Author: Ophelia Benson

Okay, time to stop messing around. I’ve been putting it off, but it can’t be shirked any longer. I have to make fun of the whole article, all of it, not just selected highlights. I have to be thorough.

…this fascism of the masses, as was practised by Hitler
and Mussolini, has today been replaced by a system of
microfascisms – polymorphous intolerances that are
revealed in more subtle ways. Consequently, although the
majority of the current manifestations of fascism are less
brutal, they are nevertheless more pernicious.

Less brutal (there’s the not killing millions of people by shooting or overworking or gassing them for instance) but more pernicious? Really? More pernicious in what way? They don’t say. They just get to the important part:

Therefore, we will use this term
as defined by Deleuze and Guattari, and now used by a
number of contemporary authors.

Ah. It’s used by a number of contemporary authors – so it’s okay then. There’s bravery, there’s rebellion, there’s independence of mind. But then what about ‘Because ‘regimes of truth’ such as the evidence-based movement
currently enjoy a privileged status, scholars have not only a scientific duty, but also an
ethical obligation to deconstruct these regimes of power’? What about privileged status, what about regimes of power? If Deleuze and Guattari and ‘a
number of contemporary authors’ have the power and privileged status to make it okay to use the word ‘fascism’ to refer to the evidence-based movement
in the health sciences, then…isn’t that a regime of power based on privileged status? Why is one kind okay while the other isn’t? Because – because our authors aren’t really thinking? Is that it? They’re just performing a ritual, that’s meant to look like (high-status) thinking, but isn’t? Could be.

There’s a longish sane part after that, where they at least could be talking sense. Maybe it’s true that the EBHS approach is too narrow and/or rigid; I don’t know. But then things go funny again.

We believe that health sciences
ought to promote pluralism – the acceptance of multiple
points of view. However, EBHS does not allow pluralism,
unless that pluralism is engineered by the Cochrane
hierarchy itself. Such a hegemony makes inevitable the
further ‘segmentation’ of knowledge (i.e. disallowing multiple
epistemologies), and further marginalise many forms
of knowing/knowledge.

Uh oh. Pluralism and the acceptance of multiple
points of view and multiple
epistemologies and many forms
of knowing/knowledge – that all sounds much too much like Sandra Harding on a bad day. It could (just) mean something sane but it could also mean ‘anything goes’.

As a response to this, a vigilant resistance must arise from
within the health disciplines themselves, and one way of
deploying such resistance is by using a tool called ‘deconstruction’.
Drawing on the work of the late French philosopher,
Jacques Derrida, deconstruction is notoriously difficult to
define because it is a practice, and not a fixed concept
based on abstract ‘facts’ or ‘evidence’.

Okay. Let’s not use it then. Let’s use something else, that’s not so terribly hard to define, because it has this problem with facts and evidence.

But no. No such luck.

In
a deconstructive vein, we must ask not only, ‘What constitutes
evidence?’ but also, what is the ‘regime of truth’ (Kuhn
would call this a ‘paradigm’ and Foucault an ‘épistèmé’) that
dictates when or how one piece of evidence shall count as
evidence, while another is denigrated or excluded altogether?

What indeed. What regime of truth is it that dictates that. It’s probably dressed up in a Nazi uniform and wearing those boots. Bastard.

We believe that EBM, which saturates health sciences discourses,
constitutes an ossified language that maps the landscape
of the professional disciplines as a whole. Accordingly,
we believe that a postmodernist critique of this prevailing
mode of thinking is indispensable.

See there’s your problem right there – it’s that ‘accordingly.’ That accordingly doesn’t belong there. The second sentence doesn’t follow from the first, so that accordingly has shoved its way in (or interpellated itself do I mean?) from some other pair of sentences one of which does follow from the other. In other words, that first sentence could be quite true (that’s some more of the sane part) without that second one following from it at all. One, maybe EBM is ossified, but two, why would a postmodernist critique be indispensable? Why not a nonpostmodern critique instead?

Those who are wedded
to the idea of ‘evidence’ in the health sciences maintain
what is essentially a Newtonian, mechanistic world view:
they tend to believe that reality is objective, which is to say
that it exists, ‘out there’, absolutely independent of the
human observer, and of the observer’s intentions and observations.
They fondly point to ‘facts’, while they are forced
to dismiss ‘values’ as somehow unscientific.

I guess that’s why the postmodern critique is indispensable: because it says stuff like that, and it knows where the box of scare-quotes is kept.

Along with Deleuze and Guattari, we understand such
fascist logic as a desire to order, hierarchise, control, repress,
direct and impose limits…In light of our argument, fascism is not
too strong a word because the exclusion of knowledge
ensembles relies on a process that is saturated by ideology and intolerance regarding other ways of knowing.

And it resembles George Bush, too. Why not, after all?

The all-embracing economy of such ideology lends the
Cochrane Group’s disciples a profound sense of entitlement,
what they take as a universal right to control the scientific
agenda. By a so-called scientific consensus, this ‘regime of
truth’ ostracises those with ‘deviant’ forms of knowledge,
labelling them as rebels and rejecting their work as scientifically
unsound. This reminds us of a famous statement by
President George W Bush in light of the September 11
events: ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’.
In the context of the EBM, this absolutely polarising world
view resonates vividly: embrace the EBHS or else be condemned
as recklessly non-scientific.

Bastards. Fascist Bush-like ostracising bastards.

Okay that’s better. I don’t like to leave these little jobs half-done.

It was above all the theater, the vulgar “art”, the grand guignol productions of the beer halls and the street. It was the provocation, the excitement, the frisson which Nazism was able to provide, in the brawling, the sweating, the singing, the saluting. Nazism, whether one wore brass knuckles and carried a rubber hose or simply played along vicariously, beating up communists and Jews in one’s mind, was action. Nazism was involvement. Nazism was not a party; Nazism was an event.
Eksteins, M., Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, (Black Swan, London: 1990), 414.

Our office is in an incredible state. Dozens of people pass through every day and at any time there are 20 or 30 in the building. The sandwich bill alone adds up to £50 a day. There are people of all ages here, but especially young people who are outraged at what has happened….

Demonstrations can’t happen – or not on the scale we expect tomorrow- without this level of organisation and commitment. And movements only thrive when they begin to harness this energy and commitment in all sorts of different ways…

So this mood and involvement is something special again…Even at this last minute people are booking tickets on coaches, leafletting tubes and getting their friends and families to come. If we are right, this will be very large, and will catch the mood and the moment. A perfect storm is gathering, and the prime minister is at its centre.
Lindsey German,
Convenor, Stop the War Coalition

The point here, of course, is nothing as daft as the claim that the StWC are Nazis. It’s a point about the nature of mass politics; the psychology of mass political participation, if you like. Watching that morally bankrupt, anti-Israel march, it was striking that the marchers were having a party; and obviously a party that was parasitical on the suffering of the people of Lebanon and Israel. Read this, and tell me that Lindsey German isn’t just loving the whole thing.

Here are some people expressing their sorrow, anger and outrage at the events in Lebanon (and no, this is not selective photography).

This is Jerry (again), so don’t blame OB.

The Deleuzoguattarian deconstruction of the evidence-based hegemonic post-positivist paradigm is being discussed in other places. It makes a nice chain – I got it from Tom P (he emailed me about it) who got it from Ben Goldacre. Alun at Archaeoastronomy got it from me, Martin Rundkvist at Salto Sobrius got it from Alun, PZ got it from Martin, and Orac got it from Martin and PZ and is planning to take it on.

The main author has a profile here.

For several years, he has been a clinical nurse in forensic psychiatry (both in hospitals and in the community) as well as in public health. His research interests focus primarily on the issue of the power relationship between nurses and vulnerable clients. He is also interested in the control mechanisms used or deployed by nurses. Most of his work, comments, essays, analyses and research are based on the theoretical work of Michel Foucault.

So – pretty much everything he ever writes or says is based on the theoretical work of Michel Foucault? So Foucault is pretty much all he needs for this perilous and exciting journey through life? He finds Foucault sufficient for all his theoretical needs? Well, that would account for a certain…limited quality in the thinking in that article.

Another excellent article from Fred Halliday.

Amid the unconscionable violence, targeting of civilians, and appeals to unreason and ethnic identification that such modern wars entail, it is all the more necessary to retrieve the example of those who sought to defend core values that crossed boundaries of prejudice and narrow partisanship. I have already honoured one of those in this openDemocracy series of columns: the great French scholar of the Muslim world, Maxime Rodinson. Two more such figures were formative in articulating an internationalist position – one (Isaac Deutscher) within a Marxist framework, the other (Hannah Arendt) within a broadly liberal perspective.

And two very long-standing intellectual heroes and influences of mine.

Soon after the 1967 war, Deutscher gave an interview to three editors of the London-based Marxist intellectual journal New Left Review…In it, Deutscher struck a note that has diminished to near-invisibility in more recent debates, where claims of identity prevail over universal principle, where identification with one side or the other predominates, and where the atrocities and callous political blunders of each combatant readily find their intellectual defenders…Deutscher built on these premises an argument – couched in tones of anti-clerical, universalist disdain, something all too lacking in these days of grovelling before “identity”, “tradition” and “faith communities” – that was clear in its rejection of the invocation of the sacred, the God-given, in political debate. Deutscher rejected Talmudic obscurantism and bloodthirsty Arab calls for vengeance alike.

These days of grovelling before “identity”, “tradition” and “faith communities”…Oh yeah.

The work of the German philosopher Hannah Arendt…was not directly related to the Arab-Israeli question, but her liberal internationalist outlook does have immense relevance to it. This is especially true of Eichmann in Jerusalem…Much more controversial (and neglected) is Arendt’s critique of the legal and moral case made by the Israeli prosecutors against Eichmann. For, whereas the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war criminals had been conducted under what at least purported to be some form of “international” law…Adolf Eichmann was prosecuted for the taking of Jewish lives and in a Jewish court. A case that in 1946 had been (if weak in some points of principle) confident in its universalist aspirations, had by the early 1960s been converted into something derived from the ethnicity of the victims. And this ethnicisation of the victims was, at the same time, deemed to convey a particular right, if not responsibility, on the state that lay claim to representing those victims, namely Israel. This was what Hannah Arendt identified.

Identified and sharply criticized, which is one reason I keep re-reading Eichmann in Jerusalem. She didn’t do any grovelling before ‘identity’ and ‘faith communities.’

There is an enormous historical regression involved here. It involves seeing membership of a particular community, or claims of affinity, ethnicity or religious association with others, as conveying particular rights (or particular moral clarity) on those making such claims. In purely rational terms, this is nonsense: the crimes of the Israelis in wantonly destroying Lebanon’s infrastructure, and the crimes of Hizbollah and Hamas in killing civilians and placing the lives and security of their peoples recklessly at risk, do not require particularist denunciation. They are crimes on the basis of universal principles – of law, decency, humanity – and should be identified as such.

We’re in – we’re well and truly stuck in – a period of enormous historical regression. Here’s hoping we can claw our way out of it very soon.