Author: Ophelia Benson

And here’s an amusing and heart-warming little item. Tom Morris went to the Euston Manifesto launch and gave it ‘the liveblog treatment.’ Ain’t technology grand? So he tells us how it goes – what Nick says, what Norm says, what Eve says, what Shalom Lappin says, what Alan Johnson says. Then he says what someone in the audience says – making me give a snort of laughter in the process:

The first question is about women and feminism – the response was simple: get involved, and look at Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels.

Yep, that’s a simple response all right, but an elegant kind of simplicity, like a little black T shirt – look at me! Get involved, and look at me. Why not after all?

No but seriously. That was Nick. Paul at RobertIngersoll.com told me Nick had said that, and so did Nick. I must say, I find that quite pleasing. I like being someone that people can look at when they wonder why there aren’t more women doing something. I haven’t done any feminist storming of corporate bastions or any becoming a woman head of state or any being the first woman to circumnavigate the globe in an inner tube, but I like being someone women can look at when they wonder why most websites are male things, and now I also get to be someone women can look at when they fuss (as Natasha Walter did in the Guardian on May 2) that Euston seems awfully full of guys. Not that I’m actually inside Euston, but I signed it, despite being (as I told Norm, in my helpful way) perhaps more sharply critical of the present US government and of its ways of choosing its governments than the Manifesto is.

It is odd that there aren’t more women doing this kind of thing though, isn’t it? It seems odd to me. It’s not as if there are any of those barriers there are in other kinds of work. No old boys’ clubs wanting more old boys to feel comfy with, no titty pictures in the locker room, no expectations of coffee-making, no passing over for promotion. So where are they? I don’t know, but until they show up, I’ll try to be exemplary.

Sunny of Pickled Politics has an excellent wrathful comment on Asia House’s cancellation of the M F Husain exhibit because of whining by a group ludicrously called ‘Hindu Human Rights’ (ludicrously because it clearly has a peculiar idea of what human rights are or should be). You go Sunny.

It is surely a bizarre state of affairs that we have reached a point where religious organisations are competing against each other for victim status…You may notice the similarity in language to other self-appointed representatives. Indeed, HHR’s campaign was backed by the supposed representative of British Hindus, the Hindu Forum of Britain, whose spokesperson, Ramesh Kallidai, has trotted out the familiar line that Hindus are being maligned in favour of Muslims and other religious groups.

I do indeed notice the similarity, and intend to say more words about it later on when I have more time. Meanwhile, don’t miss the comments on Sunny’s article; they’re usually not worth reading, but they certainly are this time, because who should drop in to dispute the ‘self-appointed’ aspersion on the MCB but – wait for it – Inayat himself. Well what fun, a chance to see him asked the questions we’re always wanting to ask him (and Sacranie of course) around here, such as why they consider themselves representative of anything. Sunny nails him. It’s great.

“If any strong body of opinion among British Muslims feels that they are not sufficiently represented then they can affiliate to the MCB to correct this” Why should they have to affiliate themselves with the MCB to correct this? And why are all British Muslims not afforded a vote when you claim to speak for them? That other groups are the same is no excuse – since I view each one as unrepresentative. The MCB merely represents a segment of socially conservative Muslims who go to the Mosque regularly. Not all Muslims.

Radio 4, please note.

It was Freud’s 150th the other day. Prospect looks in on the birthday boy.

[Janet] Malcolm was not one of psychoanalysis’s detractors. Far from discrediting it, her aim had been to distinguish charlatanism from genuine practice. But American psychoanalysis had by that time reached its baroque period, and was ripe for pillorying. A decade later, the Berkeley English professor Frederick Crews delivered the coup-de-grâce in the New York Review of Books with an essay which still stands as one of the most unflinching executions to have been performed on Freudian practice, theory and scientific pretensions.

I still have fond memories of the fuss that essay kicked up. That and the Sokal hoax made the mid-nineties a pleasant time to be alive.

But as a feature of public health in this country, psychoanalysis in its pure form is almost non-existent. It is hard to argue that such an uneconomic method, which makes such conditional claims for what it can achieve, should play much of a part in the big problems facing the NHS in treating mental illness. So we are left with a vague impression that, while the practice is impractical, the theory still contains a blueprint of how the mind works. Perhaps Freud was similar to Darwin (whom he admired), providing a model which would later be refined by scientific developments. In fact, the better analogy may be with Marx (whom he did not admire) – hugely influential in the 20th century, but with little evidence for his “scientific” theories.

But of course that one little word ‘influential’ opens up a huge yawning gap through which people can (and do) drive great honking 18-wheelers of rhetorical verisimilitude. Or to put it slightly less metaphorically, fans of Freud (like fans of other eloquent and persuasive but evidence-impoverished theorists) like to use the word ‘influential’ in a tricky way, to smuggle claims of, how shall I put it, of having gotten something right for their chosen theorists past people who are willing to confuse ‘influential’ with ‘right’. But influential is different from right. Tim LaHaye is exceedingly influential, but he’s not right. This of course is the point Linklater is making with the Marx analogy.

What we know for certain is that most of the brain is not conscious; but this does not mean that the subconscious pathways of cognitive science amount to the same dynamic region of conflicting desires that Freud postulated. It simply tells us the obvious, that the brain conducts most of its operations without our being aware of them. The non-conscious mind may even have turned out to be less of a mystery than the conscious one. It is consciousness that cognitive scientists find hardest to locate rather than what lies beneath it.

But consciousness, as cognitive behaviour therapy has found, is a lot easier and more productive to work with. Thoughts influence (there’s that word again) mood, and thoughts and mood can be changed – and there’s not even any call to develop a fixation on the therapist. It’s less spooky and disconcerting and exciting than psychoanalysis, and much more helpful. Oh well. Many happy returns, Herr Professor Doktor.

A little more on the question of skepticism and complacency and how and whether it is possible to have one without the other. What I think is that it could well (of course) be that we are all complacent around here, but that JS’s account of his special powers experience and our reception of it doesn’t really show that. I don’t think it can show that, in the nature of the case. Something else might show that, but I don’t think this particular offering does. I think the reason it can’t is the one I’ve already indicated, as have others: there are too many perfectly legitimate reasons to be skeptical of it and too few legitimate reasons to be credulous about it for it to count as a symptom of complacency that we made some skeptical points. One of the biggest objections, as both Ian and Nicholas pointed out in comments, is to the reliance on the sense of conviction beforehand, combined with getting the answer right. It seems to me so obvious and so likely that getting the answer right would instantly work retroactively to intensify the sense of conviction beforehand, that I think it would be far more complacent to ignore that possibility than it is to take it into account. In short, I don’t see why it is more complacent of us to question that than it is of JS to rely on it. He has a witness, of course, as he points out, but the witness can’t be a witness to the intensity of his conviction beforehand. The intensity of conviction and the witness are thus two completely separate items of corroboration or attempted corroboration, and the one can’t strengthen the other. I think JS has been using them, perhaps implicitly, to corroborate each other, but they can’t.

So I don’t see where the complacency comes in, and I’m curious about it. But it’s occurred to me that JS may be doing a sort of test run, or perhaps more like a training run. It has to do with what he said in the HERO interview –

I’m not comfortable with consensus, so I think if it turned out that the kinds of views that B&W advocates became mainstream and taken-for-granted, then I’d have to adopt alternative positions. This isn’t just bloody-minded contrarianism; I think there is value in dialectical engagement. It inoculates against the possibility of a smug complacency over our truth-claims.

It may be that he’s treating B&W as a place in the world where in fact the kinds of views it advocates have become mainstream and taken-for-granted, with the result that he has had to adopt alternative positions – ‘adopt’, remember, in the sense of argue for, or perform, or make a case for, as opposed to actually believing in. So – the whole exercise may have been an exercise in adopting alternative positions in order to inoculate us against smug complacency over our truth-claims. The trouble is, I think it would have done the job a lot better if he’d had a more convincing case; if he’d had a case where we would have had fewer objections to make. I still take the point that his account could be exactly right, and that something rare and difficult to research did happen, and that it is a bad thing if naturalistic methods can’t find that sort of thing out; but I also still don’t see what the alternative is, if we’re not simply to start believing anything and everything.

Carl Sagan has an apposite comment in ‘The Burden of Skepticism’:

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble.

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.

On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all.

Those two modes of thought are, I would say, not just in some tension, but in a great deal of tension. So – la lutte continue. The simultaneous, tense struggle against both complacency and credulity. Aux armes, citoyens!

Here’s a little information. Amazon says, irritatingly, that Why Truth Matters is ‘usually dispatched within 5 to 8 weeks’ – but it doesn’t mean it. The publisher looked into it and discovered that Amazon has an automated system whereby if they temporarily run out of copies of a book (because of a sudden spike in sales, for instance) their system automatically reverts to 5-8 weeks, even if they have an arrangement with the publisher that supplies them directly so that they get new supplies in 24 hours. No amount of pleading from the publishers, apparently, can shift this odd and unhelpful way of doing things. Well, thanks! Discourage customers, why don’t you! So the point is, it’s not really going to be 5 weeks before they send copies, it’s going to be the usual few days, or just one day. Ignore them when they say it will be fifteen years.