Category: Articles

The New York Times: Living for Today, Locked in a Paralyzed Body

When Attorney General John Ashcroft attacked an Oregon law allowing doctor-assisted suicide in 2001 – a case that is still working its ways through the legal system – patients with the disease were among those who supported the law in court. But while the legal case and much of the national attention has focused on the issue of the right to die, less is known about those patients who want to live, and, like Dr. Lodish, will go to extraordinary lengths to do so.

Debates between Liberals and Conservatives on some “lifestyle” issues are usually represented as disputes between those who believe that people should get what they want and those who believe that desire-satisfaction should be circumscribed by some independent, non-utilitarian principles of morality. The assumption is that people whose “quality of life” is seriously not up to snuff want death with dignity, that individuals in bad marriages want out and that members of ethnic communities want to preserve and identify with their ancestral cultures.

What people want is an empirical question and it seems likely that different people want different things. Cultural myth-makers obscure this obvious fact, often in the interests in telling us what we want to hear. It would be nice to think that people whose survival imposed substantial financial and emotion burdens on their families, and society at large, wanted to be put down. Over the past 20 years the media have featured innumerable stories of individuals who were crippled, chronically ill or elderly who wanted to suicide out to accommodate those of us who weren’t–yet.

Many of us, particularly males, would like to believe that everyone wants out of “relationships” that aren’t mutually satisfying. During my youth, clinging women who cramped their mens’ style were berated in song and myth. Good counterculture chickies stood by their men, went waitressing to support them, had their babies and gracefully let go when the time came. Soon feminists got into the act and assured women that being dumped for a new chickie or a younger trophy wife was a blessing in disguise: they would find true love in new relationships or, even better, make careers as artists, poets or fashion designers and find themselves. In any case, the Pre-Established Harmony would kick in and everyone would be better off.

Nowadays we’re assured that that members of ethnic minorities want nothing more than to preserve their native languages and cultures. In North America we actively promote “multiculturalism” and bi-lingual education. Geneology has been big business since Roots made it big in prime time and former students of Indian boarding schools established for the purpose of “killing the Indian to save the man” are suing their alma maters for “loss of language.” Internationally, the 14 and 16-year old daughters of a French secular-Jewish lawyer and his secular-Muslim wife who are testing French law by wearing the hajib to school have become poster children for multiculturalism and religious tolerance.

Samira Bellil’s Dans l’enfer des tournantes as far as I know hasn’t been translated into English. We hear very little about immigrants who want to assimilate, members of ethnic minorities who want nothing more than to be unhyphenated 100% Americans or the majority of ethnically Muslim women in EU countries who want nothing to do with veiling, the folkways of the banlieus, or the misogynistic culture of their ancestors.

I don’t know what most people want: that’s an empirical question. What I do know is that we can’t count on a Pre-Established Harmony to guarantee that people we want dead would prefer to die, that cast off wives and lovers will do better on their own or that members of ethnic minorities want to follow the (real or imagined) way of their ancestors.

H.E. Baber (PhD Johns Hopkins) is a professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego, specialising in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. This article appeared on her blog The Enlightenment Project.

Maryam Namazie: Theo van Gogh, a film director and journalist, was assassinated in broad daylight in Amsterdam on November 2. He was repeatedly stabbed and his throat slit. They say his assassin has “radical Islamic fundamentalist convictions”. There is a debate on whether this is the act of an individual or the political Islamic movement. Why have you said it is political Islam?

Azar Majedi: This is not the first time we’ve seen that someone who has criticised Islam has been murdered. Political Islam has been massacring, torturing, executing and beheading people for the exact same thing in the Middle East, in Iran under the Islamic Republic of Iran, Afghanistan, the Sudan, and so on. Even when they are not in power but they have political voice in the opposition – they do the same with their opponents e.g. Algeria is a good example. And we’ve seen what has happened in the west lately, e.g. 9/11. This is the method of political Islam – terrorising people. Terror and intimidation are the only methods they have for gaining power. Here we have a typical classic case of someone criticising Islam, exposing its misogyny, and being threatened a number of times and then killed. And ‘coincidentally’ the person who killed him is said to have ‘has fundamentalist convictions’ – the code word for someone who adheres to political Islam. That is why I have said this is another murder by political Islam, which has to be condemned.

Maryam Namazie: You’ve said this has happened before. You yourself know many friends and comrades who have been killed and assassinated by the political Islamic movement. As you said, it is nothing new, is it?

Azar Majedi: No it’s not. Actually just a week ago, I had a programme in commemoration of Gholam Keshavarz, a good comrade and friend of mine who was assassinated by the Islamic regime of Iran in Cyprus 13 years ago for opposing political Islam, being a communist, a socialist, and atheist. The regime sent agents outside of Iran with an elaborate and detailed plan to assassinate him. This is only one example of what political Islam has done to people in Iran, in the Middle East, North Africa and now to people in the west. What they are trying to do in the west – both in Islamic communities and in the society at large – is increasing more and more every year.

Maryam Namazie: You have said in a previous statement: ‘He was murdered because he cared and dared to expose the inherent misogyny in and the brutal nature of Islam. An act, which sadly, nowadays calls for great courage, due to advancements of political Islam and the rise in religion’s influence in the society.’ We are getting reports that he was a racist and that he didn’t separate people from the ideology or religion. For example, in an interview, with the Cultuur magazine he said: “I like to insult people with a purpose. I want to warn against the fifth column here in the Netherlands that tries to corrode our way of life.” According to the Guardian newspaper (04/11/04) Theo van Gogh previously described Muslims in a derogatory manner. Do you think he really cared and dared and was courageous? I would say you are courageous.

Azar Majedi: I must admit when I heard the news I did not know Theo van Gogh and had not read anything by him. I read and found out that he had criticised Islam and made a film, which exposed Islam’s misogyny. This, the news of the death threats he had received, the method of murder, and the letter found on his body all made it clear to me that he was murdered by political Islam. I became furious and saw it as my duty to categorically condemn this crime and call upon all free thinkers and freedom loving people to do the same. If we do not raise our voice against this reactionary movement, if we do not stand firm, political Islam will continue to terrorize the society and make even more advances. Therefore, I described him as courageous. I must say that unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, his writings are not translated into English. Later I found out that he had made many racist and derogatory comments about Jews, Moslems, feminists, and so on.

Having said that, this murder must nonetheless be categorically condemned for many reasons. First of all, this is a murder. And any decent human being is against the murder and killing of human beings. Second, if it is not condemned, we are giving Islamists a green light to go ahead with their terror and intimidation. Thirdly, if this murder is not dealt with in a right and progressive manner, it will add fuel to the racism that already exists in the society. Racists are going to use this as an excuse to terrorize immigrants and incite racial hatred – something we are witnessing in the Netherlands.

I would like to make one point clear. Criticising Islam, ridiculing it, no matter how harshly, falls within the concept of freedom of expression and criticism, and is not racist. However, insulting people by reference to their religion or race is racist. We need to make this distinction very clearly because we find tendencies among the left who consider criticism of Islam as racist. Islamophobia is an invented concept by Islamists and their apologists, a concept that condemns any criticism of Islam as a racist act. I believe Islamophobia is as hypocritical as it is reactionary. We should raise the banner of unconditional freedom of expression and criticism.

The above is an International TV (http://www.anternasional.tv/english) interview dated November 7, 2004.

‘Islam against Islam’ is an interesting topic. The irony of a believer criticising the beliefs is provocative. I am not a Moslem; I am an atheist. However, I have lived Islam; I have firsthand experience of Islam. I was born within a religious conflict: a religious mother and an atheist father. From childhood, I began to see the flaws, the restrictions, the misogyny, the backwardness, the dogma, the superstition, and uncritical nature of Islam vis-à-vis the enlightenment, the freethinking spirit of atheist thinking.

I became an atheist at the age of 12.

The establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran after a failed revolution laid bare many other appalling and cruel dimensions of Islam, which we later came to label political Islam. It was not only dogma or superstition anymore. It was torture, summary executions, stonings, amputations, and the rape of 9-year-olds in the name of marriage. Another face of Islam? Perhaps. But a real one. Millions in Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Nigeria, and Iraq are experiencing this true face of Islam daily.

With the coming to power of the Islamic Republic in Iran, we began to witness a revival of the Islamic movement as a political movement, i.e. the emergence of political Islam. I prefer not to talk about this movement as fundamentalism, but rather political Islam. We are talking here about a contemporary political movement which refers to Islam as its ideological framework and vision. It is not necessarily a doctrinaire and scholastic movement, but it embodies different and varied trends of Islamic tendencies. It is a political movement seeking hegemony and a share of power in the Middle East, North Africa and in Islamist communities. This movement embodies Islamists who hypocritically defend freedom of clothing, so as to oppose the banning of veils in schools and for under-aged girls in their fight against the secularisation of society in the West, and those in Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and Algeria who throw acid at unveiled women, slash them with knives and razors, and who flog them for not observing veiling. They are part and parcel of one movement. This movement is a threat to humankind. It is a movement, against which all freedom loving, equality seeking human beings must take a firm and uncompromising position.

‘Islam against Islam’ may imply finding ways and means to reform Islam, to resort to so-called more moderate interpretations of Islam. As a personal, private belief this may be possible, but as a political movement it is not. The movement which has terrorised the world, we are experiencing today, and which we have become firsthand victims of, is incapable of reform. We are dealing with a political movement which resorts to terror as the main means of achieving power. My experience in Iran explicitly shows that the only way to deal with this movement is to relegate it into the private spheres, eradicate it from the state, education and societal sphere. To do this, we need to build a strong movement both in the region and worldwide.

In my opinion, there are a number of points which can be the basis for an international united front against political Islam in order to make the world a better, more humane and safer place.

Defence of secularisation and de-religionisation of society is one of them. This banner has historically proven successful in the fight against the church and now against the gains of political Islam. The voice for secularism has become loud and clear in Iran. There is a strong movement for the secularisation of society in a country under the siege of political Islam for 25 years. We should unequivocally raise this banner in the West and in the East. We should recreate the spirit of the 18th century, the enlightenment, and the French Revolution, in a contemporary manner.

The fight for universality of human rights and women’s rights is another important cause. In the past two decades the Islamists were largely aided by the proponents of cultural relativism. By defending this racist concept, the Western academia, media and governments turned a blind eye to the atrocities committed by this misogynist and reactionary movement, not only in the so-called “Moslem world”, but in Islamic communities in the West. Apparently, according to this concept, there are some rights that are suitable for Western women and not appropriate for women like me, who are born in the other part of the world.

The veil, sexual apartheid, and second class citizenship were justified by reverting to this arbitrary concept of “their culture”. A violation that felt appalling if committed against a Western woman, was a justifiable action committed against a woman born under Islam. This double standard, this sheer violation of humane principles must be stopped. I must admit that it has been pushed back a great deal. We have fought hard against it for more than one decade.

Defence of children’s rights is another fight which must be extended to areas where so-called religious beliefs are concerned. The veiling of under-aged girls must be banned, not only in schools, but altogether. The veiling of children is a clear violation of their universal rights. Just as we fight for obligatory education for children, abolition of child labour, banning of corporal punishment, we should fight for the banning of veiling of under-aged girls. This has the same significance as other basic children’s rights. The veil deprives a child from a happy normal life, and healthy physical and mental development; it brands their life as different by segregating them. It defines two sets of gender roles and imposes it upon children who have no way of protecting themselves and demanding equality and freedom. Children have no religion; they are only by accident born into a religious family. Society has a duty to protect them and uphold their rights as equal human beings.

Abolition of religious schools is another important arena. This is also an important principle of a secular state, and for the protection of children’s rights. Children must be free from official religious teachings and dogmas. Religion’s hands must be eradicated from children’s lives. The new legislation in France regarding banning of conspicuous religious symbols in public schools and institutions, is an important step but insufficient. In order to safeguard children’s rights, religious schools must be abolished. Otherwise, we create religious ghettos, segregate children living in religious families from the society, and condemn them to a life in isolation. The new legislation is the easiest way out for the state. But we cannot remain indifferent to these children’s lives. The society and the state have the duty to protect their rights. They should be allowed to integrate in the society, to go to school like any other child, and to be free from the meddling of religion in their lives, at least until they are still children.

The recognition of the right to unconditional freedom of expression and criticism is one of the important pillars of a free society and free thinking. The right to criticise Islam is another important means of fighting religious dominance in society. We need to and must criticise Islam relentlessly, without the fear of being beheaded in countries under the siege of Islam, or of being called racist in the West. Islamophobia is a new term created by Islamists or their apologists in order to stop a growing critical movement against Islam and Islamic movements. This is as hypocritical as it is regressive.

I call upon all of you here to recognise the importance and the urgency of demanding secularisation and the de-religionisation of the state and society, unconditional freedom of expression and criticism, recognition of women’s equality and the universality of their rights, the banning of child veiling, and the abolition of religious schools. In order to build a better, safer, freer and a more egalitarian world, we must unequivocally raise this banner.

The above is a speech made by Azar Majedi in a Paris conference entitled ‘Islam against Islam’ on 30 October 2004. Azar Majedi is the head of the Organisation for Women’s Liberation.

Physicists Matt Young and Taner Edis are the editors of a new volume whose contributors are working scholars in the sciences touched by the newest expression of “creation science”: Intelligent Design (ID) Theory. Why Intelligent Design Fails is a patient assessment of all the scientific claims made in connection with ID. The half dozen science-enabled spokesmen for ID are the indispensable core group of an international neo-creationist big tent. Goals of the American movement are sweeping: they begin with a highly visible, well-funded, nationwide effort to demean evolutionary science in American school (K-12) curricula. ID is offered as a better alternative. The hoped-for result is the addition of ID to, or even its substitution for, the teaching of evolution. Which would mean substituting early 19 th-century nature study for modern biology. The admitted ultimate goal of the ID movement is to topple natural science (they berate it as “materialism”) from its pedestal in Western culture and to replace it with “theistic science.”

For several decades, similarly imperialistic goals of a coterie of cultural theorists have been achieved in many university departments of social sciences and humanities, including art history. One well-known art critic, Roger Kimball, has long been an analyst of their postmodern, postcolonial, gender-feminist chic. But now he admits to second thoughts about the value of patient analysis of its gaucheries. Painstaking analysis, applied to presentist posturing like that which now passes in some parts of the academy for art history, can be counterproductive. He worries, in a new book, that careful analysis of wishful absurdities can suggest, to onlookers innocent of academic high culture, that the absurdities are legitimate alternatives to the serious study of art—that the conflict is between equally meritorious interpretations. “Patient objections to the ludicrous,” he writes, “become ludicrous themselves.”1

But this is a worry that goes beyond cultural studies, and it has now become acute in the evolutionary sciences. Patient analysis of creationist blunders and sham reasoning (definition: ostensible inquiry whose conclusion is fixed in advance) has as often done harm as good to the life sciences. Biologists are confronted endlessly with touring companies of debaters and religious charismatics who present the scripts of “scientific” creationism. Most evolutionists and other biologists who are aware of these performances take the easy way out: they ignore all religion-based commentary on science, justifying indifference by declaring that to argue would dignify absurdity. Or worse: they shrug off sham reasoning with a glib dismissal: “Nobody really believes that stuff.” The excuse is itself absurd: Vast numbers—indeed, a majority—of our countrymen do believe that stuff, even as they are ignorant of the real science.

Still, refusal to dignify absurdity has some merit. The creationist position, especially this newest form of it, is pure Hollywood: There is No Such Thing As Bad Publicity. That this view is held by the ID leadership is fully documented in several recent studies of the movement. Thus, almost any careful examination of ID by qualified scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers—especially by those with strong credentials in evolution or cosmology—is likely to be advertised by ID publicists as proof of the scientific importance of ID. Any non-polemical response to it is described to the mass audience for anti-evolution as showing the revolutionary truth of ID, the fear and trembling it causes among Darwinists. That a few dedicated scientists take the trouble to answer ID “theory” in detail is regularly adduced—in ID books, editorials, opinion columns, talk shows, dedicated internet sites, and in a growing numbers of activist student organizations around the country—as signaling the collapse of Darwinism.

The contributors to Why Intelligent Design Fails (WIDF) have risked being so used. But they decided, evidently, to accept this risk. They decided to examine every supposedly scientific (or mathematical, or epistemological) claim of ID, patiently, in detail, and to offer only those conclusions about the value of ID science—if any—that emerge clearly in the individual critiques and from their totality. Whether this risk was justified will be known only if and when the book is widely read, and then responded to (as inevitably it will be) at those many creationist web sites, meetings, talk shows, conferences, and clubs. If they do no more than to denounce the book and disparage its authors (as they began to do the day it was listed on Amazon.com), WIDF will have succeeded. If instead they proclaim it evidence for the scientific muscle of ID theory, the tables will, at least to some extent, have been turned. But about the quality of the critiques in this book, and of the totality, there is no doubt. This is honest, technically competent—patient—inquiry; the critique of the newest form of creation science is devastating.

The Science of ID “Science”

Those scare-quotes on “science” are in ironic honor of recent and current philosophers and sociologists of science who use them routinely to sabotage the value of any word they surround. Thus if you are a relativist, you write about “truth” to signal your discovery that there is no such thing. If you are convinced that objectivity is made impossible by an observer’s culture or ethnicity, then you write “objectivity.” WIDF is about the scientific claims of ID, not about its background, history, purposes, politics, and practices. All those are covered in other books and merely touched upon in the short introduction. The undertaking here is, rather, to examine and judge only those ID claims that have some original scientific (or mathematical) content. Therefore the book lacks any discussion of, for example, one of the iconic books of the movement, Jonathan Wells’s Icons of Evolution, which offers no science of its own but rather a litany of accusations against evolutionary biology, mined from the literature of creationism and applied to quotes dug up from internal arguments in the biological literature. Its burden is that evolution as taught is wrong or fraudulent, and must therefore not be presented to children without the strongest disclaimers. Wisely, the contributors to WIDF have ignored all this. It has already been dismantled, point by point and claim by claim, in lengthy treatments by scientists who are experts in all the fields involved. A check at www.ncseweb.org will unearth them all. There are, on the other hand, purportedly new arguments for ID: and those are the mainstay of its nationwide campaign. They fall loosely into three classes:

• Primarily biological. The featured argument was offered by biochemist Michael Behe, who proposed in 1996 that at the sub-cellular level of molecular machines and chemical reaction pathways, important systems are “irreducibly complex” (IC). Such systems have multiple working parts, each of which is essential for function. Absence of any part would destroy the function. But, his argument goes, non-functioning systems are not subject to positive natural selection. Therefore complex functioning systems cannot have evolved gradually by any Darwinian mechanism, which requires that all intermediate stages have some function. They must have arisen in one fell swoop. Therefore (sic) they are the product of some designing agency—of intelligent design. All recent ID biological claims relate to this one, and the most widely exposed mathematical claim depends upon it too. A body of other, very old but regularly updated creationist claims comes along with ID, however. These are all versions of the young-earth creationist preoccupation: that while there may be some common descent at a very low level (contemporary species, perhaps, from the original basic kinds), the world’s biota are the products of God’s “kinds,” as per Genesis or in separate interventions.
• Epistemological-Physical. These arguments challenge the logic or the formal plausibility of prevailing scientific accounts of universal origins and of the history of life on Earth. There are several threads of which these arguments are woven, some very old, some relatively new. The oldest are creationist canards from thermodynamics, for example: that since the entropy of a (closed) system either rises or remains constant, and its degree of order (complexity) must therefore remain constant or fall, the spontaneous (read “natural”) appearance of life-forms (which means increased order and complexity) is impossible. Something other than nature alone must have done it. Another class of arguments depends upon heuristic models—Michael Behe’s mousetrap, for example—as illustrations of irreducible complexity or the need for a purposeful designer. The more sophisticated arguments surfacing in ID ignore these old thermodynamics howlers and focus, instead, on supposed limitations of self-organizing processes or on the several anthropic principles (“the fine-tuning of the universe for life”) as indicators of supra-physical design in the universe.
• Mathematical-Probabilistic-Computational. These are descendants of the primitive creationist claim of life’s improbability, as calculated. If, that is, the assembly of something necessary to life requires a coming together, at just the right time and place, of a large number of individual events or objects, each of which has its own (often low) probability, then the probability of the assembly occurring by chance is the product of all those constituent probabilities. If that product is small enough, then the likelihood of the assembly happening in any real time-interval is effectively zero. Again, the more sophisticated ID proponents shun this argument, steering away from the self-evident absurdity of such clearly inapplicable models. Nevertheless, the flawed basis in equi-probability and multiplication remains in the fancier versions. The achievement of William Dembski, the movement’s mathematician-theologian-philosopher, is to couple such arguments with a purely deductive device, an eliminative “design inference,” by which—he claims (but has never demonstrated)—the presence of design can be discovered as the cause of any supposedly natural process. This is to be done by considering the probabilities of chance and “regularity” (physical law) as causes, and then by the extent to which the still unexplained event or object has “specified complexity.”

Judging ID Science

WIDF analyses of these ID offerings are provided by a team of well-qualified contributors. For the biological claims, there are chapters from paleontologist Alan Gishlick, biologist-engineer Gert Korthof, molecular pharmacologist Ian Musgrave, and molecular biologist David Ussery. For logic, epistemology, physics, and cosmology, there are contributions from physicist (and editor) Taner Edis, taphonomist (the study of fossilization) Gary Hurd, bio-mathematician Istvan Karsai, physicist-engineer Mark Perakh, philosopher-biologist Niall Shanks, physicist Victor Stenger, and physicist (editor) Matt Young. Finally, the mathematical and probabilistic arguments are examined closely by zoologist-computer scientist Wesley Elsberry, physicist Mark Perakh, and mathematician-computer scientist Jeffrey Shallit.

Result? Not one of the ID claims is sustained, let alone proven, in the massive output of ID to date. Most of the claims are shown to be simply bad science. The expository style of WIDF is for the most part respectful of the authors and claims analyzed. It is therefore very remarkable that those presumably qualified ID authors should have committed themselves, and to some extent their academic careers, to a relentless, public elaboration of soft claims, bad arguments, and plain mistakes. One can only guess that they are driven by motivation and sincere feelings other than simple dedication to doing the best possible science.

A few examples, telegraphically stated, must suffice here. Irreducible complexity will do for most of the biology. Behe’s entire argument depends upon the implied necessity that every piece of a sub-cellular molecular machine—and most such “pieces” are proteins, which are encoded in genes—be provided for ab initio. That is, it requires that all the proteins of a supposedly irreducibly complex system are (or were) provided from the beginning, or that the genes for them were already there at the beginning but not necessarily being used. Examples he adduces of such systems are the blood clotting cascade and the bacterial flagellum, which functions as an outboard motor for the bacterial cell. But as the biologist-authors of WIDF show, there is no need for all the parts of any such system to be there, or to have been there as such, from the beginning. Behe made a simple, but bad, mistake. He overlooked gene duplication and the independent evolution of copies; and he forgot that many, perhaps most, proteins have multiple functions. He seems not to have thought through the startling redundancy of subcellular functions. Thus, in separate WIDF chapters, Ussery and Musgrave present unshakable evidence that systems Behe would consider IC have evolved by “Darwinian mechanisms”; and that relic intermediates for many of the steps in that evolution survive as the current, simpler version of the system in some contemporary organism.

Gishlick, in an unexpected way, tops even those no-nonsense contributions. Taking the definition of IC at face value, he shows that there must be IC systems at the level of anatomy, as well as of biochemistry. One well-studied IC system of contemporary animal anatomy is the flight machine of birds: the wing. Gishlick sets out the special parts of the working wing and all its auxiliaries, from wrist bones to special, airfoil-producing flight feathers. He then shows that all those parts appeared during the long course of Avian evolution over geologic time, and that for most of that long stretch, those parts functioned usefully (therefore selectably) for somethingother than flight. Evolution of functional systems is almost always a story of co-optation, as evolutionists have known for nearly a century. Gishlick’s naming of known fossil species that had those intermediate states of the system as it evolved, is an overwhelming dismissal of the central claim from IC.

Gert Korthof undertakes the modest job of examining descent with modification as viewed by the ID leaders. “Descent with modification” was Darwin’s own shorthand for the history of life on Earth, for the facts of evolution as he gathered them together (even in the absence of a workable idea about heredity). All the ID
leaders equivocate about this. They do hesitate to state, if not to imply, the young-earth creationist absurdity that all species are “kinds,” and that all kinds were called into being by God. Biologist Behe, for example, concedes that descent with modification has occurred; but he indicates that it can’t account for IC, so that intelligent design must be at the heart of real species-formation—if and when that happens. Others among the ID leadership either deny any taxonomically significant descent with modification, or labor to create complex “alternate” taxonomies that allow species to proliferate, but only as products of basic families—the “kinds” of genesis. Korthof’s essay is a compact gem: he shows that none of these jury-rigged schemes can possibly explain the huge matrix of facts out of which modern evolutionary biology grows, and that they are severally illogical to boot.

The part-epistemological, part-faux-thermodynamic ID claims to the effect that information-rich complexity cannot arise spontaneously in natural systems are addressed by several of these authors. But Shanks and Karsai describe such spontaneous complexities as the beautiful Benard (convection) cells that organize themselves in an asymmetrically-heated Petri dish, and the astonishing, ad hoc shaping of cellular structure in wasp nests, whose builders have no intelligent-design contingency book for nest structure. The last resort of ID proponents when defeated, as they have been in arguments about the need for designer-intervention in such historical processes as evolution and such contemporary processes as these discussed by Shanks and Karsai, is to invoke the strong anthropic principle. The universe is exquisitely fine-tuned, this says, as regards the values of its fundamental physical constants and the possible structures arising because of them—fine-tuned for “life as we know it,” for us. Therefore the universe must have been pre-loaded with the right information—the “complex specified information” that William Dembski and Behe and the others argue is the unfailing diagnostic of an intelligent designer. Victor Stenger, however, explains here why current theoretical and astro-physics, especially multiple-universes cosmological theory, is perfectly at home with a “fine-tuned” universe inhabited by ourselves, and with its having arisen spontaneously.

Mark Perakh has taken great pains to study and analyze the claims of Dembski’s most influential theoretical book so far. That book presents an argument based upon certain induction-formalizing, optimizing theorems discovered by mathematicians David Wolpert and William MacReady in 1997. As Dembski exploits them, these so-called “No Free Lunch” theorems mean that the “the Darwinian mechanism,” taken to mean iterated algorithmic searches on a (biological) fitness landscape, cannot in general find the kinds of solution represented in the complexity of biological organisms—unless necessary information is incorporated beforehand in the algorithm itself. “Front-loading” again. But Perakh’s study shows that this conclusion results from a misunderstanding and misapplication of the No Free Lunch theorems. David Wolpert, co-discoverer of the theorems, dismissed Dembski’s prolix argument as “written in Jello.” Elsberry and Shallit, finally, provide a well-named essay, “Playing Games with Probability: Dembski’s Complex Specified Information.” In it they show that this most fundamental (and most obscure) of the formal elements of Intelligent Design Theory is simply incoherent.

The editors, Young and Edis, contribute strong chapters of their own on a number of these points and also provide concise but useful background on the ID movement, on the epistemological issues, and on ID congeners elsewhere in the religious world (for example in Islam). Gary Hurd provides a very useful appendix on organizations and websites concerned with ID (pro and con).

What’s Really Happening

Much of this might appear to professional biologists to be nit-picking; and in a sense it is. But it is nit-picking because the claims of neo-creationism are mostly nits. They are quote-minings, trivially literal models such as mousetraps and painted bulls-eyes, or obscure mathematical-probabilistic arguments based upon unrealistic models of biological phenomena. Biologists who know what has been going on in evolutionary science the past decade or two can be, understandably, bemused. They know that there has been an explosion of progress in study of the central process of evolution: the formation of new species—speciation. They are aware of excellent recent books, popular (2) and professional, (3) recounting that progress, conveying what we know today of at least some of the real mechanisms by which speciation has occurred in the past and is happening all around us, now.

They recognize that providing a fully detailed account of macroevolution is the daunting task yet before us, but that the fruitful marriage of molecular genetics and developmental evolutionary biology has already provided plausible answers to the basic question: how the proliferation of animal body plans happened, at least since they first fossilized well during the lower Cambrian. The forms demonstrated then heralded the eventual diversity. Evolutionists know now that the Cambrian “explosion” was not a literal explosion: that the rapid unfolding of body-plans in the lower Cambrian was inherited from ancestors: and some of those ancestors have been found. An ancestral Echinoderm (not yet an Echinoderm) has at last been discovered in the Chengjiang deposits of China. The Echinoderms did not appear explosively, by some act of special creation. They evolved. There is no reason to doubt that the same was true for the other phyla. One of the elusive, predicted, and long-awaited microscopic ancestors of all bilaterian animals has been found, fossilized, in the Doushanto formation in China. It dates to some 50 million years before the Cambrian.

Every reasonably informed biologist knows that there are big problems in the history of life on Earth still to be solved, and the ways to their solutions are not transparently clear. But that is the way of all science; and so far, natural science has delivered testable and daily-confirmed explanations. No other “science,” theistic or otherwise, has. Every one of those informed and open-minded biologists therefore knows, as well as anything about the physical world can be known, that organic evolution happened on this planet. And he or she knows that current evolutionary theory, the product of 145 years of often besieged work, of testing and winnowing, is one of our surest scientific possessions.

So it seems a trouble for busy scientists to give their time to truth-squads, examining (scrupulously, as do the WIDF contributors) the incessant nay-saying of creationists, and now of creationists who use the language of science and mathematics comfortably. But it must be done. There will be more anti-evolution, religiously motivated nay-saying, and there must be more books like WIDF. The stakes are high. Nothing less hangs in the balance than the hope that some fraction of the next generation—of our children—will get serious education in science, and that they will be capable of speaking truth not only to power, but to and for all their peers.

Dr. Paul R. Gross is University Professor of Life Sciences, emeritus, at the University of Virginia. His baccalaureate and doctoral degrees are from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a developmental and molecular biologist who has taught at Brown, Rochester, MIT, and the University of Virginia. He is co-author with Norman Levitt of Higher Superstition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), and with Barbara Forrest of Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Oxford University Press, 2003).

References

(1) Roger Kimball, The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art. (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004), 52.

(2) Menno Schilthuizen, Frogs, Flies, and Dandelions: The Making of Species (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

(3) Jerry A. Coyne and H. Allen Orr, Speciation (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, Inc., 2004).

Why Intelligent Design Fails is published by Rutgers University Press, copyright 2004.

Permission to print, distribute, and post with proper citation and acknowledgment. Copyright 2004 Michael Shermer, Skeptics Society, Skeptic magazine, e-Skeptic magazine. Opinions expressed are those of the authors, and not necessarily those of the Skeptics Society, its Board of Directors, or its members.

“The Passion held the No. 1 position at the box office for three weeks, then dipped when Dawn of the Dead knocked it out of first position. Now in its seventh week, The Passion beat out last weekend’s No. 1 movie, [the] comic-book action-adventure Hellboy, which dropped 52 percent to $11.1 million . . ” Anne Thompson, New York Times, April 11, 2004.

The German Romantics revolted against the Enlightenment by inventing a poeticized Christianity in literature and art and by incarnating their reinvented religion in a spiritualized poetry, love, and nature. Since their spiritualization of art effected its transformations in an autonomous poetic realm, their political impact was slight. For the same reason, even the deeply devout Romantic poets Novalis or Eichendorff composed a poetry that speaks to the secular-minded as much as to the religious. The essence of their work resides in a realm as separate from traditional religion as from science and politics.

But the legacy of German Romanticism also includes subliminally blended admixtures of religion with poetry and politics with religion-adulterations that subvert tradition in religion and simulate sacred authority in politics. Mel Gibson’s film of the last twelve hours in the life of Jesus was attended by millions of spectators, many of them devout Christians, between Ash Wednesday and Easter, 2004. It would undoubtedly surprise many to know that Gibson’s film is rooted in the era that pioneered the poetic reinvention of religious authority. Without acknowledgement in the credits, The Passion of the Christ incorporates a tradition going back directly to nineteenth-century German Romanticism and indirectly to the mystical phenomena and writings they revived.

Gibson’s Passion is known to have borrowed a great deal from a book published under the name of a nineteenth-century German nun, Anna Katharina Emmerich (1774-1824): The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (DP). What is less widely known is that German Romantic poet Clemens Brentano (1778-1842) was the author of the work attributed to her: Das bittere Leiden unsers Herrn Jesu Christ in its original title (Br 26). The true authorship of The Dolorous Passion was never a secret to scholars of German literature or to church historians. As Kenneth L. Woodward put it in Making Saints, the work resulted from “the conscious elaborations of an overwrought Romantic poet” (389).

Much of the debate over the film has therefore been based on erroneous premises. Early critical articles and reviews took Gibson to task for incorporating an objectionable passage, Matthew 27:25, the curse pronounced by the Jews on themselves in demanding the blood of Christ. The objection gave rise to the misleading impression that the critics were demanding that Gibson censor the Bible. The impression was further encouraged by the tenor of Christian support for the film. It seemed that the more critics of the film cited historical evidence contrary to the Bible or presumed to know the true message of Jesus better than the enthusiastic Christian audience, the less tenable their views became to those they needed to convince. The critics drew a line in the sand. Millions crossed it in the other direction. If the critics had begun by observing that the film is based on the “conscious elaborations of an overwrought Romantic poet,” the debate might have evolved differently. Without mentioning his source in the film credits, Gibson adapted a literary work that deviates from the Bible to the idiom of the violent action film.

The Film as Book

The reader is invited to imagine four intersecting circles across the page. The two middle circles are boldly outlined. They overlap broadly to signify the major content that the film borrows from the book: its continuous line of action, major episodes, secondary characters, dialogue, and many details. The outside circles that project their influences into the center signify on the left the concealed Romantic influence and on the right the visual impact of the Hollywood action film. From opposite extremes, the extraneous influences proceeding from German Romanticism and the Hollywood cinema thus meet and blend in the overlapping space of the film as book, giving rise to a cinematic verisimilitude that is spectacular and visionary but non-biblical in significant narrative and affective aspects. Without acknowledgment in his credits, Gibson extracted from the Romantic-era work an account of the Passion as combat against a formidable, personalized opponent, in a theater of battle polarized between friend and foe. Near the beginning of the film (just after the Last Supper), Jesus lies face down, praying in the night on the Mount of Olives. Beside him stands his opponent, Satan as tempter (in the film an androgynous temptress), who mutates into a serpent. When Jesus reconfirms his spiritual resolve, his physical ordeal begins. Next the opponent is the Jewish police who arrest him and beat him on the way to Jerusalem (DP 130ff.). Spectacularly, they throw him from a bridge. Then Jesus faces the physical abuse and mockery of the Jewish crowds and Sanhedrin. They behave as a raging lynch mob, far in excess of their Gospel prototypes (DP 152, 153, 154, 157, 159, 166, 187, 199, etc.). Similarly, Roman sadism exceeds any biblical precedent. The scourging of Jesus is attenuated and gruesome (DP 217-23). The torrent of blows and savagery continues relentlessly until Jesus expires on the cross. From the fluid mob-like opponent, a few thoughtful individuals emerge: Pilate and his wife Claudia, dissenting Jews, the good thief. The book lends the film its alternation of crowd scenes with one-on-one scenes, its colorful spectrum of individualized yet dichotomized good and evil characters, and its blow-by-blow choreography of violence. Gibson is in fact surprisingly faithful to the unacknowledged Emmerich-Brentano.

Film scenes:	Gospel Precedent:	Emmerich-Brentano (DP):
1. Snake at Jesus’ feet .	None	“odious reptile” … “gigantic” (114)
2. Violent bridge scene .	None	Jesus struck, thrown from bridge (136)
3. Sanhedrin or Jewish crowd as “lynch mob”	One episode in each Gospel	Constant blows and abuse. Devils appear in Jewish crowds (see above.
4. Peter confesses to Mary	None	Corresponds exactly (174)
5. Underground prison	None	Jesus in a subterranean prison (176)
6. Herod as decadent	Herod only mentioned	Herod as “effeminate” prince (206)
7. Scourging of Jesus	No details are given	Extended characterization (202-3)
8. Pilate’s wife Claudia	Mentioned only once	Every detail corresponds (219-24)
9. Claudia’s many dreams	One dream mentioned	Claudia dreams like Emmerich (203)
10. Claudia brings cloth	None	Exact correspondence (224-5)
11. Nailing Jesus’ hand	No details given	Exact correspondence (270)
12. Raising up of cross	No details given	Exact correspondence (273)
13. Dialogue of high priest and the good thief	No details or no precedent	Close correspondence (280, 281)

This merely outlines the relations of the Bible to Emmerich-Brentano and Gibson. In Emmerich-Brentano, the action was originally informed by numerous allusions lost to the film audience. Part of the content was the anti-Semitism of Romantic circles with which Brentano associated. But this was only one part. The tumultuous blood-thirsty crowd scenes have been interpreted as a reference to the French Revolutionary mob (Frühwald 182). Pilate and the Romans allude to the French or to the Protestant Prussian rulers of Emmerich’s Catholic Westphalia following the Congress of Vienna. Emmerich is the suffering Jesus, Brentano a disciple. The violence has its own tradition-bound semiotics. The Stations of the Cross, the seven falls of Jesus on the Via Dolorosa, the seven words spoken on the cross, or the roles of Mary, Veronica, or other “good Jews” are drawn from Catholic tradition. Evangelical Protestants who have embraced the film are blissfully unaware that the flesh sundered from Jesus’ body when he is brutally beaten or scourged is a disparaging symbolic allusion to them as heretics ripped from the ecclesiastical body of Christ by the Reformation, an allusion explained early in The Dolorous Passion.

Bernhard Gajek has documented the materials on which Brentano drew. Among them was the Baroque devotional writing Das Leben Christi (Mainz 1677) of Martin von Cochem (Gajek 93ff.). Martin’s Baroque prototype contained many of the episodes and details Gibson extracted from Emmerich-Brentano, notably the detailed circumstances of Jesus’ capture, scourging, and crucifixion. Martin had cited such prior sources as Brigitte of Sweden and Catherine of Siena and had enveloped his recounting of the sacred events in an intrusive narrator’s monolog, reminiscent of St. Augustine’s prayerful Confessions or Soliloquies. Brentano shrewdly recast the Passion narrative, eliminating the Baroque middleman with his overt citations of traditional authorities and giving Emmerich the role of a transparent medium that witnesses historical events immediately and recounts them in her own words. When Gibson in turn eliminates from the film itself any mention or crediting of Emmerich, the resultant immediacy of presentation takes on an appearance of historical and biblical authenticity.

In composing Das bittere Leiden unsers Herrn Jesu Christi, Brentano consulted Hebrew calendars, travelers’ reports, and maps of Jerusalem and the Holy Land (Gajek 98). Even what the poet heard and wrote down from Emmerich herself was triggered and influenced by the questions he put to her or by sources such as Tauler that he read to her at her bedside (Schultz/SS 404). As a book collector-connoisseur and Romantic stylist-artist whose preserved manuscripts are replete with fine ink sketches of visionary scenes, Brentano also drew on medieval and Baroque iconography (Gajek 109-12). Akin to the Catholic Romantic “Nazarene” painters of the Lukasbund, the poet employed his literary skills to fashion finely wrought tableau-like scenes which the film exploits effectively.

When we see a Nazarene painting from the life of Christ or a Baroque painting of Jews persecuting Jesus, we know that we are looking at a Nazarene or Baroque painting. In the film, the historical determinants have been rendered imperceptible to the public. Since neither Emmerich nor Brentano is mentioned in the film credits, what remains of Gibson’s immediate source is what conforms to the scenario of the violent action film: action, violence, and good Christians against bad Jews and Romans. The defense might be made that the film adheres to the spirit rather than to the letter of the Bible. But what sort of spirit? Received via what kind of human agency? The fact that Brentano is the unacknowledged source of the film adds weight to the case against it. But it also greatly complicates matters.

Emmerich According to Brentano

This brings us to the character of the visionary nun, her devotee, his artistic life, and its relationship to the reported ordeals of Anna Katharina Emmerich. His notes of their conversations appear least embellished (Br 28,1). His anecdotal biography of her contains things that later Catholic commentators preferred to ignore. If Das bittere Leiden unsers Herrn Jesu Christi is known to be the work of the poet, Emmerich’s input is undeniable; and between his notes and biography of her on the one hand and the details of The Dolorous Passion on the other, there are many significant parallels and revealing resonances that are lost or subsumed in the film. In consequence, the Romantic influence subliminally but potently informs the film.

Emmerich has been referred to in various articles as an “anti-Semitic nun.” Though it is certainly possible that she held the prejudices of her time, the source cited for her anti-Semitism is from Schmöger, who published his biography of her forty years after her death and drew upon Brentano’s possibly unreliable protocols (Schmöger 547-8.). The evidence cited is in any case less substantial than Brentano’s own involvement in the anti-Semitic Deutsche Tischgesellschaft. It makes little sense to select atypically from Schmöger’s late nineteenth-century work while ignoring tendencies of its Romantic source. Brentano either conveys a less filtered view of Emmerich or he confronts us with seminal tendencies in the presentation of her life and significance. In fact, his account is more nuanced and compelling that those authored by more conventional biographers who depict her as the stereotypical saint. It can neither be ignored that Brentano spent several years at Emmerich’s bedside, and therefore had much first-hand knowledge, nor can it be ruled out that he would have had good reason to tailor his biographical account to match the visions he ascribed to her. Whether he was more accurate or simply more adept, his presentation is part of the historical context of the book and thus pertinent to the hidden sources of the film.

The degree to which the extant accounts of her life are derived from Brentano’s propaganda would be worthy of investigation. In the poet’s notes of their conversations, Anna Katherina does not come across as a hate-driven bigot. She is a cheerful peasant woman who from childhood possesses naive piety, imagination, and compassion. As a fourteen-year old, Anna had tried to assist her ailing parents by prayer and her peculiar device of surrogate suffering, that is, by taking upon herself the sufferings of others. In her later life, her instinctive pity and surrogate suffering intensified. Her pains became more acute and debilitating. The once vigorous and active peasant girl was eventually reduced to a bed-ridden invalid.

Joining an Augustinian convent fulfilled her life’s dream. But when her convent was secularized along with many others in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, she was deprived of her longed-for status. This led to a conflict of authority of a kind often associated with the beginnings of mystical experience. Her lost authority could only be restored by God himself. Beginning in medieval times, the challenged authority of women, lay persons, or clergy caught in double binds involving faith had given rise to the varieties of visionary, contemplative, and speculative mysticism. Her afflictions, visions, and ecstasies began to spread her fame on the winds of the Catholic Awakening movement that was gaining force at the time. From 1812 on, her afflictions are said to have included stigmata and other Christ-like wounds. Whatever these might have been – imagined, self-inflicted, or paranormal – it’s worth remembering that pain was hardly in short supply. In Brentano’s account, she pledged to suffer as a surrogate for the misery of her fellows. Her prayers were fulfilled.

This seemed an appropriate response to the discontents of her times. Compassion was in vogue in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Europeans, even of Anna’s peasant class, had fresh memories of revolution and of decades of war exacerbating the perennial misfortunes of the common people. The pious and uneducated Anna Katharina reacted naively to the crises of her time, its turmoil and confusions. As a child, she had dreamed dreams of the Reign of Terror, of Louis XVI at the guillotine, and of the chaos and bloodshed of battle. She had experienced dread at a place in the fields where an innocent soldier was said to have been betrayed by false witness and executed. From early childhood on, she had been gripped by scenes from the Bible. She sought to emulate Christ in her own afflictions.

In August 1819, Anna’s status as a mystical stigmatic was challenged by the state: she became the object of a public controversy when a Prussian government commission investigated her. Her newly arrived disciple became so zealous on her behalf that he antagonized even the cautious Catholic officials (Schultz/SS 402.). The commission’s painful and humiliating examination of Emmerich’s body appears as a likely prototype for Jesus’ envisioned humiliation. The Dolorous Passion mentions the violation of his modesty in a manner that suggests a refined or feminine sense of shame. Forced to strip publicly before he is whipped, Jesus loosens a remaining undergarment and quickly turns to face the pillar to conceal his private parts, calling out to the Virgin Mary to avert her gaze. In the German original, Mary swoons in this same instant-a psychologically suggestive passage that was deleted from the generally faithful translation. Emmerich’s humiliation by the investigating commission was also an extension of the political subjugation of Catholic Westphalia to a rationalist Protestant Prussian state. In a complex manner, Romantic sentiments and sensibilities as well as Catholic compassion were being made to suffer at the hands of an unsentimental Prussian order.

Compassion was a profound, intellectual, but also highly contradictory, impulse of the Zeitgeist. The years of Anna’s peak reputation produced Goya’s Disasters of War, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, the utopian schemes of Charles Fouriér and Robert Owen for alleviating popular misery, and Arthur Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, with its philosophical meditations on cosmic suffering and its exaltation of a compassionate sainthood. The example of Schopenhauer should serve to remind us that it is possible to write brilliantly about compassion without actually having any. The era of compassion was also a period of rising political repression and of a new anti-Semitism. There were anti-Semitic riots in many German cities in the year before Brentano met Emmerich. The cry of the rioters was “Hep, Hep!” an acronym for “Hierosolema est perdita,” “Jerusalem is lost.” According to Elon, this is a throwback to the medieval crusading ethos encouraged by Romantic nostalgia (Elon 101-7).

Brentano’s Path to Emmerich

In this dangerously contradictory, overheated climate, Emmerich’s fame spread to the Romantic intellectuals, many of whom had converted or were ideologically inclined to embrace Catholicism as a confirmation of their Romantic impulses. Her untutored faith and visionary gifts appealed to the Romantic elevation of imagination and interest in folk culture and to Brentano’s own quest for transcendent truth and absolute love. The poet believed that elements of a primal myth survived in folk tradition (Gajek 35). The visionary nun also nourished his fascination with occult or mystical knowledge. He would eventually use her to test his hypotheses about the power of the miraculous. He experimented with her ability to recognize true holy relics or gain clairvoyant knowledge of Jesus. After her death, Brentano even tried to prove the supernatural preservation of her corpse by having it exhumed (Schultz 192).

Possibly like Gibson himself, Brentano was beset by artistic and personal crises. He had renounced the literary life and returned to the Catholic faith. He was the brilliant, unstable, prodigal son of a wealthy Frankfurt merchant family with distinguished Italian roots. Orphaned young, he threw himself into intense, unconventional attachments. He hurled pleading love letters at Sophie Mereau, the married woman who became the first wife whom he adored but subordinated to his own ambitions (Dülmen 272). He was devastated by her death in 1806. A bizarre marriage followed in 1807 with Auguste Bußmann, a sixteen-year-old girl of good family who was already solidly betrothed to another before her tryst with the poet. The two were standing in a crowd of Frankfurt burghers attending Napoleon’s triumphant entry into the city. After making a scandalous public spectacle of their passions, the older man and the young girl eloped (Schultz/SS 169). The marriage was an instant disaster. Auguste was an untamed pupil of Romantic rebellion. He soon came to see his child bride as the demonic counterpart of the angelic mother figures he had always worshiped. With the support of friends, Brentano disposed of the demonized Auguste by means of a separation and divorce, an un-Catholic solution that he did not regret after returning to Catholicism, or indeed even after she committed suicide in 1832, in the wake of another tragic marriage (Schultz/SS 224-5).

Orphaned young, widowed early, burdened with guilt, Brentano was a prodigal son with nothing to return to. He invented a home, first in “the Invisible Church of Art” (Hoffmann 180) and afterward in a poeticized Catholicism. Van Dülmen recently called attention to the continuity of the Romantics’ cherished circles of friendship and their later conversions to a Catholic religious fellowship. This is nowhere more evident than with Brentano who found life unbearable without the intimacy of his sister Bettina, his friend and brother-in-law Achim von Arnim, or other associates whose hospitality for the wayward poet had begun to wear thin. In 1817 he wrote a massive confession of sins and returned to the fold. He also courted a Lutheran pastor’s daughter, the poet Luise Hensel. She was in love with another man, but likewise in the throes of a conversion to Catholicism, encouraged by Brentano. Partly to get him out of her hair, Luise urged the poet to visit Emmerich in the Westphalian town of Dülmen. He had been preceded there by others from his circle, including his brother Christian.

The poet went to Dülmen in 1819 and was so overwhelmed by his first encounter with the saintly invalid that he extended his stay for five years until her death in 1824. Luise also became a nun and continued to influence Brentano’s affairs for years to come. After Emmerich’s death, preserving her visions and the memory of her life became the central objective of Brentano’s remaining years. He published The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ in 1833-nine years after Emmerich’s death-and worked on her biography. The Catholic expert who examined the Brentano-Emmerich papers in the 1920s didn’t think very highly of the poet’s religious development before or after his conversion. There was something unclean about his Romantic alchemy of sacred and profane love. Before converting, Brentano had raised poetry to a religion. After it his Catholicism was rank with poetic impulses. Before, he portrayed himself as crucified by the torments of unrequited love. Afterward the nun replaced the other female figures in his life as a mother-figure and soul-mate in one. Recent scholarship has even argued for an erotically charged relationship. Brentano is said to have encroached on Emmerich’s female privacy in tending her wounds. The invalid nun’s expressions of affection for her “Pilgrim” go beyond the erotic usages of traditional bridal mysticism and offer evidence of a relationship not confined to the spiritual (Schultz/SS 401-2).

Be this as it may, it seems clear that Brentano’s obsession with guilt and expiation and Anna’s extraordinary spirituality were decisive in drawing him to her bedside. The available literature suggests that, no less than Yeats or Dostoyevsky, he was above all an author, driven not by lust or anti-Semitism, but by his own creative demons. What they drove him to is of course another matter. In one respect at least, the Romantic poet was as modern as the present-day writers and artists who can’t simply experience their personal crises without publicizing them on talk shows and turning them into marketable commodities. Brentano made a major artistic production of his spiritual crisis, with God as a co-sponsor and the devil on hand to claim the critics and doubters. In this sense, we are dealing with a passion of the creative artist.

Brentano Eclipsed

Both the book by Brentano and the film by Gibson succeed in attributing their production to a divine source: Emmerich’s divinely inspired visions or the Bible. For either, this involves something like ventriloquism or slight of hand; and the upshot, in both cases, is a validation, of Catholic Romanticism on the one hand and of the violent action film with a sacred content on the other. One might seek further parallels in the moral and religious development of Brentano and Gibson or the conservative political climate of their respective times; but this could unnecessarily complicate the issue. Not the concealed motive behind the deed but the work itself is the key to understanding their respective uses of substitution or ventriloquism. Gibson did not choose to return to Jesus by giving up his profane art and quietly operating a soup kitchen in obscurity. In making The Passion of the Christ, the director was working in the same métier as before. Not the profession was changed; the genre was instead elevated by its new content.

In the case of Brentano, the matter is similar yet more complex. The work he attributed to Emmerich both breaks with and validates his previous life as an artist. In collaboration with Achim von Arnim, the poet had formerly reworked and elevated folk material in Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Scholars including Frühwald and Gajek have established that, like Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Das bittere Leiden incorporates and refashions materials drawn from various sources (Frühwald 294-7). With their peculiar artistic means, the Romantics supported the dictum vox populi, vox Dei. If Des Knaben Wunderhorn played secretary to vox populi, Das bittere Leiden does so for both populus and Deus. At the same time, the work necessarily relates to the lives and interactions of Emmerich and Brentano. Given the main premise that the nun’s sufferings imitate those of Jesus, it is only consistent that the participants in her lived drama correspond (though not one-to-one) with figures in the visionary work itself. They correspond to the degree that they embody either faith and compassion, or cruelty, indifference, and unbelief.

The following discussion should suggest how much of the informing power of the Romantic sources is lost and how much is either sublimated or transformed into the one-dimensional cinematic action film genre. In the film, the visionary scenarios from The Dolorous Passion are bolstered on the one hand by a presumption of biblical inerrancy and on the other by visionary cinematic technique. This leads to a serious disconnect. Despite their mystifications, Emmerich and Brentano did not go so far as to claim divine verbal inspiration. By omitting to mention his immediate source in the film credits, Gibson encourages the public to suppose that his screenplay is based on the Bible treated with a modicum of artistic license. Gibson thereby obfuscates the Romantic source of his film’s pathos and masks the human illness, compassion, historical experience, and imaginative inner life of Emmerich, as well as the poetic interventions of Brentano.

The Romanticism that is subsumed or supplanted in the film infuses the beginning of The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Its Last Supper is celebrated in a German Romantic ambience: “An der Südseite des Berges Sion, nicht weit von der nun auch verödeten Burg Davids und dem von der Morgenseite zu dieser Burg aufsteigenden Markte, liegt ein starkes, altes Gebäude zwischen Reihen oben zusammengezogener schattiger Bäume in einem geräumigen Hofe, der von dicken Mauern umgeben ist” (Br 26:71). “On the southern side of Mount Sion, not far from the ruined Castle of David, and the market held on the ascent leading to that Castle, there stood, towards the east, an ancient and solid building, between rows of thick trees, in the midst of a spacious court surrounded by thick walls” (DP 64-5). Moreover, David’s Castle, we are told, was where he and his chivalrous companions honed their martial skills: they are knights of yore, as imagined by a Romantic artist (DP 65). In another commentary, implausibly attributed by the supposed scribe to the untraveled Emmerich, the ruined Castle is described in the manner of a Romantic ruin. David’s Castle is reminiscent of the ruined monasteries painted by Caspar David Friedrich-or the heart-breaking secularization of Emmerich’s own Augustinian convent: “Wenn ich in den alten Zeiten Schlösser großer Könige und Tempel so herabgekommen sehe zu niedrigem Gebrauche, denke ich immer … wie jetzt, wo auch so viele große Werke frommer, treuer Mühsamkeit, Kirchen und Klöster zerstört, oder zu weltlichem, oft nicht allzu sündenreinem Gebrauche verschleudert werden” (Br 26:218). “When in meditation I behold the ruins of old castles and temples … my mind always reverts to the events of our own days, when so many of the beautiful edifices erected by our pious and zealous ancestors are either destroyed, defaced, or used for worldly, if not wicked purposes” (DP 192). Brentano’s Jerusalem obviously stirs the same emotions as Romantic Heidelberg, where a fellowship of poets and artists dreamed in the shadows of a ruined castle.

The Last Supper takes place in the house of Nicodemus. Like a German painter of the Lukasbund in Rome, Nicodemus dwells amid the ruined monuments of the past and occupies himself as a sculptor in his spare time. The Supper itself is eaten at three tables which seat twelve each in three adjoining rooms. This fanciful arrangement is suggestive of the interlocking circles of Romantic friends documented in Richard van Dülmen’s cultural history of Romanticism Poesie des Lebens. In its size, semi-public surroundings and male network, the Last Supper is not unlike the Christlich-Deutsche Tischgesellschaft of Brentano’s beloved friend and brother-in-law Achim von Arnim (Nienhaus 16).

Romantic art and Catholic faith merge in the ambience of visionary Jerusalem. Objects of utility in the Last Supper are depicted with a painterly attention to symbolic detail. There are scarcely veiled defenses of Catholic rites and sacraments, including the Real Presence in the Eucharist, which, it seems, Protestants no longer contemplate with sufficient solemnity. During the Last Supper, the Apostles are depicted as jotting down notes on the small parchment rolls they carry on their persons. Just as the notes the Apostles take are destined to become the Gospels, the notes Brentano took, or claimed to have taken, at Emmerich’s bedside are to become The Dolorous Passion. The visionary revelation at her bedside thus goes beyond claiming to mediate the biblical antecedent to mimic and embody it in an artistic equivalent of Real Presence in George Steiner’s sense. In all events, these symbolic and contemplative elements are lost in the transformation of book into film. It is only when the mode shifts to action and violence that the Romantic source is readily convertible into the modern cinematic medium.

The Book as Film

Beginning with Jesus’ sorrow and subsequent capture on the Mount of Olives, the film transforms the book into a Hollywood action film with its violence, physical feats, and polarization of good and evil characters. The setting as depicted in the book is still redolent of German Romantic sensibilities. True to the Romantic sense of nature, Jesus prays not in the cultivated stretches but in the wildest part of the Garden of Gethsemane, beneath a “nearly full moon.” Whereas in the book these details suggest a Romantic sensibility and a traditional Catholic symbolism (the moon as the Church), in the film they evoke the trappings of cinematic horror. The grotesquely androgynous hooded Satan appears vampire-like with a worm recoiling in her nostril. The cinematic snake is not crowned as in the book, a meaningful detail but a potentially absurd one in the film. Gibson’s horror-film ambience of night is intensified by the uncanny creatures that haunt Judas. In the book, they hover, less spooky, near Judas at the Supper (DP 79, 86).

As soon as Jesus is captured on the Mount of Olives, the lynch-mob-like action becomes dominant. Led off to Jerusalem, Jesus is made to run a gauntlet of blows on a bridge, a non-biblical scene from The Dolorous Passion. Spectacularly, he is thrown by his captors over the side of the bridge and caught to dangle on his ropes and chains in mid air. This acrobatic torment is not only drawn directly from the book; it also recollects an incident reported by Brentano of Emmerich’s childhood, one of her several encounters with the evil power. Crossing a bridge on her way to church, an evil passerby, apparently Satan in the form of a dog, struck her and threw her from the bridge (Br 28,1:261).

However, the book and film also introduce consoling scenes, wholly absent in the Gospels. The thrice repeated denial of Jesus by Peter figures prominently in the Gospels, where the space assigned to it in the terse narration is significantly large. A powerful episode within the Passion narration, its suggestive artistic potential received an eloquent testimony in Chekhov’s fine short story “The Student”: two peasant women weep bitterly as a seminarian evokes the failure of the faithful. However, in The Dolorous Passion, the Apostle Peter’s failure and betrayal of Jesus is overshadowed by crowd violence and then consolingly outshone by Peter’s interpolated confession of his betrayal to Mother Mary. The emphasis is shifted from the failure of the faithful to the viciousness of the faithless. Who could really blame this Peter? After capitulating before a vicious reign of terror, the Apostle confesses to Mary and promptly rounds a corner on his way to becoming a rock of the Church. This resembles the selective remorse of the poet, who was still defending himself near his own death from any possible heirs from the demonized Auguste (HS/SS 224-5), and was in any event less exercised by any personal guilt for her tragic death than by the blindness of those who did not embrace the Guarantor of his salvation. Like the Apostle Peter, the poet had found a mother figure to seek solace with in Emmerich. His prolonged penance at her bedside had put him well on his way to becoming a pillar of the resurgent Church -by doing what he had always done best.

Mary is not the only parallel of the compassionate nun. Another consoling female interpolation is the sensitive wife of Pontius Pilate, Claudia. Not without justification, the critics of the film have regarded her as symptomatic of an unhistorical vindication of the Romans at the expense of the Jews. However, the matter is more complicated. In book or film, Pilate’s wife Claudia watches Jesus being led through the street in bondage. In the book version, the wife of Roman power appears to be Anna Katharina’s sister in dream. For like the visionary nun, Claudia dreams extensively about Jesus’ life. Indeed, the visionary nun is said to have had visions of Claudia’s visions. Claudia is drawn by compassion to the spectacle of Jesus’ torment. In book and film, she brings or sends a bundle of cloth so that Jesus’ mother can wipe up the blood shed during his scourging. The detail is reminiscent of the ministrations required by the bleeding wounds suffered by Emmerich or imagined by Brentano.

In The Dolorous Passion, Pilate does not come off quite as well as in the film. He is presented in the book as cowardly, indecisive, opportunistic, and superstitious. Less so in the film, where he seems rather a man of good sense and good will, caught between a rock and a hard place. What the Catholic Guide to the Passion confirms of the film’s Pilate in the Ecce Homo scene can be extended to his larger role: “Here we see the vivid contrast between a man who still has a shred of compassion left in his heart set against a seething mob whose appetites for greater spectacle can’t be satiated” (43).

In Emmerich-Brentano, Matthew 27:25, the curse of Christ’s blood upon the Jews, elicits a vision of evil reverberating upon the accursed. Even if this is balanced elsewhere with expressions of compassion for Jews or Lutheran heretics, this is surely Brentano’s hand at its heaviest and at its worst. Here especially there is an echo of his involvements in anti-Semitic Romantic circles in Berlin. The above mentioned “Hep, Hep!” riots in numerous German cities in 1818 suggested to Amos Elon an intellectual influence at work, whether directly or indirectly (Elon 101ff.). In all events, Brentano’s stylized reflections on the curse are an inversion of the true historical situation. It seems as if by rioting against Christ the Jews were responsible for persecuting themselves.

The film’s horrendous scourging of Jesus is pure Emmerich-Brentano. It is an extended scene for which there is at most only the single laconic line in the Gospel of John: “Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged” (19:1). In film or book, there is a non sequitur in this. If Pilate’s purpose is to let Jesus off easy, why should he have had him flayed to a bloody pulp? The extreme scourging that makes little sense in the film, and therefore comes across as a sadomasochistic spectacle, again conforms to what Brentano conveys of Emmerich’s ascribing of divine meaning to her painful ailments as suffering on behalf of others. In film and book, Jesus is taken at Pilate’s behest to a public place where he is chained to a post, a tall one in the visions and a waist-high one in the film. In either case, brutal and degenerate sadists begin by working Jesus over thoroughly with rods. Then they go on to use whips that look like cat-o’-nine tails, with “hooks.” These serve to rip strips of flesh from Jesus’ back. In the book, it is made clear that the tearing off of Jesus’ flesh is symbolic of a Protestant Reformation that sundered “flesh” from the ecclesiastical body of Christ. The scourged Jesus is flayed in back and then turned to be flayed just as brutally in front. In film or book, blood splatters the arms of his sadistic tormentors.

In a small but technically significant detail, the film differs here from its source: Because Gibson’s whipping post is waist-high Jesus can be whipped until prostrate. He then rises to his feet, causing his tormentors to utter in amazement: “Reddere non potest.” It isn’t possible to come back after that sort of punishment. The movie-going public may well be less likely to take this as a foreshadowing of the triumph of spirit over flesh in the Resurrection, than to recognize it from, say, The Last Samurai: Tom Cruise, as a captive of samurai warriors, takes a fierce beating only to get back up and fight his opponent to a stand-still. Whether in The Last Samurai or in The Passion of the Christ, the hero who is beaten to a pulp before making a redemptive comeback is a Hollywood stock-in-trade.

Emmerich-Brentano and Gibson can be gruesomely impressive in capturing the physical details of torment. It is at least conceivable that, as a hard-working peasant girl, Anna could imagine in craft-like terms the task of nailing a man’s hands to a crossbeam. Preparing to nail Jesus’ hands, the soldiers in Emmerich-Brentano bore holes so the nails won’t bend or break in the hardwood beam. When they notice they have miscalculated Jesus’ arm length, a rope is tied to his wrist to wrench his arm so that his second hand is in place to receive the nail. Equally grim and craftsman-like is the manner in which the cross to which Jesus has been nailed is hoisted up till its base is inserted into a reinforced hole, causing his suspended body to receive a final tormenting jolt. The procedure is found in outline in Martin von Cochem, but if we can assume that the invalid Emmerich really suffered as the reports of her condition indicate, then the gruesome precision might also betoken a contemplation of the meaning of her pain. If this connection is implicit in the book, it is missing in the film. The viewers are given no clue of the framing account of the visionary nun, which might have lent the perspective of the film an honest distance from what it portrayed. Instead, harsh cinematic immediacy pretends to be authoritative. By ratcheting up the descriptions with special effects, The Passion of the Christ surpasses the evocations of torment in The Dolorous Passion. There was no dearth of blood in Emmerich-Brentano, yet the film’s extravagant effects of dripping, splattering, running, and pooling blood owe more to a tradition that goes back to the Sam Peckinpah blood-bath Western.

Conclusion

Stripped of their figurative symbolism, the details of violence merge with the cinematic verisimilitude that passes itself off as scriptural-historical veracity, a slight of hand that works. It all looks so real, therefore it must be true. Despite its pretense of biblical fidelity, The Passion of the Christ confers legitimacy on a media violence that numbs thought and compassion. The potential to foment anti-Semitism or other forms of group hatred may derive more from the action-film scenario of good and evil characters than from any biblical passage. The word as thought is subsumed and degraded by the spectacle. The Passion of the Christ reflects an American fear of and fascination with pain. Christ’s transcendence is conceived as an exponential leap off the10-point pain scale displayed in hospital wards. Ocean-bound islanders who convert to Christianity may well be gratified to witness Bible stories performed in their native idiom and style. Gibson has done as much for the insular tribe of media-bound American Christians: the idiom of the tribe is action, horror, and cruelty. Already a master of righteous violence, Gibson in his starring role as The Patriot inflicted a similar desecration on the heritage of the American Revolution. Equipped with his expertise and armed with the secret weapon of Brentano’s Romantic-era forgery, he has successfully engineered the transformation of sublime mystery into formulistic trash.

More could be said about the atavistic status of both Gibson and Brentano in the traditions they draw upon and revive. Brentano’s relationship to Emmerich re-enacts the medieval monastic constellation in which male scribes served as amanuenses to visionary or ecstatic nuns (Gajek 42-3). There are significant atavisms that link the medieval to the cinematic. In his Film vor dem Film, Jörg Jochen Berns argued that the mental processes of cinematic viewing and imagining were anticipated at the end of the Middle Ages by the pictorial mechanisms invented for the contemplation of the Passion. Gibson’s film draws on deep and tangled roots that are mystical and medieval as well as Romantic.

However, any satisfaction we as scholars might derive from demonstrating that the new is after all rooted in the old should not divert us from the unfolding character of the new. It would be inadequate to say that Christianity is entering the sphere of public entertainment. If The Passion-vying for its box-office victories between Hellboy and Dawn of the Dead-is a sign of the times, Christianity is instead turning itself over to the entertainment profiteers to be retooled on their terms. Gibson and his film have aroused the acclaim once accorded to revivalists, reformers, or saints. Any Christian misgivings about the mindless violence of the genre as practiced by the director were drowned out. When ancient Roman Christians sought to abolish the bloody Roman games, they did so as much to save the souls of the spectators as to spare the flesh of the gladiators and their prey. In the twenty-first-century equivalent, the Christian enterprise appears content to affix its logos to the arena and insinuate its insipid prayers into the ritual of saluting the emperor as a sanctimonious prelude to the fun of watching the killing. With private altars in every household, the Cineplex has shown that it can rival the churches as the place to experience what passes for sacred mystery.

We need to consider what sort of future is foreshadowed by a blockbuster film as mendacious and lucrative as The Passion of the Christ. We live in an era in which the realms of faith and fact, of values and realities, appearance and truth, are confounded by the very institutions formerly devoted to the preservation of their separate integrity. The once distinct realms are becoming dangerously distorted in the process. The infomercial, fictionalized journalism, or the cinematic special effect, as well as political hypocrisy and dissimulation on an unprecedented scale-all these reflect the same trend. As a result, the Romantic program of a poeticized reality in which artistic myths bind society together is acquiring an ironic applicability. To transform society, the Romantic poet Brentano planned to create a “Christian world epic” with roots in folk culture. This program which was quixotic then is attainable now. With its capacity to create and disseminate popular cultures, an entertainment industry guided by nothing but profit may well succeed where the Romantic intellectuals failed. From a collective imagination rooted in the past, the industry requires only one thing: a supply of compelling narrative material. Marketable myths must be constantly invented, discovered, or revitalized, since those in production rapidly lose their utility. Earlier art, music, or literature could reinterpret the Passion over and over again without vitiation. But at least for now the Passion has been “done” and the question is: what can we expect next?

No tendency is more alarming among Christians, Muslims, or Jews today than the trend toward a conflict-prone messianic or apocalyptic mind-set. The end-time outlook conforms to and encourages the general tendency to embrace a violent, dualistic world-view, a tendency retailed in the media and favored by our political leadership. When it comes to tapping into and profiting from this powerful source material, the violent action film is more intimately familiar to the public at large than the cosmic plan of destruction laid out in the Book of Revelation. But what could be better than a biblical ingredient for enhancing and dignifying the material? Films as influential as The Passion are capable of creating and shaping a popular eschatological consciousness-not based on scriptural or theological considerations but grounded in popular myths. A public trained by thousands of viewing hours knows what comes next when familiar motives flash before it. The holy victimization suffered by Gibson’s Christ cries out for its sequel: the return of a kick-ass Warrior Messiah, the avenging superhero familiar as Schwarzenegger, as Gibson in The Patriot and Braveheart or Russell Crowe in The Gladiator.

The recyclers of a centuries-old pious fraud are already advancing into this next, dangerous phase with the politicized Christian apocalyptic of the Left Behind novel series of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Their concluding sequel, Glorious Appearing, came out hard on the heels of The Passion, delivering the requisite vision of divine vengeance: “Men and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin.” Here is a degradation of the word by its self-anointed prophets that ought to stir religious and secular scholars alike to act in its defense. If we, as academic scholars of sacred or secular literature, fail to address this degradation in our research or teaching, we are like physicians who are faced with an epidemic but remain cloistered in their labs and offices – preoccupied, as we like to say, with our own work.

Andrew Weeks, Illinois State University (May 25, 2004/ revised Nov. 1, 2004)

Works Cited

Berns, Jörg Jochen. Film vor dem Film. Bewegende und bewegliche Bilder als Mittel der Imaginationssteuerung in Mittelalter und Neuzeit. Marburg: Jonas-Verlag, 2000.

The Bible (New Revised Version). The Gospels According to Matthew (ch. 26-27); Mark (ch. 14-15), Luke (ch. 22-23), and John (ch. 18-19).

Boyer, Peter J. “The Jesus War: Mel Gibson Discusses his Controversial Movie.“ The New Yorker 15 September 2003:58-71.

Brentano, Clemens. Das bittere Leiden unsers Herrn Jesu Christi, nach den Betrachtungen der gottseligen Anna Katharina Emmerich, Augustinerin des Klosters Agnetenberg zu Dülmen. 2. Auflage. (Br 26) Ed. Bernhard Gajek. In Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 26. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1980.

—–. Das bittere Leiden unsers Herrn Jesu Christi. Lesarten und Erläuterungen. (Gajek) Ed. Bernard Gajek. In Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 27,2. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1995.

—–. Anna Katharina Emmerick-Biographie (Br 28,1), ed. Jürg Mathes. In Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 28,1. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1982.

Catholic Exchange. A Guide to the Passion: 100 Questions about The Passion of the Christ. West Chester, PA: Ascension Press, 2004.

Cunningham, Philip A. “Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ: A Challenge to Catholic Teaching.”

van Dülmen, Richard. Poesie des Lebens. Eine Kulturgeschichte der deutschenRomantik. Vol. 1. Cologne: Böhlau, 2002.

Elon, Amos. The Pity of It All. A History of Jews in Germany, 1743-1933. New York: Holt, 2002.

Emmerich, Anne Catherine. The Dolorous Passion of the Christ: From the Visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich. (DP) Preface by The Abbé De Cazalès. Rockford: Tan Books, 1983. (The preface uses without acknowledgement the information stemming from Brentano. The jacket of the paperback edition misstates his role as follows: “The Dolorous Passion … being based on the detailed visions . . . as seen by Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich … recorded by Clemens Brentano….”)

Fredriksen, Paula. “Controversial ‘Passion’ presents priceless opportunity for education. A toxic film delivers a dangerous, but teachable, moment.” Christian Science Monitor. 2 Feb., 2004.

Frühwald, Wolfgang. Das Spätwerk Clemens Brentanos (1815-1842). Romantik im Zeitalter der Metternich’schen Restauration. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1977.

Hoffmann, Werner. Clemens Brentano: Leben und Werk. Bern: Francke, 1966.

Hümpfner, Winfried, O.E.S.A. Clemens Brentanos Glaubwürdigkeit in seinen Emmerick-Aufzeichnungen. Würzburg: St. Rita-Verlag, 1923.

Kirkpatrick, David D. “The Return of the Warrior Jesus.” New York Times. Sunday Edition. 4 Apr., 2004. Section 4, 1+

Martin von Cochem. Leben und Leiden unseres Herrn Jesu Christi. Mainz: Verlag von Franz Kirchheim, 1863. (Since this is a revision of the 1677 original, I have relied for details primarily on Gajek’s account of the latter. However, even the revised edition can convey the intrusiveness of Martin’s narrative mode which was eliminated by Brentano.)

Nienhaus, Stefan. Geschichte der deutschen Tischgesellschaft. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003.

Niessen, Johannes. A. K. Emmerichs Charismen und Gesichte. Grundsätzliches, Tatsächliches, Kritisches. Zugelich Beiträge zur Clemens Brentano-Frage. Trier: Petrus-Verlag, 1918.

The Passion of the Christ, a film by Mel Gibson, 2004.

Schmöger, Karl Erhard. Anne Catherine Emmerich. Los Angeles: Maria Regina Guild, 1968. (The first German edition received the imprimatur of the Church in 1868.)

Schultz, Hartwig. Schwarzer Schmetterling. Zwanzig Kapitel aus dem Leben des romantischen Dichters Clemens Brentano. (Schultz/SS) Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2000.

Schultz, Hartwig. “Clemens Brentano,” in Reclam Deutsche Dichter, vol. 5 (Romantik, Biedermeier, Vormärz) (Schultz). Stuttgart: Reclam, 1989.

Thompson, Anne. “Holy Week Pilgrims Flock to ‘Passion.’” New York Times 11 Apr. 2004. B1+

Weeks, Andrew. German Mysticism from Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Literary and Intellectual History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.

Wills, Garry. “God in the Hands of Angry Sinners. The Passion of the Christ, a film directed by Mel Gibson; Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II, by Jason Berry and Gerald Renner.” New York Review of Books. 8 Apr., 2004.

Woodward, Kenneth L. Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.

Yesterday Theo van Gogh, a journalist and a filmmaker, was brutally murdered in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He was murdered because he cared and dared to expose the inherent misogynism in and the brutal nature of Islam. An act, which sadly, nowadays calls for great courage, due to advancements of political Islam and the rise in religion’s influence in the society. He was murdered by political Islam, a reactionary movement that resorts to intimidation and terror as its main tools for gaining power and achieving its goals. This is not the first crime committed by this movement as a way to silence the critics of Islam and Islamists, and if we do not stand against it, it will not be the last. Political Islam is not only making life a hell for millions of living people in countries like Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, it is also taking lives in the heart of Europe. Political Islam is a threat to humankind.

We need to take a firm stand against it. It is time to defend unconditional freedom of speech and criticism. It is time to defend the principle of universality of human rights and women’s rights. It is time to end the so-called diplomatic relations with governments propagating political Islam. It is time to take sides with the aspirations of people for secular and progressive governments in the birthplace of political Islam, countries like Iran and Iraq. Hundreds of people are being killed, massacred everyday under the rule of political Islam. Taking a progressive and human stand against this movement is the way forward. Being silent about it is paramount to supporting it.

We condemn this horrendous crime and call upon all freedom loving and equality seeking human beings to unequivocally condemn this atrocious murder and to take a firm and uncompromising position against this movement.

Azar Majedi
Organisation for Women’s Liberation-Iran
November 3, 2004
azarmajedi@yahoo.com

Freud once wrote, “Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.” This is certainly true of intellectuals. The problem is that if you look at anything very closely, including ideas and ideals, differences which appear small from the wider perspective suddenly appear very large indeed. And so it should be. It is precisely our ability to examine the objects of intellectual endeavour closely and discern differences invisible to the naked mind’s eye which allows us to deepen and extend our learning in the humanities and the sciences.

However, if we never step back and examine the broader picture, we can become blinded to some important features of intellectual life which should be obvious to us. And while intellectual hyperopia gets in the way of first class, specialised academic work, intellectual myopia is a more pernicious and widespread affliction of intellectual life today.

Intellectuals in general, and academics in particular, have taken their eyes off the ball. They have forgotten how precious their shared commitment to rationality is. Instead, they fetishise technical disagreements and lose sight of one of the core intellectual virtues they share. The result is that the values of rationality and reasonableness become debased and we are left with no defences against the traditional enemies of enlightened humanism: superstition, ignorance, prejudice and plain stupidity.

Consider, for example, what Simon Blackburn, in the title of his forthcoming book, has called “The Truth Wars”. The general history of this conflict has been chronicled many times. First came the Enlightenment, and the championing of reason, truth and science over authority, falsehood and superstition. Then, in the twentieth century, many lost faith with the Enlightenment project. Some, such as Adorno and Horkheimer, went so far as to suggest that Auschwitz was the logical conclusion of the Enlightenment. We had to reject, so the story went, the myth of the rational mind, dispassionately analysing the world. To understand the history of ideas, we need to look not at syllogisms but at who wields power or at the subconscious mind. Reason does not determine what we think; rather, what we already think determines how we reason.

These disagreements are important within the academy today, which is divided between those who carry the torch of the Enlightenment and those who debunk its pretensions. But the disagreements occlude a more important agreement. As Bernard Williams put it in his swan song, Truth and Truthfulness, differences in each camp’s “respective styles of philosophy” leads them to “pass each other by”.

Williams identifies two virtues of truth that are central to intellectual enterprise: sincerity and accuracy. You do your best to understand things as clearly as possible and “what you say reveals what you believe”. Although Williams maintained that these virtues only make sense if there is such a thing as the truth, in some form or another they are held by virtually everyone with a commitment to intellectual work, with important consequences. For what it implies is a shared commitment to nothing less than rationality itself.

This fact is disguised by the failure to distinguish between thin and thick conceptions of rationality. To illustrate the differences, consider thin and thick conceptions of hedonism. The thin conception of hedonism is the minimum which anyone who is any kind of hedonist is committed to. This is roughly the idea that the best form of life is one in which pleasure or happiness is maximised. Such a thin conception leaves a great deal undetermined. In order to “thicken” the conception and come up with a well worked-out hedonistic blueprint for living, much needs to be added, and what you add can result in very different blueprints. Nonetheless, the thin conception does actually rule out a great deal. No kind of hedonist will make duty the cornerstone of their ethics, for example.

In just the same way, even though intellectuals and academics disagree about their thick conceptions of rationality, almost all agree on a thin one, in which the virtues of sincerity and accuracy are central. These two virtues manifest themselves in five features of rational discourse: comprehensibility, assessability, defeasibility, interest-neutrality and compulsion of reasons.

No thinker of any quality sets out to deliberately make their writings unnecessarily incomprehensible. If one is committed to the value of reason, then one is committed to explaining oneself in terms which are in principle comprehensible to others, even if such understanding is difficult. This is part of the sincerity of the intellectual enterprise.

It is also important that these comprehensible reasons are in principle assessable by others. So, for example, if I tell you that I have infallible knowledge and you just have to accept that; since you can’t possible know why that it is the case, I have given you a comprehensible belief, but not an assessable one. I have not, therefore, given you any rational grounds to believe I have infallible knowledge. My sincerity means that I am open to criticism and my commitment to accuracy opens up the possibility that I am wrong. Together, these entail the notion that what I say is assessable by others.

This is important, for the hallmark of rational enquiry is that it does not just provide the whats of belief, but also the whys. This is why so much religious teaching lies outside of rationality. If I am told that I must accept that something is true because it is the word of God, and that the reason it is the word of God is just that we have faith that it is, then I have not been provided with any rational grounds to believe that thing is true. There must be some way for me to assess the truth – or value – of what it is that is being claimed.

The third feature of rational reasons is their defeasibility. This is simply the fact that we always accept that it is possible we are wrong. It follows from the fact that our beliefs are assessable by others that their assessment may be unfavourable. We remain open to the possibility of our own error. The moment one says that such and such a principle can no longer be the subject of any doubt or sceptical inquiry, one has shut the door on rationality and turned belief into dogma.

Rational argument also strives to be as interest-neutral as possible. It is part of the sincerity of rational arguments that they are never knowingly glosses for partisan prejudices. This is the case even when the upshot of the enquiry is that no enquiry is ever truly interest-neutral.

The last, and most elusive, of the features of rationality I see as central is compulsion. This is simply the feature of rational reasons for belief that, if they are strong and understood, they exert some kind of force upon you. You don’t just decide to agree or disagree with good reasons for belief. You feel in some sense compelled to agree or disagree with them. This relates to the virtue of accuracy: a good rational argument is answerable to something other than our will.

Why does any of this matter? Consider how someone might object that this thin conception of rationality is too thin. Even religion, for example, can offer reasons for belief that are comprehensible (albeit not necessarily in traditional, rationalist terms), assessable (albeit it not by entirely rational means), defeasible (Kierkegaard talked of the risk of faith, the risk being precisely that we could be wrong), interest-neutral (even though those who grow up in a different religious tradition may find the transition hard), and which certainly exert a compelling force on those who come to accept them.

There is no problem here. Since it is evident that there are many religious people who have not given up on rationality, any thin conception of rationality must allow the religious in. The point is that, once in the big tent of rationality, then more detailed debate can begin on how to thicken the idea of rationality, and it is at this stage, and only this stage, that sensible disagreement about the rationality or irrationality of religious belief can begin.

This is why a thin conception of rationality is so important. The true spirit of the enlightenment is not to be found in any specific beliefs about the power and scope of rationality. Rather, the key is that disagreements can be discussed and argued, in a common, intellectual space in which everything is open to everyone and no appeals to authority are allowed to trump. This broad domain of rationality is very precious indeed.

The problem is that, to listen to many western intellectuals, you would think that it doesn’t exist. This, even though many earn their living at universities that are concrete manifestations of institutions committed to thin-rationality.

If we are tempted to think that thin rationality is too woolly a notion, we should remember that there are many people who do reject it. To use another word with unfortunate connotations, fundamentalists of all descriptions have opted-out of the domain of rational enquiry. What they hold to be true is certain, not defeasible. It is assessable only by God, not man. There is no attempt to understand the interests of others who take a different view, and the compulsion they advocate comes not from the ideas themselves, but the force of violence.

More worryingly, I find it impossible to ignore the parallels between what I have been describing and the attitude of the United States in particular towards Iraq. Whether or not it was better to confront Saddam Hussein’s regime, the manner in which the US government conducted itself seems to me to mark a disturbing disdain for the values of rationality I have defended. I am not convinced that the administration had any interest in making its true reasons for action comprehensible. Its main claims about Saddam Hussein were not genuinely assessable but had to be taken on trust. There was a certainty of purpose which seemed to me to ignore the demand that we accept the defeasibility of our beliefs. Nor was enough attention paid to the interests and perspectives of others who took contrary views. And finally, it did not matter that the reasons given were not compelling; compulsion was achieved militarily. In short, a commitment to sincerity and accuracy, and with it rationality, seemed to be sorely lacking in the US administration.

And yet the academics and intellectuals who were among the strongest critics of the war need to accept some responsibility for eroding the rational domain and helping to make this disregard for it possible. Our obsession with our scholastic disagreements has created the impression that there is no common domain of rationality within which disagreements can be thrashed out. We just have a multiplicity of discourses and rationalisations to legitimise different interest groups.

I should make it clear that this is not just a criticism of those currents of thought broadly and loosely labelled post-modern. The enemies of post-modernism have set themselves up as the sole champions of reason – something made easier by their opponents’ willingness to relinquish the labels of rationality and reason. In so doing they too have contributed to the sense in which the intellectual sphere is too fragmented and divided along factional lines for any general dialogue to be possible. By dismissing large sections of the intellectual community as anti-rational, the anti-postmodernists have also contributed to the sense in which it is pointless to seek to argue one’s case in the widest possible forum.

We need, therefore, to reassert our shared values of rationality, to relegitimise the domain of intellectual discourse as the right place to discuss differences and settle disagreements. It is time western intellectuals took a wider view and realised that unless they stress what they have in common, the whole enterprise of rational enquiry will only come to see more and more irrelevant to those who seek solutions to the problems of today.

Based on a talk given to the seminar ‘Humanism for the 21st century’, Perspectives East and West Conference, at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo, 4-5 June 2004.

Julian Baggini is author of What’s It All About? Philosophy and the meaning of life.

The embrace of relativism by many leftist intellectuals in the United States, while it may not be politically very important, is a terrible admission of failure, and an excuse for not answering the claims of their political opponents. The subordination of the intellect to partisan loyalty is found across the political spectrum, but usually it takes the form of a blind insistence on the objective truth of certain supporting facts and refusal to consider evidence to the contrary. So what explains the shift, at least by a certain slice of the intellectual left, to this new form of obfuscation?

When I was an undergraduate I volunteered to go door to door for Zero Population Growth to promote the liberalization of abortion laws. I thought that, as a philosophy major, I was just the person for the job: I had read Locke on personal identity and could explain to people that even though fetuses were human beings, living organisms of species homo sapiens, they were not persons. I was prepared to expand on this in great detail.

I was told that this was not a good idea. At the training session for volunteers, we were cautioned not to get into “philosophical arguments.” If a contact attempted to argue we were to repeat (as many times as it took) that abortion was simply an issue of women’s rights, and that was that. If we allowed ourselves to be drawn into arguments of any kind, we were warned, we were lost.

It was the same thing whenever I tried to work for the political causes I supported–argument was out. I don’t know whether this was peculiar to leftist causes (since I never supported any others) or a feature of politics as such but the idea was that sloganeering and manipulation were sophisticated while argument was, at best, naive. But it did seem especially entrenched in the Left: it was a commonplace that you couldn’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.

When, I wondered, had rationality become a partisan issue and, in particular, when had reason, objectivity, science and all the tools of the Enlightenment come to be seen as part of the Right’s kit?

Anti-intellectualism, the religion of the heart, the exaltation of rustic simplicity and old-fashioned virtue along with scorn for arid logic-chopping and rationalism broadly construed-has always been a feature of American life. Yet “only yesterday,” when the Scopes Monkey Trial was in progress, the Left was the party of science and socially conservative Middle Americans were scandalized by the tough-minded rationalism of progressives. Since yesterday political polarities have shifted and, as with the magnetic field’s periodic flip-flops indelibly imprinted in the geological record, we know when it happened but not exactly why.

It happened during the late ’60s and ’70s when the Baby Boom generation came of age. Arguably it happened then because that was when Baby Boomers, the largest American generation, came of age and, by sheer force of numbers, dominated the social landscape. Their fashions, behavior and ideologies became iconic and forged the link between the politics of the Left and the romanticism of adolescence in the American mythos.

The sources of the youth culture of the period were manifold. First, on the political side, there was Marxism, committed to the doctrine that ideology was epiphenomenal and rational reflection was escapist. This was the theme that I heard rehearsed incessantly as I participated in the anti-war movement and the politics of the Left. Rational argument was a sham, a power play by our adversaries: to respond in their terms was to fall into their trap.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, there was the revolt against cultural masculinity, sparked by resistance to the Vietnam War and centering on the refusal of young men to meet the two traditional core male obligations, work and warfare. It spilled over into a distaste for everything socially coded as male, from meat-eating to contact sports. Peace, love and gentleness, fruits, nuts, grains and little herbal teas, intuition, emotion and all the stuff of stereotypical femininity were glorified; “male” rationality was, at best, suspect.

This was not feminism, indeed the second wave of feminism was largely a reaction against it. Within the Counterculture, which liberated men from the burden of traditional male role obligations without depriving them of the benefits, women were doubly cursed: while locked more firmly than ever into femininity by the earth mother cult and expected to provide sexual services to their men with no strings attached, they could no longer get the traditional compensations for meeting their role obligations: male protection and financial support. The position of women in the Movement was prone.

Finally, the national disgrace of an immoral war followed by political scandal engendered an unprecedented level of cultural self-hatred, amplifying the perennial romantic theme that the exotic Other, especially the primitive Other, was better. Undergraduates like myself consumed Margaret Mead’s South Sea fantasies and innumerable books by lesser lights who had established through sociological research that American society was “sick,” damaged by consumerism, conformity, and shallow, calculating, soulless rationalism.

None of it was new. Ever since adolescence became an institution-when boys were no longer apprenticed to their fathers’ trades at a tender age and girls were no longer married off at puberty-adolescents have been romantics. The difference was that in 1969 there were so many of us that we were taken seriously: instead of dismissing us, middle-aged pundits hailed us as the vanguard of a new era. So theologian Harvey Cox, in his dithyramb on the resurrection of Dionysus, applauded us for ushering in a new age and celebrated the demise of the man in the gray flannel suit, “rational, Apollonian plane-catching man.”(1)

Because of the war and the draft we were caught up in politics and wedded to the Left; because we were iconic our rendition of the politics of the Left became iconic. Adlai Stevenson was dead. Bertrand Russell, for decades the symbol of Leftist politics and anti-war activism, was off the radar. Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, the most progressive politicians to occupy positions of national leadership in US history, had become the Left’s demons. Americans across the political spectrum began to identify the Left with our preoccupations, including our disdain for the rationality of Apollonian plane-catching man.

That disdain for rationality, skepticism about the possibility of objective truth and the unshakable conviction that Life is bigger than Logic is not peculiar to the French “intellectuals” Sokal and Bricmont exposed or to academic literati-it is a feature of popular culture and has persisted even after the collapse of the Left as we knew it because it is preeminently a feature of adolescent romanticism. I get it from students all the time. Every year the freshmen in my intro logic classes, where I devote the first 3 weeks to “critical thinking” and debunking, rehearse the theme. Many are superstitious and almost all buy some version of mellow relativism. Most don’t think logic broadly construed is important–in the words of one haunting course evaluation comment: “What’s the good of being logical if no one else is?”

Talking to upperclassmen, who were more articulate and reflective, I got a better idea of their views. Even though the politics of the Left had largely disappeared from the undergraduate subculture, like most Americans, students were convinced that rationality, insofar as it was important at all, was exclusively the business of business and the political right. They had learnt in their required intro econ course that rational behavior was, by definition, self-interested. Rationality was appropriate in the workplace and public life; it was irrelevant, and inappropriate, in the private sphere where relationships, “values” and beliefs were based on feelings, culture, faith and brute personal preference. The trouble with Liberals, well-meaning though they were, was that they just didn’t understand this division of labor.

Conservative ideologues in my ethics classes believed that “rationality” was coextensive with the Market, which was perfectly efficient–any objections to the free operation of the Market was ipso facto irrational. Some were convinced that not only I, but Rawls and everyone on the syllabus apart from Nozick were warm-hearted sentimentalists who didn’t know how the real world worked and that Sen just didn’t understand economics. Most of the others believed that rationality was a matter of arbitrary convention–a matter of memorizing and following arbitrary rules. To be rational was to be blinkered and constrained, conventional, obedient, rigid, simplistic and dull.

In less than a week I’ll be back to teaching after my sabbatical–I’ve got a lot of work to do. On the whole I’m not a great enthusiast about teaching. But I do get a kick out of it in intro logic classes when students have their satoris and realize that the stuff makes sense–and I can say (it usually gets a laugh) “Hey–that’s why they call it ‘logic’!”

(1)Psychology Today interview with Harvey Cox c. April 1971

H.E. Baber (PhD Johns Hopkins) is a professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego, specialising in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. An earlier version of this article appeared on her blog The Enlightenment Project.

Maryam Namazie: Let’s talk about the horrendous and tragic situation in Beslan. We know that over 1,000 people were held hostage. Over 300 were killed. 150 plus of those so far are children. It is an immense human tragedy. Are there any words that can describe what’s happened there?

Bahram Soroush: It is extremely difficult to come up with the right words to describe this tragedy. It is on a horrendous scale; of an unbelievable magnitude. It is very hard to try to put yourself in the place of those parents who lost their loved ones. I don’t myself remember having witnessed a terrorist action where children were taken hostage on such a scale and used as a bargaining chip. It is comparable to the 9/11 tragedy and it will be remembered for years to come. People will look back and try to make sense of what happened on that day. One’s first reaction, apart from deep grief, is outrage that such a monstrous attack against innocent civilians, against children is possible.

Maryam Namazie: Who is responsible for this slaughter? Is it the Islamic terrorists that took the hostages? Or is it the Russian government and its violent suppression of the so-called Chechen liberation movement?

Fariborz Pooya: The world is facing waves of Islamic terrorist atrocities. We are seeing that on a daily basis now. It seems there are no depths to which these people would not sink. The Islamic movement has shown its capacity for savagery and brutality and this is the ultimate that they could have done. Initially, we have to make sure that we condemn this brutal act. At the same time, on a much broader scale, we have to recognise that the world is hostage to the two poles of terrorism. On the one hand, you see the US in Iraq and Russia in Chechnya who have destroyed whole cities and slaughtered civilians. On the other hand, you have the political Islamic movement who does not have the slightest regard for human life. They have shown the depth of their barbarity by actually killing so many children.

The attention of the media has occasionally focused on whether Putin is going to survive this or not! But this is not the issue. The question that the world is facing is how to combat international terrorism of the Islamic kind. Clearly, military actions like that of the US and Russian armies are incapable of preventing this; in fact they strengthen the grounds for the growth of such forces. The people who can stop the Islamic movement are the progressive movement that can uphold the standards and expose the Islamic movement and its capacity to sink to such levels. The Islamic movement has to be defeated – in all its fronts; whether you are fighting the hijab in Europe, the Islamic government in Iran, Al-Qaeda in the Middle East or Chechen terrorists in Russia. It is the fascism of today and must be defeated. At the same time, we know that the military action of the United Sates and the Russian army is incapable of defeating this movement.

Maryam Namazie: In the newspaper Independent there was an article saying that the Chechen movement is a national liberation movement, that it is not a political Islamic movement and it has been given this image in order to allow the Russian government to place it within the framework of the war on Islamic terrorism. Would you agree with that?

Bahram Soroush: I wouldn’t. This is very clear from the features of that movement. It is not easy to try to hide the Islamic or political Islamist character of that movement. This is not the only atrocity that they have committed. This tragedy, although an enormous tragedy compared to the earlier ones, was one in a chain of attacks recently inside Russia and over recent years as well. The attack bears the hallmarks of a very organised force. In the media there have been suggestions that other local, tribal, nationalist movements were involved. But when you look at the scale of the attack, it is very similar to, for example, two years ago, when a theatre in Russia was seized and where many people died. So clearly the indications are that this was the work of political Islamists; I don’t think there is any doubt about that. And if anyone in the world had the slightest doubt about the capacity of the Islamic movement in committing such atrocities, this carnage should have dispelled that. This should be the last straw for anyone. From now on there should be an enormous campaign by all progressive people to discredit, oppose and crush this movement. When it comes to people like Putin and Bush, although they try to pose themselves as people who are waging war on terror, they are themselves part of the problem. They are part of the terrorist contest that is creating catastrophes for civilised humanity, for all of us. So we are not expecting Putin to come and fight political Islam. It is up to us, to workers, to the progressive movement throughout the world to do that.

Maryam Namazie: Obviously it is very clear that there can be no guilt put on the children. They are not to blame for anything that has happened in Chechnya or elsewhere, but sometimes you do see in the media that there is a sort of collective guilt put on people who are the victims of terrorist acts or of the hostage-taking of Islamists. You see the two French journalists who were held hostage. The French government went and negotiated with them and said, well, we were against the war, so you shouldn’t be holding French journalists hostage. If you continue that line of reasoning, then you could say, well, it’s OK to hold an American hostage or it’s OK to behead a Turkish worker or driver because of the US and Turkish governments’ involvement in the war. The justification they sometimes offer is that these are acts of revenge, like they said, for example, about September 11th. What’s your analysis on that?

Fariborz Pooya: Historically, there have been people who try to justify taking civilian lives. There are people who justify the killing of civilians based on the interests of a national liberation movement, for example. But killing civilians must be condemned under any circumstances. We know that the US forces bomb civilian areas in Iraq. They are doing it today. We know that the Islamic terrorist movement has no regard for civilian life. There needs to be a Left progressive movement that raises its banner against them. If there’s a war between armies, we need to defend civilians.

Maryam Namazie: Should there be a justification for the decapitation of an American soldier, for example, who has been taken hostage?

Fariborz Pooya: There shouldn’t be. Absolutely not. These are acts of barbarism and need to be condemned. At the same time, the attacks against civilians these days, the scale of them, are unbelievable. There is no justification for such actions. We know that the true source of this is both state terrorism and the political Islamic movement. That needs to be condemned and the world has to be protected against this. At the international protest on 15th February last year against the war on Iraq, world humanity showed that it can raise its voice and say, enough is enough! People need to come out on the streets and condemn both the Islamic movement and international state terrorism.

The above is an International TV interview dated September 6, 2004.

Maryam Namazie hosts International TV English. Prior to the English programme, Maryam Namazie also hosts a half-an hour long Farsi programme. Fariborz Pooya is the co-editor of WPI Briefing and Bahram Soroush is a civil rights activist.

A ban on conspicuous religious symbols in state schools and state institutions has caused heated debate regarding secularism vs. religious freedoms, giving us the opportunity to reiterate our defence of secularism and women’s and children’s rights. While Islamists and their supporters have proclaimed that banning religious symbols in schools and state institutions is a ‘restriction of’ ‘religious freedoms’ or ‘freedom of belief’, ‘religious intolerance’, ‘a violation of women’s and girls’ rights’, ‘racist’, ‘discriminatory’, and so on, we believe the truth is simple and quite contrary to what they claim. In brief:

The ban is pro-secularism not a restriction of religious freedoms and beliefs: A ban on conspicuous religious symbols in state schools and institutions is but one step toward secularism or the separation of state and religion. Secularism is an advance of civilised humanity. In the nineteenth century, this was a demand targeted against the Church resulting in for example France’s 1905 law; today, it is first and foremost a demand against political Islam, particularly since that movement has wreaked havoc in the Middle East and the world. At a minimum, secularism ensures that government offices and officials from judges, to clerks to teachers are not promoting their religious beliefs and are instead doing their jobs in a neutral and impartial manner. In the same way that banning a teacher from instructing creationism instead of science in the classroom isn’t a restriction of his or her religious beliefs or freedoms and is not considered religious intolerance, so too is the banning of religious symbols not to be considered so. One’s religious beliefs are a private affair; public officials cannot use their positions to impose or promote their beliefs on others.

The ban is pro-children’s rights: When it comes to the veiling of girls in schools, though, children’s veiling must not only be banned in public institutions and schools but also in private schools and everywhere. Religious schools must also be banned. Here the issue extends beyond the principle of secularism and goes straight to the heart of children’s rights. While adults may ‘choose’ veiling, children by their very nature cannot make such choices; what they do is really what their parents tell them to do. Even if there are children who say they like or choose to be veiled (as some media have reported), child veiling must still be banned – just as a child must be protected even if she ‘chooses’ to stay with her abusive parents rather than in state care, even if she ‘chooses’ to work to support her family in violation of child labour laws or even if she ‘chooses’ to stop attending school. States must intervene to protect children no matter what. Also, states must level the playing field for children and ensure that nothing segregates them or restricts them from accessing information, advances in society and rights, playing, swimming and in general doing things children must do. Whatever their beliefs, parents do not have the right to impose their beliefs, including veiling on children just because they are their own children, just as they can’t deny their children medical assistance or beat and neglect them or marry them off because it’s part of their beliefs or religion.

The ban is pro-women’s and girls’ rights not vice versa: In addition to being pro-children’s rights, a ban on conspicuous religious symbols is pro-women’s rights not vice versa. It protects women (albeit minimally) from being harassed and intimidated into veiling. Those of us who have fled political Islam know full well the levels of threats and intimidation women have faced both in the Middle East and here in Europe and the West to wear the veil or else. The political Islamic movement behind veiling is the same movement that is waiting to execute Kobra Rahmanpour in Iran, impose Sharia law in Iraq and enshrine Islamic inequalities in the Afghan constitution. It is the same movement that has blown up innocent people on buses, cafes and in office buildings across the globe. Everywhere it has had power, it has murdered and brutalised. Women and girls have been its first victims. Now it is this very movement that is demanding the institutionalisation of its repressive measures against women in the heart of Europe, framed in terms of ‘women’s rights’ and ‘religious freedoms’! What cheek! It is this very movement that have become accomplished and renowned in and symbolic of the assault on women’s right and freedoms. The debate on veiling must be seen within this wider context.

‘My Hijab, My Right’ – I don’t think so: Of course an adult woman has the right to practice her religion, customs and beliefs in realms other than those where she is representing the state or the educational system. Of course it is her ‘personal choice’ to be veiled. But if you remove all forms of intimidation and threats by Islamists, Islamic laws, racism, cultural relativism and ghetto-isation by Western governments, norms that consider women half that of men, and so on I assure you that there will be very few women wearing the veil. Even if there are still those who do so, one must remember that it is not a positive right. ‘My Hijab, My Right’ is like saying ‘My FGM (Female Genital Mutilation), My Right’!!! The veil is an instrument to control a woman’s sexuality, like FGM. It is meant to segregate women. It is in no way like a nose ring as one writer has claimed! Have innumerable women been killed, tortured and flogged for transgressing the nose ring in Europe? I don’t think so. Today, more than ever before, the veil is political Islam’s symbol and women and girls are its first victims. The veil is not just another piece of clothing – just as FGM is not just another custom. I suppose if it were to be compared with anyone’s clothing it would be comparable to the Star of David pinned on Jews by the Nazis to segregate, control, repress and to commit genocide. There is much that will come to light about this Islamic holocaust when the Islamic regime in Iran – a pillar of political Islam – is overthrown.

The ban is not racist or discriminatory: Some say that banning religious symbols is racist or discriminatory; in fact, it is discriminatory and racist to create separate laws and policies for different people, including immigrants and women living in Islamist communities in the West. Such ‘differences’ have been so hammered in by cultural relativism and multi-culturalism that a ban of religious symbols immediately causes some to cry racism and demand ‘the right to wear the veil’! In fact, crying racism is the new catch phrase of Islamists and the political Islamic movement along with their supporters in order to shut people up and hinder opposition, as they know full well that no one wants to be called a racist even if the matter has nothing to do with racism.

And this labelling as ‘racist’ anyone who criticises Islam or the political Islamic movement has reached preposterous heights. As an example, one woman wrote to me saying she smelt ‘Islamophobia’ (whatever that means) in our call for secularism because ‘Christmas, Easter and many other religious events are celebrated in Britain’ and she could not ‘demonstrate in favour of secularism when [she] knew this [was a] double standard’! She therefore joined the Islamists’ demonstration in defence of the Hejab and against secularism instead of our counter demonstration! Why not join secularist forces and call for further demands such as the banning of religious schools and all religious holidays (as we have)? Suffice it to say that multi-culturalism has made irrationality into an art form. True, racism is part and parcel of the system, but defending secularism has nothing to do with racism. Was the battle for secularism in Europe in the nineteenth century racism against the Church or Christians?

This has nothing to do with supporting ‘imperialist’ France: And of course I mustn’t forget our dear anti-imperialists, which say defending secularism equates supporting the ‘imperialist French state and its education system’. The struggle for secularism and women’s rights has nothing to do with supporting the French government and everything to do with defending progressive human values. These are values that people and the working class have fought and died for. Also, if you continue their bogus rationale then for example no one in France should have opposed the war on Iraq since it would have been siding with the ‘imperialist French state’. These anti-imperialists are so staunchly anti-imperialist that they can be nothing else. Interestingly though they are only anti-imperialist if they can remain reactionary at the same time. When Western governments promoted the Taliban and promote the Islamic regime of Iran, they seem to have amnesia. When women are stoned to death in Iran, when the Afghan Constitution asserts that no human right can contradict Islam, or Sharia law is imposed on Iraq, they are unable to even mutter syllables to show us they are at least alive and breathing.

There are no more pressing issues: And finally, for now, for those who keep on about how many more pressing issues there are than a ‘piece of clothing’; yes, we know the drill – when it comes to women’s and girls’ rights, there are always far more pressing issues. It’s one way of ignoring critical issues and hoping they will go away. But they won’t. At least not while we’re around.

First published in English in WPI Briefing 129.

The situation of the present state of psychoanalysis and of the current reputation of Sigmund Freud is well documented and cogently (and patiently!) presented in Professor Crews’s “Reply to Holland.”(1) In my view, and in the opinion of several other Freud scholars, the continuing ability of Freudian rhetoric to deceive is even more dangerous and difficult to resolve than Crews allows.

And, alas, the kind of staged public jousting whereby Fred Crews will accept the publication for the Spring/Summer issue of The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine (vol. 9, no. 1) of “a commentary on both submissions [that of Holland and the reply of Crews] by the psychiatrist Peter Barglow” seems to be `loaded’ from the start.

Barglow is a psychiatrist of the Old School when it was thought a useful career-move in American medical schools, if you were specializing in psychiatry, to go into analysis and to become a certified psychoanalyst oneself. And then to conduct training analyses.(2) That Barglow is a personal friend of Holland and has just returned from the June conference on Art and Psychology at Arles in France where they both were, raises the suspicion (no doubt unworthy) that Crews may not receive an entirely “objective” commentary.

Some works are missing from Crews’s generally excellent bibliography and I need to refer to them in this article. They are, in alphabetical order: Jacques Bénesteau’s Mensonges freudiens: histoire d’une désinformation séculaire (Sprimont, Belgium: Mardaga, 2002); Max Scharnberg’s The Myth of Paradigm-Shift, or How to Lie with Methodology (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala Studies in Education 20, 1984); Robert Wilcocks, Maelzel’s Chess Player: Sigmund Freud and the Rhetoric of Deceit (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994) and Mousetraps and the Moon: The Strange Ride of Sigmund Freud and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2000).

Frederick Crews is careful to reply to the full text of Norman Holland’s paper, rather than to limit himself to the abbreviated version now available on Butterflies and Wheels. Crews begins “Although Norman Holland’s synopsis conveys the gist of `Psychoanalysis as Science,’ the devil is in the details.” In fact, Crews is being scrupulously fair here to Holland and his arguments are indeed closely related to Holland’s full original text. Crews is mistaken, however, if he really believes that “the devil is in the details.”

With Holland’s wretched piece, the details are insignificant and largely irrelevant. I will come to his “innocent” and misleading use of Fisher and Greenberg in a minute (and I will offer the devastating examination by Scharnberg as evidence). But let me begin with Holland’s last Freudian quotation. For in that quotation — as it is offered by Holland – lies the very essence of what is wrong with psychoanalysis-as-science. And it has nothing to do with sex (or even with Freud’s weird version of it), nor with science, nor with concepts of the mind. It has everything to do with lying. And you cannot build a science – of any kind – on LIES!

If, as Frank Cioffi pointed out over a quarter of a century ago, Freud was a liar,(3) then the problem of the significance of the power to deceive of psychoanalysis is resolved immediately. Snake-oil! And rub it in carefully. You suffer from hay-fever? Have no fear – psychoanalysis will resolve the hay-fever(4). And so on… Now, how does Norman N. Holland end his piece? With a priceless quotation from one of the most devious paragraphs that Freud ever drafted. The devil is not in the details, Professor Crews is being far too circumspect; the devil is right here in Holland’s deceived (and innocently deceptive) conclusion. I quote:

In Freud’s first published dream analysis, for example, he began by spelling out his associations (his data). In doing so, he indicated a variety of recurring themes. Finally, he concluded: “They could all be collected into a single group of ideas and labelled, as it were, concern about my own and other people’s health — professional conscientiousness” [26, p.320]. This is purely and simply holistic reasoning.

And that is precisely the kind of response that Freud was counting on, the intelligent, sympathetic and credulous offering of a heart laid bare by the Master’s magic with words.

This is where “his associations” or, as the brackets naïvely inform us, “his data,” take their place in the presentation of psychoanalysis as the one and only way to understand the human mind and the related by-products of dreaming. Now go back to that very strange title I have chosen for this paper: “1893–1895–1897–1899” – there is a problem here. Interestingly, it was a problem recognized over half a century ago by the faithful daughter, Anna Freud. When she was preparing the first edition of the collected correspondence of her father to the Berlin Otorhinolaryngologist (E.N.T. doctor as we say in England – Ear, Nose and Throat), Wilhelm Fliess,(5) Anna Freud dutifully removed (and/or censored) certain letters from her father which might cast doubt on his veracity. Could the founder of psychoanalysis and her father be a liar? Perish the thought! Or rather, remove the correspondence which might give rise to such sacrilegious thoughts. (Which implies, incidentally, that the disinformation invented by Sigmund in the cocaine-inspired years at the end of the 19th Century was thoughtfully – and knowingly, quite knowingly – continued by Anna Freud in the 20th Century.)(6)

This most famous of dreams – “The Dream of Irma’s Injection” – is indeed the first dream we encounter in Chapter 2 (after a preliminary chapter giving a brief history of dream investigation) of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. It was called by Freud himself Das Traummuster – “The Specimen Dream.” It is also a piece of contrived rhetorical deception devised by Freud probably during the autumn of the year in which his book was published (1899). My multi-dated title refers to the various dates that are involved in the text offered to the unsuspecting public by Sigmund Freud.(7)

Briefly, the dream reported as dreamed and analyzed on 23/24 July 1895 could not have contained the associational material reported by
Freud.(8) At that date his eldest daughter, Mathilde, had not suffered from diphtheria. According to the dream reports, Freud’s anxiety about her health relates to concerns of some two years previous (i.e., 1893). In April 1897, however, we find (now, thanks to Masson’s Harvard University Press publication of the uncensored correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess) that Mathilde did indeed suffer from a bout of diphtheria – and thanks to him we now know when (April 1897)! And it was precisely this letter (with several others) that Anna Freud chose to remove from her 1954 edition of the correspondence. The letter had nothing to say about psychoanalysis; but it did show clearly that her father was a liar in his professional invention. And lies have to be covered up by denial or censorship or disinformation.

It is extraordinary that in France of all places, a seriously-researched book on Freud should appear that would tear holes in the whole fabric of Freudian invention. The author of this excellent piece of work – Mensonges freudiens – is a clinical child psychologist at the University of Toulouse – Dr. Jacques Bénesteau. His book, and this is a splendid opportunity to congratulate the objectivity of la Société française d’histoire de médecine, was unanimously awarded the year’s prize for the best book on the history of medicine in France for 2003.

Bénesteau reveals to the public at large the multitude of deceptions and downright lies that were at the heart of the psychoanalytic enterprise – and also at the heart of the Jung version of “Analytic psychology.” It is no wonder – this is par for the course, alas – that Bénesteau had to run through the unappreciative hoops of at least sixteen Parisian publishers before he found intelligence and integrity in the Belgian publisher, Pierre Mardaga.

The last publisher to be presented to the North American public is that of the Swedish university of Uppsala. Dr. Max Scharnberg, who teaches in the Faculty of Education of the University of Uppsala, published in 1984 The Myth of Paradigm-Shift, or How to Lie with Methodology (Upsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala studies in Education, 20.). His book is a scorching indictment of the “authority” assumed in North America by Fisher and Greenberg (and their devoted followers). Scharnberg, who understands mathematics and symbolic logic better than I do, complains about the moral dilemma of some types of Freudianism which claim the sanctity (and hence the accuracy?) of “science” for psychoanalysis. Let me quote from Endnote 20 of Chapter 5 of my last Freud book:

See the penultimate paragraph of the preface to: Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg (1978), The Scientific Evaluation of Freud’s Theories and Therapy: A Book of Readings (New York: Basic Books). As their preface points out, this collection of papers is intended as a companion volume to their earlier (1977) The Scientific Credibility of Freud’s Theories and Therapies (New York: Basic Books). As a matter of topical interest, I should mention the careful assessment of Edward Erwin, which is unsparing in its critique of the pro-Freudian hopes of Fisher and Greenberg. See E. Erwin (1995) A Final Accounting: Philosophical and Empirical Issues in Freudian Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press). Fisher and Greenberg seem (and have seemed for years) innocent of, or totally vacuous about, the hideous implications of their enterprise.

A moral, as well as scientific, critique was published in 1984 in Max Scharnberg’s The Myth of the Paradigm-Shift, Or How to Lie with Methodology. Having described the methodological slip from “real problem” (Pr) to “substitute problem” (Ps), Scharnberg writes:

Every psychoanalytic experiment with a positive outcome that I have come across during 24 years uses Ps’s that are invalid signs. And we must question the honesty of Fisher and Greenberg: The Scientific Credibility of Freud’s Theories and Therapy; they give lots of extremely false accounts of cited experiments. The worst instances of the faults that I shall describe below could easily have been avoided without any new knowledge. Better morals are much more important. (Scharnberg, 1984, p. 151)

That “honesty” had been questioned – or rather, denied – some fifty pages earlier in the introductory pages of his Chapter 4, “The Doctrine of the Substitute Problem,” where Scharnberg writes: “The only thing that is academic in Fisher and Greenberg’s book is the jargon. Everything else is swindle.” (quoted in Wilcocks, 2000, pp. 173-174)

And, indeed, as Scharnberg notes, “everything else is swindle.” It is with the “swindle” that we now have to deal (and please note, this has NOTHING to do with science). The mistake of that excellent philosopher of science, Adolf Grünbaum, was to have taken Sigmund Freud at his word. Grünbaum’s investigations of psychoanalysis have, as Frederick Crews has shown, revealed the intellectual disaster awaiting the noviciate. But Grünbaum’s critique is really one for those who might have been impressed by Freud’s rhetoric of persuasion; it is not a critique that has any significance for the more thoughtful.

Will it never end? This extraordinary waste of human potential? The great English medical scientist, Sir Peter Medawar, chairman for important years of the British Medical Research Council, and Nobel Prize winner for his contribution to medicine (in relation to his work on organ transplants), once wrote in a review-article for the New York Review of Books, “The opinion is gaining ground that doctrinaire psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century…”(9) Sir Peter Medawar got it right! It is, or was, the “most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century”… Did it catch you? At an uncomfortable moment of your life? Well … there is help at hand, just read Molière’s splendid satire of the corruption of the “directeur de conscience” Tartuffe. Tartuffe was, in 17th-century Paris, what “The Shrink” became for many Americans after the Second World War. The French, of course, had their very own psychoanalytic Tartuffe in the ghastly presence of Jacques Lacan.

1. Butterflies and Wheels

2. This career pattern is less prevalent no in North America. Crews is correct in pointing out that nowadays many serious university departments of psychology no longer rely on Freud or on Freudians. Richard McNally at Harvard’s Department of Psychology told me this Spring that there were no longer any Freudians in his department – the last of them had long since emigrated to departments of literature!

3. See, for example, Frank Cioffi, “Was Freud a Liar?” The Listener 91 (1974), pp. 72-74. See also the many critical articles reprinted in Cioffi’s Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1998.

4. This is not a joke in poor taste. It is what is revealed in a reading of the correspondence between Freud and his infatuated neophyte Karl Abraham. (Hilda C. Abraham & Ernst L. Freud, eds. A Psycho-Analytic Dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907-1926. Tr. Bernard Marsh and Hilda C. Abraham. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.)
See Abraham’s letter of August 9, 1912 (pp. 121-22) in which “looking for the psycho-sexual roots of the hay-fever” is the first step to its complete cure by psychoanalysis. There is a sense in which psychoanalysis was promoted rather like one of those all-purpose products that 19th-century con-men delighted in selling: it cleans your teeth, polishes your shoes, removes unwanted hair, and presses your suit. Norman Holland is still at this level of understanding.

5. This edition, which appeared in English in 1954 was entitled The Origins of Psycho-Analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes, 1887-1902, by Sigmund Freud. Edited by Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris; translated by Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey; introduction by Ernst Kris. New York: Basic Books, and London: Imago Publishing Company, 1954.

6. This is one of the carefully documented points made by Jacques Bénesteau in his Mensonges freudiens: Histoire d’une désinformation séculaire. The various forms of disinformation and misinformation and “re-writing” of its own history have made of the psychoanalytic movement the nearest thing medicine has to Stalinism and the Soviet version of its own (and everybody else’s) history.

7. For extensive discussion of this deception see Wilcocks (1994), Chapter 7, pp. 227-280. This material was the consequence of a thorough medical check via the University of Alberta’s Infectious Diseases Unit. It has since been confirmed by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen who informed me that the Anna Freud archives at the Library of Congress (Washington) show clearly that in response to an Ernest Jones request for information about the health of the Freud children, Anna Freud replied that Mathilde and the others had no grave illnesses at the time which would correspond with the associations (“the data”) invented for the “Dream of Irma’s Injection.” I am pleased to note that the Australian clinical psychologist, Malcolm Macmillan, has accepted my discovery and refers to it positively in the revised MIT edition of Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc (1997).

8. We have, in fact, a brief letter addressed by Freud to Fliess on the very morning of the day on which he claimed to have had the secrets of the dream revealed to him. Needless to say, there is not a word in this letter about resolving the secrets of dreams, nor indeed about the apparent monumental revelation of the previous night. See, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (ed.), The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904 Cambridge (Mass.), The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 134.
Fliess himself, by the way, must have been one of the first to have realized the fabrication involved in this dream. He wrote to Freud questioning the date reported by Freud. And Freud replied (Masson, 1985, letter of June 18, 1900, p. 419), with the blind confidence of genius, that that was the date in the book itself, Die Traumdeutung! “I have authenticated the date of July 24, 1895, however. The dream is dated the same way in the book, July 23-24, and I know that I analyzed the dream the following day.” (Masson, 1985, p. 419.)

9. See Sir Peter Medawar’s review of The Victim Is Always the Same by the neuro-surgeon I.S. Cooper. The title of Medawar’s article is “Victims of Psychiatry” and it originally appeared in the New York Review of Books, January 23, 1975, p.17. It was reprinted in the collection of essays and articles mischievously called Pluto’s Republic, Oxford University Press paperback, 1990.

16 year old Ateqeh Rajabi was publicly hanged in the city centre in Neka in the northern Iranian province of Mazandaran on 15 August for ‘acts incompatible with chastity’ after having been arrested a few months earlier for having sexual relations. She had no attorney at any stage of the farce.

During the ‘trial’, she expressed her outrage at the misogyny and injustice in society and ‘judicial’ system and even removed some of her clothing. The lower court ‘judge’ was so incensed by her protestations that he personally put the noose around her neck after his decision had been upheld by the ‘Supreme Court’.

In some reports on her execution, Ateqah has been labelled ‘mentally incompetent’.

I suppose it could be nothing but madness that drives a 16 year old to rage against the system. That drives Zahra Kazemi to take photographs in front of Evin prison. That drives Shahla Jahed to scream out in ‘court’ against the torture she had faced and her execution order. That drives Maryam Ayoubi to rage against her stoning order.

I suppose it must be madness that brings hundreds of women to the streets of Iran on International Women’s Day to burn the hejab, that makes tens of thousands ‘improperly’ veil despite the arrests and fines and harassment…

Pure madness?

Reading that Ateqeh was mad reminds me of the innumerable protesting women deemed mad for their centuries. But dear readers, there is one difference.

It is not sweet 16 Ateqah who is mad for her century but the regime that has just brutally ended her life…

No-one will accept this grotesque violation.

Maryam Namazie hosts International TV English. TV International/English is a weekly hour-long news analysis and commentary programme that focuses on the Middle East and rights and freedoms from a progressive and Left standpoint. Prior to the English programme, Maryam Namazie also hosts a half-an hour long Farsi programme.

Introduction

Any field dealing with “origins” – archaeology, historical linguistics, general history – has seen its share of nonsense, usually painting a glorious past for whatever ethnicity or social group is involved. Thus a hypothesis popular with (certain) feminists and neo-pagans has an egalitarian, matriarchal, peaceful paradise all throughout the neolithic – until patriarchal, warlike, horse-riding nomads destroyed it all (with the exception of what survives underground in today’s Wiccan movement, of course). Another example may be “Afrocentric” pseudohistory, which ascribes incredible technological advancement to ancient Egyptian society, which happened also to be the cradle of ancient Greek philosophy and culture. In these two examples, pseudohistory serves a clear political goal, which could be regarded as progressive – the emancipation of women and Afro-Americans. However, the left does not have a monopoly on fantasized histories. In this essay, I want to give an example of a rather similar effort at myth-building in the guise of prehistory: namely, a hypothesis on the origins of the Finns and Finno-Ugric populations immensely popular, and raising great controversy, in Finland and Estonia. The amount of literature published recently in defense of the new “paradigm” is stupendous, the quality highly debatable; I will refer here only to those sources I have at my immediate disposal at the time of this writing.

The basic category historical linguistics deals with is that of the language family. A language family is any number of languages descended from a common ancestor, which itself is determined and partially reconstructed by positing (spatiotemporally bounded) sound changes, based on putatively common etymologies among the languages in question. Any hypothesized sound change must be productive in the sense that it can be said to have occurred regularly at a given place and time; ideally, they would lead one to uncover etymological links which were not all that obvious at first sight. Automatically, such a procedure leads to a “family tree” of languages – this is the unavoidable product of trying to reconstruct a common historical basis on the basis of current diversity. Of course, language families are irrelevant to contemporary culture (no one would deny that, culturally, Finland is much more similar to Sweden than it is to Hungary) as well as the genetic origins of individual people or groups of people (as obvious to anyone noting that American Blacks speak English, many Siberian indigenous minorities speak Russian, etc.).

In this fashion, Finnish has been known to be genetically related to Hungarian as well as a number of languages in the Volga region in Russia and Western Siberia since the early 19th century. In Finland, as well as in Hungary, language history and language origins have always been acutely relevant to national identity in a way that they are not in, for example, Western Europe during the past fifty years, and layman interest in historical linguistics has always been high. Concurrently, a number of researchers in Finland, particularly during the early part of the 20th century, may well have been partially motivated by national feeling – this is, however, largely irrelevant to the results of their research, which have always been firmly set within (historical) linguistics in general. There are exceptions, such as, for example, Sigurd Wettenhoven-Aspa who in the early 20th century envisioned a glorious Finnish prehistory complete with “Finnish-Egyptian” etymologies – there are fringe figures like him in any country. In Hungary, conversely, nationalist ideologies have been mostly hostile to mainstream historical linguistics for positing a close connection between the Hungarians and the Khanty and Mansi hunters and fishermen of the Ob river in Siberia. Hungarian nationalists (for example, László Marácz, Hungarian Revival, Nieuwegein 1996) would rather envision prehistorical kinship with the Mongols, the Sumerians, the Uyghur of Western China, and other, more “prestigious” people.

Trying to fit the results of historical linguistic research within a more holistic picture of the origins of peoples, together with archeological results and, recently, population genetics as well, is a hedgy affair at best – there is no guarantee that a given archeological culture, say, the comb ceramic culture in Northern Europe from around 4000 BC, represented an ethnically and linguistically homogenous community, as the incompleteness of the archeological record may mask cultural differences and migrations, and, putting it bluntly, pot shards don’t speak any language. These problems become more acute, of course, the father back in time one goes. Still, more or less well-founded hypotheses have been made; according to the consensus view the speakers of a Uralic/Fenno-Ugric ancestor language would have lived in the Volga region in Russia around 6000-4000 BC, and have spread to the Baltic region and Finland rather rapidly after that. It is generally considered impossible to make inferences involving languages about times much earlier than about 6000 BC, since the relentlessness of linguistic change would have wiped out most traces dating from such times.

In the mid-90s, however, the Finnish linguist Pekka Sammallahti (1995) presented a paper, ‘Language and Roots,’ in which he argued that Finland may well have been inhabited by the genetic and linguistic ancestors of the modern Finns and Saami (Lapps) immediately after the ice-cap receded in Scandinavia, about 10000 BC. His ideas were modified and expanded upon greatly (regarding both time-depth and areal space) and presented enthusiastically by, for example, the historian Kyösti Julku (1997) and in particular, Kalevi Wiik (1997, 2002), then professor of phonetics at the University of Turku, who received significant media coverage for his hypotheses, which revolved around paleolithic ancestral Saami and Finns in an enormous area of Europe (from the British isles to the Urals) at the edges of the icecap during the glacial maximum of 20000 BC and afterwards (it should be noted, by the way, that Sammallahti did not support this hypothesis). What more interests me here, though, is the other side of the origins of the alternative “paradigm”.

Anatomy of a paradigm shift

In 1995, two linguists from the Department of English at Helsinki University, Jarno Raukko and Jan-Ola Östman, presented a paper called ‘The “pragmareal”challenge to genetic language tree models’ (Raukko and Östman 1995). As I mentioned, language family trees are models depicting the disintegration of an ancestor languages into daughter languages: they are irrelevant to the cultural history of the peoples speaking those languages, and, moreover, they do not tell us about the processes by which those languages dispersed. It is widely known, and uncontroversial, that the influence that languages may exert upon one another play a key role in such disintegration processes, but, ontologically, language contact and genetic transmission of an ever-changing language from generation to generation are absolutely, conceptually different things. Östman and Raukko, however, argued for a far more holistic interpretation of the genetic “identity” of a language, taking into account language contacts as well as genetic linguistics, and placing them on par with each other: “(…) Finnish and Swedish may also be said to have a common ancestor. If we take seriously the all-embracing similarities between Finnish and Swedish, we might even be able to ‘reconstruct’ some parts of this common ancestor.” (Raukko and Östman 1995: 46).

As I said, the similarities between Finnish and Swedish and between Finnish and Hungarian are of an essentially different nature: this different nature is rooted in the very reality we are trying to research. Analogies between historical linguistics and biology are often made, and they are more than often rather unhelpful, but here a somewhat fitting analogy would be an attempt to place porcine parvovirus, or rather the symptoms of porcine parvovirus, on the same line with the prehistorical ancestors of pigs in an account of pig evolution. To pull this off, one needs to depart from the idea that linguistic evolution is based in historical reality, and defend the idea that it is a purely theoretical construct: “Concretely, we are suggesting that a theoretical construct like ‘Baltic Europe’ has a similar status to ‘Indo-European’, ‘Germanic’, ‘Uralic’ or ‘Baltic-Finnic’. The status of these is highly hypothetical – the main reason for using them all is methodological – so that they are equally important or unimportant when we start speculating about the ‘real ontology’ of things.” (Raukko and Östman 1995: 59) Thus, linguistic evolution is a totally epistemological matter, and, analogically, epistemological constructs in which porcine parvovirus is one of the ancestors of the modern pig could be just as valuable as those in which they are not. As Künnap(2000b) puts it: “The difference between the two kinds of relationship is understandably entirely subjective, following from a wish of linguists to make such a distinction.”

What Östman and Raukko were trying to do here, I believe, was to propose an adjusted (and, I believe, essentially ahistorical) historical linguistic metascience which fitted in more with their research interests within synchronic linguistics. Certainly, they were not adding their support for grand visions of Finnish prehistory, and have not spoken out on the issue, as far as I know, since 1995. However, their paper was received enthusiastically by those who followed Julku and Wiik’s new paradigm, particularly by Ago Künapp, professor of Uralic languages at the University of Tartu (Künnap1998: 30-32). Künnaphas published dozens of papers on the subject in the span of a few years, for clarity, I will refer here to a 1998 book called Breakthrough in Present-Day Uralistics. In it, Künnapcommits himself to the holistic model on Finnish prehistory as argued for by Wiik and Julku, approvingly citing Wiik’s hypothesis of ancestral Finns and Lapps in glacial Europe no less than 40000 years ago (that is, slightly before the generally accepted arrival of Cro-Magnon man in Europe) (Künnap1998: 36), but particularly criticizing the language “family tree” model, opposing it to a multiplicity of multiple-rooted trees based on, essentially, Raukko and Östman’s epistemological view on language relatedness (Künnap1998: 25-35). As it is, Künnap(1998: 9) starts off in the introduction to his book with a quote of Deleuze and Guattari – “We’re tired of trees. They’ve made us suffer too much.” and seems to dislike tree models more as such than as their particularly linguistic incarnations. A similarly holistic criticism of “tree models” is mounted by Urmas Sutrop (2000) who helpfully starts out early, with Jacob’s Ladder – here, too, tree models are seen primarily as conceptual constructs, and their rootedness in and relevance to external reality is relegated to the background.

It should be noted that, without a family tree-model and without a distinction between genetic transmission of language and language contact, or, better said, between the way languages propagate themselves over the course of generations, and the way they change in the process (two very different things), you can’t have historical linguistics. The aim of the discipline is to get an idea how a given language has changed in prehistorical times. To do that, one has to make up a reconstruction on the basis of related languages or dialects. This necessarily entails reconstructing past unity on the basis of current diversity, and therefore necessarily entails a tree model. And this is the part of historical linguistics which generates hypotheses, which may be proven or falsified. Any other hypothesis on language change – for example, concerning the possibility a certain feature may have been borrowed from another language – is dependent upon it. Throw it out, and what you have is a bunch of fancy labels with little or no content.

Thus gutting the metascientific toolkit of historical linguistics from the prehistorical reality to which they had been supposed to apply, they may be re-used with a much more contemporary political relevance. This is starkly apparent in an article by Pauli Saukkonen, who departs from the same holistic vision of linguistic genetic identity as Raukko and Östman, and argues: “The future Finnish and Estonian will be Euro-languages, more and more influenced by English and other languages. The names Finnish and Estonian will be applied to them also for innumerable years to come, but then, however, they obviously do not belong to the Finno-Ugric language family in any other sense but morphologically. And in a few thousand years comparativists discuss from where the Finnish and Estonian languages of that time, after their common Proto-European, had obtained forms which deviate from other daughter-languages as English and German!” (Saukkonen 2000: 373). Lest I sound paranoid here, let me add that the name of a collection of papers edited by Kyösti Julki in 1997 is Baltic Finland – An European Country, and that Kalevi Wiik has published colums with such titles as Europe’s Oldest Language? (Books from Finland 3/1999), Finland, a clean peripherical area of the EU (Turun Sanomat 18.7.1998, ‘clean’ here means, indeed, racially unmixed), From Mongols to Europeans (Turun Sanomat 12.6.2002) and Do genetics, too, support Finnish membership in the EU? (Turun Sanomat 10.7.2002) (translations here are mine – MdS). In other words, part of the thrust of the new paradigm seems to be to make Finnish prehistory more suitable to contemporary Finnish identity.

Reception

The paradigm that thus emerged, combining a grand vision of ancestral Finns all over early paleolithic Europe with a relativistic, eclectic view on linguistic methodology – essentially departing from both the “rational” and the “inquiry” parts of rational inquiry, has been defended by its adherents in positively Kuhnian terms. Hence the title of Künapp’s 1998 book – Breakthrough in Present-Day Uralistics and his decidedly eccentric view on scientific progress: “I am about to say by way of comparison that the unavoidable breakthrough of Uralistics paradigm is like the opening of a big abscess with a scalpel which due to the pain caused by the operation should be performed after administering a large dose of anaesthetics. A compress, sucking the abscess dry drop by drop or just local anaesthesia are not the means for recovery. Regretfully, I know no soporific agent to make it all painless so that later on there is only a tiny scar on the skin that would remind one of the process. Now, however, the patient is in a towering rage from pain and hysterical as if being slaughtered by a murderer.” (Künnap2000a: 313). Elsewhere (Künnap2000b: 27): “Every scientific society loves its old traditional theories. Scientifi paradigm changes itself from time to time. The change of scientific paradigm turns old scientific theories to myths. The majority of scientists cannot believe that old scientific paradigms turn to myths. There are always some rebels in science. The paradigm of Uralistics is changing just now under the leadership of some Uralistic rebels. Their war against tradition is not Uralic-nationalistic: the paradigm of humanities is being changed by the Indo-European scientists, not by the Uralic ones. (…) Quite a different thing is that this paradigm changes and the changes in scientific views of the rebels concerning the Uralistics are suitable for the new scientific identity of Hungarians, Estonians and Finns. It just so happened, it was not for nationalistic purposes.” Or Julku (2002) (my translation – MdS): “During the past 15 years the traditional paradigm at the base of research dealing with Fenno-Ugricity has been proved thoroughly false by new information and methods coming from geology, archeology, genetics and physical anthropology. This fact has not disturbed the large majority of linguists at all, but they have been content to repeat the truths or yesteryear and to admonish innovative researchers. Apparently they will now finally tear their clothes or be silent, as the old paradigm is destroyed in linguistics as well.” There is a striking similarity here with the athmosphere of “preposterism” in philosophy as described by Susan Haack (1997) where “we breathe an atmosphere of puffery, of announcements in paper after paper, book after book, that all previous work in the area is hopelessly misconceived, and here is a radically new approach which will revolutionize the whole field.”, and where the basic goal of rational inquiry – to find out about the truth, about how things are and work in the real world – is put on the back burner. Within Finno-Ugric historical linguistics, this has lead to a scene where, in Anttila’s (2000: 503) words: ”Now the scene is indeed full of reinvented wheels, and they tend to be squarish, or at least have serious bumps and dents. This is given as revolutionary progress.”

Criticism of the “new” paradigm appeared slowly, with, interestingly, initially researchers from other subfields of linguistics, as the general linguists Esa Itkonen and Eve Mikone, or the Indo-Europeanists Jorma Koivulehto and Petri Kallio participating in the discussion. However, long exchanges on the subject eventually appeared in Virittäjä, the main Finnish journal of general and Finnish linguistics, as well as non-scientific periodicals as Kanava and Kaltio. Anttila (2000: 496) relates the slowness of the response to an excessive collegiality typical for the Finnish academic scene: “It means that you leave your academic colleagues alone, even when they transgress all credibility. You might privately criticize a colleague’s wilder ideas, but you do not do so openly or publicly in any fora.”. In the autumn of 2002, matters nonetheless came to a head when it emerged that Kalevi Wiik’s new book Eurooppalaisten Juuret (The roots of Europeans – again, those Europeans) was nominated for a prestiguous Finnish award, the Tieto-Finlandia award for popular-scientific works. A number of researchers in the field of Finnish, Uralic and general linguistics (author of this included) published a letter to Helsingin Sanomat, the main Finnish daily newspaper, protesting this nomination. Though eventually Wiik’s book did not win, the row raised enough public interest that slightly over a thousand people attended a live debate between Kalevi Wiik and Helsinki University linguist Ulla-Marja Kulonen. Aside from this, dozens of items covering Wiik’s speculations, usually sympathetically, have appeared over the years on television, daily papers, weekly papers, monthly papers – from Helsingin Sanomat to, indeed, Valopilkku – the free door-to-door magazine of the local energy firm of the city of Turku.

Layman interest in the “new” paradigm and the debate surrounding it has always been great. Thus the “new paradigm” has spawned it’s own small solar system of, often even more wild, theories. A radical example is Andres Pääbo’s website which argues for ancient Finno-Ugrians expanding into Northern Canada. And, though Kalevi Wiik, Ago Künnapet. al. have always been careful to disavow any immediate political relevance to their hypotheses, they have been enthusiastically re-published on various sites on the internet, varying from nationalistic and anti-Swedish to Neo-Nazistic. Of course, it is no more than natural that a hypothesis proclaiming that the genetic and linguistic ancestors of Finns were not only the original inhabitants of Scandinavia, but inhabited all of Northern Europe more than twenty thousand years ago would meet with enthusiasm among nationalists. If science provides a result that racists happen to like, that’s just too bad – but it does not reflect upon the result, as long as it is science.

But it cannot be stressed enough that the “new paradigm” that is being proclaimed so pompously has nothing to do with historical linguistics. There is no scientific basis, none at all, for any speculation about the language spoken by people twenty thousand years ago. The model proposed is deeply ahistorical in that sense, that it essentially departs from the linguistic make-up of contemporary Europe, with its three main language families (Finno-Ugric, Indo-European and Basque), and extrapolates this make-up back enormous time-depths, even when it is well known that there were quite a few languages of either uncertain or decidedly non-Indo-European/Basque/Finno-Ugric origin in Europe at the dawn of the Classical Age (Pictish, Etruscan). With larger time-depths, the number of such uncertain factors can only increase. Moreover, the holistic model of language origins propagated by Künnaphas little or no basis in linguistics, and neither has a slightly modified version proposed by Wiik in his latest book Eurooppalaisten Juuret, in which languages are regarded to change exclusively through contact, and hence are defined as an amalgam of a genetic ancestor and subsequent contact “layers”. There is even less basis for the many individual hypotheses Wiik argues for, such as, to take a pick, the idea that homo habilis walked on all fours (Wiik 2002: 54), that the megalith culture constituted a religion with missionaries and all, who spoke a Basque language suffused with Hamito-Semitic elements, and that these missionaries succeeded in leaving Basque traces in the language of the ancestors of Saami (Lapp) (Wiik 2002: 136-137), that the name Athens is derived from a modern Albanian form e thÎna which apparently is a participial form of the word ‘to speak’ (Wiik 2002: 322), and so forth. Shortly, the model proposed is so overarching and includes such time-depth that it can be said to be “possibly true” only to the extent that most of it is not falsifiable by serious linguistic research (as speculations about the language of the first Cro-Magnon men happen to be). To the extent that Wiik’s model has provided us with falsifiable hypotheses, most have been falsified.

Political questions

If a new “paradigm” has little scientific basis, but all the more political relevancy, the question of its political nature becomes quite acute. It has been noted (for example, Anttila and Kallio 2002, Anttila 2000: 498) that the new paradigm bears an uncanny relevance to the linguistic ideas proposed by N.J. Marr (1865-1934), who likewise blurred the distinction between genetic transmission of languages and language contact, who stressed temporal and spatial continuity where he could, etc. Ironically, Marr’s linguistics were elevated to official orthodoxy in the Soviet Union until Stalin himself intervened in the matter. Now it seems that, at least in the former Soviet Republic of Estonia, he is making something of a comeback. Some of the critics of the new paradigm (Aikio and Aikio 2002, Anttila and Kallio 2002, Hasselblatt 2002: 3) have made it quite clear that they regard it as nationalistically motivated wishful thinking. If Wiik et. al. are given the benefit of the doubt in this regard, the decision to publish English translations of the papers from the 1997 collection Itämerensuomi – Eurooppalainen maa (Baltic Finland, an european country) in The Mankind Quarterly – an outlet that usually publishes research supporting supposed genetic intelligence differences between races and some such – shows a stunning lack of judgement.

Historical linguistics proper is not an empirical science in the sense that physics is – in which repeatable spatiotemporal occurrences are studied – but a discipline which strives to provide a picture of the past as plausible as possible, one in which the interpretations of the researcher play a vital role. This makes a strict methodology and in particular the conviction that it is historical reality we are after, not someone’s reality but reality itself, all the more necessary, since it is all too easy to slide in Von Däniken-like fantasism. Linguistic pseudoscience, invariably striving to paint a picture as glorious as possible of the past of whatever nation you belong to, has always existed, and always will – but during the last ten years in Finland and Estonia, it seems to have made a sustained push to the mainstream. One of the roots of the “new” paradigm in Finland and Estonia is epistemological relativism, the view of language families, and particularly the distinction between genetic transmission of languages and language contact, as epistemic constructs rather than existing in historical reality. And indeed, if “Finno-Ugric” is just a “theoretical construct” – why not talk about “Euro-languages” instead? Why indeed should one distinguish between recent loanwords from Swedish and shared etymological material with Hungarian if the game is no longer about testing hypotheses about linguistic prehistory, but about building up an appropriate national, historical identity in the age of the European Union? Thus, the methodology of historical linguistics have been abused to support an ahistorical, if not positively antihistorical, model of a Great and Glorious Past.

An analogical situation

Upon writing this essay, I serendipitously hit upon an article published by Subash Kak (Indic language families and Indo-European, Yavanika 6, 1996 p. 51-64). It was the first hit when searching for the terms “sanskrit”, “Indo-European” and “pseudoscience” in a search engine, proving once again that the Internet is beginning to show signs of autonomous intelligence. There are currently two large language families on the Indian subcontinent: Indic languages, belonging to the Indo-European language family, largely in the north (Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, etc.) and Dravidian languages, a family on their own, in the south and northeast (Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, etc.). In addition, a language with no relatives at all, Nahali, is spoken in central India, whereas in the east, Tibeto-Burman and Munda languages are spoken. The consensus view is that people speaking an ancestor of the current Indic languages invaded the Indian subcontinent from the northeast about 1600 B.C. (Beekes 1995: 45), before that, Dravidian languages may or may not have been spoken on a larger area than they are now; the presence of one outlying Dravidian language in Southern Pakistan, Brahui, would suggest the former. Kak attacks this consensus view, and replaces it with something strikingly similar to what we have seen in Finland: he argues that “(…) language families belong to overlapping groups, because such a view allows us to represent better the complex history of the interactions amongst their ancestor languages.” (Kak 1996: 54) – recall the attempt by Raukko and Östman to fit all linguistic relationships, including conceptually different ones, in the same holistic mold – which allows him to bypass the fact that Indic and Dravidian languages are not genetically related (Kak 1996: 59), and thereby “resolving” the problem posed by the different origins of the two language families and the possible ancient Indic invasion: “The Indian linguistic evidence requires the postulation of two kinds of classification. The first is the traditional Indian classification where the whole of India is a single linguistic area of what used to be traditionally called the Prakrit family. Linguists agree that based on certain structural relationships the North and South Indian languages are closer to each other than Sanskrit and Greek (…) Second, we have a division between the North Indian languages that should really be called North Prakrit (called Indo-Aryan by the linguists) and the South Indian languages that may be called South Prakrit (or Dravidian).” (Kak 1996: 60). Of course, the inference that “based on certain structural relationships the North and South Indian languages are closer to each other than Sanskrit and Greek” is meaningless from a linguistic point of view, unless it is clarified by what measure they are considered “closer” – trivially, they are “closer” in the sense of geographical distance between speakers, but not in terms of genetic linguistics. Anyway, Kak argues that this linguistically worthless reinterpretation is useful because: “This classification will allow us to get rid of the term Aryan in the classification of languages which is a good thing because of the racist connotation behind its 19th century use. Its further virtue is that it recognizes that language families cannot be exclusive systems and they should be perceived as overlapping circles that expand and shrink with time.” En passant, Kak (1996: 60) connects ancient Greek culture to the influence of seafaring Indians, dates Vedic Sanskrit a few millenia earlier than is commonly done (Kak 1996: 51), and it not too modest to speak of a “breakdown of the old paradigm” (Kak 1996: 62).

The analogy with the situation in Finland is that here, too, we see a gutting of the scientific basis from the conceptual toolkit of historical linguistics, which is then re-used to support a politically more pleasing view on ancient history. The difference is that Kak is considerably more sophisticated in his attack on traditional historical linguistics, arguing that “we all understand how the 19th century construction of the Orient by the West satisfied its needs of self-definition in relation to the Other. To justify its ascendancy, the Other was defined to be racially mixed and inferior; irrational and primitive; despotic and feudal. This definition was facilitated by a selective use of the texts and rejecting traditional interpretations, an approach that is now called Orientalism.” (Kak 1996: 52), and that historical linguistics, the core of which in the 19th century was indeed the study of Indo-European languages, was suffused by Eurocentric myth-building (Kak 1996: 52-53). There is little doubt that a lot of the work done in historical linguistics during the 19th century was suffused by romantic notions of origins – but the linguistic content of that work, the picture constructed of the prehistoric development of individual languages, by and large, still stands. In arguing against the old historical-linguistic paradigm, Sabhan Kak conspicuously fails to tackle the linguistic part of it.

Conclusions

At the beginning of this essay, I referred to Afrocentric studies as a similar paradigm, in which historical research is subverted to the political needs of the day. In the case of Afrocentrism, these political needs may be, however, regarded as mostly left-wing. In the case of glacial Super-Finland, the political relevance seems to be rather rightist, romantic and nationalist. Politicalization and politically-inspired relativism in any discipline is not essentially leftist or rightist, the popularity of, say, left-inspired critical linguistics and critical critical linguistics and critical critical critical linguistics is much more a consequence of the common political view in humanities departments than the phenomenon itself. In another situation, relativism and politicalization may serve counterposed goals.

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Petri Kallio, Aslak and Ante Aikio, Johanna Laakso and Jorma Koivulehto for keeping me and each other informed about the vagaries of the “new paradigm” over the last few years, and to Raimo Anttila for sending me his 2000 article.

References

Aikio, A. and Aikio, A. 2002: Suomalaisten fantastinen menneisyys. Kaltio

Anttila, R. 2000: The Indo-European and the Baltic-Finnic interface: time against the ice –
Renfrew, C., McMahon, A. and Trask, L. (ed.): Time depth in historical linguistics. Cambridge p. 481-528.

Anttila, R. and Kallio, P. 2002: Suur-Suomen tiede harhapoluilla. Kaltio

Beekes, R.S.P.: Comparative Indo-European Linguistics. An Introduction. Amsterdam 1995.

Hasselblatt, C. 2002: Wo die wahre Revolution ist. Wiener Elektronische Beiträge des Instituts
für Finno-Ugristik

Julku, K. 1997: Eurooppa – suomalais-ugrilaisten ja indoeurooppalaisten pelikenttä – Julku, K.
(ed.): Itämerensuomi – Eurooppalainen maa. Oulu p. 249-275.
– 2002: “Wie es eigentlich gewesen ist.” Kaltio

Kak, S. C.: Indic language families and Indo-European. Yavanika 6. 1996 p. 51-64.
Pdf file

Künapp, A. 1998: Breakthrough in present-day Uralistics. Tartu.
– 2000a: Miscellanea Uralica – Künapp, A. (ed.): The roots of peoples and languages of Northern Eurasia II and III. Fenno-Ugristica 23. Tartu p. 306-317.
– 2000b: About some morphological features of Proto-Uralic – Künapp, A. (ed.): The roots of peoples and languages of Northern Eurasia II and III. Fenno-Ugristica 23. Tartu p. 27-32.

Raukko, J. and Östman, J.-O. 1995: The ‘Pragmareal’ challenge to genetic language tree models
– Suhonen, S. (ed.): Itämerensuomalainen kulttuurialue. The Fenno-Baltic cultural area. Helsinki p. 31-69.

Sammallahti, P. 1995: Language and roots – Congressus Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum VIII
Pars I, p. 143-153.

Saukkonen, P. 2000: On the Ancestors of Lapps and Finnic Peoples – Künapp, A. (ed.): The roots
of peoples and languages of Northern Eurasia II and III. Fenno-Ugristica 23. Tartu p. 372-380.

Sutrop, U. 2000: The Forest of Finno-Ugric languages – Künapp, A. (ed.): The roots of peoples
and languages of Northern Eurasia II and III. Fenno-Ugristica 23. Tartu p.165-196.

Wiik, K. 1997: Suomalaistyyppistä ääntämistä germaanisissä kielissä Julku, K. (ed.):
Itämerensuomi – Eurooppalainen maa. Oulu p. 75-103.
– 2002: Eurooppalaisten Juuret. Jyväskylä.

Some bibliographical notes

Künnap1998 has been republished in virtually unchanged form as A. Künapp: Contact-induced perspectives in Uralic linguistics by Lincom Europa, M¸nchen 2000, and may be available more widely. Anttila 2000, which is an excellent introduction to the consensus view of Finnish prehistory, may be widely available as well. Kalevi Wiik’s bibliography on the subject (73 items in about 10 years!) is available on: here. A number of discussions germane to the point of this article took place at the Indo-European mailing list in 2001. Finally, with the help of Petri Kallio and others, I have attempted to build and update a bibliography of on-line and off-line material on the subject here.

The opposition to transgenic crops by environmental organizations is beyond rational explanation, since the introduction of transgenic crops has led to significant reductions in pesticide use in the U.S., as well as in other countries such as China in which transgenic crops are grown. Herbicide tolerant crops have allowed for the expansion of conservation tillage, which conserves soil, water, and biodiversity, and saves fuel along with reducing pesticide use (Fernandez-Cornejo and McBride, 2004, 27). In addition to the absolute reduction, the “substitution caused by the use of herbicide-tolerant soybeans results in glyphosate replacing other synthetic herbicides that are at least three times as toxic and that persist in the environment nearly twice as long” (Fernandez- Cornejo and McBride, 2004, 28, see also ED 2004 for comparative figures on the toxicity of glyposate compared to pesticides used in either conventional or organic agriculture such as copper sulphate). For those still under the illusion that “organic agriculture” does not use pesticides or at least, does not use synthetic pesticides, see USDA 2004.

The World Health Organization in its comprehensive study of pesticides and chemical contaminants in water, places glyphosate in a category where “it is unnecessary to recommend a health-based guideline value for these compounds because they are not hazardous to human health at concentrations normally found in drinking water (WHO 1998).

Glyphosate binds to the soil rapidly, preventing leaching, and is biodegraded by soil bacteria. In fact, glyphosate has a half-life in the environment of 47 days, compared with 60-90 days for the herbicides it commonly replaces. In addition, glyphosate has extremely low toxicity to mammals, birds, and fish. The herbicides that glyphosate replaces are 3.4 to 16.8 times more toxic, according to a chronic risk indicator based on EPA reference dose for humans (Fernandez- Cornejo and McBride, 2004, 28).

The depth of emotional commitment of the NGOs to the opposition to transgenic food crops can be seen in their partially successful attempts to prevent U.S. provided maize from being used for famine relief in Southern Africa, because some of it might be transgenic. To some of us, it seemed that they would prefer to see Africans starve rather than see them eat food grown in violation of their ideological preconceptions. Though the NGOs claimed that there was more than enough maize available locally to manage famine relief, none of them with their multi-million dollar annual expenditures offered any financial assistance to procure any relief food or other aid (Morris 2004).

The anti-transgenic forces have lost every round of the scientific argument, and every claim of adverse impact that they have made has been massively refuted. It would be difficult to find a respected scientific society or scientist of any reputability (as distinguished from the small number of scientists with varying degrees of competence that make up the anti-GM roadshow) to support the anti-transgenic cause. Equally impressive is the tens of thousands of competent scientists who have remained relatively silent on the issue. Had there been any of the dangers that the critics claim, one can be reasonably sure that many of them would have been motivated to at least sign one of the activist lists. They have not done so. Yet, most public opinion surveys in the U.S. and Europe find about 70% of the public believes that the scientific community is divided on the issue.

The list of scientific organizations and leaders in modern science, including Nobel Prize winners, who support transgenics is large and growing, as are the numbers of working scientists who are endorsing the technology by using it in their scientific work in any number of endeavors, including the creation of new pharmaceuticals which some of the activists do not oppose. To be consistent the activists should oppose all genetic engineering.

The number of national and international scientific societies in micro and molecular biology, medicine, plant genetics and physiology, ecology etc. that have recognized the potential benefits is impressively large, and the absence of any that currently oppose it is equally impressive. The strength of the endorsement varies, and many include caveats about the need for food and environmental safety provisions and case-by case approvals, but all have taken issue with the strident opposition to the technology. Since 2000, we have seen a number of national academies of science and other prestigious multidisciplinary transnational organizations issue carefully researched reports in support of the technology (RS et al. 2000, ICS 2003, IAC 2004a&b, IFST 2004, NRC 2004, USDA FAS 2004 – on the report of the French Food Safety Agency). Add in the support of those international organizations that do both scientific and applied work in helping to feed the world’s population including organizations based in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Persley 1999, RS et al. 2000, ECA 2002, FAO 2004, MPH 2004, IFPRI/ISNAR 2004, ILSI 2004).

The continued global growth in the planting of transgenic corn, soy, canola and cotton represents real victories, but they could become pyrrhic victories unless the technology is allowed to expand into other areas of food production. In spite of all of these “wins” in the scientific arguments and in the increased plantings, one can argue that we are losing the war in that the activists have successfully poisoned the public’s mind in Europe and elsewhere, making the further use of transgenics in new food production difficult if not impossible.

The science may be overwhelming but the critics still win the public relations battles. A correspondence to a journal that claims transgenic Bt corn harms the Monarch butterfly wins wide publicity in spite of the fact that the piece had been previously peer-reviewed and rejected by the same journal and by another respected journal. An activist dressed as a butterfly makes great TV and newspaper pictorials and spreads the activist’s message far and wide leaving a lasting impression in the public’s mind. A large number of peer-reviewed articles in leading journals based on major field studies that found that the Bt corn caused less damage to the butterfly than did any other method of growing the crop, were not newsworthy, and therefore never entered the broader public’s mind. Some of the research was published before the study that found harm, and there were six multi-authored, peer-reviewed articles in PNAS – Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America – based on field research (for bibliographic detail, see DeGregori 2004, 115-116). Given that Bt corn has considerably reduced pesticide use and that Bt cotton has led to a 50% reduction in pesticide use – roughly 2 million pounds in the U.S, beneficial, non-target insects, such as the Monarch butterfly have actually fared “much better under these conditions” as has the environment overall from transgenic crops (Gewin 2004).

A new strategy is needed if the larger battles are to be won. If the activists argue for the consumer’s right to know what they are eating, we ought to call their hand and raise them. We do not have to accept their position to argue that if the consumers have a right to know about transgenic breeding of food crops, they also have a right to know about the other forms of breeding that have created modern agriculture.

Many of our crops are products of “unnatural” species crosses that “nature” somehow did with humans involved only to the extent of selection. Modern bread-wheat is the product of three such crosses, while human plant breeding crossed the species barrier as early as 1884 with a sterile cross of wheat and rye. Modern agronomy, however, has allowed us to increase the diversity of wheat varieties from this narrow genetic base. For example, “wheat agriculture in the United States has experienced an increase in the number of varieties grown from 126 in 1919 to 469 in 1984” (Dalrymple 1988, cited in Brush 2004, 36, see also Cox 1991).

Commercial farmers further increase diversity in the fields and in the orchards by having different varieties “each with a different harvest date, allowing them to spread the harvest over a longer period to capture price advantages and avoid labor bottlenecks” (Brush 2004, 36). Stephen Brush’s Farmers’ Bounty is filled with data on increasing crop diversity for a large number of field and orchard crops in the United States, with the clear indication that this is typical and not the exception. Contrary to myths about the genetically impoverished North and slogans about “biopiracy” from poor countries of the South, the “poorest countries are net borrowers from other countries including the United States.”

a slowdown in crop germplasm exchange is likely to hurt poor countries … more than wealthy industrial countries without indigenous crop resources. Industrial countries have established effective crop collections that are used not only by national breeding programs but also by programs elsewhere (Brush 2004, 236 see also Evenson and Golin 1997).

The best estimates are that about 70% of the produce in the supermarket is the product of some form of mutation breeding using carcinogenic chemicals or radiation. To the various forms of mutation breeding, add in such techniques as protoplastic cell fusion, embryo rescue, meristem tip culture and other forms of tissue culture or somoclonal variation. Many of our food crops are a product of more than one of these heroic techniques.

Tissue culture makes use of the toti-potency of cells and has had an enormous impact on plant breeding over the last decades. Propagation of elite material, virus free meristeme cultures, somatic hybridization, dihaploid plants and hybrid breeding are amongst the most significant applications (IAC 2004b).

All of these substantially modify the genome far more than transgenics, which modifies it less than any form of plant breeding that has ever been done. Any reading of the peer-reviewed literature on the subject would make that clear. Transgenic science and technology does not eliminate the continuing possibilities of other forms of plant breeding. Quite the contrary, it has opened new possibilities and potentialities.

DNA technologies lead also to powerful non-GMO applications. New high-throughput technologies in the field of genomics, transcriptomics, micro-arrays, proteomics and metabolomics generate an enormous amount of data and, when interpreted correctly, lead to a profound knowledge of genome structure and functioning (IAC 2004b, see also FAO 2004).

The use of genetic markers has already proved beneficial.

This knowledge is already widely used by companies and research institutes for identifying target genes that can be isolated for use in genetic modification or followed in conventional breeding programs to increase the selection efficiency (marker-assisted selection) (IAC 2004b).

How could the activists possibly deny the “right of the consumer” to know about what they are eating, since they have been so zealously promoting this alleged right to know? Nor could they ignore the fears that would emerge since they have long been preaching on the dangers of “chemicals” and radioactivity.

Thanks to activists’ preconditioning, a large segment of the population would assume that these “mutant” foods were carcinogenic or radioactive. Any poll asking consumers the honest question as to whether they would want products of mutation breeding to be labeled would almost certainly score as high if not higher than those favoring the labeling of “genetically modified” products. The highest level of support would undoubtedly be among activists themselves, at least those who were unaware of modern plant breeding.

It would no longer be their supposedly moral argument on consumer rights. In effect, the activists would be forced to make arguments against complete labeling on issues of cost and practicality. Let them also try to make the argument that transgenics is somehow less predictable in outcomes and therefore poses more dangers than other forms of plant breeding that we have long used successfully.

The Naderites would be forced to explain why radiation of seeds to create mutations was safe while irradiating sprouts was a threat to human health, even though it was the only certain way to kill deadly micro-organisms such as Salmonella, and that neither the radiation of seeds nor the irradiation sprouts leaves any radioactive residue (Skerrett 1997, DeGregori 2002, 167-168 and FSA 2004d, see also – Bari et al. 2003, Brody 1994, Lutter 1999, Osterholm and Potter 1997, Osterholm and Norgan. 2004, Rajkowski et al. 2003, Steele 1999, Tauxe 2001 and Thayer 2004). Advocates for food safety would have to explain why they don’t favor irradiation when the Centers for Disease Control estimates that if the irradiation of food were “used for 50% of all U.S. produced meat and poultry, there would be 900,000 fewer disease cases and 352 fewer deaths due to foodborne illnesses per year” (Stimola 2004).

The European Union and others who oppose hormone-fed beef might wish to explain why growth hormones fed to cows creates a food safety issue while there is no such issue with pork from growth hormone-fed pigs. Quite possibly the fact that Denmark and The Netherlands are the world’s largest exporters of pork might influence their judgement, while imported beef from hormone-fed cows competes with domestic (European Union) cattle production.

For many of the things that it is our right to know, many of us would prefer not to know: there are inevitably items in the food we eat (as there always have been) that are harmless but definitely unaesthetic (Spencer 2002). “Imagine, for a moment, picking up a bag of frozen broccoli at the store and reading `may contain up to 276 aphids’ – the official limit for the product. … `may contain up to nine rodent hair fragments’ … `may contain up to 10 mg of animal excreta’ on the back of a can beans” (Spencer 2003, 135-136)? It should be noted that there are far fewer of these contaminants in our food chain today then there have been at any time in human history.

In line with the “consumer’s right to know,” how about labels indicating possibly dangerous levels of fungal toxins called fumonisins in “organic” corn (maize) and in the “organic” milk from cows that are fed this infected grain (Marasas et al. 1984 and Walhberg 2004)? Transgenic Bt maize has far and away the lowest level of fumonisins, followed by conventionally grown maize with “organically” grown maize having the highest level (DeGregori 2002, 108-109, Burke 2004 and FSA 2003a&b). Fumonisins can “cause fatal birth defects … by interfering with folic acid, the vitamin recommended to pregnant women to prevent such birth defects” (Walhberg 2004). The “defects include anencephaly, a fatal condition involving an undeveloped brain; and spina bifida, an improperly closed spine that is often not serious but can cause major disability” (Walberg 2004).

A recent study of “Coliforms, Escherichia coli, Salmonella, and Escherichia coli O157:H7 in Organic and Conventional Produce Grown by Minnesota Farmers” found that “certified organic” produce had almost three times the E. coli infestation that conventionally grown produce had, 1.6% to 4.3%. This was considered the good news about organic, because the now-certified produce had infestation rates of more than two and one-half times that of the certified organic produce, 4.3% to 11.4% (Mukherjee et al. 2004).

Because of the small size of the sample, 1.6% to 4.3% was not considered statistically significant by the authors, so one wonders why they bothered to publish their study? Believe it or not, the study was touted as confirming the “Safety of Organic Food,” an interpretation supported by the lead author of the study (TRI 2004). “Salmonella was isolated from one organic lettuce and one organic green pepper” (Mukherjee et al. 2004). This was two instances in a sample of 476 or “0.4 percent of organic samples” giving the potential consumer “1 in 250 Salmonella” lottery. “The jackpot is diarrhea, typhoid fever, and Reiter’s Syndrome that causes joint pain and painful urination that can last for years after the initial Salmonella infection” (Avery and Avery 2004).

More bad news for the proponents of organic food was the just released Food Standards Agency ‘Baby Food Survey on Dioxins and Dioxin-like PCBs in Baby Food’ (FSA 2004a&b&c). “While many parents are prepared to pay a premium of up to an extra 20p, or 30%, for a jar of organic food, the survey found that three of the top four products with the highest levels of toxins were organic, while none of the 10 baby foods with the lowest toxin levels had the organic label” (MacLeod 2004). Even though the study did show “that toxins in the food were well within the levels recommended by scientists even for babies,” one wonders whether the organic proponents interviewed by a reporter would have been so tranquil if the findings had been reversed (MacLeod 2004).

In one example, an organic shepherd’s pie had 90 times the level of the chemicals of its non-organic equivalent. In addition, while fish products have recently been the focus of considerable criticism over their levels of PCBs and dioxins, the only non-organic fish product tested had the lowest level of toxins, while the organic fish products were among the most affected by the chemicals (MacLeod 2004).

Nor can the activists continue to claim organic beef is certain to be free of “mad cow disease” (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) as the commission studying the outbreak in the UK found the disease in organic herds and concluded that even though they “had not conducted a full within-herd incidence analysis,” it was likely that “organic herds did not have a lower incidence than the national average” (BSE 2000).

We could “demand” labels on the less well protected organic produce indicating a history of higher levels of plant produced toxins such as the curcubitan in the “killer zucchini” that hospitalized a number of people in New Zealand in early 2003. Recent articles argue that organic produce is more nutritious because the organic plants are less well protected causing them to produce a variety of toxins (called secondary phenolic metabolites) to defend themselves (Baxter et al. 2002 and Asami et al. 2003). With very little supportive evidence, it is argued that the various metabolites add nutritive value to the plant food (Burke 2004, DeGregori 2002, 73-73, 90-93, 163-164 and DeGregori 2004, 110-113). The less well protected plant will produce a wide range of toxins, some of which have tested out to be rodent carcinogens, but these are simply ignored by those seeking to “prove” the nutritional superiority of organic produce. Of course, well protected plants also produce a wide array of the same toxins but by the very argument of the organic agriculture proponents, they would be expected to produce them in lower quantities.

In other words, let us turn the argument around and make the activists argue on scientific grounds where they have already lost. Have no fear that complete labeling would ever be enacted, since the cost would be prohibitive – as the activists know, since their call for transgenic labeling with its prohibitive costs is just a ruse to keep it from being grown and marketed.

We need not accept their purist beliefs to be able to turn their own arguments against them. It would be interesting to ask them which is more “unnatural” – to put cow’s insulin into the human body to perform a human biological function or to insert a human gene into a bacteria to produce human insulin for the same purpose? The movement’s very purist claims could well be their Achilles’ heel.

If inserting a single gene from another species is a violation of nature’s laws, what about the insertion of many genes in various wide crosses or cell fusions that have been made for decades? For those who believe that even the most minuscule amount of a transgenic food crop in a shipment is “contamination,” then by all means let us hold them to their standard. They have contaminated our use of language to further their distortions; now let us honestly use it against them by holding them to it.

When it comes to purism, the activists tell us that we cannot be too pure. Fortunately, some of them actually believe it and have provided us with just the ammunition that we need to demand purist consistency. Two works produced by a Steinerite organization give us all the arguments that we need to make our case. They were done at the Louis Bolk Institute, which is dedicated to biodynamic agriculture and a truly puristic agenda.

The 1999 monograph by Lammerts van Bueren et al, Sustainable Organic Plant Breeding (Driebergen, The Netherlands: Louis Bolk Institute) and the 2003 article in Crop Science by Lammerts van Bueren et al, Concepts of Intrinsic Value and Integrity of Plants in Organic Plant Breeding and Propagation are treasure troves of useful information for the debate over transgenic plant modification and organic agriculture. A lot is revealed in them that many of the believers in “nature’s” unique virtues and organic agriculture proponents would prefer to be less well known.

One of the virtues of these studies is that the Louis Bolk Institute that sponsored them appears to be a purist fringe of the organic agriculture/anti-transgenic movement. It seems that every purist movement has an infinite regress of fringes upon fringes, with each seeking to be more pure than the others. A fringe movement loses its elitist élan when too many start to join it. It is inevitable that some will break off to become purer than thou. This is true even if the fringe has historical precedents, as recruitment to the fringe is normally via the mainstream. It is likely that the mainstream of the organic movement would prefer to remain silent on these issues, particularly those who have commercialized the issue by selling organic products at a premium or have used the issues for recruitment and funding for their activist organization.

The Louis Bolk Institute purism does not allow it to make some of the artificial distinctions between what is and is not genetic modification (beyond the automatic exemption of the long history of genetic modification by conventional breeding) that are a staple of the mainstream organic movement. Its references to anthroposophy, biodynamic agriculture, and Demeter International along with other buzz words, clearly show the Louis Bolk Institute’s roots in Rudolf Steiner’s ideas as they passed through Richard Walther Darre and the German Agriculture Ministry in the 1930s and very early 1940s. Since this stream of thought carries an enormous baggage of lunacy (literally and figuratively) including anti-immunization (via the Waldorf schools), one wonders what other baggage of weird ideas can be found on closer inspection.

The central virtue of the monograph and the article in Crop Science is that the authors blend their mysticism with basic knowledge of plant breeding. Plant scientists may find problems with their analysis, but what is revealed in the monograph and article is potentially deadly to the movement. As the authors go through the various techniques of modern plant breeding, they clearly show what most of us already knew, that modern plants (both food crops and ornamentals) contain genes from other species as a result of a variety breeding techniques that make them more resistant to disease and otherwise superior. Add that some of these techniques involve using chemicals and radiation to create mutations, and you have a fearsome story to tell. Ironically, one is even more likely to find such items among food products deemed to be organic, because the opposition to synthetic pesticides requires that organically grown plants produce more insect and disease resistant toxins, many of which are carcinogenic.

The authors dance around these issues a bit and try to make a few saving distinctions, but fundamentally they find most of modern plant breeding to be contrary to the holistic vitalist principles that they espouse. (“A plant breeding system for organic production should be based on the organic concept of plant health and on the organic position on chain relationships,” whatever this may mean.)

More important than the distinctions that they try to make, is what they have conceded to be not in line with creating healthy holistic plants. And equally important (as we have noted above), these plants have become essential for organic agriculture because of its less effective means of crop protection. Organic enthusiasts (and the rest of us) have been eating them for decades without any evidence of harm, with the organic consumers firmly believing that they were eating a safer, healthier product and paying a premium price for it.

Those who believe that inserting a single gene into a plant is a violation of “nature’s laws” would have a difficult time, after reading these studies, denying that the wholesome organic food crops providing their daily veggie diet result from a far greater transgression of nature’s laws (as they define them) with even greater unknown long term consequences (at least according to their belief system). Precautionary principle anyone?

We would not have to demagogue the issue if we simply pointed out that what is being sold as organic is unsafe by the very criteria that the organic proponents use to define products of transgenic plants as being unsafe. After all, in nature we can and do observe bacteria using restriction endonucleases and ligases to cut DNA. The cohesive ends of the cut DNA are re-ligated, and plasmids are used as a vehicle for transporting and encoding a gene into another cell in nature, similar to what biotechnologists do today. After all, the observation of this action is the original source of biotechnology. Even in our own bodies, the RAG 1 & 2 genes along with other genes produce enzymes that cut and re-ligate our DNA in the development of our immune system.

All this does not make transgenic engineering “natural” and we are wise not to make that argument, but certainly it is no less “unnatural” than removing the membrane of two cells and forcing the remaining protoplasm together, thereby involving gene transfers. It does make the designation of being “all natural” meaningless as it always has been. The issue is not one of being more or less natural, but of hypocrisy in those who sell vitamins made by recombinant microorganisms or from transgenic soybeans, while their supporters promote the dubious claim that the genetic engineering of the bacteria used in making L tryptophan was the sole causal factor in the 1980s outbreak of eosinophilia myalgia.

We need aggressively to point out that purveyors of “all natural” foods are like the European regulators, exempting cheeses, beverages and breads made with genetically engineered enzymes and emulsifiers and detergents with genetically engineered enzymes replacing the phosphates that were polluting our rivers and streams. Wouldn’t it be nice if every time a supermarket was picketed for selling “GM food,” a picket were also set up before a store claiming to be “GM free” so that the media would have to tell the whole story and not the half truths that the anti transgenic crowd wishes to purvey?

The authors of the Louis Bolk studies seek an immediate ban for organic agriculture of some of the techniques of modern plant breeding and the food crops that they produce while allowing a 10 year transition for others since cell techniques are “so firmly embedded in conventional breeding” that banning them “would set organic farmers back twenty years and have dramatic economic consequences.” The cell techniques to be banned immediately are “protoplast fusion, incorporation of cms (cytoplasmic male sterility) without restorer genes, radiated mentor pollen and mutation induction.”

The distinction between techniques to be banned immediately and those to be phased out appear to have less to do with what is presumed to be science and more with what is economically feasible for the organic movement. They show clearly why a 10 year transition is necessary, since virtually all varieties of some major food crops, tomatoes for example, used in organic agriculture are the product of techniques which they consider contrary to nature and to cross species barriers. Even with a 10 year transition, they are seeking “generous” public funding and “active enabling role” by government.

There is truly a plethora of live ordinance in these reports. Not only do they show instance after instance of the introduction of genes from one species into another but they have appendices which list the food stuffs such as tomatoes where it is virtually impossible to avoid buying and consuming such “unnatural” products. Some of us have been saying this for years but it has too often fallen on ears deaf through incredulity. Now we can send the faithful to the words of their fellow believers. For the consumer’s right to know, maybe we ought to require a CD ROM giving the complete provenance of all food items sold (my tongue in cheek advocacy in an earlier article). This could provide print-outs for most foodstuffs and would result in toxic shock for those who panic at the thought of inserting one gene from another species into a plant.

Don’t underestimate the importance of being able to make a point with the believers by sending them to their own sources. Such an argumentative technique might not pass muster as science, but it is honest and has the benefit of possibly clearing away some misconceptions, and opening a listener to more rational arguments. I have long sent students who believe that organic food is “pesticide free” to the websites of pesticides (including synthetic ones, those dreaded “chemicals”) approved for organic agriculture. Now we can make the case that transgenic food is a product of breeding no more “unnatural” than what they are eating, with the main difference being that modern biotechnology is more precise, accurate and predictable, I can now send them to their own sources which concede that the “GM-free” food that they consume has genes that breeders have inserted by a variety of “unnatural” means.

Even the purest of the pure have limits to their purity, particularly when an economic interest is at stake. Ten years is a long time for people to continue to consume a product when one advocates that it be banned eventually. It is amazing how pragmatism can triumph over purism when it is in the best interest of those zealously promoting an extreme purist cause. It brings to mind the famed lament often attributed to St. Augustine – Oh Lord make me pure but not yet! It is like a roué making a renewed vow of total, absolute, unconditional marital fidelity but asking for a 10 year grace period for the transition to it.

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Thomas R. DeGregori, Professor of Economics at the University of Houston, is author of Bountiful Harvest: Technology, Food Safety and the Environment, Cato Institute, 2002 and the recently published book, Origins of the Organic Agriculture Debate, Blackwell Publishers, 2004. Email address – trdegreg@uh.edu. homepage – http://www.uh.edu/~trdegreg.

As someone who felt sufficiently opposed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq to join the protest marches and to attend Stop the War Coalition meetings, it is a source of great sadness to me what a shrivelled, irrelevant self-parody the British anti-war movement has become. It seems hard to believe it now, but for a couple of months in early 2003, the Stop the War Coalition seemed to be the vehicle for something huge. Schoolchildren were walking out of their classes in protest; between 750,000 and 2 million people (depending on whose estimates you believe) swarmed through the streets of London on February 15th; ordinary, middle-of the-road people – the kind you don’t normally see on a protest march – massed to vent their anger in virtually every city or major town in the UK. Celebrities like Ms Dynamite and Fran Healy queued up to go on stage at anti-war events.

By contrast, the Stop the War Coalition events you see occasionally in city centres these days are just plain embarrassing. Gone are the moderate, progressively minded individuals, leaving just an unsightly handful of dim-bulb Trotskyists, clapped-out Stalinists and Koran-thumping Islamists. The more respected campaigning organisations have either deserted them (e.g. Greenpeace) or had given them a wide berth from the beginning (e.g. Oxfam). STWC propositions rarely offer anything more intellectually complicated than shouting “Bliar!” and “End the occupation!” Their campaigns are uninspired and uninspiring, and the media stunts look increasingly cheap and desperate. You just walk pass them, put up your collar, try to avoid eye contact with them and no, I wouldn’t like a copy of the Socialist Worker, thank you very much.

The intellectual poverty of the Stop the War Coalition these days is staggering. Since so much of the STWC’s organisation now amounts to little more than a franchise of the Socialist Workers Party, they’ve adopted the SWP’s perennial habit of reducing complicated issues to placard-sized slogans. Hence, the cry on the street is not, “Develop an effective exit strategy that leaves a working democracy and a functioning civil society in Iraq!” but “End the occupation now!” The almost inevitable carnage and civil war that would follow the various foreign troops suddenly stopping whatever they’re doing and heading straight for the airport doesn’t appear to weigh all that heavily on the consciences of the protestors. If this is compassion for the people of Iraq, then it’s compassion that the Iraqi people could do without.

Naturally, none of this has the slightest impact on actual policy. One consequence of all those “Bliar” badges is that no non-awkward-squad Labour MP is going to have the slightest interest in what a STWC lobbyist has to say. But it does have the effect of cheapening discourse on Iraq within civil society – in our media, in our pubs and coffee shops, and in the streets and houses of Britain. The intellectual and moral bankruptcy reaches its absolute nadir with that section of the anti-war movement which romanticises and eulogises the various armed militias that have come to be dubbed “the Iraqi resistance.”

The warning signs started before the war even ended. A week or two after the tanks began rolling across the Iraqi frontier, I was at a meeting of my local branch of the STWC. The chair was from one of the various Judean Peoples Front-esque hard-left factions that, as with most branches of the STWC, did most of its actual administration. He posed the question, “Who do we actually want to win this thing?” My own view was that, although I felt that the war was a spectacularly bad idea, and had been justified on the basis of phoney WMD evidence, now that the war had begun, the least worst outcome was for it all to end as quickly and with as small a body count as possible, and this was most likely to come about through a swift victory by the US and Britain. The chair, though, had other views. In his opinion, the best outcome would be if the US/UK forces received “a bloody nose.”, thus preventing future military adventures. What was left unsaid, apart from the deeply uncomfortable thought of being asked to hope for the mass slaughter of large numbers of one’s own countrymen, was that any such situation would almost certainly involve massive civilian casualties among the Iraqi population, as two armies fought each other to a bloody pulp in their towns and countryside.

It was around this time that the placards on the anti-war demos not only proclaimed “Stop the War” and “Not in My Name”, but were joined by Socialist Worker placards bearing the words “Victory to the Resistance.” Was this the Stop the War Coalition, or the Lose the War Coalition? By now, the moderates who had flocked to the STWC banner in huge numbers in the previous months were deserting them just as quickly. Registering alarm at a reckless military adventure being conducted on shaky justifications was one thing. Being asked to be a cheerleader for Saddam’s fedayeen was another entirely.

Increasingly, there was also little point in protesting. The US tanks were nearly at Baghdad, and it was clear that the war would soon be over. I stopped attending the anti-war marches and meetings, and discreetly began to avoid returning the voicemail messages of STWC organisers.

Just as a segment of the anti-war movement started cheering for Saddam’s thugs in the Republican Guard and fedayeen to win the war, so too have elements begun to openly praise the actions of the Iraqi resistance as they wreak havoc across Iraq. It is these elements that represent the anti-war voice at its most intellectually dishonest and morally hypocritical.

Among the British anti-war figures who have written about the Iraqi resistance are Tariq Ali, the vice-president of the Stop the War Coalition, and the Guardian journalist Seamus Milne. Both these writers have depicted the guerrillas in over-flattering terms that are easily refuted by readily available information. In particular, they both wildly exaggerate the popularity of the resistance.

In Tariq Ali’s view, ‘The immediate tasks that face an anti-imperialist movement are support for Iraqi resistance to the Anglo-American occupation.’ [1] Ali has strongly implied elsewhere that he refers to violent, armed resistance rather than non-violent forms of protest.

Sooner or later, all foreign troops will have to leave Iraq. If they do not do so voluntarily, they will be driven out. Their continuing presence is a spur to violence. When Iraq’s people regain control of their own destiny they will decide the internal structures and the external policies of their country. One can hope that this will combine democracy and social justice, a formula that has set Latin America alight but is greatly resented by the Empire. Meanwhile, Iraqis have one thing of which they can be proud and of which British and US citizens should be envious: an opposition. [2]

Ali is echoed by Seamus Milne,

The anti-occupation guerrillas are routinely damned as terrorists, Ba’athist remnants, Islamist fanatics or mindless insurgents without a political programme. In a recantation of his support for the war this week, the liberal writer Michael Ignatieff called them "hateful". But it has become ever clearer that they are in fact a classic resistance movement with widespread support waging an increasingly successful guerrilla war against the occupying armies. Their tactics are overwhelmingly in line with those of resistance campaigns throughout modern history, targeting both the occupiers themselves and the local police and military working for them. [3] [emphasis added]

Are they, as Milne claims, ‘a classic resistance movement with widespread support’? The question isn’t difficult to answer, because since the invasion an increasing number of opinion polls have been held inside Iraq to find out what the Iraqi people actually think, rather than what people several thousand miles away say they think. These polls depict a relationship between the Iraqi people and the resistance fighters that is completely contradictory to the image portrayed by Milne and Ali.

In February 2004 Oxford Research International completed a national survey of Iraq on behalf of the BBC, to determine Iraqi attitudes to the invasion and occupation. Upon being asked if the US-led invasion of Iraq was right or wrong, 48.2% of Iraqis responded that the war was either “somewhat right” or “absolutely right”, while 39.1% said it was either “absolutely wrong” or “somewhat wrong.” [4] Admittedly this is a drop in support from a poll the previous September, in which 62% of Iraqis had said that the war had been worth it to get rid of Saddam. [5] Even so, more Iraqis still regarded the invasion as right than did not. As somebody who opposed the war, this makes me feel just as uncomfortable as those who supported it must feel when reading the Butler Report.

As for whether they supported the current presence of the coalition in Iraq, 39.5% said that they either “strongly” or “somewhat” supported it and 40.9% strongly or somewhat opposed it. The rest regarded it as “difficult to say.” A more-or-less evens split over whether or not to support or oppose the coalition. Opinion was very divided over when the coalition should leave, though only 15.1% said they should leave now. The largest segment among those polled (35.8%) said that they should remain until an Iraqi government is in place.

Iraqis may have been strongly divided about the coalition and how long it should stay, but on the subject of whether the coalition should be attacked, there was a clear majority. 78% of Iraqis viewed attacks on coalition forces as unacceptable. Yet only three months earlier, Tariq Ali had claimed that, ‘without the tacit support of the population, a sustained resistance is virtually impossible.’ [6]

Overwhelming though Iraqi public opposition may have been to attacks on coalition forces, attacks targeting US or British soldiers were the kind that had the least degree of public opposition. Even fewer regarded attacks on the CPA as acceptable, and fewer still supported attacks on Iraqis who worked for the CPA. Most unpopular of all were attacks on the New Iraqi Police. A near-unanimous 96.6% of Iraqis regarded attacks on Iraqi Police as unacceptable. This incredible level of support for the IP is echoed by Salam Pax, the Iraqi web diarist who became world famous as the “Baghdad Blogger” before and after the Iraq War.

Iraqi Police kick major ass. Much respect. Wherever you go now and open up that subject you will see a lot of sympathy with those brave men and women and a total incomprehension to what this so called resistance is doing. They are killing Iraqis now. They say Jihad against the Infidel Occupier and they go kill those Iraqi police men…It is not the Infidel the attackers are killing but Iraqis and this just might be good because the general sentiment now is “what the fuck do the Jihadis think they are doing?” [7]

Seamus Milne seems to view the terrible death toll of Iraqi Police officers as part of a ‘classic resistance movement’, to be hailed as the ‘real war of liberation’, yet he is espousing a view held by only 1.5% of Iraqis. Unforgivable. Moreover, Milne actually seems to be reading Iraqi opinion polls, as is evident from this passage by Milne.

The popularity of the mainstream resistance can be gauged by recent polling on the Shia rebel leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who was said to have minimal support before his Mahdi army took up arms in April and now has the backing of 67% of Iraqis. [8]

Milne doesn’t cite which opinion poll he’s referring to, but he either hasn’t read this one or has disregarded it, despite the widespread publicity it was given as part of BBC news coverage of the 1 st anniversary of the war. As a professional journalist who writes about Iraq, it seems almost inconceivable that he could have missed it.

Fast forward to June 2004, and Oxford Research International repeated the poll. In the intervening period, Iraq had seen bloody battles erupt around Fallujah, an uprising by the forces of Muqtada al-Sadr, and appalling photos of abused Iraqi prisoners broadcast around the world. How had Iraqi public opinion been changed by these events?

Unsurprisingly, the poll showed a drop in support for the coalition. Only 40.8% of Iraqis now viewed the original invasion as somewhat or absolutely right, while 59.2% viewed it as somewhat or absolutely wrong. Equally unsurprisingly, more Iraqis now regarded attacks on coalition forces as acceptable, up from 17.3% in February to 32.8% in June. A large increase, but even so, despite a year of occupation, despite US troops turning Fallujah into a charnel house with a horrifying mix of incompetence and brutality, despite al-Sadr’s uprising and despite Lynndie England’s holiday photos, less than a third of Iraqis were willing to regard attacks on the coalition as acceptable. Meanwhile, their support for the Iraqi Police had actually increased slightly, with 96.9% opposed to any attacks on the IP. [9] The popular uprising just ain’t popular.

It’s hard not to get a sense of a certain schadenfreude pervading much of the anti-war movement. A sort of gleeful joy at every disaster in Iraq, despite the fact that the greatest victims in all this are the Iraqi people, whom the protestors are supposed to be marching out of compassion for. A rare example of this unspoken schadenfreude made explicit is given by the Evening Standard columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

A dogged campaigner against the blighted war in Iraq, I am now wrestling with the demons of callous triumphalism. The anti-war protestors have been proved horribly right. The allies who marched with the US into this ugly adventure should feel mortified. It is a fearful and turbulent country the new Western Imperialists hand over to the Iraqis. The past months have been challenging for us in the anti-war camp. I am ashamed to admit that there have been times when I wanted more chaos, more shocks, more disorder to teach our side a lesson. On Monday I found myself again hoping that this handover proves a failure because it has been orchestrated by the Americans. The decent people of Iraq need optimism now, not my distasteful ill-wishes for the only hope they have for a future. [10] [emphasis added]

One might want to chide Ms. Alibhai-Brown for her impulses, but at least she’s being honest with herself, and at least she’s trying to fight the urges to dance in glee as Bush and Blair’s plans unravel into chaos and tragedy. As a former protestor myself, I have to concede that I’ve felt these urges too. Milne and Ali, on the other hand, give the impression of being happy to cheer on the ongoing slaughter that is creating huge waves of misery in Iraq. These are hardly peripheral figures either. Milne, a journalist for a national broadsheet. Ali, vice-president of Britain’s largest anti-war organisation. If the Iraqi people succeed in building for themselves a peaceful, sovereign and democratic Iraq, it’s hard not to feel that it won’t be because of the anti-war movement, but despite it.

Phil Doré can be contacted at: philipdore@hotmail.com.

Notes

1. Ali T. (May-June 2003) Re-Colonizing Iraq. New Left Review 21 <http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR25501.shtml>

2. Ali T. (November 3 rd 2003) Resistance is the first step to Iraqi independence. The Guardian. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1076480,00.html>

3. Milne M (July 1 st 2004) The resistance campaign is Iraq’s real war of liberation. The Guardian. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4960724-103550,00.html>

4. Oxford Research International (February 2004) National Survey of Iraq. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/15_03_04_iraqsurvey.pdf>

5. The Gallup Organisation. (24 th September 2003) Ousting Saddam Hussein “Worth Hardships Endured Since Invasion”, Say Citizens of Baghdad.

6. Ali T. (November 3 rd 2003) op. cit

7. Pax S. (October 18 th 2003) Where is Raed? <http://dearraed.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_dear_raed_archive.html>

8. Milne (July 1 st 2004) op. cit.

9. Oxford Research International (June 2004) National Survey of Iraq <http://www.oxfordresearch.com/Iraq%20June%202004%20Frequency%20Tables.PDF>

10. Alibhai-Brown Y. (June 29 th 2004) My shame at savouring American failure in Iraq. Evening Standard.

International TV Interview with Fariborz Pooya and Bahram Soroush

Maryam Namazie: We received an email from an irate ‘concerned happy Muslim Iranian’ critical of your [Bahram Soroush] statements on the incompatibility of Islam and human rights. He said, ‘it is obvious that you hate your own culture and religion and have a vendetta against anything Iranian and anything Islamic’. He made a suggestion: ‘if you hate our culture and our religion, then I suggest that you go and change your faith and tell people that you have no country and leave us alone’! Now this is something you hear a lot from cultural relativists; that it’s ‘our culture’ and ‘our religion’. Can you expand on that?

Bahram Soroush: They are trying to say that there is one culture and one religion and they put everyone together. They say the whole country and the whole population is religious, it’s Islamic, and that they have one culture. The reason they do that, I think, is because they want to justify certain things, since it’s very straightforward to understand what we are talking about. We are talking about fundamental values, which transcend anything religious or cultural. They are universal values. For example, human rights. Those rights are not something that can be conditioned by cultural considerations. Or the rights of children, which override everything else – political, cultural or religious. It is the same with political freedoms.

Such characterisations and generalisations don’t tell you much. They are unscientific and don’t tally with the facts. In any society, you have people who think differently, who have different political and ideological attachments. Secondly, I think, it serves a certain political purpose. Many of those who are fond of such characterisations, at the same time want to give concessions to certain religions or cultures.

In response to the person who has written that e-mail, I would say that I don’t have the particular culture or religion that he is attributing to me. We have criticised the Islamic regime in Iran, why does he feel hurt?! …

Maryam Namazie: He’s taking it personally!

Bahram Soroush: Exactly! 90% of the Iranian people are against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Are they ‘self-hating Iranians’ too? I think it is a question of differentiating between religious systems and organisations, on the one hand, and the people. That fact is that in Iran you have a religious sect that has come to power. They do not represent the people. I understand that there are people who have religious beliefs too, but that is different from what is being targeted.

Maryam Namazie: This is something that comes up a lot when you criticise a cultural practice or norm or religion. You hear people say that it is offensive to do so and that you need to respect cultures and opinions. That is something that you often hear about from the perspective of cultural relativism. What is your analysis on that?

Fariborz Pooya: Cultures and religions are not harmless concepts. They are institutions; a part of the organisation of society. Usually, people who advocate those views, reduce it to an individual level and individual choice. But in reality, culture is part of the institution of the ruling class. Religion is an establishment that practises and advocates a certain way of life. As part of society’s organisation and institution, it forms and regulates the way society functions. And various political movements and social movements intervene all the time and criticise it constantly. They try to improve or change the shape of the society that exists.

So to argue that we need to respect those institutions, effectively you are saying, keep the status quo; you don’t have the right to criticise it. However, society does that all the time. I don’t think the problem is limited to individual choice. After the 1970s and with the advent of the ‘New World Order’ in later years, fundamental rights, universal rights, have been chipped away. You have the movement to undermine those concepts. You have the movement, organised by the states and by the ruling class, to remove the basic standards in society. And as part of that, suddenly they have found ready-made friends in cultural groups and religious groups. In Iran, there is an Islamic government that has taken power and has been challenging those universal norms. In the West, you can see how those rights are being eroded. This is a strong political movement… I don’t think there’s anything sacred…

Maryam Namazie: Except for the human being.

Fariborz Pooya: Absolutely, the only thing sacred is humanity. But everything else is subject to criticism and that is a very healthy thing for society. Apart from the individual level, there is a political movement that is constantly hammering and battering established standards that humanity has fought for over many decades and which is largely the result of the socialist movement and the progressive and workers’ movements. You need to criticise and stand up against the reactionary movement that is trying to eliminate these fundamental rights. So it’s not a question of respecting this movement, but about our strategy to give it a bloody nose.

Maryam Namazie: You mentioned earlier that there is a political reason behind the depiction of Iran or other ‘third world’ countries as having one homogeneous culture. That it is ‘our culture’ and ‘our religion’. It’s interesting that when you look at the West, for example, you don’t see one homogeneous West, you see different opinions, different movements, different classes, religions, atheism, socialism, etc. But when it comes to countries like Iran or Afghanistan, it just seems that everybody is very much the same as the ruling classes there. Why is that the impression that is always given?

Bahram Soroush: You are absolutely right. When you talk about the West, it is accepted that there are political differentiations, that people have different value systems, that there are political parties. You don’t talk about one uniform, homogeneous culture. But why is it that when it comes to the rest of the world, suddenly the standards change? The way you look at society changes. It doesn’t make sense. But it makes political sense. We are living in the real world; there are political affiliations; there are economic ties; there are very powerful interests which require justifications. For example, how can you roll out the red carpet for the Islamic executioners from Iran, treat them as ‘respectable diplomats’ and at the same time dodge the issue that this government executes people, stones people to death, carries out public hangings, and that this is happening in the 21st century. It’s a question of how to justify that. So, if you say that cultures are relative; if you say that in Iran they stone people to death and they veil women because it is their culture, your conscience then is clean. This is the reason that we are seeing that something that doesn’t really make sense to anyone, and which they would not use to characterise anyone else in the Western world, they use it to characterise people from the third world. In fact it is very patronising, eurocentric and even racist to try to divide people in this way; to say, it’s OK for you. For example, to say to the Iranian woman that you should accept your fate because that’s your culture. This is part of the larger discussion of what lies behind this sort of thinking, but the motive is very political.

Maryam Namazie: You hear this also from the progressive angle as well. People who like what we say – for example, that we are standing up against political Islam – immediately assume that we are ‘moderate Muslims’. In the interview that you Bahram Soroush gave on the incompatibility of Islam and human rights for example, you clearly said that you were an atheist. But it just doesn’t seem to register, even among progressives. Why is that? I understand the political interests of Western governments, but why do even progressives have that opinion of us?

Fariborz Pooya: Part of it is ignorance. Purely ignorance. And it’s our duty to show the facts of the society in Iran and in the Middle East. To show that, for example, Iranian society is not Islamic at all. It’s deeply secular. It’s anti-religious. If you remove the dictatorship of the Islamic government from Iran, within a week or two, you will see the depth of secularism and the depth of the anti-Islamic movement. You will see the backlash that will have a major impact in the Middle East and the world, and not just within Iran. There is a strong socialist and workers’ movement in Iran. There is a history and tradition of the socialist movement. There are fights for workers’ interests; there are fights for improvements of living conditions.

So part of it is ignorance, and it is our duty to speak to our friends who are misinformed and to show them the realities of life in Iran. That’s part of our responsibility. I don’t think we have done enough work on that. We need to do more, and this sort of TV programme and our publications and activities are partly geared towards clarifying this and showing the reality of Iran and the Middle East. The other side of it, as Bahram clearly said, is political interest. To divide people based on religion, based on nationality, serves certain political interests. Because then it’s easier. You have similar movements in Western societies as well; ghettoising people and dividing people based on ethnicity, which is part of controlling society as well.

The above is a TV International English interview dated July 26, 2004.

Maryam Namazie hosts International TV English. TV International/English is a weekly hour-long news analysis and commentary programme that focuses on the Middle East and rights and freedoms from a progressive and Left standpoint. The programme also plays music selected by Mona Razani, the programme’s VJ. Prior to the English programme, Maryam Namazie also hosts a half-an hour long Farsi programme. Fariborz Pooya is the co-editor of WPI Briefing and Bahram Soroush is a civil rights activist.

Is psychoanalysis a science? The Spring/Summer 2005 issue of The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine (vol. 9, no. 1) will contain a debate on the scientific merits of psychoanalysis. The exchange will include a 2000-word summary by the literary critic Norman N. Holland of his essay “Psychoanalysis as Science”; a 1000-word critique by Frederick Crews; a reply from Holland to that critique; and a commentary on both submissions by the psychiatrist Peter Barglow. Holland’s full essay can already be found on the Web here. In anticipation of the SRAM publication, concerned readers may be interested in an early view both of Holland’s summary version and of Crews’s response to the longer piece. The editor of SRAM has granted permission for these postings.

Although Norman Holland’s synopsis conveys the gist of “Psychoanalysis as Science,” the devil is in the details. Necessarily, I will be referring here to the paper itself, which displays shortcomings of coverage and logic that are less discernible in the synopsis.

Holland maintains that important parts of psychoanalytic theory have been experimentally confirmed and that analysts in their daily practice employ a methodologically sound means of gathering knowledge. As he recognizes, this judgment stands at odds with the tacit, all but unanimous verdict of North American psychology faculties. Where psychoanalysis appears at all in the catalogs of well-regarded university departments of psychology, it usually figures as a prescientific historical curiosity, not as a viable body of theory. And a study of citations in the flagship psychology journals concludes that “psychoanalytic research has been virtually ignored by mainstream scientific psychology over the past several decades.” [1, p. 117]

Holland asserts that this snub bespeaks not a considered scientific assessment but rather “a deep-seated prejudice against psychoanalysis” on the part of psychology professors and textbook authors. The academic establishment, he holds, has turned its back on a mountain of studies validating key portions of psychoanalytic doctrine while disallowing some others. Indeed, according to Holland even the most adamant critics of psychoanalysis are unaware of that literature. The main task that he sets for himself in “Psychoanalysis as Science” is therefore an easy one: he will correct an unfair negative impression by calling attention to the somewhat positive results of hitherto overlooked experimental trials.

But how can Holland be sure that those results have been overlooked? One could not tell from his paper that he has read a single page of the revisionist scholarship and reasoning that have revolutionized our perception of the psychoanalytic movement and its claims of scientific validation. His 64 references include no dissenters’ texts; and only one dissenter’s name, my own, is briefly mentioned. Moreover, Holland’s characterization of my position, that I find all of psychoanalytic theory untestable and therefore merely “literary” in nature, is off the mark. I regard psychoanalytic doctrine not as literature but as partly unfalsifiable, partly falsified pseudoscience which, when it was widely believed, caused harm to people whom it demeaned, stigmatized, and misdiagnosed. [2, 3, 4; see also 5]

Unfortunately, the facts and arguments that Holland ignores bear crucially on the question he proposes to answer: whether psychoanalysis deserves to be called a science. He could have learned much, for example, from the work of two major Freud scholars, Frank Cioffi [6] and Malcolm Macmillan [7], who have extensively traced Freud’s initial confusions and misrepresentations, the many unclarities and cross-purposes that have continued to plague psychoanalytic doctrine, and the chronic flight from exposure to potential disconfirmation that has typified the entire record from Freud’s day through our own. Science is as science does. If neither Freud nor his successors have shown a due regard for objections to their pet ideas, psychoanalysis is ipso facto not a science.

Condensing the findings of Cioffi, Macmillan, and other knowledgeable philosophers of science and historians such as Adolf Grünbaum [8], Edward Erwin [9], and Allen Esterson [10], I have elsewhere put into one long sentence the anti-empirical features of the psychoanalytic movement [3, pp. 61n-62n]:

They include its cult of the founder’s personality; its casually anecdotal approach to corroboration; its cavalier dismissal of its most besetting epistemic problem, that of suggestion; its habitual confusion of speculation with fact; its penchant for generalizing from a small number of imperfectly examined instances; its proliferation of theoretical entities bearing no testable referents; its lack of vigilance against self-contradiction; its selective reporting of raw data to fit the latest theoretical enthusiasm; its ambiguities and exit clauses, allowing negative results to be counted as positive ones; its indifference to rival explanations and to mainstream science; its absence of any specified means for preferring one interpretation to another; its insistence that only the initiated are entitled to criticize; its stigmatizing of disagreement as “resistance,” along with the corollary that, as Freud put it, all such resistance constitutes “actual evidence in favour of the correctness” of the theory (SE, 13:180); and its narcissistic faith that, again in Freud’s words, “applications of analysis are always confirmations of it as well” (SE, 22:146).

This indictment is sometimes dismissed by Freudians as the raving of an unhinged mind. The justice of every item, however, has been conceded piecemeal by a number of psychoanalysts who are still unready to take in the total picture. And other previously sanguine pro-psychoanalytic commentators now grant that the Freudian community has shown none of the traits we associate with serious investigators.

Robert F. Bornstein, for example, whom Holland repeatedly cites as a compiler of positive experimental evidence, recently published an article, significantly entitled “The Impending Death of Psychoanalysis,” in which he charged analysts with “the seven deadly sins” of “insularity, inaccuracy, indifference, irrelevance, inefficiency, indeterminacy [that is, conceptual vagueness], and insolence.” [11] Bornstein portrays a self-isolated sect that is not just out of step with the march of knowledge but incapable of understanding where it went wrong. In order for Bornstein to bring his revised view into full alignment with that of the revisionist critics (whom Holland is pleased to malign en masse as “the bashers”), he need only grasp that the dysfunctional attitudes he has listed are traceable to Freud’s own arbitrary system building, to his dismissal of the need to reconcile psychoanalytic theory with mainstream science, to his heaping of scorn on all who questioned his authority, and to his declarations that backsliders from his movement had fallen into psychosis.

In the estimation of Bornstein and some other would-be reformers, psychoanalysis must now rapidly embrace commonly held scientific standards or vanish altogether from the scene. But what would become of the remaining shards of Freudian theory if their proponents took Bornstein’s ultimatum to heart? More than a century has passed since analysts, on no examinable grounds, began launching fanciful propositions about the deep structure of the mind, the stages of psychosexual development, and the unconscious symbolic thought processes in early childhood that supposedly issue in adult mental illness. Medical science has moved decisively away from that approach to explanation, which, as Freud privately observed in acknowledgment of kindred thinkers, harkened back to the “spirit possession” lore drawn upon by the judges in witchcraft trials. [12]

It would be surprising if such an undisciplined and retrograde movement had received support from well-designed experiments, and it would be no less surprising if the critics of psychoanalysis had failed to address the experimental literature. In fact, Holland’s claims on both counts are false. An extensive body of penetrating and disillusioning commentary about pro-Freudian experimentation can be found, beginning with Eysenck and Wilson’s small masterpiece of 1973 [13] and running through Edward Erwin’s meticulous study of 1996. [9] It is apparent that Holland, who innocently equates the terms “experimental” and “empirical,” hasn’t pondered these widely discussed and important works. Yet if he had attended to no other writings than my own, he would have found me engaged in pertinent debate with several of the psychodynamically committed experimental authorities on whom he relies: Seymour Fisher, Roger P. Greenberg, Lester Luborsky, and Matthew H. Erdelyi. [2, 3, 4]

As its scientific critics have shown, most of the research admired by Holland suffers from grave and obvious flaws. These studies, having been conducted by people holding a prior affinity for psychoanalysis, are riddled with confirmation bias and demand characteristics:

• Instead of testing psychoanalytic hypotheses against rival ones that might have fared better under Ockham’s razor, the experimenters have used Freudian theory as their starting point and have looked for confirming instances, which have been located with the same facility with which Holland once found oral and anal images suffusing the world’s literature.
• Terms have been construed with suspect broadness; strong causal claims have been reinterpreted as weak descriptive ones; and generous psychoanalytic rules of interpretation have helped to shape positive results.
• Freudian propositions have been assessed through the application of such questionable instruments as the psychoanalytically tendentious Blacky pictures and the Rorschach test, which already lacked validity before believers in Freudian projection twisted it to their own purposes. [14] (Holland himself twice appeals to psychoanalytic Rorschach findings as sound evidence.)
• Signs of unconscious cognitive operations have been misidentified as evidence of the very different Freudian unconscious at work. [15] (Holland’s paper indulges in the same confusion.)
• Replication of tentative outcomes by independent investigators-an essential requirement of experimentation in any field-has not been achieved or even sought.

It is Holland’s countenancing of these lax and biased practices that allows him to proclaim that research “supports an oedipal stage,” that “the penis=baby equation” has been vindicated, that “links between depression and oral fixation” have been found, and that “Freud’s account of paranoia gets confirmation.” Such “confirmation” is a strictly parochial affair, and that is why it has been left out of account by scientifically responsible textbook authors.

Critics of psychoanalysis hold that no distinctively psychoanalytic hypotheses, such as those just mentioned, have earned significant evidential backing. Freudians, however, typically credit psychoanalysis with having introduced broader notions that were, in fact, already commonplace in the middle of the nineteenth century. As the great historian of psychiatry Henri F. Ellenberger observed in 1970, “The current legend attributes to Freud much of what belongs, notably, to Herbart, Fechner, Nietzsche, Meynert, Benedikt, and Janet, and overlooks the work of previous explorers of the unconscious, dreams, and sexual pathology. Much of what is credited to Freud was diffuse current lore, and his role was to crystallize these ideas and give them an original shape.” [16, p. 548]

It is only Freud’s novelties and unique adaptations, along with those of his most emulated revisers, that ought to concern us here. Self-evidently, support for ideas that originated elsewhere, much less those that express the traditional wisdom of the ages, cannot be counted as favoring psychoanalysis. Apparently, however, Holland does not consider himself bound by this axiom.

Holland reports, for example, that research has validated such assertedly psychoanalytic propositions as that “much mental life . . . is unconscious,” that “stable personality patterns form in childhood and shape later relationships,” that “mental representations of the self, others, and relationships guide interactions with others . . . ,” and that “personality development is . . . moving from immature dependency to mature interdependency.” Insofar as these vapid truisms constitute the ground to which psychoanalysis has now fled in its retreat from Freud’s heedless guesswork, they illustrate the bankruptcy, not the scientific vindication, of his movement.

In the second half of his argument, Holland seeks to confer respectability on psychoanalysis by assimilating it to sciences that enjoy unchallenged recognition as such. His reasoning here is notably fallacious. By progressing from single inductions to themes and patterns that are then checked for adequacy, he writes, psychoanalysts employ the same “holistic” method as social scientists and some physical scientists as well; and since neither psychoanalysis nor geology nor astronomy attempts to predict the future, “psychoanalysis is not that far removed from geology or astronomy.” (Nor, in that one respect, is phrenology or the channeling of ancestors.) Needless to say, a perceived or imagined resemblance between the data gathering in one field and that in another tells us nothing about whether their eventual hypotheses are comparably parsimonious and well supported.

Holland labors to portray the psychoanalytic clinician as a scientist in his own right who cautiously moves from a theory-free study of word associations to hypotheses that make full sense of the resultant inferences. Yet he approvingly quotes a pair of experts who point out that the analyst “listens for noises that signify in psychoanalytic terms” (emphasis added); he further admits that “Freudians will see Freudian patterns” everywhere; and he adds that “Freudian patients have Freudian dreams and make Freudian statements and focus on Freudian issues”-thus providing the analyst, we may be sure, with more Freudian evidence for the confirmation of his Freudian hunches. Perversely, however, Holland still clings to his ideal vision of the tabula rasa clinician-scientist.

Freud, Holland maintains, arrived at his theory in just this inductive manner, building hypotheses from sheer attentive listening in the consulting room. We now know, however, that this hoary legend, propagated by Freud himself and his inner circle, is utterly untrue. Far from suspending judgment as a clinician, Freud typically demanded that his patients agree with his theory-driven accusations of incestuous desires, homosexual leanings, and early masturbation.

As a theorist Freud was a rashly deductive bioenergetic speculator who routinely invented “clinical evidence” to fit his predetermined ideas and who altered the facts again when a new speculation required adornment. Contemporaries accused him with good reason of having plagiarized some of his most basic notions, including repression, infantile sexuality, and “universal bisexuality.” When it proved impossible for him to deny such unacknowledged borrowings, he brazenly ascribed them to psychodynamically induced “amnesia.” [16, 17, 18]

Holland’s illustrations of Freud’s supposed method show that he has not fathomed the cardinal difference between the first psychoanalyst’s actual means of reaching conclusions and his seductive rhetorical reconstructions, which offered the trusting reader sequences of ingeniously solved little puzzles that may or may not have preceded his theorizing. Freud’s subtle diagnostic skill as manifested in the Wolf Man case history, for example, earns Holland’s praise; no one has told him about the cunning fibs in that story that were uncovered by the psychoanalyst Patrick Mahony 20 years ago. [19] And in reading Freud’s famous “aliquis slip” narrative in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Holland takes at face value a (probably fictitious) young man’s narrated “associations” of liquefied blood and calendar saints. Alas, it has been ascertained that Freud lifted those and other references from a current newspaper article and worked them into a self-flattering and mendacious yarn about Sherlock Holmes-like psychic detection on his part. [20]

Of course, the fact that Freud himself didn’t faithfully employ “the psychoanalytic method” doesn’t impugn that method in other hands. Yet it is impugned, as Adolf Grünbaum in particular has shown, by the circular procedures that Holland now dimly perceives to be a problem. Whereas Holland would like to believe that a clinician need only exercise “integrity” to avoid imposing his presuppositions on the patient, Grünbaum makes it clear that question begging in the therapeutic interchange is structurally unavoidable. [8, 21]

Grünbaum’s demonstration is devastating to the claim, still advanced by Holland, that modern psychoanalysis rests on a secure knowledge base. “Psychoanalytic method”-the analysis of (allegedly) free associations, of dreams and slips, and of the “transference”-is much the same as it was a hundred years ago, and it is helpless against the contaminating effect of suggestion. That is why we see so many warring psychoanalytic schools, each boasting “clinical validation” of its tenets.

Holland’s final misstep is to bracket psychoanalysis with plate tectonics and natural selection, which met with resistance until they were eventually vindicated by consilient findings. The fate of psychoanalysis has been exactly the reverse; it quickly won popular acclaim through its emphasis on taboo breaking but then gradually lost favor as its overweening claims met with no scientific consilience at all. It is that absence of corroboration, not “deep-seated prejudice” or the efforts of debunkers such as myself, that chiefly accounts for the moribund state of psychoanalysis today.

References

1. Robins RW and others. ‘An empirical analysis of trends in psychology’. American Psychologist 54:117-128, 1999.

2. Crews F. Skeptical Engagements. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986.

3. Crews F and others. The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute. New York, NY: New York Review Books, 1995.

4. Crews F, editor. Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend. New York, NY: Viking, 1998.

5. Dolnick E. Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

6. Cioffi F. Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1998.

7. Macmillan M. Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.

8. Grünbaum A. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984.

9. Erwin E. A Final Accounting: Philosophical and Empirical Issues in Freudian Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.

10. Esterson A. Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1993.

11. Bornstein RF. ‘The impending death of psychoanalysis.’ Psychoanalytic Psychology 18:3-20, 2001.

12. Crews F. ‘The legacy of Salem: Demonology for an age of science.’ Skeptic 5:36-44, 1997.

13. Eysenck HJ, Wilson GD. The Experimental Study of Freudian Theories. London: Methuen, 1973.

14. Wood JM and others. What’s Wrong with the Rorschach: Science Confronts the Controversial Inkblot Test. San Francisco CA: Jossey-Bass, 2003.

15. Kihlstrom JF. ‘The cognitive unconscious.’ Science 237:1445-1452, 1987.

16. Ellenberger HF. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1970.

17. Sulloway FJ. Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. Cambridge, MA, 1992.

18. Borch-Jacobsen M. Remembering Anna O.: A Century of Mystification. New York, NY: Routledge, 1996.

19. Mahony P. Cries of the Wolf Man. New York, NY: International Universities Press, 1984.

20. Skues R. ‘On the dating of Freud’s aliquis slip’. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 82:1185-1204, 2001.

21. Grünbaum A. Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1993.

Abstract

Current objections to psychoanalysis as untestable and unscientific ignore two facts. First, a large body of experimental evidence has tested psychoanlaytic ideas, confirming some and not others. Second, psychoanalysis itself, while it does not usually use experimentation, does use holistic method. This is a procedure in wide use in the social sciences and even in the “hard” sciences.

Psychoanalysis as Science

My essay, “Psychoanalysis as Science” [1] makes two points. One, although ignored in the “Freud wars,” experimenters have in fact generated much empirical evidence for the validity of at least some of psychoanalysis’ theory of mind. The oft-repeated mantra, “There is not a shred of scientific evidence for psychoanalysis,” is simply false. Two, part of the devaluing of psychoanalysis derives from a failure to understand that it rests on a non-experimental method, widely used in the social and “hard” sciences.

As for experimental evidence, two impressive books by Seymour Fisher and Roger Greenberg [2,3], summarize some 2500 empirical tests of Freud’s claims. They speak of “the incredible amount of effort that has been invested in testing Freud’s ideas fairly” [3, p. 285].

Freud’s general idea that the dream has adaptive functions survives. Experimenters confirm the clusters of traits associated with orality and anality. The literature supports an oedipal stage, but finds that a good superego is likely to come from a loving rather than a fearful relationship with a father. There is no support for any of Freud’s ideas on female development. Homosexuals of both sexes tended to have negative father images. The literature confirms Freud’s link of depression to parents who were disapproving and unnurturing, but not to early experiences of loss, although early loss gives recent losses more effect. There was strong confirmation of links between depression and oral fixation and between depression and tendencies to be self-critical and self-attacking. Freud’s account of paranoia gets confirmation. And so on.

Experimental psychologist Joseph Masling directed the book series, Empirical Studies of Psychoanalytic Theory [4-13]. In these ten volumes, distinguished psychologists and psychiatrists experimentally test and modify both Freud’s and later psychoanalytic theory . There are subliminal studies; analyses of transcripts of psychoanalytic sessions; explorations of the psychodynamics of gender and gender role; studies of unconscious feelings and motives and thought processes; longitudinal studies of development in infancy and across the lifespan; analyses of psychopathology (bulimia, depression, schizophrenia, etc.); studies of dreaming; studies of wishes; of the therapeutic alliance, and on and on. These volumes offer a wealth of empirical support and modification for a wide range of particular psychoanalytic hypotheses. Masling’s first eight volumes contain 327 pages of references with an estimated 6300 citations, most of which deal with experimental testing of psychoanalytic ideas [14].

Drew Westen sets out five general propositions that establish modern (as opposed to early, purely “Freudian”) psychoanalysis [15]. He adduces some 350 references that support this metapsychology. 1) there are unconscious motivations and defenses. 2) mental processes are in parallel or function multiply, leading to conflict and compromise. 3) personality patterns form in childhood and continue through life. 4) early patterns of attachment guide later relationships and symptoms. 5) personality development involves changing dependency but also pre-oedipal stages (oral, anal, etc.)

(Fisher and Greenberg also confirm oral and anal stages. And they are what convinced me, a literary critic, of psychoanalysis’ validity. Modern writers are often deliberately “Freudian,” but I found “oral,” “anal,” “phallic,” and oedipal clusters of images and ideas in the personal styles of pre-Freudian writers like Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Keats, Dickens, or Twain.)

As the squibs and squillets fly in the Freud wars, neither psychoanalysis’ detractors nor its supporters mention these many experiments. Psychoanalysts do not find experiments relevant to their practice. Non-analytic psychologists share a deep-seated prejudice against psychoanalysis embedded in psychology textbooks and indoctrinated in beginning psychology courses.

When psychoanalysts do point to evidence, they point to clinical evidence. Psychologists, however, rightly point out that clinical evidence is unreliable and demand experiment [16]. One needs to qualify that objection, however, by recognizing that other branches of social and “hard” sciences have somewhat the same problem. The larger theories of geology, astronomy, oceanology, meteorology, ecology, biology, and even physics do not lend themselves to repeatable experiments. But no one doubts that these sciences are sciences. In judging psychoanalysis as a science, then, one needs to consider the range of scientists’ methodologies, initially in the social sciences. One has to get over the idea that the only “science” is experimental. There is another method for dealing with non-repeatable, single instances like the psychoanalysts’ patients.

In thinking about psychoanlaysis and scientific method, I have found the ideas of Paul Diesing [17-20] the most helpful. Instead of starting wth an abstract definition of science, Diesing observed social scientists at work by reading papers and visiting laboratories. He singled out four methods in common use. Two pertain here.

One is, of course, experiment. A psychological experimenter seeks numerical correlations among independent, dependent, and controlled variables within a population of subjects. Although we generally regard experimentation as the most rigorous and “scientific” of social science methods, it has problems.

Most psychological experiments treat some stimulus as the independent variable and the response as the dependent variable. This model more or less locks the experimenter into a stimulus-response view of humans, dropping individuality out through statistical manipulations. We become blank slates on which the environment writes its influences. Thinkers like Chomsky and Pinker have raised serious doubts about this “Standard Social Science Model.”

In dismissing psychoanalysis, experimental psychologists sometimes declare they cannot confirm some large psychoanalytic concept like repression. What is striking, Matthew Erdelyi points out, is that they then dismiss the concept instead of holding their methods accountable for the failure [21, pp. 258-59].

Another problem arises because each experimenter defines variables and methods very precisely. Hence, psychological experimenters have difficulty in generalizing results beyond the particular experimental method used [17, p. 4]. In years of asking students and colleagues for a large generalization about human nature given us by experimental psychology, I have come up blank.

The other mode Diesing points to that pertains here is holistic method. it serves best to study unique systems that cannot readily be multiplied for experimental or survey manipulations: a community, a family, or a corporation, for example, or a single human being. Lots of social scientists use holistic method, and they consider it valid and scientific. I am thinking of anthropologists, archaeologistsl (notably in studying hominids and long-buried cultures), sociologists and psychologists studying special groups, some market researchers, some geographers, and most political scientists and historians [17, p. 137-8].

First, the researcher gathers data. These data consist of raw facts, as free as possible of confining hypotheses. Second, the researcher groups the data into themes, each theme representing a certain uniformity in the material, some clustering or repetition or contrast. One tests a theme by seeing whether further instances do appear. If only a few turn up, one stops paying attention to that theme. If more than one or two negative instances appear, one discards it. A theme, says Diesing, is like a pawn, easily gotten and easily discarded [17, p. 229]. Interestingly, Levine and Luborsky were able in experiments to achieve inter-judge reliability for such interpretations [22]. Similarly, Donald Spence achieved inter-judge agreement on a low-level interpretation of a dream [23].

Third, one proceeds to combine those themes into a pattern of repetitions and contrasts that applies to all one’s data. This is a “pattern explanation” of the dream, parapraxis, symptom, or even a whole culture or character as a coherent system. Fourth, one checks the explanation against new data, refining and correcting it [17].

Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, offers an elaborate discussion of various customs of the Bororo Indians, the layout of the village, dances, theories of the dead, myths, clothing, and so on. He then pulls them all together into “one regulation [that] takes precedence over all others” [24, p. 230].

Moreover, holistic method has proved useful in the hard sciences, for example in the geological theory of plate tectonics. It began with noting the matching shapes of the opposing Atlantic coasts; movements in geological time of the magnetic poles; the positions of earthquakes, ridges on the ocean floor, and volcanoes; the relative ages and positions of different mountain ranges; even the presence of marsupials in Australasia and their absence elsewhere. In short, the theory begins with a hodgepodge of data and ends by offering a narrative account of the movement of huge plates within the earth to explain a great variety of phenomena. This is, quite simply, holistic reasoning leading to a narrative explanation. It is as “scientific” as scientific gets. We teach it to our schoolchildren [25].

The major example of holistic reasoning and pattern explanation in the hard sciences is, of course, the theory of evolution. Again, Darwin began with a jumble of observations that he brought together into a single principle. Later experiments, as in plate tectonics, can confirm parts of the reasoning.

It seems to me (as to Diesing [18]) this holistic procedure is the rock-bottom core on which psychoanalysis builds. First, the researcher-analyst takes as data the patient’s free associations. Second, the analyst groups those details of speech into themes. Third, the analyst groups themes into an overall configuration or model or narrative, some systematic description of the case that will constitute an explanation of the themes and data arrived at so far. The tests at this third stage are: How many themes are included in the configuration and how many are left out? Then, how coherent or well-organized does the model make the themes [17, p. 230].

In Freud’s first published dream analysis, for example, he began by spelling out his associations (his data). In doing so, he indicated a variety of recurring themes. Finally, he concluded: “They could all be collected into a single group of ideas and labelled, as it were, concern about my own and other people’s health–professional conscientiousness’” [26, p. 320]. This is purely and simply holistic reasoning.

In this very brief summary, one-quarter the size of the original essay [1], my two points are simply 1) there is considerable evidence from experimental psychology that psychoanalytic theory is, in part, valid. 2) within psychoanalysis, the therapist uses an accepted scientific method appropriate to a human subject matter to arrive at generalizations. It seems to me psychoanalysis’ can therefore legitimately be called a “scientific” theory of mind.

References

1. Holland NN. ‘Psychoanalysis as Science’. PsyArt: A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts: article 050609, 31 May 2004.

2. Fisher S., Greenberg RP. The Scientific Credibility of Freud’s Theories and Therapy. New York: Basic Books, 1977.

3. Fisher S, Greenberg RP. Freud Scientifically Reappraised: Testing the Theories and Therapy. New York: John Wiley, 1996.

4. Masling JM (Ed.). Empirical Studies of Psychoanalytical Theories, vol. 1. Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 1983.

5. Masling JM (Ed.). Empirical Studies of Psychoanalytic Theories, vol. 2. Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, (1986).

6. Masling JM (Ed.). Empirical Studies of Psychoanalytic Theories, vol. 3. Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press 1990.

7. Masling JM, Bornstein RF (Eds.). Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Psychopathology. Empirical Studies of Psychoanalytic Theories. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1993.

8. Masling JM, Bornstein RF (Eds.). Empirical Perspectives on Object Relations Theory. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1994.

9. Masling JM, Bornstein RF (Eds.). Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Developmental Psychology. Empirical Studies of Psychoanalytic Theories. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1996.

10. Bornstein RF, Masling JM (Eds.). Empirical Perspectives on the Psychoanalytic Unconscious. Empirical studies of psychoanalytic theories. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1998.

11. Bornstein RF, Masling JM (Eds.). Empirical Studies of the Therapeutic Hour. Empirical Studies of Psychoanalytic Theories. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association 1998.

12. Duberstein PR, Masling JM (Eds.). Psychodynamic Perspectives on Sickness and Health. Empirical studies of psychoanalytic theories. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association 2000.

13. Bornstein RF, Masling JM (Eds.). The Psychodynamics of Gender and Gender Role. Empirical Studies in Psychoanalytic Theories, vol. 10. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2002.

14. Masling JM. ‘Empirical Evidence and the Health of Psychoanalysis’. J. Amer. Acad. of Psychoanalysis, 28(4): 665-685, 2000.

15. Westen D. ‘The Scientific Legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a Psychodynamically Informed Psychological Science.’ Psychological Bulletin, 124(3): 333-371, 1998.

16. Masling JM, Cohen, IS (1987). ‘Psychotherapy, Clinical Evidence and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.’ Psychoanalytic Psychology, 4(1), 65-79, 1987.

17. Diesing, P (1971). Patterns of Discovery in the Social Sciences. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1971.

18. Diesing, P (1985). Comments on ‘Why Freud’s Research Method was Unscientific’ by Von Eckhardt. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 8, 551-66, 1985.

19. Diesing, P (1986). ‘Review of Edwin Wallace, Historiography and Causation in Psychoanalysis.’ Contemporary Psychology, 31, 417-18, 1986.

20. Diesing, P (1991). How Does Social Science Work? Reflections on Practice. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991.

21. Erdelyi, MH (1985). Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Cognitive Psychology. Series: Books in Psychology. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1985.

22. Levine FJ, Luborsky L. ‘The Core Conflictual Relationship Theme; A Demonstration of Reliable Clinical Inference by the Method of Mismatched Cases.’ In S Tuttman, C Kaye and M Zimmerman (Eds.), Object and Self: A Developmental Approach: Essays in Honor of Edith Jacobson (pp. 501-526). New York: International Universities Press, 1981.

23. Spence, DP. ‘Interpretation: A Critical Perspective.’ In JW Barron, MN Eagle and DL Wolitzky (Eds), Interface of Psychoanalysis and psychology (pp. 558-572). Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1992.

24. Lévi-Strauss C. Tristes Tropiques. (J. Russell, Trans.). New York: Atheneum, 1964.

25. Plate tectonics. Encyclopædia Britannica. http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article?eu=115121. Accessed June 10, 2002.

26, Freud, S. The Interpretation of dreams. Standard Edition 4-5: 1-627, 1900.

Norman N. Holland is Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar at the University of Florida. The author of twelve books applying psychological theories to literature, he is founder and associate director of the Institute for Psychological Study of the Arts.

Islamic Sharia law should be opposed by everyone who believes in universal human rights, women’s civil rights and individual freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of religion and belief and freedom from religion. Islamic law developed in the first few centuries of Islam and incorporated Middle Eastern pre – Islamic misogynist and tribal customs and traditions. Shari’a developed not only from the Koran and the Sunna but also through juristic reasoning and interpretation and hence different sects. We may ask how a law whose elements were first laid down over a 1000 years ago can be relevant in the 21st century. The Sharia only reflects the social and economic conditions of the time of Abbasid and has grown out of touch with all the human’s social, economic, cultural and moral developments. The principles of the Sharia are inimical to human’s moral progress and civilised values.

Islam is an all-encompassing religion that controls and has opinion on everything from the dowry to the periods of women, from the amputation of limbs of thief to the stoning of adulterers, from food to the creation of the World. No detail of daily life escapes its attention. It interferes in anything and everything. The Islamic law tries to legalise for every single aspect of an individual’s life, the individual is not at liberty to think or decide for himself, he has but to accept Allah’s ruling as interpreted infallibly by the doctors of law.

Islamic law forcefully opposes free thought, freedom of expression and freedom of action. Accusations of impurity, of apostasy is waiting to silence any voice of dissent. Suppression and injustice shapes the lives of all free minded people above all atheists, who are deprive of all freedom. One is borne Muslim, and one is forced to stay Muslim to the end of their life. Islamic law denies the rights of women and non- – Muslim religious minorities. Non -believers are shown no tolerance: death or conversion. Jews and Christians are treated as second – class citizens.

In countries which have proclaimed an Islamic state, such as Iran, the Sudan, Pakistan, some states in Northern Nigeria, and Afghanistan under the Taliban, we can already see the pernicious effects of the Sharia: the stoning to death of women exercising their right to personal freedom; random accusations of blasphemy – carrying a mandatory death penalty – being used to settle personal grudges, public hangings for apostasy, real or alleged, and many other cruelties.

A fundamental aspect of Islam is that the will of god should be followed. Thus it is god and not the people that decide how things are to be. In an open and free society, people lay the boundaries of powers of organs of state, that is, the people dictate the powers that state is to have over them and the people through their elected organs and representatives decide the laws. The situation is quite different under Islamic states or where Islamic law acts as an important part of the legal system. Examples are Saudi Arabia where the Koran has been declared to be the constitution and no laws contrary to it can be passed. Other examples are Iran, the Sudan, Afghanistan under the Taliban, and many other Middle Eastern countries where Islamic law has a considerable influence on the legal system. This is clearly not acceptable and is denying the people the right to determine the governance of their countries.

The Sharia & Human Rights

Human rights and the Sharia are definitely and irremediably irreconcilable and antagonistic. Oppression, massacres, intimidation, lack of freedom, ferocious censorship are the undeniable facts of all countries designated Islamic. Human rights are desirable to ensure a certain standard of living for people across the globe. It is often alleged that Human rights constitutes a means of enforcing western ideals on others who might not believe in them. It is not acceptable to let governments and authorities away with many of the abuses by using cultural relativism as an excuse. We cannot let cultural relativism becomes the last refuge of repression. To accept religion as a justification for human rights abuses is to discriminate against the abused and to send the message that they are un-deserving of human rights protection.

Perhaps the most unsavoury aspect of Islamic law from human rights perspective is the punishments doled out. Islamic law regulates individual morality, being opposed with sexual morality. From flogging to stoning to death of individuals. Sexuality and sexual behaviour is a realm that Islam has strict rule on. Adultery is strictly forbidden and harshly punished. The punishment is execution, death by stoning or flogging. Homosexuality is also forbidden and punishable by Islamic law. To add to the inhumane nature of executions, in majority of countries under Islamic states, these executions are carried out in front of crowds of people.

The Sharia & Women’s Rights

In the Koran and according to the Sharia, women are considered inferior to men, and they have less rights and responsibilities. As regards testimony in the court of law and inheritance, a woman is counted as half a man, equally in regard to marriage and divorce, her position is less advantageous that that of the man, her husband has the legal, moral and religious duty to beat her. She does not have the right to choose her husband, her clothing, her place of residence, and to travel. A very young legal age of marriage ranging from 9 in Iran to 13, 15 and 17 (in Tunisia) is also another aspect of Sharia. This is according to the way Muhammad the prophet of Islam married Aisha a 9 – year old girl when he was 43. The four orthodox law schools plus shi’i mainly differed on points important to women. In all schools marriage is a contract according to which husband should perform sexually and provide materially for the wife. The wife must have sex whenever husband wishes. A man can easily divorce a woman by pronouncing it three times. Polygamy up to four wives was permitted, in shi’i sect, temporary marriage is allowed where man can have access to unlimited number of women. The practice is known as Mot’a or Sigheh. According to Islamic law men were permitted concubines and female slaves. Islamic law and the Koran permit men to beat their wives if they disobey.

Another discriminatory rule is that in many Muslim inhabited countries a woman is not allowed to marry a non-Muslim whereas men are allowed to marry non-Muslims. With the object of protecting morality and preventing sexual anarchy women are expected to cover their whole bodies bar their faces and their hands up to their wrists. Islamic law is totally against dress freedom. This is obviously a huge infringement on the personal development of women, not allowing them to develop sexually and as people. It is inhumane to imprison women behind veils when it is men, who according to Islam and Islamic law cannot be trusted to control themselves.

Once again, in order to protect morality it is dictated that women cannot be in contact with men to whom they are not related without the presence of some male relative. The segregation of sexes in this way makes it very difficult for women to leave their houses and participate in society in any way at all. Islamic law in this way completely prevents women from taking part in society and keeps them locked up, isolated and unable to reach their potential. Women deserve to be treated as human beings and for this reason alone Islamic rule and Islamic law which are completely misogynist must be opposed.

The Sharia & Discrimination against non- Muslims

In addition to the imposition of Islamic morality on non-Muslims, Sharia law dictates that there should not be equality between Muslims and non-Muslims. Under strict Sharia law only Muslims can be full citizens of a Muslim state. Many of Islamic states shamelessly discriminate against non-Muslims. In Saudi Arabia and in Kuwait being Muslim is a precondition of naturalisation. A person who believes in a scriptural religion, such as Christianity or Judaism will have limited rights in an Islamic state; they cannot participate in public life or hold positions of authority over Muslims. Anyone else is deemed to be an unbeliever and is not permitted to reside permanently in an Islamic state. In addition, the Koran only recognises People of the Book as religious communities. Others are pagans. Pagans must be eliminated.

In many Islamic states, non-Muslims men are not allowed to marry Muslim women and in criminal prosecutions non-Muslims are given harsher punishments than Muslims. Crimes against Muslims are often punished more severely than crimes against others. In many countries the testimony of a non-Muslim in court s not equal to that of a Muslim.

Freedom of religion does not just mean freedom to hold a faith but also the freedom to change one’s religion or belief. Apostasy is when a Muslim advocates the rejection of Islamic beliefs or announces his own rejection of Islam by word or by act. That is when a Muslim abandons his or her faith. Apostates face the most ferocious violence, often are punished to death. This discrimination is clearly contrary to freedom of belief and religion and the principle that religion should be a private affair of individual. The use of any and especially such violent coercion in matters of faith is completely unacceptable.

Believing in religion should be voluntary and as a private matter, otherwise people who practice a religion are not doing so of their own convictions but rather because of the sanctions that will be imposed on them if they don’t. When the law gets involved, religion is no longer between the individual and what or whom they believe, as it should be.

The Sharia & Freedom of Expression

Under the Sharia and where Islam oppresses, writers, thinkers, philosophers, activists, artists are all deprived of their freedom of expression. Islamic regimes are notorious for suppressing freedom of expression. Often, as the government aligns itself so closely with Islam any critics of the government are accused and charged with vague charges of heresy and insulting Islam. Under Islamic law people are deprived of drinking, playing music, reading literature on philosophy, sexuality, and arts.

For the human rights abuses sanctioned by, the discrimination institutionalised in, the autonomy deprived by, the lifestyle choices deprived by and the human dignity eroded by Islamic Law, this barbaric inhumane law should be opposed.

In the west, even in countries which have a sizeable Muslim minority, any idea that the Sharia could have any sway should be strongly opposed since it conflicts with many basic human values, such as equality before the law, that punishments should be commensurate with the crime, and that law must be based on the will of the people.

Islamophobia & Racism

The problem for us in the west is how to oppose these violations of human rights without being accused of neo-colonialism and racism, and of failing to respect different cultures. There is a key – point here, that human rights are vested in the individual, not the group. As soon as rights are accorded to any group rather than to individuals it creates the possibility for conflict that only between the group and those outside it, but between the group and its own members. Any group, which denies the right of its members to leave, is in contravention of one of the most fundamental principles of human rights. It is clearly one of the reasons for the growth of Islam over the past century that becoming a Muslim is a one way street. Whether by birth or conversion (historically likely to have been a forced conversion and an imposed phenomenon) once you are a Muslim the only way out – under the Sharia – is death.

Apologists for Islam often claim that this sort of argument is based on a misunderstanding of Islam, the religion of peace. Apologists will quote this sura rather than that to prove their point. But like the Christian Bible, of course, the Koran has arguments to support every possible point of view. The only answer to this is to show by actual examples the reality of what is happening in countries that have fallen under the sway of the Sharia. It is also frequently claimed that critics of Islam are guilty of a) racism, and b) Islamophobia. Since we are discussing religion and not race, the first argument fails. Certainly in the west there is a high degree of correlation between race and religion. The Muslims in Britain, for example, tend to be of Middle Eastern origin. Nevertheless, it is perfectly feasible to love the believer but hate the belief. Human beings are worthy of respect but not all beliefs must be respected. Attempts to make Islamophobia a crime are thinly disguised attempt to equate anti-Islamic arguments with racism. It is essential to distinguish criticism of Islam both from fear of Islam and from fear, hatred or contempt for Muslims. But often, moral criticism of Islamic practices or criticising the Islamic religion is dismissed as Islamophobic.

When Islam really does promote violence by advocating jihad to achieve world domination, when it really does say that men should beat women and that the testimony of a woman in court is worth half that of a man and that followers of Islam should not befriend Jews or Christians, then why not having fear to it? Why not criticising it?

The world is a battleground of social movements and ideas. It took people in the west over 400 years of often-bloody struggle to gain the right to criticise Christianity. Even now, that right is still not fully recognised. In Britain, for example, there is still a law against blasphemy, and many Islamic clerics have argued that it should be extended to cover Islam as well. It should be scrapped. But once we are prevented from expressing our point of view in the market place of ideas: then we are on the slippery slope back to the dark ages.

Of all the existing ideologies and religions, Islam remains the greatest danger for humanity, as it has not been caged by progressive forces and because of the terrorising power of political Islam and the close ties of states and the establishment Islam.

We must recognise that our society is far larger, diverse and complex than the small primitive tribal society in Arabia, 1400 years ago, from which Islam emerged. It is time to abandon the idea that anyone in the region should live under Sharia. More than ever before, people need a secular state that respects freedom from and of religion, and human rights founded on the principle that power belongs to the people. This means rejecting the claims by orthodox Islamic scholars that, in an Islamic state, sovereignty belongs to the representative of Allah or Islamic justice. It is crucial to oppose the Islamic Sharia law and to subordinate Islam to secularism and secular states.

Adapted from a speech given by Azam Kamguian at a discussion panel & debate on 10 October 2002, organised by University Philosophical Society of Trinity College, Dublin – Ireland.

Azam Kamguian is the editor of the Bulletin of the Committee to Defend Women’s Rights in the Middle East. This article was first published on the CDWRME site and is republished here by permission.

In my speech, I will argue against the Islamic tribunals and will discuss how the Islamic Sharia law brutally violates human and women’s rights. I will try to demonstrate how Islamism and multi – culturalism are a united camp against universal human rights in Canada. At the end, I will emphasise the urgency of stopping the Islamic tribunals in Canada.

As we all know, Islamists in Canada have recently set up an Islamic Institute of Civil Justice to oversee tribunals that would arbitrate family disputes and other civil matters between people from Muslim origin on the basis of the Islamic Sharia law. This is the first time in any western country that the medieval precepts of the Sharia have been given any validity. One can imagine that the Islamists will use this as a lever to work for similar recognition in many other western countries. After all, if Canada is prepared to recognise Sharia law in this way why not every other country in the west.

This move is yet another effort by Islamists to impose the barbaric Sharia law, but this time on the people in the west. This move belongs to political Islam, a major force that has brutally suppressed people’s rights and freedom in general and women’s rights in particular in the Middle East. It is a political movement that came to the fore against the secular and progressive movements for liberation and egalitarianism in the Middle East. In Iran, the Sudan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Islamic regimes proceeded to transform women’s homes into prison houses, where confinement of women, their exclusion from many fields of work and education, and their brutal treatment became the law of the land.

Sadly and unfortunately, the setting up of the Sharia tribunals in Canada will be given validity, due to the reactionary politics of multi-culturalism. This is yet another fruit of a policy that causes fragmentation; apartheid based legal system and racism. Of course, this politics of fragmentation and apartheid suits the purpose of Islamists best. Mr. Mohamed El Masry, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, has argued that Canada needs “a multiplicity of laws” to accommodate different groups when their moral standards clash. Mr. El Masry says the tribunals, which would include imams, elders and lawyers, will provide Muslims with the means to settle civil disputes out of court according to their beliefs.

Advocates for the Islamic tribunals have argued that one of the beauties of free and open societies in the west is their flexibility. But the very same ‘flexibility” provides the Islamists with the opportunity to impose their own rigid and oppressive rules on a specific community in the society. Mr. Momtaz Ali, president of the Canadian Society of Muslims, and a leading proponent of the Islamic tribunals has said: “It – the Islamic tribunal – offers not only a variety of choices, but shows the real spirit of our multicultural society,” The very same Mr. Ali also says: “…On religious grounds, a Muslim who would choose to opt out … would be guilty of a far greater crime than a mere breach of contract – and this would be tantamount to blasphemy or apostasy”. You are aware that blasphemy and apostasy are among the worst crimes in Islam, in many countries punishable by death.

This project is against the equality of all citizens before the law, regardless of race, religion or gender. Such equality does not exist under the Islamic Sharia law. Sharia tribunals effectively establish a parallel legal system based on religion, which I believe will lead to an apartheid-based legal system. The principles of individual freedom and equality before the law should take precedence over any collective goals that members of a particular group might claim for themselves.

Many people from Muslim origin will be pressured into accepting arbitration by the Islamic Institute on matters of civil and family law. This presents a serious problem for the rights of particularly women living in Canada. The decisions of the tribunal will be final and binding and will be upheld by the Canadian courts. The Institute will be applying Islamic Sharia law which is totally against impartiality of the legal systems. For example, a woman’s testimony under the Sharia counts only as half that of a man. So in straight disagreements between husband and wife, the husband’s testimony will normally prevail. In questions of inheritance, whilst under Canadian law sons and daughters would be treated equally, under the Sharia daughters receive only half the portion of sons. If the Institute were to have jurisdiction in custody cases, the man will automatically be awarded custody once the children have reached an age of between seven and nine years. Given this inequality it is particularly worrying that there will be no right of appeal to the Canadian courts. The principle being that if both parties in a dispute willingly submit to Islamic arbitration, they can’t complain when they lose.

The problem here is the word “willing”. Too many women from Muslin origin living in the west still live in Islamic and patriarchal environments where the man’s word and pressure from the community is law. It will take a brave woman to defy her husband, and to refuse to have her dispute settled under Islamic law when her refusal could be equated with hostility to the religion and apostasy. To this is added the problem that going to a Canadian court will take longer and cost more. There is no reason however why arbitration service under Canadian law could not be used instead. The danger is that once these tribunals are set up people from Muslim origin will be pressured to use them, thereby being deprived of many of the rights that people in the west have fought for centuries.

In virtually every western country with a sizeable Muslim minority there is pressure from Islamists for a separate civil and criminal law. They seek to establish their own state to oppress people, legally and officially. There must be no state within a state. Yet this is precisely the objective that the Islamic advocates are pursuing. They argue that it is their duty as good Muslims to work for precisely this end. And this end precisely leads to more forced marriages, more honour killings, more Islamic schools, more FGM-s done secretly, and more harassment and intimidation towards women and girls in ghettos.

In Islam, as Mr. Momtaz Ali has said, there is no separation between religion and the law. But in the contemporary civilisation, laws are seen as the work of man and as such can be changed in the light of changing circumstances. In Islam, the law is against universal women and human rights, but is God’s law, and change is impossible.

Islamic Sharia law should be opposed by everyone who believes in universal human rights, women’s civil rights and individual freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of religion and belief and freedom from religion. Islamic law developed in the first few centuries of Islam and incorporated Middle Eastern pre – Islamic misogynist and tribal customs and traditions. We may ask how a law whose elements were first laid down over 1000 years ago can be relevant in the 21st century. The Sharia only reflects the social and economic conditions of the time of Abbasid and has grown out of touch with all the human’s social, economic, cultural and moral developments. The principles of the Sharia are inimical to human’s moral progress and civilised values.

Islamic law forcefully opposes free thought, freedom of expression and freedom of action. Accusations of impurity, of apostasy are waiting to silence any voice of dissent. Suppression and injustice shapes the lives of all free minded people. One is borne and labelled Muslim, and one is forced to stay Muslim to the end of their life. Islamic law denies the rights of women and non- – Muslim religious minorities. Non -believers are shown no tolerance: death or conversion. Jews and Christians are treated as second – class citizens.

Under the Sharia, for over two decades, millions around the world have fallen victim: countless people have been executed, beheaded, stoned to death, had their limbs cut off, flogged and maimed, bombed to pieces and routed. In countries which have proclaimed an Islamic state, such as Iran, the Sudan, Pakistan, some states in Northern Nigeria, and Afghanistan, we have already seen the pernicious effects of the Sharia.

Human rights and the Sharia are definitely and irremediably irreconcilable and antagonistic. Universal human rights are essential to ensure a certain standard of living for people across the globe. It is not acceptable to let governments and authorities away with many of the abuses by using multi – culturalism as an excuse. We cannot let multi-culturalism becomes the last refuge of repression. To accept religion as a justification for human rights abuses is to discriminate against the abused and to send the message that they are un-deserving of human rights protection.

Multi-culturalism is a cover to create a comprehensive social, legal, intellectual, emotional, and civil apartheid based on distinctions of race, ethnicity, religion and gender. This complete system of apartheid attacks women’s basic rights and freedom and justifies misogynist rule inflicted on women by Islamists. Any attempt to restrict human and women rights in the name of religion and culture, or defining freedom and equality according to different cultures and religions is racist.

Our contemporary society is far larger, diverse and complex than the small primitive tribal society in Arabia, 1400 years ago, from which Islam emerged. It is time to abandon the idea that anyone should live under the Sharia. More than ever before, people need a secular state as well as a secular society that respects freedom from and of religion, and human rights founded on the principle that power belongs to the people and not to God. It is crucial to oppose the Islamic Sharia law and to subordinate Islam to secularism and secular states.

I call upon all secularist forces and freedom-lovers to stand up and protest against the setting up of Islamic tribunals in Canada. All progressive people should make a joint effort to stop Islamism and multi – cultural politics of the Canadian authorities from violating the universal human rights and our civilised values.

Adapted from a speech delivered by Azam Kamguian at a panel discussion and debate on “The Sharia Courts & Women’s Rights in Canada”, on 7th March 2004 in Toronto – Canada, and also at a seminar in the commemoration of the International women’s day on March 14 2004, in Birmingham – U.K

Azam Kamguian is the editor of the Bulletin of the Committee to Defend Women’s Rights in the Middle East. This article was first published on the CDWRME site and is republished here by permission.