for they are not based upon any actual research. It is not clear if the process of making bhasams turns these heavy metals into oxides or some other kind of compound altogether. According to Dr. C. Viswanathan, an allopathic doctor at Government Medical College, Thrissur, Kerala, who was consulted for this essay, “oxide of mercury is certainly toxic and is a health problem…. I think it is just wishful thinking to suggest that any amount of baking with herbs is going to make mercury non poisonous.” The Dr. P. Viswanathan, the Ayurvedic expert consulted for this essay states that, “as far as I know, there has been no tests that proved that the mercury used in bhasams is safe for human consumption. The end products of mercury in bhasams have not been studied for their toxicity.”

Simply following age-old recipes is no guarantee of safety. The fundamental processes and the concepts on which these ancient processes are based must be exposed to serious experimental investigation.

AS THE THIRD and the final case, let us look at Swami Ramdev’s prescription of parnayam as a “miraculous” cure for “all diseases, from A to Z.” Ramdev lists some 260 conditions, including infectious diseases (cholera, leprosy, syphilis), hormonal disorders (diabetes, thyroid disorders), and complex, life-threatening, systemic diseases of heart, liver, kidneys, brain, reproductive system. Yoga and parnayam (deep breathing exercises) alone, he promises, can “completely” cure all of these ailments. He claims that patients show significant improvements in their blood-sugar level, blood pressure, cholesterol and triglyceride levels, lung functioning and obesity by only eight days of doing yoga and parnayam in the “yoga-science” camps he organized periodically through 2004-2005.

There are undeniable benefits of yoga. But curing diabetes? Curing infectious diseases? There is no credible evidence for any of these claims. In the refereed medical literature, yoga has only shown some benefit for reducing hypertension (that too, only in combination with aerobic exercises and extremely low-fat diets). There are also some reports that show marginal and short-lived improvement for asthma and carpal tunnel syndrome. Yoga is also shown to improve strength and flexibility, but not any more than other physical exercises, including walking.

Can Ramdev’s claims for “miraculous cures” be trusted? His “scientific evidence” simply does not meet even the most minimum standards of clinical trials. There were no controls, it is not clear if all the patients he followed for only eight days were on the same diets or not, or if they even had the same disease to begin with. How do we know that any other kind of physical exercise and/or relaxation therapy could not have brought about the “miracles” he claims?

But the poor quality of evidence seems to be almost beside the point in the debates about Ayurveda that take place in the public sphere in India. The majority of those who believe in Swami Ramdev’s cures, or in traditional remedies more generally, seem to be convinced by anecdotes and personal stories they hear from friends, relatives and those who testify on TV shows. One cannot, however, put too much confidence in anecdotal evidence and personal testimonies. As Dr. C. Viswanathan explains, going by testimonies alone, one will have to grant that all kinds of miracles work. After all, there are many people who testify to all kinds of cures by prayer alone. The problem with anecdotal evidence, according to Dr. C. Viswanathan is that many times the patients and the doctors are not familiar with the natural history of the disease, and they end up giving unwarranted credit to some treatment method for a ‘cure,’ which would have occurred naturally. Moreover, it is a well-recognized fact of medical science that even when a treatment does not work, it helps people to reinterpret their symptoms and experience them as less severe. (That is why clinical trials include controls who receive fake treatments or placebos.) Anecdotal evidence of people reporting that they are feeling better can not provide sufficient grounds for “scientific” validation of Ayurveda or any other kind of medicine.

WE HAVE HEARD many claims of Ayurveda and yoga being “complete” and “highest” sciences. It is time now to actually expose these ancient sciences to the test of medical and biological sciences, as we understand them today.

Toward that end, it will be useful to keep in mind the wise words of Marcia Angell and Jerome Kassirer from their famous 1998 editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine: “There cannot be two kinds of medicines – conventional and alternative. There is only medicine that has been adequately tested and medicine that has not, medicine that works and medicine that may or may not work. Once a treatment has been tested rigorously, it no longer matters whether it was considered alternative at the outset. If it is found to be reasonably safe and effective, it will be accepted. But assertions, speculations and testimonials do not substitute for evidence. Alternative treatments should be subjected to scientific testing no less rigorous than that required for conventional treatments.”

Charaka would have certainly agreed. After all, it was Charaka who advised his fellow healers to “always strive to acquire knowledge. There is no end of medical science. Hence, heedfully thou shouldst devote thyself to it… And even if possessed of sufficient knowledge, thou shouldst not boast of that knowledge.”

The author would like to thank Dr. C. Viswanathan, M.S. (Ortho), Senior Lecturer in Orthopedics, Government Medical College, Thrissur, Kerala and Dr. P. Viswanathan, M.D. (Ayurveda), Consultant Physician, Kottakkal Arya Vaidya Sala Agency, Hyderabad. They provided valuable medical opinion.

A longer version of this essay, complete with references, will appear in the Economic and Political Weekly (India).

1 AYUSH stands for Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Yunani, Siddha and Homeopathic medicines. The Government of India funds research and education in all these traditional medical systems through its deparment of AYUSH which is a part of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. The details of the kind of projects AYUSH funds can be found at its official website.

2 CSIR stands for the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. The agency funds basic and applied research in all scientific disciplines.

3 Bhasam is the Hindi/Sanskrit word for ashes. Ayurvedic bhasams are made by an elaborate process requiring slow heating of metals with herbs. The heated mixture is ground into a fine powder.

Even as the intelligent design controversy rages on, California recently
witnessed a concerted push by a coalition of three Hindutva (Hindu
supremacist) groups – Hindu Education Foundation, Vedic Foundation and
the Hindu American Foundation – to doctor sixth grade social science
textbooks. Their strong ideological and organizational links with the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in India makes them all the more
dangerous, for any success here would provide a much-needed fillip to
the RSS family of organizations in India [1]. Fortunately, interventions
by a group of Indologists led by Professor Michael Witzel and strong
mobilizations by the South Asian community resulted in a resounding
defeat for the Hindutva groups.

As repeatedly pointed out by groups at the forefront of the California
struggle, the edits proposed by the Hindutva groups sought to negate
the “great pluralism within Hindu practice, as well as the religious
diversity within Indian society” [2]. For this purpose, the Hindutva
forces hired the PR firm Ruder Finn which has a reputation of targeting
liberals, feminists and Jews and mobilizing public opinion for American
intervention in the Balkans [3]. However, “His Divinity, Dharm
Chakrvarti” Swami Prakashanand Saraswati, the spiritual leader of the
Texas-based Vedic Foundation has dug them such a deep hole that even
Ruder Finn – with all its ruthlessness – would have a hard time
salvaging any respectability for its clients. Saraswati’s magnum opus,
“The true history and the religion of India”, reeks of megalomania from
start to finish and is bound to be an embarrassment for any practicing
Hindu [4].

If Saraswati were one of those dime-a-dozen Swamis, his book could have
been dismissed as a failed attempt at humor. However, as the Vedic
Foundation’s aggressive posturing in California demonstrated, they are
out to mythologize history and science. In the last few decades, the
rationalist currents in Indian philosophy have gradually been supplanted
by the ideology of Hindutva and the megalomania of the Vedic Foundation
nicely dovetails into the Hindutva agenda [5]. What follows is a
fictional account of a tête-à-tête between Prakashanand Saraswati and a
Hindutva activist; except for questions #6 and #7, Saraswati’s responses
are taken almost verbatim from his book.

Q1: The Western mind seems incapable of comprehending the significance
of our sacred places and rivers. Why would anyone want to take a dip in
the dirty waters of say, the river Ganges, they ask [6].

A: The holy rivers or places that come in the Puranas eternally exist
as the Divine personalities, or the Divine existences in the Divine
abode of the supreme God. Their representation in the from of rivers or
places on the land of India is a kind of holy manifestation of the
Divinity on the material plane for the devotional benefit of the
devotees of God, just like the Vedas and the Puranas are in a book form
in the material world and they are in their Divine form in the Divine
world.

Q2: How different are the western religions from our Bhartiya religion [7]?

A: In no way could there be any comparison of the western religions
(which are based on mythologies) with the Hindu Vedic religion which is
eternal, universal and is directly revealed by the supreme God.

Q3: The California textbooks refer to some of our sacred texts as myths…

A: Divine writings cannot be analyzed in a material way. How could a
worldly being, possessed with the vehemence of his own passions and
desires, try to argue with the writings of Sages and Saints whose entire
life was a divine benevolence for the souls of the world? You should
know that all of our religious writings are Divine facts, and facts
always remain facts, they cannot become myths. Using the word myth for
our religious history is a serious spiritual transgression.

Q4: In the California struggle, the anti-Hindu side has gotten a lot of
support from scholars and academics specializing in South Asia. Is this
of any consequence?

A: It is a fact that in the world almost all the academic literature in
English about Hinduism, even by Hindu writers, bears the western
influence, and that, none of these books represent the correct view of
total authentic Hinduism. Historians forget that one cannot determine
the history of Bharatvarsh on meager archaeological findings of coins,
toys and pots. Whereas the general history of Bharatvarsh is already
written in its scriptures and the Puranas whose texts and the
philosophical descriptions are the outcome of the Gracious and
benevolent minds of eternal Saints.

Also, arguing about the proven facts of the Bhartiya history (which are
re-authenticated by our great Masters) by a worldly person (even if he
is a higher degree holder) who is attached to his intellectual,
emotional and sensual enjoyments of a pure worldly nature, is like a
school going science student, who has read some science fiction stories,
happens to visit NASA Research Institute and sneaks into the research
chamber and starts telling the scientists how they are. But, this is the
age of the freedom of speech, anyone could say anything; still the fact
remains the fact and the fiction remains the fiction.

Q5. But, Swamiji, some people dismiss such attitudes as
anti-intellectualistic…

A: Some people have a critical nature and a leaning towards
non-Godliness which is the sign of the impiousness of their heart and
the biased structure of their mind. It is the nature of such people that
they cannot tolerate to read or hear about the authentic and eternal
Divineness of Bhartiya religion and Bhartiya history which is described
in the Puranas especially in the Bhagwatam. It is thus wise to leave
them to live with their own beliefs and don’t try to unnecessarily argue
with them to accept the right thing.

Q6: Swamiji, you write in your book: “We find that the ancient society
of Greece had adopted certain social customs that were prevailing in
India. Such as: the husband headed the family and the wife ran the
household affairs; parents arranged and decided their children’s
marriage; a girl was controlled and protected by her parents before
marriage and by her husband after marriage; and many more such customs.”
The California textbooks say the same — that “men had many more rights
than women” – but the Hindu Education Foundation has called this a
distortion of truth and the Hindu American Foundation has threatened to
sue the California State Board over this (and other things).

A: I don’t take much interest in such worldly matters, puthra (son).

Q7: In two years, Texas school textbooks (dealing with Indian history)
will be up for review. “Anything is possible in Bush-land” your devotees
say, and a friend has claimed that the “Hindu American community of
Texas has already started gearing up for quite some time now, and has
been historically very well organized for over a decade.” What are your
thoughts on this fight closer home?

A: Puthra, the whole brahmand (universe) is the creation of our Lord.
Such geographical differences don’t matter to us Swamis; California or
Texas or New Delhi, it’s all the same for us. And if we don’t succeed
the first time, we won’t quit. As Swami Vivekanand said: “Arise, awake
and stop not till the goal is reached.”

Q8: Swamiji, could you comment on the Divinity of our scriptures?

A: Bhartiya scriptures are the Divine powers eternally residing in
the Divine abode of God. With the will of God they are introduced in the
world through Brahma who transfers this knowledge to the Rishis (Sages).
Later on those Rishis reproduce them in the form of scriptures; their
very first manifestation was trillions of years ago when our Brahmand
(universe) along with the planetary system was originally created by
Brahma. Our scriptures also reveal the various sciences (Sanskrit
grammar and language, astrology, sociology, defense and medicine etc.)
for the good of the people of the world in general. It is an axiom that
everything that is produced by God is eternal, because God is eternal.
Thus, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of the path to God are both
eternal, and the scriptures containing those knowledges along with the
Sanskrit language are also eternal. And the Vedas and the Upnishads
themselves reveal their own eternity along with the other scriptures as
well as the Sanskrit grammar also.

Q9: Papal infallibility adds an aura to the Catholic Church. Are
Bhartiya scriptures infallible too?

A: Bhartiya must know that our scriptures were produced by God
Himself Who is the creator of the entire universe, and they were
introduced in the world by Brahma who is the creator of this very
brahmand. Thus, they are the absolute truth and there could never be a
mistake in their philosophy. Whatever theoretical discrepancies are
found between Bhartiya scriptures and the modern science, they are only
in the theories of the worldly scientists because they are the products
of material minds.

Q10: What can (potential) participants in the 4-week study course (based
on your book) offered by the Vedic Foundation learn about Bhartiya
scriptures?

A: In the Bhartiya scriptures, sincere intellectuals find all the
answers of their intellectual quest; pious scientists find the
consolence of their heart and a guideline for their future research;
truthful scholars find the philosophy of their liking that opens the
path to God; and the selfless devotees of God find such a sure and
simple path of devotion and adoration to their beloved God that fills
their heart and mind with the sweetness of the devotional love. An
impious mind does not accept the Divine truth.

Q11: Thanks, Swamiji, for your concise definitions of sincerity, piety,
truthfulness and selflessness. But why have the scientists ignored the
wealth of knowledge in our scriptures, and instead propounded such
fantastic theories as the Big Bang? Are they all impious?

A: Hindu scriptures reveal the scientific axioms that are extremely
helpful in the research and the development of science. But, the
intelligentsia of the world as well as the researchers of the physical
sciences, being skeptical of Hindu religion, never thought of using the
scientific knowledge of the Upnishads and the Puranas to promote their
study and researches in the right direction. Had they trusted the Divine
greatness of our scriptures, the scientific achievements of the world
would have been much more positive, productive and directed towards the
right direction.

Q12: Do our scriptures discuss the science of creation?

A: Of course, they do! Our scriptures describe the origin, evolution
and the creation of this universe which is apparently the manifestation
of an endless, eternal and lifeless energy that works with the help of
God and involves unlimited number of infinitesimal souls which remain
under its bondage. They are the manifestations of the same Divine power
which has created this universe and so they bear the true principles of
the creation and the evolution science. According to the Bhagwatam,
which represents the total knowledge of all the Bhartiya scriptures, our
planetary system (along with all the celestial abodes) was originally
created by Brahma 155.5219719616 trillion years ago.

Q13: Thanks, Swamiji. Such accurate estimates of the age of the universe
are indeed a tribute to Vedic astronomy and mathematics. However, when
Christian theories of creation have failed in the west, how can we hope
for acceptance of the Bhartiya theory of creation?

A: One thing we must know is that most of the scientists,
archaeologists and geologists, who directly deal with the natural
phenomena all the time in their life, do not believe in God; because the
dogmatic God of the Bible does not appeal to their intellect and they
are mostly unaware of the universal Graciousness of the Hindu religion.
So, they don’t want to bring God into their theory. However, I share Dr.
Deendayal Khandelwal’s hope that “the facts brought to light in this
book about creation and languages will lead to new research in the
fields of anthropology and astronomy and will lead (both Indians and
non-Indians) to search for new directions for research in the fields of
physical sciences based on the Hindu scriptural statements.” I also hope
that more people will echo the thoughts of Dr. Mahesh Mehta, founder of
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America: “The time has come that the
scientific knowledges of the Upnishads in relation to the Creation
should be considered as a guideline for further researches in cosmology.”

Q14: Your thoughts on Sanskrit…

A: Sanskrit is the language of the Divine abodes, which are inhabited
with unlimited Saints who are always drowned in the felicity of the
Bliss of their beloved God. Being the Divine language it is perfect by
its own nature. The perfection of the pronunciation and the uniqueness
of the grammar that stays the same in all the ages (from the very
beginning of human civilization and up till today) are such features
which themselves prove that Sanskrit is not man-made; it is a divine
gift to the people of this world. Sanskrit language has never had any
dialect, and in every age and in every corner of this brahmand (and the
earth planet) it always remains the same. To understand the Divine
greatness of the Sanskrit language, you have to know the origination and
the shortcomings of the western languages.

Q15: For the uninitiated, could you describe the salient features of our
religion?

A: The religion of Bharatvarsh is the direct descension of the Grace
of God which is manifested in the form of our Divine scriptures. They
reveal the total philosophy of each and every aspect of God and the
creation of this universe, and, at the same time, they also reveal the
process of God realization with all the necessary informations, whatever
a devotee may need during his devotional period … The history and the
religion of Bharatvarsh are not like the history and the religion of the
western world which contains the accounts and the ideologies of the
material beings; this is the description of the Divine personalities,
Divine acts of our Sages and Saints, Divine descensions, and the
knowledge of the Divine approach to God that enables a soul to receive
God realization.

Q16: Thanks, Swamiji, that was very enlightening! But why doesn’t the
West appreciate the Divine Divinity of our Divine culture?

A: This is the age of materialism called kaliyug that started 5,101
years ago (3102 BC). The effects of kaliyug are to despise the Divine
truth and to elevate the anti-God elements in the name of God. In the
last 200 years such despisations were much greater when the English
regime tried to destroy the culture and the religion of India by all
means, and, during that time, they deliberately produced such derogatory
literatures in huge quantities that confused and misguided the whole
world. Trying to impose the worldliness of their own culture upon the
Hindu faith, they introduced such fictitious theories and disparaging
dogmas that produced a derogatory and demeaning view of Hinduism. These
publications affected the minds of Hindu writers to such an extent that
they also began to think and write on the same lines.

Q17: Swamiji, you say: “Through its unbroken [1,900 million-years-old
Ganges valley] civilization, India provides an unbroken Divine facility
to obtain the Divine knowledge and to proceed on the path to God
realization to the souls of the whole world.” How do we account for our
current subordinate status?

A: Our Divine teachings were restricted from reaching the souls of the
world by extensively promulgating the adverse propagations about
Bhartiya (Hindu) religion and culture by the Britishers of that time,
and in this way the whole world remained bereft of the true knowledge of
God realization. Thus, they deceived and misguided the whole world by
such acts that damaged the spiritual growth of millions of people of the
world. Its effects have gone so deep in the Hindu society that many of
the followers of Hinduism are not bereft of its damaging effects and it
shows up in their writings. All this has ruined the image of the Divine
greatness of Bhartiya religion and history.

Q18: In your 800-page masterpiece, you describe in copious detail the
damage caused to Hindu society by British rule (and also due to the
Muslim invasions). I am glad that there’s hardly any mention of caste in
your book, all this noise about caste and caste-based discrimination is
very unnerving and so anti-Hindu.

The swami flashes a knowing smile and takes off on his Pushpak
Vimana, “which could fly at the speed of thought” [8]

Notes

1) The California struggle’s significance for the Sangh Parivar is best
illustrated by the Organiser’s (the RSS’s English mouthpiece) keen
interest in this issue, the active participation of numerous Hindutva
ideologues from India, and this premature proclamation of victory by an
activist during a global RSS meeting held in Ahmedabad in December 2005:
“Through the Hindu Education Foundation run by the RSS in California, we
have succeeded in correcting the misleading information in text books
for primary and secondary classes.” [The Times of India, Ahmedabad
Edition, Dec 31, 2005] The political significance of this struggle was
not lost on the other side as well, as numerous activist (including
Dalit) groups and academics who had fought against the RSS’s
saffronization project in India also wrote to the Board.

2) See the letter here.
This is an excellent resource page
for the California struggle. For a concise overview of this issue,
see “History Hungama: California Textbook Debate”.
The South Asia Citizens Web is an excellent
resource page for Hindutva attempts at writing history in India.

3) Ruder Finn’s President James Harff once said, “We are not paid to be
moral.” That he really meant what he said is evident from Ruder Finn’s
activities in the past few years and their current support of Hindutva.
For more on Ruder Finn, see PRWatch.org.

4) Not surprisingly, the book has won laurels from senior Hindutva
ideologues like Tarun Vijay [Editor of the RSS’s Hindi weekly,
Panchjanya], Vishnu Hari Dalmia (President of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad)
and Mahesh Mehta (founder of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America).

5) The invention of a distant Golden Age is one of the cornerstones of
the Hindutva ideology. As Christopher Jaffrelot explains, upper caste
Hindus sought to maintain the basic elements of the (hierarchical)
traditional social order by simultaneously stigmatizing and emulating
those who allegedly threatened Hindu society. “The tension between
cultural preservation and modernization was solved through the invention
of a distant Golden Age which was both indigenous and in accord with
modern values.” Prakashanand Saraswati’s fulfils both objectives — it
invents a Golden past whose accomplishments not only measure up well
against the present, but were better in all respects!

6) White America is often uncritical of its own practices while sneering
at others’ irrationality, but that doesn’t make the latter any more
respectable. Institutional racism cannot be fought by glorifying
irrational practices and beliefs as minority rights, as the Hindutva
forces unsuccessfully attempted in California. Hindutva’s cynical
invocation of minority rights in California, even as their Indian
buddies are celebrating one of their Nazi-loving leaders, is just one
more example of their doublespeak. [Golwalkar, the second dictator of
the RSS, endorsed the Nazi Holocaust and called it “a good lesson for
us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.”] More on Golwalkar.

7) As Saraswati claims (and the RSS would gladly agree): “‘Bhartiya’
and ‘Hindu’ terms are synonymous. But when an emphasis is needed to
represent the spirituality of India we normally use the terms Bhartiya
and Bharatvarsh. Bharatvarsh (and its short term Bharat) is the original
Sanskrit term for India; and, that which is related to Bharatvarsh is
called Bhartiya.”

8) The Hindu Education Foundation’s “resources on Hinduism” page points
to this website that seeks to historify the mythical Pushpak Vimana
“which could fly at the speed of thought”!

The ground on which a United Nations conference takes place is No Man’s Land, outside the legal jurisdiction of the surrounding country. Here, in a barren field on the outskirts of Tunis, it is No Man’s Land par excellence.

Buses shuttle laptops -and their requisite laps- from tightly guarded hotels to a gigantic, tightly-guarded, white plastic tent here. Tunisians aren’t allowed anywhere near either the hotels or the tent. In fact, they’ve been sent on holiday. All schools and government offices are shut. The gigolos that normally press their services on female visitors must take a break or face jail. The streets are empty of traffic.

Inside the tent, the laptops can put conference information on websites, so laptops across the globe can get it. But not laptops in Tunisia. Such internet sites are blocked by the Tunisian government.

‘This is not what the internet was supposed to be about,’ several laps bleated loudly at conference sessions.

Supposed to be about? Duh, wasn’t the internet born as a US State Department project to hide information from the Soviets during the Cold War? I guess laps’ memory-banks only go back as far as the invention of Linux. The rest is prehistory, when homo-sapiens roamed the earth, not laptops.

Tunisia’s President, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who proposed this Summit, demonstrates the power of information technology. In Ben Ali’s hands, a simple fax machine is a thing of wonder. His face is everywhere, fluttering on pennants wreathing the city, leering at you from every hoarding, billboard and pillar. He seems to share a PR agent with Kim Jong Il, and a plastic surgeon with Berlosconi. Is it Botox, you wonder as you confront his pasty death-mask for the thousandth time, or cyber-mummification? Maybe he doesn’t even really exist; it was a hologram that spoke at the opening of the conference. The moment a foreign head-of-state referred to Ben Ali’s lack of devotion to freedom of information, the video feed conveniently stuttered and denied the world his words.

Yes, in the Information Society, things are easier, more efficient and speedy. Take hunger strikes for instance. Tunisian democracy activists learnt from information technology that every UN summit requires some drama, a riot or two perhaps, to grab a couple seconds of television time. With a zillion police and secret police ranging around, riots aren’t really advisable. The activists mounted a hunger strike instead. The press duly hared off to laud them. Once their images were digitally transmitted to a laptops round the world and the conference began to wind down, the hunger strikers went to lunch. Who said a hunger strike is a joy forever? Missing breakfast for democracy counts too. Where’s the rule that says you have to die for your cause? That might put you in the same category as suicide bombers.

The People Have no Bread? Let them Eat Gobble-de-Geek

And the Information society is to end hunger, not prolong it. Techno-geeks from Microsoft, Ericcson, Nokia -all the usual suspects- have mounted dazzling exhibitions to show the UN how they will solve the 3rd world’s problems. As we know, UN bureaucrats’ main task is to pile jargon onto jargon until it becomes gobbledegook. Here it became gobbledegeek.

Take the fact that African teachers are dying of AIDS or running off to Britain where they can earn a pittance. UNESCO has a cunning plan to end this. You know all those grandmothers and aunties left behind in places like Lesotho to care for the AIDS patients and AIDS-orphaned? Well, the geeks are going to turn them into teachers.

Never mind the fact that AIDS has already turned them into nurses. Never mind that they themselves are illiterate, speak languages no laptop has ever heard, have no computers… or electricity to run computers. Never mind that they have to scrape a living to feed the orphans as well… and gather firewood… and spend 12 hours a day trudging uphill for water… and flee from rampaging soldiers… Never mind the fact that information technology hasn’t prevented a decline in basic skills like reading and arithmetic in the developed world.

How are those 3rd world losers going to afford Microsoft’s services? Privatisation, of course. Sell the telecommunications companies they invested in during pre-history, when people used their heads to think, not their laps.

The Jamaican government has a cunning plan to combat poverty, its minister revealed. Jamaica is going to sell its telecommunications company and invest in broadband. How will that combat poverty? Jamaica will still have no economic resources except cocaine-trafficking. Perhaps the traffickers will become more efficient. They are avid users of information technology; each of them carries around not one, but five, mobile phones. In any case, it’s only in prehistory that poverty was defined as a lack of food and shelter. The UN has added ‘information-poverty’ to the definition.

If you have nothing to privatise, the World Bank will lend you money to pay Microsoft and the other usual suspects… and add to your debt burden.

The World Bank also had a cunning plan. The World Bank also had a cunning plan. It flew in a woman from India to reveal how information technology was making the poor less poor. She came armed with a brilliantly-organised power-point presentation – but argued instead that food and shelter were the real priorities of the poor, not information technology. And she was backed up by the latest research.

A very broad and systematic study, published by a British university two months ago, showed that only 2% of people in rural areas of developing countries are interested in the internet as a source of information. People prefer radio and television. But that’s prehistoric technology involving journalists. In the Information Society, bloggers are the heroes of the day. In the tower of babble that is the internet, ‘the moon in Aries is causing your poverty’ has equal weight to ‘government corruption is causing poverty’.

The white men in suits purveyed their gobbledegeek using a prehistoric tool – the mouth. Guess whose words are carrying the day? It doesn’t matter what technology you use, here, or what hard information you have. It’s how much money, or how many guns, which amounts to the same thing: power.

So the information society is going to be business – as usual. Let’s face it. Mobile phones are mainly used to tell your wife you’re going to be late for dinner. And the research shows that poor people want them for the same purpose, keeping in touch with their relatives. With markets in the developed world saturated, Nasdec shareholders are looking towards 3rd world. In Sri Lanka, people are willing to spend a whopping 15% of their incomes on phone services. Those who have incomes, that is.

The Chinese are spectacularly absent from this Summit, apart from their official delegation. While we are fantasising about the society of the future, they are busy creating it.

This article was written for a Dutch newsmagazine at the end of last year during the summit on the information society.

Niala Maharaj is a writer based in Amsterdam. Her first novel, Like Heaven, will be published by Random House on June 1. Her website is here.

The following was Maryam Namazie’s speech at a free speech march in Trafalgar Square in London on March 25, 2006.

• In Iran, Tehran bus workers demanding their rights have been arrested, including their wives and children, and some tortured.
• In Afghanistan, teachers defending the right of girls to an education are threatened with death.
• In Iraq, women’s rights activists are threatened for demanding equality and freedom.
• In Iran, journalists who published a satirical article comparing the advent of Khomeini to AIDS are languishing in prison…
• In Yemen, Mohammad Al Asadi, an editor, is facing execution for recounting how Mohammad approved of the killing of a woman who had insulted him.

The list is endless…

Too many more nameless, faceless human beings across the globe are maimed, threatened, killed, bound and gagged for speaking out and expressing themselves.

And it’s not just ‘over there’, but right here…

• A website in Sweden publishing the Mohammad caricatures is shut down.
• Editors are fired in France.
• The Behzti play is shut down after Sikhs are offended by it.
• A Scottish cancer charity is intimidated into not accepting money raised by ‘Jerry Springer the Opera’.
• Writers living and writing here, including myself, are threatened to death on threads of umma.net.
• People are arrested and summoned to court for carrying placards or flyers with the Mohammad caricatures on them [in fact Reza Moradi was told he will be summoned to court for ‘offending’ someone because he carried a placard with the Mohammad caricatures at the March 25 free speech rally – more on this later].

Clearly, free speech and expression are not luxuries or western values. They are essential for people everywhere.

And what more and more people are standing up and saying after government upon government and organisation upon organisation demanded apologies for the Mohammad caricatures and gave them on all our behalves is that they are not up for sale.

We know better.

Any limits on free speech & expression are really attempts by those in power or vying for power to limit our rights and the rights of the population at large.

Don’t be duped into thinking otherwise.

And that is why the defence of free speech and expression are so intrinsically linked to the defence of other rights. You cannot defend one without the others. You cannot defend one without also defending the right to asylum, the right to strike and organisation, labour rights, women’s and children’s rights, the right to live in a secular society, the right to equality and freedom, universal rights, the right to religion and atheism and belief as a private matter, the right to live lives worthy of 21st century humanity and of course vice versa. You cannot defend humanity without defending its right to speak and express itself…

For this, nothing can be deemed sacred except the human being.

Defining certain expressions and speech as sacred is merely a tool for the suppression of society; saying speech and expression offends is in fact an attempt to restrict it.

And of course what is held most sacred and deemed to offend the most especially in this New World Order is criticism and ridiculing of religion and its representatives of earth.

Why do it if it offends? Because it must be done.

Because ridiculing is a form of criticism, is a form of resistance, is a serious form of opposing reaction!

Whilst we may all be sometimes offended by some things, it is religion and the religious that are offended all of the time. They alone seem to have a monopoly on being offended, saying their beliefs are a no go area, and silencing all those who offend.

And don’t think this reactionary rightwing political Islamic movement is only offended by a criticism of Islam or Mohammad. [I am focusing on this because it is a movement in power.] It is offended if you hold hands on the streets, have sex outside of marriage; it is offended if you are unveiled or improperly veiled; it is offended if you listen to certain music or if you teach evolution and science or if you dare to teach girls; it is offended if you are gay; if you are a woman; – many of which are by the way punishable by death or at the very least flogging and imprisonment in many countries under the rule of Islam….

It is interesting how the political Islamic movement kills, it maims, it humiliates – with Islam as its banner – and we are not even allowed to ridicule and criticise it.

Religion considers a woman as worth half a man, gays as perversions, sex outside of marriage as sinful, and so on and so forth but it is a few caricatures that are offensive!

Offensive or not, sacred or not – religion and superstition – Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Scientology and so on – must be open to all forms of criticism and ridicule.

It must be first and foremost because religion is not something from eras past but because it is as a political movement wreaking havoc across the world. Not a second passes without some atrocity being committed by it. It hangs people from cranes and lamp posts, it stones people to death – in the 21 century – with the law even specifying the size of the stone to be used, it amputates and decapitates.

It must be criticised and ridiculed because that is how throughout history reaction was pushed back.

That is how throughout history society has managed to advance and progress.

Why this should be seen as an attack on Muslims or Christians or Sikhs or Scientologists per se is beyond me. Is an attack on the belief and practice of Female Genital Mutilation an attack on girls who have been mutilated? Is the criticism of Israeli state terrorism an attack on Jews? Is an attack on the BNP that promotes Christian culture or the Christian Council of Britain it has recently established, or the ridiculing of Jesus racism against Christians? No of course not. And the same applies to the Muslim Council of Britain, Hamas, the Islamic Regime in Iran and the Mohammad caricatures.

Islamophobia – and now by the way the Church has asked that Christianity-phobia also be included in UN rights terminology – none are racism because criticisms of a religion, idea, a belief and even the practices that result from beliefs – even a phobia and hatred against beliefs have nothing to do with racism against real live human beings.

Saying it is so is merely part of the effort to make it such in order to silence criticism of religion and the political movement that holds it up as its banner.

The world is today threatened and taken hostage by two poles of terrorism. The state terrorism led by the United States on the one hand and the political Islamic movement on the other share a lot more than they let on. After all they were former friends and many of them still are. Both use religion to attack the gains made by humanity in centuries past. Both defend religion and use it.

Freedom of speech and expression are one of the few means at the disposal of many to resist this terrorism and its attack on universal values and norms.

We must defend it unconditionally. There can be no ifs ands or buts.

Readers of the March 27, 2006, issue of Newsweek were greeted with the cover-story “news” that “Freud Is Not Dead.” Three items attempted to make that point in different ways. The author of the main article, Jerry Adler, consulted many people, including me, before writing his article. Readers of Butterflies and Wheels who took note of Newsweek’s spring offensive may be interested to see the e-mailed answers I gave to Mr. Adler’s questions, along with two subsequent assessments that I offered him after his piece was published. You will see, below, that I among others offered Newsweek reason to think clearly about the dubious nature of the editors’ attempted Freud revival.

The inconsecutive nature of my paragraphs reflects the various questions that Mr. Adler posed to me.

First response:

My answers to almost all of your questions can be found, with
references, in the editorial parts of my anthology Unauthorized Freud
(Viking, or a Penguin paperback, 1998), which you may or may not have
had time to peruse.

One set of questions can be answered summarily: of course Freud’s
influence in our culture has been pervasive. Nobody doubts it, so
that surely can’t be the news item.

A more interesting question would be whether any evidence–recognized
as such by uncommitted and scientifically well-informed parties–has
recently, or ever, come to light in support of Freud’s specific
propositions about the mind. That issue was thoroughly addressed a
few years ago by the philosopher of science Edward Erwin in a book
called A Final Accounting. Its conclusion was that no corroborative
evidence whatsoever has been found. The same conclusion emerges from
Malcolm Macmillan’s great study Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc
(1991; revised 1997, with a foreword by me).

How can this be, if, as you say, your own dreams and slips appear to
vindicate Freud’s views? The answer is that scientific validation
requires more than the reporting of phenomena that seem consistent
with a given theory. The same phenomena may admit of any number of
other explanations, some of them more consistent with Ockham’s razor
(the fewer gratuitous assumptions, the better). Thus, e.g., Sebastian
Timpanaro’s important book The Freudian Slip, while admitting the
possibility that deep unconscious conflict may explain some slips,
shows that Freud and his followers have ignored a range of much
simpler explanations. Until such explanations have been tested and
ruled out on strict empirical grounds, the theory of the Freudian slip
remains a parlor game and nothing more. And the same critique can be
applied to Freud’s dream theory, which (in The Interpretation of
Dreams) presumes the truth of its own suppositions and makes a number
of arbitrary and sneaky moves. The fact that you yourself can see
something “Freudian” in one or another of your dreams attests to the
theory’s influence but not to its cogency.

Two years ago, your colleague Fred Guterl wrote a rather sensational
cover story about “What Freud Got Right,” relying heavily on the
testimony of the neuroscientist Mark Solms, who purported to find the
neurobiology of dreaming to be strongly supportive of Freud’s notions.
What Mr. Guterl neglected to mention was that Solms is a
psychoanalyst, an editor of Freud’s writings, an official of the Anna
Freud Centre, and an ardent public advocate whose views about
psychoanalysis-&-dreaming are by no means shared by his scientific
colleagues, who find them amusing at best. On a deeper level, Mr.
Guterl failed to understand the point I have made above: that
resemblances between a given phenomenon–e.g., dreaming–and a given
theory in no way constitute a triumph for the theory. (Guterl and I
had a civil correspondence about this.)

One rational way of judging whether Freudian propositions have found
empirical support might be to bypass the print wars between Freudians
and anti-Freudians and simply look at the research being done in
academic psychology departments. A recent citation study (by Robbins
et al.) found that, for several decades now, the major journals of the
field have completely ignored all psychoanalytic claims. Nor, I
believe, can you find a single course, in the psychology department of
any reputable American university, that treats Freudianism as anything
other than a historical curiosity.

Why not? It’s because academic psychology concerns itself with
testable hypotheses that stand a chance of vindication through
controlled experimentation–and because nothing in Freudian psychology
is sufficiently free of ambiguity and self-contradiction, or
sufficiently close to raw experience, to be of empirical interest.
This virtually unanimous verdict of the people who are most qualified
to pass judgment ought, I think, to count more with Newsweek than the
perpetuation of folklore that has been culturally, but never
scientifically, accepted since the early years of the twentieth
century.

I don’t know whether you yourself are a veteran of psychoanalytic
therapy, but at present nearly all of the remaining enthusiasm for
Freudian theory comes from such veterans, who feel that their
experience on the couch has borne out some of Freud’s propositions.
Suffice it to say that all therapeutic regimens produce such
conviction in their satisfied clients. Indeed, the beliefs thus
acquired may actually work some positive therapeutic effects–why not?
But at the same time, the highly suggestive conditions under which
they are acquired disqualifies them as evidence for the objective
truth of any given proposition.

You ask, in a different vein, about the credit Freud ought to receive
for having recognized our darker nature and freeing us from
common-sense verities. Well, I agree that there is nothing
commonsensical about psychoanalysis and that the Freudian movement
stirred intellectuals and artists to value and explore “the
irrational.” But Freud greatly, and systematically, exaggerated his
originality, and his followers have maintained the sham to this day.
Nietzsche alone, to mention no other name, anticipated Freud in a
number of ways–but without the shallow pretense of having
scientifically demonstrated the mechanics of the mind.

Have you seen Henri Ellenberger’s historical masterpiece of 1970, The
Discovery of the Unconscious? In it you would find that virtually all
of Freud’s general ideas about the unconscious, psychic conflict,
dream life, etc., were richly anticipated by authors whom he had
assuredly read. And on the central topic of sexuality, Freud
plagiarized notions that were current in the “sexology” of his
day–and he placed a more prurient and prudish construction on those
notions than did their actual originators (Moll, Krafft-Ebing, Ellis,
et al.). Freud’s great public success lay in portraying himself as
the only anti-Victorian in the game, a man of tremendous courage and
ascetic scientific integrity. It was all utter bullshit, and his
contemporaries knew it and were justly scornful of his pretensions.
For extensive documentation of that fact, see a wonderful new book in
French, Le dossier Freud, by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu
Shamdasani.

Of course, there are a number of points on which Freud was quite
original; and those are the ones that deserve to be scrutinized if you
are seriously interested in his “contribution.” There are, e.g., the
death instinct, the inherent penis envy and masochism of women, the
universal Oedipus complex, the latency period, the vaginal orgasm, the
primal crime committed by the primal horde, and the phylogenetic
inheritance of memory traces from that event. All of these ideas are
now embarrassments. Consequently, Freudians fall back on the banal
commonplaces about the deep, dark soul–ideas whose genealogy goes
back at least to Mesmer and in some cases to Plato. What needs to be
emphasized, in any case, is that the same daffy method that led Freud
to psychoanalyze our first non-simian ancestors also underlay his
“clinical discoveries,” none of which were actually inferred from
inductive experience. The man was simply a wild speculator whose
habit was to invent after-the-fact “evidence” for whatever pet idea he
harbored at the moment. The evidence was always a perfect match for
the theory–a sure tip-off to scientific fraudulence.

I do hope that Newsweek will recognize this time, as it didn’t two
years ago, that matters of psychological theory are best decided not
by partisans like Solms and me but by the relevant scientific
community, whose critiques of one another’s hypotheses guarantee a
certain level of rigor. As I’ve said, there is no longer any doubt
about the standing of psychoanalysis among serious independent
inquirers into mental processes. If your editors recognize that fact
but persist, once again, in dredging up the perennial saws about “what
Freud got right,” they will have shamed themselves once more.

Second response:

In the 50s and 60s I absorbed the standard Partisan Review truisms
about the courageous Freudian exploration of the deep, dark human mind.
But in the later 60s I found myself unable to answer penetrating
criticisms by Karl Popper, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook, and others, all
showing quite damningly that psychoanalytic theory is an exercise in
circularity. That is, the “proof” of Freudian concepts is an illusory
effect produced by the application of those same concepts to
experience. It’s scarcely different in kind from materializations of
the Virgin Mary, which, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, are granted only to
gullible Catholics. If the Virgin manifested herself to me, that would
be news; but it is just as unlikely as a Freudian’s finding anything
non-Freudian about some aspect of mental life.

People of a Freudian bent just can’t bring themselves to believe that I
and other apostates have found rational grounds for disbelief that
proved compelling on rational grounds. That’s because an essential
feature of the system is ad hominem slander of any and all critics,
whose dissent must be caused by Freudian factors within their twisted
minds. As someone (Richard Armstrong) recently wrote, it’s as if Darwin
were to have answered his opponents by saying that their failure to
appreciate his theory resulted from their being insufficiently evolved.

Psychoanalysis remains seductive for a number of reasons, of which I
will mention just a few. Secular intellectuals vibrate to Freud’s
sardonic attack on religion and his invitation to “deep knowers” to see
through the sunny illusions of the bourgeoisie. Academic humanists find
that by entering Freud’s world of interlocking symbols and facile
causal assertions, they will never run out of shrewd-looking,
counterintuitive things to say in their essays and books. (It isn’t
always easy to distinguish between actual belief in psychoanalysis and
tenure-minded careerism.) People who are just now overcoming a
repressive provincial upbringing are often dazzled by, and grateful
for, the Freudian emphasis on sexual health. Many top editors,
publishers, and pundits are brainwashed graduates (or perennial
undergraduates) of psychoanalytic therapy. And finally, the Freud
legend–that Promethean story about a single individual who heroically
overcame his repugnance, unlocked humankind’s best-kept secret, the
repressed unconscious, and returned from the underworld to save us
all–continues to be successfully peddled. Newsweek, it must be said,
has done its part in keeping this myth from joining that of Orpheus on
the fiction shelf.

[Peter] Swales’s thesis about Minna [Bernays] has much going for it, including direct testimony by several knowledgeable parties, such as C. G. Jung. But of course it has nothing to do with the correctness or incorrectness of Freudian theory. The people who mention it most often are Freudians,
who cite it as an absurdity that typifies the thinking of all “Freud
bashers.” If you’re really interested in this sidelight, see John
Kerr’s book A Most Dangerous Method.

As for Swales’s aliquis case, which is intimately connected to his
thesis about Freud and Minna, Swales’s 1982 article has been
spectacularly vindicated, with quite conclusive new evidence, in a
recent article by Richard Skues; and that vindication is all the more
impressive because Skues himself has been a fierce defender of Freud.
For those of us who are more concerned with Freud’s scientific ethics
than with his sex life, the bottom line in the aliquis matter is this:
Freud was so unscrupulous that he was willing to invent whole
personages who would attest to the rightness of his theory and the
infallible brilliance of his deductive powers. In other words, once
again, you are dealing with a charlatan here.

The Freud Archive was assembled by Kurt Eissler, who urged the various
donors to stipulate ridiculously long periods of censorship in their
bequests. Eissler’s explicitly stated view was that the world was not
yet ready to learn what the documents contained about the man Freud;
there were too many anti-psychoanalytic types out there who would
misuse the information.

It wasn’t Masson’s (invaluable) Freud-Fliess letters that broke the
logjam, but rather Janet Malcolm’s book of 1984. Malcolm, a loyal
Freudian, made fun of both Masson and Swales, implying that their
strange personalities were more or less what you’d expect from any
anti-Freudian; but as an investigative journalist, she also mocked
Eissler for his timid secrecy. Eissler’s successors at the Library of
Congress have been mightily embarrassed by Malcolm’s scorn, and they’ve
done what they can to undo Eissler’s Orwellian effort. A great many
documents were finally declassified in 2000, and the Library is very
cooperative now in dealing with scholars. Even so, many transcripts of
documents retain Eissler’s blacking-out of patients’ names, as if
people who have been dead for 70 years or so are still at risk of
shame. Moreover, censorship of some files remains in place.

You could do me a favor by sending me some version of your article when
it’s done. I gave up my subscription to Newsweek when, for the
umpteenth time, it indulged in its bad habit of pandering to Christian
superstition. The big “news” question on the cover, as I recall, was
whether the Virgin did or didn’t ascend bodily to heaven–but the
details escape me now.

First post-publication response:

There is indeed much pro-&-con in your article, and I was glad to see
Swales’s aliquis thesis affirmed. The fact that Jonathan Lear doesn’t
care a whit about manufactured evidence is also useful news, I’d say.
But in general, the three items leave a distinctly biased impression,
ranging from a failure to address the (missing) evidential base of
Freud’s ideas to subtle ad hominem shading. Yours truly, e.g., is
portrayed as a “caustic” climber who “made his reputation” at the
expense of the defenseless Freud, whereas Lear, a lay analyst, is
presented as a serenely reliable authority on what Freud taught us all.
More important, it simply isn’t true that neuroscience is validating
repression in particular and psychoanalysis in general. But what’s the
use of complaining, when Newsweek‘s devotion to Freud is second only to its devotion to Jesus?

Second post-publication response:

You did do a good job of juggling all the balls that were tossed at
you. For me, however, the bottom line is that Newsweek can look
straight at scientific fraud–that “sinkhole of circular logic,” plus
the brazen invention of “evidence”–and nevertheless declare its
gratitude to Freud for having uncovered the essentially conflictual
nature of the mind (a nature already acknowledged as such by Plato).
Those of us who ask that a scientist meet ordinary criteria of prudence
and honesty continue to be treated as suspect gadflies whose objections
must stem from some private compulsion or ambition; but when
psychoanalysts praise psychoanalysis, that’s still regarded as weighty
information.

Newsweek had an opportunity to distinguish clearly between the vague honor that Freud heaped upon himself for facing our “dark nature” and
his actual, specific propositions, not a single one of which has been
corroborated. Instead, the net effect of the three articles is to keep
the threadbare legend intact.

By the way, Jonathan Lear is no “psychiatrist.” He’s an academic
philosopher who underwent Freudian therapy and was so impressed by it
that he took the requisite courses and became a lay analyst. All
psychiatrists, as I’m sure you know, possess the M.D. degree.

Here is a good story: a 26-year-old patent clerk, having
studied theoretical physics largely on his own,
publishes in a single year four extraordinary papers
that revolutionise physics. Most of us believe, for
many reasons, that this story is true. We say that in
1905 it actually happened that it is history.

Still, we know that it is unlikely that a single
person in a single year can be so successful in physics.
Accordingly, some people have formulated hypotheses
to explain Albert Einstein’s productivity. Recently, some have argued that he worked with a secret collaborator, his first wife Mileva Marić. It
would be an extraordinary story. Famous physicist
steals credit from his modest wife. Such a story, if
true, would be of great interest to social historians,
and it would serve as a vehicle for reaffirming the
rights of women and for encouraging female students
to study physics. In that sense, it’s a good story. But
is it true?

Like many extraordinary stories, it might be
tempting to simply disbelieve it, to dismiss it as
fiction. But if you are a teacher, you may soon find
that some of your students ask you ‘Is it true that
Einstein’s wife co-authored his famous theories? ’
Because, there are currently several books and many
Internet websites that ascribe to Mileva Marić a
contributing role in the creation of Einstein’s works.

In 2003, television stations in the United States and other countries began to broadcast a documentary
called Einstein’s Wife (see end-note 1). It overviewed
Marić’s life and highlighted the idea that perhaps she
contributed to Einstein’s scientific works. The
programme was accompanied by a PBS Internet
website (including various errors) on Marić’s life. It
features an online poll on whether she collaborated
with Einstein. It asks: ‘Was it really possible for Albert
alone to produce all the phenomenal physics
generated during 1905?’ Currently, 75 per cent of the
people polled responded that Marić indeed
collaborated with Einstein.The website beckons: ‘Did
Mileva Marić collaborate with Einstein? You Decide!
Take our online poll.’ As if history were a matter of
democratic votes.

Carl Sagan used to say: ‘extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence ’. So let’s analyse some
of the ‘evidence’ that the proponents of Marić have
highlighted. By doing so, teachers and laypersons can
increasingly distinguish the various degrees to which
misinformation can be misconstrued as history.

Evidence in context

In the 1980s, old letters between Einstein and Marić
were made public by members of their family. In some
of those letters, written around 1900, Einstein briefly
alluded to projects on which the two seem to have
collaborated. He used expressions such as ‘our
research’, ‘our paper ’ and, most interesting, ‘our work
on relative motion’ (Renn and Schulmann, 1992: 41,
39). Specialists in history of physics were fascinated
but concluded that such letters are just too vague, and
do not establish that Marić contributed in any of
Einstein’s publications. Still, plenty of non-specialists
also began to ponder roles that Marić conceivably
could have played.

Consider an example. Christopher Jon Bjerknes,
author of Albert Einstein: the incorrigible plagiarist
(2002), claimed that ‘We have direct evidence from
Albert’s own pen that the work on relativity theory
was a collaboration between Mileva and him’
(p. 201). He cited the suggestive letter. Translated, the sentence
in question reads: ‘How happy and proud will I be,
when we both together have brought our work on the
relative motion victoriously to its end!’ (Stachel, 1987:
282, trans. AM.). Non-specialists might hastily conclude
that this letter refers to the theory of relativity.
But it does not. One important point that Bjerknes
omits is that the letter was written in 1901. By no
means did Einstein have the theory of relativity in
1901.At that time, he believed in the ether and sought
ways to detect its relative motion experimentally. This
problem of ‘the relative motion’ was a widespread
concern; many people aimed to solve it. Einstein
attempted many approaches until he abruptly devised
his theory in 1905.

Nevertheless, the letter constitutes evidence that
Einstein shared the aspiration with Marić, at least at a
time midway through the ten-year process during
which he pondered questions on relative motion. It is
well known that his obstinacy carried him through.
But what about her? We know that she failed college
examinations twice. She then abandoned her plan to
obtain the teaching degree. We also know that she
abandoned her efforts to do a PhD thesis (for more
on Marić, see Stachel, 1996).

Charitable exaggerations

One writer, Dord Krstic (1991), claimed that ‘From
the spring of 1898 until the fall of 1911,Mileva worked
daily at the same table with Albert – quietly, modestly,
and never in public view ’ (p. 98). This is a speculative
exaggeration. The two could not work ‘daily at the
same table’ because, of course, they were not always
at the same place. For example, from mid-1900 until
December 1902 they lived mostly in different cities,
even in different countries. Moreover, the two did not
leave any written evidence that they regularly worked
together on physics once they reunited in Bern,
Switzerland.

Regardless, Krstic wrote: ‘Almost simultaneously,
Marie Curie opened the door into the world of
radiophysics and radiochemistry and Mileva Einstein
bravely began to explore the secrets of quantum and
relativity – the fields that even today we call modern
physics’ (p. 85). Does it sound like a good story?

What role did Mileva play once she lived with
Einstein in Bern? It is well known that Einstein and
two friends,Moritz Solovine and Conrad Habicht, had
a discussion group that they called ‘the Olympia
Academy’. Their readings and discussions were very
influential in Einstein’s development. Nowadays,
some writers claim that Marić too was an active
participant. In the television programme, Einstein’s
Wife, the narrator says:

Maurice Solovine writes: Mileva would sit in
the corner during our meetings listening
attentively. She occasionally joined in. I found
her reserved, but intelligent, and clearly more
interested in physics than in housework.

Where did the producers of the show get this
information? The source can be traced to the book
Einstein in love , where Dennis Overbye wrote:

Marriage had made Mileva a de facto member
of the Olympia Academy, and Solovine later
recalled her sitting quietly in the corner during
the meetings at their apartment, following the
arguments but rarely contributing. He found her
reserved but intelligent, and clearly more
interested in physics than in housework.
(Overbye, 2000: 110)

This passage sounds plausible. Since Albert and
Mileva now lived together, it is easy to imagine that
Mileva now participated to some extent in the
meetings of the Academy. But what is the evidence?
What Solovine actually wrote was only that once
Einstein and Marić married:

That event did not effect any changes in our
meetings. Mileva, intelligent and reserved,
listened to us attentively, but never intervened in
our discussions.
(Solovine, 1956: xii, trans. A. M.)

Compare this passage to the derivative accounts.
Writers have skewed the history. Solovine did not
write that Marić ‘occasionally’ or ‘ rarely’ contributed,
nor that she was ‘clearly more interested in physics
than in housework ’. There is no evidence that she was
an active participant. In none of the correspondence
between Einstein, Habicht, and Solovine, does Marić
appear as a ‘member ’ of the Academy, nor even in
Marić’s own letters.

So readers beware. Moreover, errors lurk even in
reliable places. For example, the Collected papers of
Albert Einstein (Klein,Kox and Schulmann, 1993: 617)
state that the Academy began in Easter of 1903. But
that is a mistake. The meetings began in the Spring of
1902, months before Mileva lived in Bern (see, for
example, Solovine, 1956: vi).

Einstein had lively discussions with Solovine and
Habicht. He also greatly enjoyed discussing his
research with his close friend Michele Besso, whose
help he acknowledged in his first paper on relativity.
What about discussions with Marić? Consider a
statement that her proponents never cite. Philipp
Frank, a colleague and friend who interviewed
Einstein for a biography, noted that Marić ‘was
taciturn and reticent ’ and that ‘When he [Einstein]
wanted to tell her, as a fellow specialist, his ideas,
which overflowed from him, her reaction was so scant
and faint, that often he just did not know whether she
was interested or not ’ (Frank, 1949: 39, 44, trans.
A.M.).

Checking the sources

In her book, In the shadow of Albert Einstein: the
tragic life of Mileva Einstein-Marić , Desanka
Trbuhovic-Gjuric (1969/1993: 79) claimed that the
Russian physicist Abram Joffe, in his article ‘In
remembrance of Albert Einstein’, pointed out that the
1905 papers were originally signed ‘Einstein-Marić’.

Following Trbuhovic-Gjuric, Evan Harris Walker
wrote a letter to Physics Today , published in 1991,
reiterating the claim. Walker claimed that, regarding
the 1905 papers, Joffe noted that ‘Their author was
Einstein-Mariti’ (Walker, 1991: 123). That phrase is
Walker’s translation from an article of 1955 in
Russian. Furthermore, Michele Zackheim, in her book
Einstein’s daughter (1999: 19), stated that ‘Abram F.
Joffe, a Russian scientist, wrote in Meetings with
Physicists: my reminiscences of foreign physicists,
that three original manuscripts, including the one
describing the Special Theory of Relativity, were
signed “Einstein-Marity” .’ Likewise, Bjerknes (2002:
195) stated that ‘Joffe (Ioffe) recounts that the paper
was signed “Einstein-Marity” .’ Furthermore, in 2003
the claim that Joffe cited Marić’s name on the 1905
manuscripts was aired in the television programme,
Einstein’s Wife. And, the companion website (see endnote
1) claims that ‘there is at least one printed report
in which Joffe declared that he personally saw the
names of two authors on the 1905 papers: Einstein
and Marity’.

To add credibility to their claims, writers who
ascribe such words to Joffe often add that he was a
successful and respected physicist. Hence they attempt
to argue by appeals to authority along with allusions
to purported evidence. But what did Joffe actually
write?

First, Zackheim and others are wrong in claiming
that in his book Meetings with physicists Joffe claimed
anything about how the 1905 manuscripts were
signed. He did not even claim to have ever seen them.
As for the article ‘In remembrance of Albert Einstein’,
published in 1955, it was an obituary for Einstein.
Literally translated, it reads:

In the year 1905, in Annals of Physics , there
appeared three articles, thereupon beginning
three most important, relevant directions in the
physics of the 20th century. Those were: the
theory of Brownian motion, the photon theory of
light and the theory of relativity. Their author –
unknown until that time, a bureaucrat at the
Patent Office in Bern, Einstein-Marity (Marity
– the last name of his wife, which by Swiss
custom is added to the last name of the
husband). (Joffe, 1955: 187, trans. A. M.)

This passage shows that, for example, Walker’s
‘translation’ is a gross misrepresentation: ‘Their
author was “Einstein-Mariti”.’ Likewise, a few other
writers have distorted Joffe’s words to make it seem
as though he made a controversial claim. It is unusual
that Joffe this one time happened to refer to Einstein
by the name ‘Einstein-Marity’. But that simple
peculiarity does not entail that he ascribed any
authorship to Einstein’s wife. It is clear that Joffe
meant that the author was one person, a male
employee at the patent office, namely Albert Einstein.

Still, proponents of Marić have tried to make
something out of the fact that Joffe happened to write
‘Marity’ instead of ‘Marić’. For example, Walker
claimed that Joffe just had to have seen an original
paper, with the name Marity on it, because otherwise
he would not have known the alternative spelling of
Marić, since it ‘apparently is not found in any of the
Einstein biographies ’ (Walker, 1991: 123). Again,
Walker was wrong. The name ‘Marity’ appears, for
example, in Carl Seelig’s well-known biography of
Einstein published in 1954 (p. 29). Moreover, when
Joffe first sought to meet Einstein in Switzerland, he
happened to meet Marić (Joffe, 1967: 889). At the
time, she used the name Einstein-Marity.

The key point remains the same. Joffe did not
claim that Marić co-authored or collaborated in any
of Einstein’s papers. And he did not claim that her
name was on the original manuscripts or that he ever
saw any such manuscripts. In multiple places throughout
his career, like anyone else, Joffe acknowledged
Einstein for having authored the famous works of
1905.

In a particularly careless confusion, the producers
of Einstein’s Wife and the companion website pictured
a fragment of a page that reads that the articles were
‘signed Einstein-Marity’, purportedly written by Joffe.
But the page pictured is instead from a popular science
book from 1962, by a Russian writer, Daniil
Semenovich Danin, who, again, did not even claim
to have ever seen the original manuscripts or to have
known anyone who had (Danin, 1962: 57).

Suppose, imagine, that some credible individual
actually had claimed to have seen manuscripts that
listed Marić as co-author. Would that constitute
evidence? It would only constitute the testimony of
an alleged witness. Further evidence would be
required to substantiate the claim. Likewise, imagine
that a famous scientist, or perhaps a wealthy writer,
gets divorced. And suppose that then the ex-spouse
claims to actually have been the true author of some
works. Such allegation, by itself, would not constitute
authorship. We might reply: ‘That is a serious
allegation.What evidence do you have to support it? ’

Lacking evidence, some writers cultivate rampant
speculations. For example, Bjerknes (2002) claims
that Einstein probably stole the credit from Marić and
that she, in turn, probably plagiarised the ideas from
other writers.

Who really said what?

In her book, Zackheim (1999) claims that ‘Mileva and
Albert’s son Hans Albert told Peter Michelmore, an
Einstein biographer, that Mileva helped Albert “solve
Certain mathematical problems” .’ (p. 19). Is Zackheim
claiming that Marić spoke with Michelmore? We must
reject that impression because Michelmore never met
Marić. Better syntax would be: ‘Hans Albert Einstein,
son of Mileva and Albert, told Peter Michelmore …’.

Michelmore (1962) wrote that, while Einstein
struggled to solve puzzles of relative motion in
electrodynamics, ‘Mileva helped him solve certain
mathematical problems, but nobody could assist with
the creative work, the flow of fresh ideas’(p. 45) .

But is it true that Hans Albert really told that to
Michelmore? We do not know. It is conceivable that
he did. But strictly speaking, the historical evidence
does not certify the claim. We know what Michelmore
published. We do not know for certain what parts of
it were really told to him by Hans Albert. He visited
and interviewed Hans Albert for two days in February
of 1962, in California. In his book, Michelmore
admitted that Hans Albert never saw or proofread the
manuscript for the book:

he answered all my questions, and waited while
I wrote down the answers. He did not ask to
check my notes, or edit my book. He trusted me.
It was the sort of naiveté his father had. Thank
God for all naive people, and I use the word in
its noblest sense. (p. vii)

Unfortunately, when interviewees do not check
writer’s accounts, errors and inaccuracies often
increase.

Alongside correct and verifiable statements,
Michelmore’s book also includes incorrect information.
For example, he mentioned that while Einstein
studied at the Polytechnic in Zurich he befriended
‘Maurice Solovine, a Frenchman taking the physics
course ’ (p. 36). But actually, Moritz Solovine was
Romanian, born and educated in Romania, until he
moved, not to Zurich, but to Bern, where he met and
befriended Einstein in 1902, almost two years after
Einstein had graduated at Zurich. Michelmore also
wrote that once Mileva fell in love with Einstein, by
their final year of college, ‘Her personal ambition
had faded’ (p. 36). But we know from letters that she
remained interested in a career at least until mid-1901.
Such inaccuracies detract from the credibility of an
author’s words.

Years ago, John Stachel, editor of the Collected
papers of Albert Einstein, enquired whether Michelmore’s
family happened to posses Michelmore’s
manuscript or ideally the notes from the interview
with Hans Albert. The answer was negative. If we
had the notes from the interview, then perhaps we
might know what Hans Albert apparently told
Michelmore.

Faced with such ambiguities, each historian must
decide whether to believe, disregard, or at least
incorporate, a given passage into a historical
reconstruction. Personally, in a manuscript that I am
finishing on the origins of special relativity, I chose
to incorporate Michelmore’s suggestive words about
Mileva. But I hope that readers will realise that the
sentence in question is not necessarily a photograph
of the events that happened. It is but a passing claim
that appears in a popular biography written by an
author who only interviewed a son of the individuals
in question, a biography that was not proofread by
the individuals discussed in it or by the interviewee.
It was written and published almost 60 years after the
event in question. Hans Albert himself could not
possibly testify to such an event, since he was a one-year-
old baby in the spring of 1905. Hence, if he
actually spoke such words in 1962, he was merely
voicing a conjecture or echoing words voiced by
someone else. The point is to distinguish this kind of
indirect claim from evidence from the historical
moment.

Several documents shed light on Marić around
1905. For example, Krstic provided this translation
of a letter from Marić to her friend Helene Savic,
written after the 1905 papers were published (see endnote
2):

My husband spends all of his free time at home,
often playing with the boy; but … I would like to
remark that this, together with his official job, is
not the only work he does – he is writing a great
number of scientific papers. (Krstic, 1991: 94)

As usual in her letters to her intimate friend, Mileva
made no claim of working on science herself, ever
since she left college. Now notice the ellipsis in the
quotation above. What did Krstic omit? An uncut
translation of the original letter was published later
by a grandson of Helene Savic (see end-note 3). It
reads:

My husband often spends his leisure time at
home playing with the little boy, but to give him
his due, I must note that it is not his only
occupation aside from his official activities; the
papers he has written are already mounting
quite high. (Popovic, 2003: 88)

So we see that Krstic chose to omit a phrase in which
Marić herself further acknowledged Einstein’s
labours; she gave him his due credit.

Likewise, on 3 September 1909, when Einstein
was receiving much recognition from physicists,
Marić wrote to her friend ‘I am very happy for his
success, because he really does deserve it ’ (Popovic,
2003: 98).

Scale of likely reliability for
information sources

• 1 Original notes and drafts of the scientist’s
  labours and ruminations
• 2 Contemporary private diaries of the scientist,
  peers, or friends
• 3 Contemporary documents such as letters to
  friends
• 4 Contemporary accounts of statements
  among scientists and peers
• 5 Manuscripts, the original scientific work



• 6 Early retrospective accounts by the scientist
• 7 Early interviews of the scientist, proofread by
  the scientist
• 8 Later retrospective accounts by the scientist
• 9 Later interviews of the scientist, proofread by
  the scientist
• 10 Systematic interviews by historians,
  psychologists, or other specialists
• 11 Informal interviews of the scientist
• 12 Recollections that exist only in an indirect
  form, such as a transcribed lecture
• 13 Retrospective accounts that exist only in a
  doubly indirect form
• 14 Late recollections by an intimate
  acquaintance
• 15 Biography based on interviews, approved by
  the scientist and interviewees
• 16 Account based on multiple interviews but not
  proofread by the interviewees
• 17 Account of interviews with a close relative or
  peer, proofread by that person
• 18 Material based partly on interviews from a
  relative, peer, or acquaintance
• 19 Rough translations of biographies or sources
• 20 Hearsay, late indirect accounts of what
  someone allegedly told someone else

Distinguishing among sources

Students and laypersons may lack a clear understanding
of the extent to which different sources
warrant different degrees of credibility. Therefore, it
seems useful to illustrate such differences. Historians
sometimes disagree on what weight to attribute to any
one document, but I can at least sketch my own
outlook.

The list in Box 1 describes some of the different
kinds of information that may exist pertaining to the
genesis of a scientific work. To distinguish them, I
have ranked them in order of proximity to the
historical event, the instance of scientific creativity.
The greater the number of an item, the less credibility
I would tend to ascribe to it as a likely source of precise
information about that moment in time.

This list is not exhaustive. My aim is only to
distinguish among some different kinds of information.
The line following item 5 sets a boundary
between evidence generated during the production of
the scientific work and various kinds of hindsight and
conjecture.

In this scale, the biography written by Michelmore
falls on level 18. In contradistinction, a letter by
Einstein to his friend Conrad Habicht, written in May
of 1905, while he was drafting the paper on relativity,
counts as evidence of level 4. That letter, which historians
cite often, is a precious though narrow window
to the creative moment. There are many different kinds
of information between the two, to which we ascribe
various degrees of reliability.

For example, in 1922 Einstein delivered a lecture
in Kyoto, Japan, titled ‘How I created the theory of
relativity’. He delivered it in German without having
written it down, and, as he spoke, it was translated
into Japanese. The translator kept notes that were soon
published in Japanese. In my scale, I would rank this
Japanese rendition of the lecture as being of level 13.
It is ‘doubly indirect’ in the sense that Einstein did
not write it, and that we only have the version in
Japanese. It is not a very late document in Einstein’s
life, so that we may imagine that forgetfulness perhaps
did not distort his account very much. But still, the
transcript was not proofread by Einstein. Less
credible, for instance, might be a document placed in
level 14. Consider one such example: a letter written
in 1948 by Michele Besso. At 74 years of age, he
asked whether Einstein’s early reading of a book by
Ernst Mach, following Besso’s suggestion, had been
at the root of Einstein’s thoughts about clocks and
measuring rods when conceiving the theory of
relativity ( Besso and Einstein, 1972: 386 ) . Einstein
replied in the negative. He acknowledged a great
influence of Mach on his intellectual development in
general. But he noted that his reading of DavidHume,
which he discussed with Solovine and Habicht, had
been of greater importance (Besso and Einstein, 1972:
391).

Readers can identify how the different claims
about Marić fall at various levels in the list above.
Any document, even a document from level 1, can
include errors, omissions, inaccuracies or even lies.
Likewise, information of all kinds can include truthful
claims, of course. The important point is to realise
that the further a document stands away from the
period it purportedly describes, the more layers of
potential inaccuracy. Inaccuracies can exist in the
translation, rewording, interpolation, and so forth. A
letter written, even decades later, by a participant in
the events in question, can still be very informative,
even though placed at level 14, though we should still
be careful with its contents. More so, an even later
account, by someone who was not present at the events
in question, involves greater uncertainties.
Unfortunately, we cannot always confirm or refute
all such uncertainties. But we should at least
acknowledge them.

Teachers should carefully grant different degrees
of trust to various sources. Most readers do not usually
have the time or opportunity to research and examine
the validity of a given source of information.
Nevertheless, one should cultivate a moderate
scepticism, especially against outstanding stories that
resonate with what we would personally like to
believe. We can teach students that historical claims
should be inspected carefully, as when testing
hypotheses in science. Too often, writers enamoured
with a sensational conjecture tend to misread
evidence. Too often, they seek not to test a hypothesis,
but to confirm it. But what makes a good story, or
plausible fiction, is not necessarily what makes good
history.

This article was first published in School Science Review and is republished here by permission.

Copyright 2005, Alberto A. Martínez and
School Science Review.

End-notes

1 Einstein’s Wife was produced by an Australian company, Melsa Films, in association with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Oregon Public Broadcasting in the United States.

2 Krstic (1991: 94) dated this letter as being from ‘the very beginning of 1906’.

3 Popovic (2003:88) dated this letter as being from December 1906, apparently following notes by Julka Savic, see p. xi. The historians who edited The collected papers of Albert Einstein Vol. 5 (Klein, Kox and Schulmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) also dated the letter as being from December 1906, owing to its contents (see p. 45). Popovic’s translation is a literal rendering of the original in German (copy at the Einstein Archive, item 70-724; someone wrote ‘juli 1906’ on the letter itself).

References

Besso, M. and Einstein, A. (1972) Correspondance 1903–
1955, with notes and translations by P. Speziali. Paris:
Hermann.

Bjerknes, C. J. (2002) Albert Einstein: the incorrigible
plagiarist. Downers Grove, Illinois: XTX Inc.

Danin, D. S. (1962) Neizbezhnost strannogo mira. Moscow:
Molodaia Gvardia, Gosudarstvenaaja Biblioteka SSSR.

Frank, P. (1949) Einstein, sein leben und seine zeit. Reprint
(1979) Braunschweig/Wiesbaden: Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn.

Joffe, A. F. (1955) Pamiati Alberta Einsteina. Uspekhi
fizicheskikh nauk. 57 (2), 187.

Joffe, A. F. (1967) 2nd edn. Begegnungen mit Physikern.
Leipzig: B. G. Teubner. Translation from the original
(1962) Vstrechi s fizikami moi vospominaniia o
zarubezhnykh fizikah. Moskow: Gosudarstvenoye Idatelstvo
Fiziko-Matematitsheskoi Literatury.

Klein, M. J., Kox, A. J. and Schulmann, R. (1993) The
collected papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 5. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.

Krstic, D. (1991) Mileva Einstein-Marić. In Hans Albert
Einstein: reminiscences of his life and our life together.
Einstein, E. R. Appendix A, pp. 85–99. Iowa City, Iowa:
Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research.

Michelmore, P. (1962) Einstein: profile of the man. New
York: Dodd, Mead & Company.

Overbye, D. (2000) Einstein in love: a scientific romance,
New York: Penguin Books.

Popovic, M. ed. (2003) In Albert’s shadow: the life and
letters of Mileva Marić, Einstein’s first wife. Baltimore,
Maryland / London, England: Johns Hopkins University
Press.

Renn, J. and Schulmann, R. ed. (1992) The love letters.
Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Letters of Albert
Einstein to Mileva Marić, 4 April 1901 and 27 March 1901,
respectively, trans. Shawn Smith.)

Seelig, C. (1954) Albert Einstein, eine dokumentarische
Biographie. Zurich/Stuttgart/Wien: Europa Verlag.

Solovine, M. and Einstein, A. (1956) Lettres à Maurice
Solovine. Paris: Gauthier-Villars.

Stachel, J. ed. (1987) The collected papers of Albert Einstein,
Vol. 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stachel, J. (1996) Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić: a
collaboration that failed to develop. Reprinted in Stachel, J.
(2002) Einstein from B to Z. pp. 39–55. Boston/Basel/
Berlin, Birkhauser.

Trbuhovic-Gjuric, D. (1993) Im Schatten Albert Einsteins,
das tragische Leben der Mileva Einstein-Marić. Bern/
Stuttgart/Wien: Paul Haupt. Translation from the original
(1969) U senci Alberta Ajnstajna. Krusevac: Bagdala.

Walker, E. H. (1991) Letter: Mileva Marić’s relativistic role.
Physics Today, 44(2), 123.

Zackheim, M. (1999) Einstein’s daughter: the Search for
Lieserl. New York: Riverhead Books/Penguin Putnam.

It must have been around 1990 that I first read newspaper reports about the claims that Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Marić, had made substantial contributions to his early achievements in physics. The contentions seem not to have made much headway in the UK, and, after two popular biographies of Einstein published in 1993 rejected the claims, I presumed the story had ended up in the backwaters of speculative notions on great scientific figures. How wrong I was.

Towards the end of 2005 my attention was drawn to the fact that the claims had gained a new lease of life through the production of an Australian documentary “Einstein’s Wife”, which was broadcast in the United States in 2003 by Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and is available on DVD. At the same time PBS produced a website devoted to the subject, complete with comprehensive lesson plans for teachers of high school students.[1] It was at this point that I decided to investigate the claims more closely. It turned out that they are almost entirely based on erroneous contentions and dubious hearsay evidence. However, in a relatively short article it will only be possible to provide a limited account of the misconceptions that occur in abundance in the documentary and on the PBS website.

The background

Before we examine the main evidence adduced by proponents of the notion that Marić collaborated on Einstein’s early papers it is important to dispose of some myths about his early life. It is widely believed that he was a mediocre school student. However, a letter from his mother to her sister in 1886, when he was 7, reports that he was “again top of the class”. During his years at the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich he performed well in science and mathematics, and his exceptional precociousness in these subjects has been recorded by Max Talmey, a medical student who visited the Einsteins each week from 1889 to early 1894.[2] In 1894, when Einstein was 15, his father’s electrical engineering business was failing financially, and his parents emigrated to Milan, leaving him to complete his education at the Gymnasium. However, six months later on his own initiative he left the school, and went to live with his parents in Italy. In due course he began private study for the entrance examination for the prestigious Federal Swiss Polytechnic in Zurich in the autumn of 1895. Although he was some two years younger than the stipulated age of application to the Polytechnic he obtained high grades in mathematics and physics, but failed to achieve the required grades in some other subjects. On the advice of the Principal of the Polytechnic he spent a year at a high school in Aarau in Switzerland, and his school-leaving certificate from September 1896 records that he achieved maximum grades in algebra and geometry, high grades in physics and chemistry and some other subjects, and performed badly only in French. He received the highest grade average in his class.[3]

This is the academic background to his commencing studying for a teaching diploma in physics and mathematics in the autumn of 1896, at 17 still below the normal age of entrance to Zurich Polytechnic. And it was here that he met Mileva Marić, who enrolled in the same course that autumn. Marić’s school record, especially in physics and mathematics, was excellent, but institutional obstacles to girls wishing to study science in the Austro-Hungarian Empire meant she had had to leave her Serbian homeland to eventually graduate from a Swiss girls’ high school in 1895. She initially considered a medical career, entering the Zurich University medical school in 1896, but completed only one semester before deciding to take an entrance exam which enabled her to start the physics and mathematics teaching diploma course at the Polytechnic in the autumn of that same year. Because of illness and difficulties in her path she was by then age 20.

At the Polytechnic Einstein and Marić were part of a small group the rest of whom were specialising in mathematics. Marić spent the first semester of her second year at the University of Heidelberg, and rejoined the course at Zurich Polytechnic for the next semester in the spring of 1898. In the 1898 intermediate diploma examinations (in which 3 of the 5 subjects were mathematical) Einstein achieved the highest overall average grade among the candidates.[4] Because of missing the semester at the Polytechnic Marić postponed taking the intermediate exams until the following year, and her result placed her fifth out of the six candidates in their group.[5] By this time Einstein was spending much of his time following up his own interests in physics, and in the final diploma exam in 1900 he came fourth out of five candidates, with an overall average grade of 4.91 (grades from 1 to 6). Marić fared less well, coming last with an overall average grade of 4.00.[6] The examiners granted diplomas to the top four candidates, but not to Marić. She studied to repeat the exam the following year, but failed again without improving her grade, under the adverse circumstances that she was some 3 months pregnant at the time.

The Einstein/Marić correspondence

Before the publication of the first volume of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein under the editorship of John Stachel in 1987, the existence of letters between Einstein and Mileva Marić from the early period of their relationship (1897-1903) was discovered, and they were included in that volume. (Characteristically, the report of their discovery given in the “Einstein’s Wife” documentary is, in the words of Robert Schulmann, the historian who was instrumental in their being brought to light, “totally and unequivocally false”.)[7] The publication of the letters led to the first widely circulated claims that Marić made contributions to Einstein’s celebrated 1905 papers, or even that she co-authored them. These contentions were based on the fact that in a number of letters Einstein used the pronouns “our” and “we” in relation to physics topics he was working on during the period when they were students. Now there is no doubt that the couple worked together on subject matter pertaining to their diploma course, and to their respective diploma dissertations, which were both on topics in thermal conductivity. But many of the instances in which Einstein used inclusive language clearly relate to extra-curricular subject matter. What is in dispute is whether this demonstrates that Marić worked together with him on this material.

Unfortunately many of the letters Marić wrote to Einstein in this period have not survived. However, one thing immediately apparent is that whereas Einstein’s letters frequently contain reports of ideas he is working on, and of physics publications he is reading in relation to them, there is not a single one of Marić’s that contains any corresponding material.[8] Her letters occasionally refer to work related to her diploma studies, including her dissertation project, but are mostly devoted to personal matters relating to friends and family. Stachel has examined the letters in the context of the claims about Marić, and makes a number of telling points.[9] During the period in question Einstein was deeply emotionally involved with Marić, and clearly believed that they would be colleagues in the future scientific endeavours he envisaged for himself. His use of inclusive language sometimes occurs in a context in which he is seeking to reassure her of his continuing attachment in the face of external difficulties. And, significantly, for every occasion that Einstein uses “we” or “our” in connection with a particular topic, there are numerous others when he uses “I” or “my”, indicating it is he who is actually working on the topics in question. In the case of one specific instance that has been cited, Stachel points out that there are more than a dozen uses of first person singular pronouns by Einstein in regard to this same subject matter. As Stachel writes, “His letters are full of accounts of his ideas about physics, including new theoretical ideas and proposals for new experiments… [E]ven in the case in which we have Marić’s direct response to Einstein’s letter detailing his rather striking ideas about the electrodynamics of moving bodies, no response to his ideas on this subject, or any other topic in physics that he raised, is found in her letters.”[10]

It is significant that in relation to two instances in which Einstein uses inclusive language Marić explicitly states in letters to her close friend Helene Kaufler that the work in question was written by Einstein. In one of these letters she adds, “You can imagine how proud I am of my darling”, and in the other, “I have read this work with great joy and real admiration for my little darling, who has such a clever head.”[11] It is evident that these are not the words of someone who made substantive contributions to the papers in question.

The claim has been made that Marić assisted Einstein with mathematical problems relating to his published work, specifically in relation to the 1905 relativity paper. This is negated by the fact that the mathematics used by Einstein in that paper does not go beyond fairly basic algebra and calculus. Moreover, in spite of the fact that Marić has been misleadingly described as a “mathematician”, her grade in the maths component of the final diploma exam in 1900 was less than half that of the other four candidates, and it was again her maths that let her down when she failed at the second attempt in 1901.[12]

Aside from his published papers, Einstein’s Collected Papers contain an impressively large mass of letters to friends and to eminent physicists containing discussions of his current work in physics in the years from his student days to the time he and Marić separated. Against this there is not a single known document of Marić’s that contains ideas of her own on such subjects. As Robert Schulmann and Gerald Holton have written: “All serious Einstein scholarship, by Abraham Pais, John Stachel and others, has shown that the scientific collaboration between the couple was slight and one-sided… Nor is there a shred of documentary proof of her originality as a scientist.”[13]

Abraham Joffe

One item adduced by proponents of the collaboration thesis is the contention that the Soviet physicist Abraham Joffe claimed that Mileva Marić was co-author of the 1905 papers. According to the PBS “Einstein’s Wife” website, “there is at least one printed report in which Joffe declared that he personally saw the names of two authors on the 1905 papers: Einstein and Marity (a Hungarianized form of Marić)”.

This claim has been fully investigated and comprehensively refuted by Martinez and, in painstaking detail, by Stachel.[14] The relevant passage by Joffe, part of an obituary for Einstein, is the following (literally translated by Martinez):

“In the year 1905, in Annals of Physics, there appeared three articles, thereupon beginning three most important, relevant directions in the physics of the 20th century. Those were: the theory of Brownian Motion, the photon theory of light and the theory of relativity. Their author – unknown until that time, a bureaucrat at the Patent Office in Bern, Einstein-Marity (Marity – the last name of his wife, which by Swiss custom is added to the last name of the husband).”

It is evident that Joffe did not claim that he had seen the original manuscripts, nor that Marić was a co-author of the 1905 papers; on the contrary, he writes that the author was “a bureaucrat at the Patent Office in Bern”, in other words, Albert Einstein. Furthermore, in a blunder symptomatic of the poor level of scholarship involved in this project, the fragment of a page in Cyrillic script displayed on the PBS website and in the documentary is not even by Joffe! As both Stachel and Martinez point out, it is actually from a popular science book by the Soviet writer Daniil Semenovich Danin. And, again, it does not cite Marić as co-author of the 1905 papers, nor say that anyone has seen her name on the original manuscripts.

One should also ask if it is conceivable that had Joffe actually declared he saw Marić’s name as co-author of the celebrated 1905 papers such sensational information would not have become widely publicised.

“Einstein’s Wife”

The PBS “Einstein’s Wife” website purports to present the facts about Mileva Marić so that people can make up their own minds about the claims that she was Einstein’s scientific collaborator. This can only be described as disingenuous, given that much of the material takes the alleged collaboration as given, and that the information provided contains a large number of tendentious errors and misconceptions. As Martinez has written of the documentary on which the website material is based: “Many of the claims are misapprehensions, speculations and hearsay.”[15] The misinformation is too extensive to document here, and I shall cite only a few of the more egregious examples.

The homepage of the PBS “Einstein’s Wife” website has the following statement: “Einstein’s autobiographies never mentioned his first wife. The world only learned of her existence through the first release of Einstein’s private letters in 1987.”[16]

The first sentence here is misleading, since Einstein did not write an autobiography in the normal sense. In his “Autobiographical Notes” for the volume Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist he stated that his scientific and philosophical views comprised the essential part of a life such as his. That being the case, he made no mention whatsoever of any personal or family matters in the article in question. He also wrote a late autobiographical sketch that appeared in the volume Helle Zeit – Dunkle Zeit: In memoriam Albert Einstein (ed. C. Seelig, 1956), in which essay he does mention Marić. As for the second assertion, the most cursory research would have revealed that biographies of Einstein written before 1987 do mention Mileva Marić, often providing considerable detail about her.[17]

Under the heading “Mileva’s Story” we are told in relation to the period during which Einstein and Marić studied at Zurich Polytechnic: “He demands all her time. She sacrifices her studies as well as her friends. In the summer of 1900, they both fail their final exams. He somehow gets a diploma…”

In fact Einstein’s letters show that he encouraged Marić in her studies, and there is no evidence that she neglected them prior to her final diploma exam in 1900. Nor was Einstein responsible for Marić’s neglect of her friends – her letters show that her desire that they spend time together was at least as strong as his. More important, the statement that they both failed the diploma exam in 1900 is false (see above).

Leaving aside numerous other erroneous statements in this material, I’ll now turn to the PBS Lesson plans for teachers of high school students. In Lesson 1 (Mileva Marić Einstein) teachers are told: “Encourage students to understand that she was a gifted scholar and scientist prior to meeting Albert Einstein.” Now it is true that Marić graduated from high school with excellent grades, but thereafter her academic record was generally mediocre, and she failed to obtain a teaching diploma at two attempts. To represent her as a gifted scientist at any stage would be highly misleading, but to tell students this was the case even before she met Einstein is absurd.

A little later the students are told in relation to her attending one semester at Heidelberg University at the beginning of her second year of study: “She is excited and intrigued by the research of the professors. She shares her knowledge with Albert in their correspondence.” This piece of misinformation is based entirely on one letter that Marić wrote to Einstein in this period in which she provides a rather naive report of a lecture given by Philipp Lenard on the kinetic theory of gases.[18] The notion that she shared knowledge of Lenard’s research at that time with Einstein is scientific nonsense.

In Lesson 2 (Two Women of Science) the students are misleadingly told from the outset that Marić (like Marie Curie) “broke through the male-dominated academic world to study physics at the highest levels”. The technique employed in much of the PBS Lessons material is to instruct students to stop the “Einstein’s Wife” DVD at relevant places and review sections that lead them to the ‘correct’ answers that are expected of them. For example, in this section they are told to note that the documentary states that when Marić came back from Heidelberg in 1898 “she brought back more than herself to Albert Einstein”, at which point students are told: “They published some early works together and conducted research together. They shared information through their writing. She brought back information that served as part of the foundation of quantum mechanics.”

Leaving aside the repetition of the erroneous contention that Marić was co-author of some of Einstein’s early papers, the final sentence is an embellished version of the scientific nonsense already presented in Lesson 1 (see above). What is being alluded to here is the fact that in one of his celebrated 1905 papers Einstein gave a revolutionary theoretical explanation in terms of light quanta for the results of experiments on the photoelectric effect published by Lenard in 1902. Nothing that Marić could have learned from lectures given by Lenard at the beginning of her second year of study in 1897-1898 could have had the remotest connection to Einstein’s theoretical solution for Lenard’s 1902 experimental results.

Later in the material the students are led to review the (false) contention in the “Einstein’s Wife” DVD that Joffe stated he has seen Marić’s name as co-author on the 1905 papers, and are then asked: “Why was Mileva’s name removed when the papers were published?” It speaks volumes about the material on the PBS website that students are asked to provide an explanation for an alleged incident the supposed occurrence of which is based, in Martinez’s words, on a “shred of non-evidence”.[19]

At each stage teachers are made complicit in the misinforming of their students. For example, they are told: “Discuss with students their own opinion about Mileva. She had the education and the ability to conduct the research. They worked closely together for years, but she is not always listed on the papers.” Only people entirely ignorant of the nature of Einstein’s 1905 papers could write of someone who had twice failed her teaching diploma exam, with especially poor marks in the mathematics component, and for whom there is not a single document showing original ideas in physics, that she “had the education and ability to conduct the research”. By such criteria many thousands of graduates, let alone failed graduates, could have matched Einstein’s achievements. And note the way that the statement that Marić was not “always” listed on Einstein’s early papers carries the implicit subtext that she was co-author of the 1905 papers.

I could go on, but I’ll just mention that in Lesson 3 (Society’s Expectation of Women) the students are told yet again that “they both failed their exams” but “Albert’s grades were rounded up to a passing mark and Mileva’s grades were not”. It seems a false story can’t be repeated too often on this website.

The accounts propagated by the “Einstein’s Wife” documentary and PBS website portray Marić as pursuing a scientific career tacitly even after her academic failures. But there is evidence that even before her first failure at the diploma exam she had given up any such ambition. According to a letter written by Helene Kaufler to her mother in July 1900, Marić was “offered an assistantship at the Polytechnic but did not wish to accept it”; instead “she would rather apply for an open position as librarian at the Polytechnic”.[20] The few letters to Helene in the period immediately following her marriage in January 1903 make no mention of physics, except in relation to her husband’s activities. Of Einstein she wrote: “I am even closer to my sweetheart, if that is at all possible, than I was in our Zurich days; he is my only company, and I am happiest when he is next to me, and I am often angry at the boring [patent] office that takes so much of his time.”[21]

The true story

There is a very real story behind Marić’s life that’s worth telling in its own right, that of an academically talented girl who overcame both personal and institutionalised difficulties to acquire a College education in physical science from which women were disbarred in many parts of Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. But the actual facts of a life lived bravely in the face of adverse circumstances is apparently not enough for some doctrinaire feminists who have sought to make ideological capital out of claims based on misconceptions and erroneous contentions. They have seized upon these dubious claims to produce an alternative history of Einstein and Marić in a way that violates the basic tenets of principled historical research. Dubious speculation, hearsay evidence, and contentions that have been refuted are all asserted as fact, and excessive claims are made about Marić’s mathematical and scientific abilities that the records do not bear out. And now this false history is being used to promote Marić to the list of feminist icons, as she is portrayed by writers such as Andrea Gabor who uncritically recycle unsubstantiated and erroneous contentions as historical fact.[22] The proponents of this alternative history display an almost complete ignorance of the scientific subject matter, and a corresponding lack of comprehension of the magnitude of Einstein’s achievements.

Although refutations of the claims now circulating have been made by knowledgeable physicists,[23] this has had little impact in the public domain compared with misinformation of the kind presented on the PBS website. What is truly shocking is that PBS, which proclaims itself to be the largest educator in the US, should be party to the travesty of education represented by its “Einstein’s Wife” teaching material.

For detailed critiques of the “Einstein’s Wife” documentary and the PBS “Einstein’s Wife” website material see: Einstein’s Wife: Mileva Maric 1 and Einstein’s Wife: Mileva Maric 2.

I would like to thank Alberto A. Martinez for his assistance during the preparation of this article.

NOTES

1. PBS ‘Einstein’s Wife’

2. Talmey, M. (1932). “The Relativity Theory Simplified And the Formative Period of its Inventor.” New York: Falcon Press, pp. 163-164.

3. The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 1, eds. J. Stachel et al, Princeton University Press, 1987, pp. 23-25.
4. Collected Papers Vol. 1 (Stachel et al, 1987), p. 214.

5. Highfield, R. and Carter, P. (1993). The Private Lives of Albert Einstein. London: Faber and Faber, p. 50.

6. Collected Papers Vol. 1 (Stachel et al, 1987), p. 247.

7. Personal communication.

8. Renn, J. and Schulmann, R. (eds.) (1992). Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić: The Love Letters. Trans. by S. Smith. Princeton University Press.

9. Stachel, J. (2002). Einstein from ‘B’ to ‘Z’. Boston: Birkhäuser, pp. 31-37.

10. Stachel, J. (2005). Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics. Princeton University Press, p. l.

11. Popović, M. (2003). In Albert’s Shadow The Life and Letters of Mileva Marić, Einstein’s First Wife. Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 70, 80.

12. Collected Papers Vol. 1 (Stachel et al, 1987), p. 247.

13. Letter in New York Times Book Review, October 8, 1995. Quoted in Brian, D. (1996). Einstein: A Life. New York: Wiley, p. 434.

14. Martinez (2005), “Handling Evidence in History: The Case of Einstein’s Wife”, School Science
Review, March 2005, 86 (316), pp. 51-52; Stachel (2005), pp. liv-lxiii.
See also Martinez (2004)

15. Martinez (2004): http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/17/4/2/1

16. PBS ‘Einstein’s Wife’

17. For example: Seelig, C. (1956). Albert Einstein: A Documentary Biography. London: Staples Press; Michelmore, P. (1962). Einstein: Profile of the Man. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.; Clark, R. (1971). Einstein: The Life and Times. New York: World Publishing Company; Hoffman, B. and Dukas, H. (1973). Albert Einstein, Creator and Rebel, London: Granada; Pais, A. (1982). Subtle is the Lord: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein. Oxford University Press.

18. Renn & Schulmann (1992), pp. 3-4.

19. Martinez (2004)

20. Popović (2003), p. 61.

21. Popović (2003), p. 83.

22. Gabor, A. (1995). Einstein’s Wife: Work and Marriage in the Lives of Five Great Twentieth-Century Women. New York: Viking, pp. 1-32.

23. E.g., Stachel, J (1996). “Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić: A Collaboration That Failed to Develop.”
Stachel, J. (2002). Einstein from ‘B’ to ‘Z’. Boston: Birkhäuser, pp. 26-38.

8th March is a day of equality of women and men. It is a day when, once again, the progressive sections of society organise a struggle against discrimination and the lack of women’s rights in the world. 8th March is a reminder of the suppressive and unequal position of women everywhere. It is also a reminder of the protests against the inhumane situation of women. The Organisation for Women’s Liberation is at the forefront of this struggle and movement for unconditional and complete freedom of women and men in Iran.

We are celebrating 8th March at a time when the women’s liberation movement has become one of the strongest determining elements of the future changes in Iran. It has become clear that these changes will not culminate without women’s liberation and equality. Women’s demands have occupied a special place in the society’s demands for freedom and equality.

The movement for women’s liberation is, at the present time, the flagship of No to Inequality, No to Discrimination, No to Sexual Apartheid, No to the Veil, and is the flagship of defence of Women’s Rights against Cultural Relativism, defence of Secularism, and the struggle against Political Islam. The progressive movement for women’s liberation has, through its activities and influence in many protests, succeeded in pushing back and defeating the Islamic regime’s attacks against women. The presence of a radical women’s movement is an undeniable reality in Iran. The political changes in Iran are a reflection of the organisation and struggle which are taking shape within the women’s movement on the eve of International Women’s Day. The women’s movement in Iran is, once again, going to demonstrate to the world its protest against this medieval regime.

Women and men!

The measure of society’s freedom is freedom of women. To achieve freedom we must overthrow the medieval Islamic rule. So long as this regime is ruling, women and the society will not be free. The struggle for women’s freedom is part of the general struggle for freedom, equality and welfare.

The Organisation for Women’s Liberation urges all to gather round the following demands:

No to the Veil

No to Sexual Apartheid

No to Suppression

Long Live Freedom and Equality of women and men

Long Live Secularism

These are the demands of the movement for women’s liberation at every conference, demonstration and gatherings. Towards a fantastic 8th March celebration!

SAN FRANCISCO: The Campaign to Stop Funding Hate (CSFH) applauds the
successful mobilization of the South Asian community in response to the
Hindutva [Hindu supremacist] attempts to inject their sectarian
political ideology into California school textbooks.

On Monday, February 27, 2006, people of diverse backgrounds, faiths and
ethnicities testified at a public hearing before a committee of the
California State Board of Education (SBE). The SBE held the hearing to
consider proposed changes to the new history-social science textbooks
for the 6th grade in public schools in California. Eight books, and the
associated teachers’ guides and students’ workbooks, were put forward by
different publishers last year, and released by the SBE for public
review and comment. Several Hindutva groups inserted themselves into the
review process by claiming to be representative of the diasporic South
Asian community, and began pushing the SBE to accept sectarian,
unscholarly edits. Leading the attack were the Hindu Education
Foundation (HEF) and Vedic Foundation (VF), backed by the Hindu American
Foundation (HAF), a Hindutva front posing as a ‘human rights’
organization. Outraged scholars and community members from California
requested the SBE to stand firm and not cave in to sectarian pressures.
The public hearing was organized to allow everyone to air their views.

Even as the HAF, HEF and VF sought to erase Dalits from the ancient past
and portray the caste system as a benign form of social classification
instead of the brutal system of oppression and exploitation that it
really is, the Sangh’s view of caste was on full display at the public
hearing (“Sangh” and “Sangh Parivar” refer to the family of Hindutva
organizations that have been spawned by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,
the RSS, of India). While the worldwide Sangh Parivar is busy
celebrating the birth centenary of M S Golwalkar — the second supremo
of the RSS, an admirer of Hitler and his genocide of Jews, and of Manu,
the Hindu lawgiver who codified the oppressive caste system [1] — every
mention of caste found the Hindutva supporters squirming in their seats
and exchanging unpleasant glances. Some of them, laboring under the
illusion that they were whispering, spewed vitriol about the SBE
“allowing all these chura-chamars to speak” (chura-chamar, literally
scavenger-cobbler, is one of the derogatory terms commonly used by
upper-caste Hindus to insult Dalits and lower castes). But the
HAF/HEF/VF members weren’t just fulminating in private, their arrogance
and hate of Dalits and lower castes overrode the warnings to be cautious
being whispered to them by the senior handlers that the RSS had sent
along. Among the comments made by HAF/HEF/VF members is included this
choice gem: “If Dalits are so oppressed in India, how did some of them
come to America?” As testimonies from Dalits who have made California
their home continued, Gaurang Desai of HSS, the U.S. analogue of the
RSS, got very agitated and screamed at the Board members that he once
cleaned his own toilet and did not feel oppressed, so Dalits who are
forced in India to carry human waste on their heads cannot claim to be
oppressed either!

The SBE heard testimonies from many individuals, from representatives of
several groups – including the Federation of Tamil Sangams of North
America (FeTNA), Friends of South Asia (FOSA), and Coalition Against
Communalism (CAC) – and most importantly, from members of local Dalit
communities. All of these people expressed their strong opposition to
the brazen attempts by HAF, HEF and VF to infuse Hindutva ideology into
school textbooks in California.

Numerous scholars and academics – including some of the most renowned and
respected members of the faculty from the various campuses of the
University of California system – also testified and presented their views
on why the Board must overturn the distortions introduced by the HEF/VF/HAF.

These testimonies should finally put to rest not only the notion that
the HAF/HEF/VF represent all, or even a plurality of Hindus, but also
that the Hindutva forces have any scholarly credibility. As Girish
Agrawal, a member of the CSFH collective noted with amusement, “despite
the couple of hundred people that the Sangh Parivar had bused and flown
in from around the United States, they could not produce a single
scholar to back their pseudo-history.” Girish Agrawal also commended all
the commentators opposing the Hindutva changes for speaking forcefully
and eloquently, and especially for staying calm in the face of the
thuggish behavior of the HAF/HEF/VF members and supporters: “All in all,
I think the HAF/HEF/VF showed their true colors today and it would be
hard for them to live down their own boorish behavior and the exposure
of their complete lack of concern for anything beyond their narrow
agenda of hate.”

Commenting on the textbook issue, CSFH collective member Ra Ravishankar
said: “The Sangh’s claim that its suggested edits are meant to enhance
the self-esteem of young children is first irresponsible, for how can
children learn to recognize and act upon oppressive and discriminatory
practices in the present if the past histories of these practices are
erased and whitewashed? And second, it is a lie because the edits that
the Sangh is fighting so hard to retain are not the ones their
ideologues spout as examples in every forum. Most of those edits were
minor corrections that are not disputed by anybody. Clearly, the Sangh
effort is an opportunistic one to use the relatively few and minor
problems in content as a Trojan horse to bring in the supremacist
political ideology of the Hindutva movement.” CSFH applauds the
California Department of Education for seeing through the HAF/HEF/VF’s
façade and rejecting their attempts to mythologize history. The Board is
now fully aware that the HAF/HEF/VF are tied to virulently supremacist
anti-minority agendas.

The CSFH has fought a protracted battle against the neo-fascist Hindutva
movement in the United States since 2002, and we have a deep
understanding of how the Hindutva movement operates globally. We are a
small volunteer collective of academics and professionals who came
together in 2002 after the “Gujarat Pogrom” where more than two thousand
Indian Muslims were killed by organized paramilitary mobs of the
Hindutva movement in India (the RSS and the Sangh Parivar, as the family
of RSS organizations are collectively known). We set for ourselves the
task of investigating and reporting the massive movement of funds from
the U.S. to the various arms of the Hindutva movement in India – funds
which are used to support the Sangh’s violent, anti-minority activities
in India. The results of our investigation were published in a report
titled Foreign Exchange of Hate – IDRF and the American funding of
Hindutva [2], and resulted in several major corporations, including
Cisco Systems, revamping their charitable giving policies.

The following paragraph is a synopsis of the connections between HEF/HAF
and the Sangh Parivar. We will be glad to provide more detail.

Briefly, the HEF is a creation of the HSS (Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh), the
U.S. arm of the RSS, and its board of advisors includes several senior
Hindutva leaders and ideologues. The HAF is a creation of the VHP of
America. The VHP is the militant religious arm of the RSS. HAF’s
president and founder, Mihir Meghani, is a former governing council
member of the VHP of America. That their current interventions have
nothing to do with minority rights should be obvious from the fact that
Meghani’s HAF and the HEF are avowed opponents of the rights of
religious and ethnic minorities in India. As CSFH collective member Raja
Swamy noted: “The same U.S.-based Sangh Parivar organizations and
individuals who have spent the past four years ‘defending’ the
butchering of 2,000 men, women and children in Gujarat, have now come
out in defense of the HEF and HAF.”

Notes:

[1] Golwalkar had explicitly endorsed Hitler’s campaign against the Jews
in Germany by calling it a form of “race pride”” India should emulate.
He lays bare his casteism in his praise of Manu as the “first and
greatest lawgiver of the world [who] lays down in his code, directing
all the peoples of the world to go to Hindusthan [sic] to learn their
duties at the holy feet of ‘eldest born’ Brahmins of this land.” A
random selection of the ‘wisdom’ found in the Manusmriti on caste is as
follows:

• Serving Brahmins alone is recommended as the best innate activity of a
  Shudra; for whatever he does other than this bears no fruit for him
  (123, Chapter X).
• They should give him (Shudra) the leftovers of their food, their old
  clothes, the spoiled parts of their grain, and their worn-out household
  utensils” (125, Chapter X).
• A servant (Shudra) should not amass wealth, even if he has the
  ability, for a servant (Shudra) who has amassed wealth annoys priests”
  (129, Chapter X).

[2] See http://www.stopfundinghate.org/sacw

For More Information Contact:

• Girish Agrawal at girish_agrawal@hotmail.com
• Ra Ravishankar at ra.ravishankar@gmail.com
• Raja Swamy at raja.swamy@gmail.com

MANIFESTO

Together facing the new totalitarianism

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.

We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.

The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.

Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.

We reject ‘cultural relativism’, which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia”, an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.

We plead for the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas.

We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of Enlightenment, not of obscurantism.

12 signatures

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Chahla Chafiq

Caroline Fourest

Bernard-Henri Lévy

Irshad Manji

Mehdi Mozaffari

Maryam Namazie

Taslima Nasreen

Salman Rushdie

Antoine Sfeir

Philippe Val

Ibn Warraq

Presentations for the press

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, of Somali origin, is member of Dutch parliament, member of the liberal party VVD. Writer of the film Submission which caused the assassination of Theo Van Gogh by an Islamist in November 2004; she lives under police protection.

Chahla Chafiq

Chahla Chafiq, writer of Iranian origin, exiled in France is a novelist and an essayist. She’s the author of “Le nouvel homme islamiste, la prison politique en Iran” (2002). She has also written novels such as “Chemins et brouillard” (2005).

Caroline Fourest

Essayist, editor in chief of Prochoix (a review that defends liberties against dogmatic and integrist ideologies), author of several reference books on laicité and fanaticism: Tirs Croisés: la laïcité à l’épreuve des intégrismes juif, chrétien et musulman (with Fiammetta Venner), Frère Tariq: discours, stratégie et méthode de Tariq Ramadan, et la Tentation obscurantiste (Grasset, 2005). She received the National prize of laicité in 2005.

Bernard-Henri Lévy

French philosopher, born in Algeria, engaged against all the XXth century ‘ism’s (Fascism, antisemitism, totalitarism, terrorism), he is the author of La Barbarie à visage humain, L’Idéologie française, La Pureté dangereuse, and more recently American Vertigo.

Irshad Manji

Irshad Manji is a Fellow at Yale University and the internationally best-selling author of “The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith” (en francais: “Musulmane Mais Libre”). She speaks out for free expression based on the Koran itself. Born in Uganda, she left that country with her Indian Muslim family at the age of four and now lives in Canada, where her broadcasts and books are enormously successful.

Mehdi Mozaffari

Mehdi Mozaffari, professor from Iranian origin and exiled in Denmark, is the author of several articles and books on Islam and Islamism such as: Authority in Islam: From Muhammad to Khomeini, Fatwa: Violence and Discourtesy and Globalization and Civilizations.

Maryam Namazie

Writer; TV International English producer; Director of the Worker-communist Party of Iran’s International Relations; and 2005 winner of the National Secular Society’s Secularist of the Year award.

Taslima Nasreen

Taslima Nasreen is born in Bangladesh. Doctor, her positions defending women and minorities brought her in trouble with a comittee of integrist called ‘Destroy Taslima’ and caused her to be persecuted as an ‘apostate’.

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is the author of nine novels, including Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses and, most recently, Shalimar the Clown. He has received many literary awards, including the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, Germany’s Author of the Year Award, the European Union’s Aristeion Prize, the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Premio Mantova, and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He is a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres, an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T., and the president of PEN American Centre. His books have been translated into over 40 languages.

Philippe Val

Director of publication of Charlie Hebdo (Leftwing French newspaper who have republished the cartoons on the prophet Muhammad by solidarity with the Danish citizens targeted by Islamists).

Ibn Warraq

Ibn Warraq, author notably of Why I am Not a Muslim; Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out; and The Origins of the Koran, is at present Research Fellow at a New York Institute conducting philological and historical research into the Origins of Islam and its Holy Book.

Antoine Sfeir

Born in Lebanon and a Christian, Antoine Sfeir chose French nationality to live in an universalist and laïc (genuinely secular) country. He is the director of Les cahiers de l’Orient and has published several reference books on Islamism such as Les réseaux d’Allah (2001) et Liberté, égalité, Islam: la République face au communautarisme (2005).