Author: Ophelia Benson

Here’s something to make you think, to shake your comfortable old positivist assumptions down to their roots, to alert you to the fact that there are deeper levels of reality that you’ve been forgetting to take into account…

I am glad to see that this page is being read by the press. On 6th December, Catherine Bennett of the Guardian (UK national newspaper and dyed-in-the-wool astrological sceptic) writes: On the Astrology News website, there is already speculation that the tsunami “because it involves destruction originating from a submarine source … appears to fall in line with the mythological themes of Sedna”. Suggesting that the California Institute of Technology scientists whose decision it was, last year, to name the planet after the Inuit sea goddess, may be more competent in the divination department than all the UK’s astrologers put together. I suspect that Bennett writes about esoteric subjects without reading about them. She would benefit by studying the writings of Carl Jung. Jung’s notion of synchronicity is that there is an acausal (non-linear) principle that links events having a similar meaning by their coincidence in time rather than sequentially. He claimed that there is a synchrony between the mind and the phenomenal world of perception. Though I am not sure if every coincidence has deep meaning, the naming of a planet is a significant and symbolic event that affects the world. As such, I cannot rule out a connection between the choice of the name and the nature of the planet.

An acausal principle that links events – how cool is that? And it’s non-linear, too, which is even cooler. Not that I have the faintest idea what the astrologists mean by that, and I bet they don’t either, but that’s exactly why it’s so cool. If we understood it that would take the mystification I mean mystery out of it, and that’s no fun.

So events are ‘linked’ (what does linked mean? linked how, linked in what sense, linked with what result, linked according to what evidence or logic?) if they have a similar meaning. Oh. What does meaning mean? What kind of meaning, and according to whom? They’re linked by their coincidence in time rather than sequentially. Oh – but since we don’t understand what ‘linked’ means, and so don’t understand how they’re linked, and we don’t understand what ‘meaning’ means, and so don’t understand what meaning has to do with the non-understood ‘linking’ (except that we’ve been told that it’s acausal, which helps remarkably little, in fact hinders), the information that they are ‘linked’ in a non-understood way by their coincidence in time rather than sequentially…really doesn’t get us much farther. But it sounds kind of deep, maybe. Either that or kind of daft.

I’ll show you something that links though. Not sequentially, but by meaning. But I, pedantically or literally enough, will explain in what sense the two items ‘link’ – I will explain that they ‘link’ in my own mind because I see a connection between them, which I will endeavour to explain to that large majority of the world’s population that doesn’t share a brain with me.

The scientific profession possesses considerable cognitive authority in modern societies…Such authority is of course of inestimable value to individual scientists, and they have a vested interest in its maintenance. They can be expected to police the existing boundaries of science, to avoid the intrusion of whatever may detract from its reputation and to seek to dispel anything potentially disreputable which arises within it.

That’s from the opening of chapter 6, ‘Drawing Boundaries,’ of Scientific Knowledge by Barry Barnes, David Bloor and John Henry, page 140. Here is a bit from the end of the same chapter, page 168:

The boundaries of science are conventional. To reify those boundaries, and to see them as hard-and-fast divisions between inherently different subject areas or disciplines is simply a mistake. The demarcation of science from pseudo-science, or of science from scientism or even physics from chemistry, can be fully understood only in sociological terms…Scientific boundaries are defined and maintained by social groups concerned to protect and promote their cognitive authority, intellectual hegemony, professional integrity, and whatever political and economic power they might be able to command by attaining these things.

Both of those statements have some truth to them as far as they go – but they leave a lot out. They also seem to carry a wealth of implication, which is probably what Barnes, Bloor and Henry have in mind, given the leaving a lot out aspect. The link I see between the two sets of quotations is that the kind of rhetorical skepticism we find in the last two tends to work as an enabler of the woolly thinking in the first one – at least I think so. The knowing stuff about policing boundaries and dispelling the disreputable is very popular with astrology fans and New Agers of all kinds. In other words, sociologists of knowledge who write sly comments like that without qualifying them (except sometimes in other books or far distant chapters) are just promoting the fashion for childish irrationalism we see all around the place.

This is an odd piece – a mix of harsh but possibly true observations and macho unpleasantness. Of course the one so often does slop over into the other. I do that slopping often myself, at least so I’m told (and I’m sure it’s true). That’s what’s usually going on in disagreements over Richard Dawkins (and Christopher Hitchens, too: he attracts such Necker cube-like clashes of perception the way chocolate attracts, er, me). Many people think Dawkins is being rude, tactless, brutal, self-satisfied and the like, while others think he is being honest and fog-dispelling. I tend to the latter view, but then I’m an atheist myself, so what he says doesn’t get up my nose at the outset.

But this guy who doesn’t admire Susan Sontag…

The reverential tone of the obituaries served to confirm that self-proclaimed intellectuals, no matter how deluded or preposterous, exert a strange, intimidating power over non-intellectuals – especially if they employ that infuriating literary device, the epigram.

Well, yeah. One does know what he means – though actually I would say that it’s (some) intellectuals that the intimidating power is really exerted over, rather than non-intellectuals. It’s hard not to suspect that some version of that is what’s going on with the cult of Derrida. (I say ‘suspect’ because as I’ve mentioned several times, I haven’t read Derrida [apart from a few late articles], so I’m talking about the way his followers [and they are followers, all too often, rather than merely admirers or readers] talk and write about him, not what he said and wrote himself.) The admiration seems to be so out of proportion to anything anyone manages to articulate that one has to wonder – are they simply snowed by rhetoric? If they were snowed by substance, wouldn’t they do a better job of convincing skeptics?

But even though one knows what he means, one also wishes he had kept some thoughts to himself – or better yet not had them at all (in a perfect world).

But would that someone had treated Sontag in life as Dr Johnson had disposed of Bishop Berkeley’s contention that objects only exist because we see them: kicking a stone till he bounced off it, he snarled, “I refute it thus.”

To take the trivial point first, it’s well known that Johnson didn’t ‘dispose’ of anything, that idealism is not disposed of that easily, that Berkeley was not such a fool that he didn’t know what a stone was. But that aside – Johnson kicked a stone, not Berkeley. Here’s this columnist guy (an intellectual of some sort, presumably, or he wouldn’t have the gig) apparently wanting to kick Sontag herself. Or perhaps not – perhaps simply wanting someone to ‘dispose of’ her contentions by kicking stones with energy. But he phrases it so vaguely and ambiguously that we can’t really tell, and I suspect that’s deliberate. Especially given the way he follows it up.

If memory serves – and possibly it doesn’t, no doubt clouded by guilt that I failed to put the wretched woman over my knee and give her a sound spanking…

Oh please. Come on. Isn’t it time to wake up now? Time to get a clue? Time to, you know, not let one’s threatened guy syndrome hang out quite so blatantly? Don’t men realize what they sound like when they slaver over fantasies of beating up women? Well who knows – I suppose in their view and that of their fans they are doing what I take people like Dawkins to be doing: brushing away clouds of sentimentality and obfuscation and appeasment (as Salman Rushdie put it) to tell the plain truth. Being blunt, irreverent, disrespectful, amusing, and honest. But threats of violence (however ‘jokey’) don’t work that way. Except clearly some people think they do. Oh well.

Well said, Salman. In a sharp letter to the Guardian in reply to a silly comment of Ian Jack’s on Saturday (I saw the comment at the time, rolled my eyes and wanted to argue with it, but also wanted a rest from the sound of my own voice arguing), in which he mentions the ‘currently fashionable Blairite politics of religious appeasement at all costs.’

Should we now censor ourselves because the current potentates of the Islamic faith are more repressive than their predecessors? Do we have no principles of our own? The continuing collapse of liberal, democratic, secular and humanist principles in the face of the increasingly strident demands of organised religions is perhaps the most worrying aspect of life in contemporary Britain.

Well said, Salman (excuse the familiarity – I’m a vulgar Yank). Well said Salman and Kenan and Homa and Maryam and Azam and many more. Maybe before too long this kind of well-saying will reach critical mass and the fashionable appeasment thing will become much less fashionable. If everyone just keeps nagging away (despite getting tired of sound of own voice, as one does).

If you listen to the most recent Start the Week – well you have to listen to a good bit of Ann Widdicombe, which I think is fairly unpleasant – but you could always fast forward. The last ten minutes or so you get Kenan Malik talking about Islamophobia and the religious hatred law. It’s good stuff. He thinks the idea of ‘Islamophobia’ is badly overblown and works to silence criticism of Islam and that that’s a bad thing. As you will have surmised, he also thinks the religious hatred law is a bad thing for the same sort of reason. He asks exactly the question I’ve been bleating and whining and braying for several months – why is it okay to say hard things about other ideas but not about religion?

And those of you in the UK will get to see his documentary on the subject on channel 4 at the end of the week. Wish I could.

“Everyone from anti-racist activists to government ministers wants to convince us that Britain is in the grip of Islamophobia.” But is this the reality or is hatred and abuse of Muslims being exaggerated to suit politicians’ ends and to silence critics of Islam, he asks. Malik, who grew up in the 80s – an era of real racist violence – shows how today there is very little statistical evidence to support the claims that Muslims are subject to either more physical assaults or to being targeted by the police.

See, silencing critics of immensely powerful institutions like religions is just not a very good idea. On Start the Week Malik talks about self-censorship, and he’s too right. There’s a lot of that around, along with a lot of other-censorship and attempted other-censorship. All of it unfortunate.