Author: Ophelia Benson

I’ve just done a study, one which involved reading one article from the THES and coming to a conclusion about it. My conclusion is that the guy doing the study the article discusses is, well, over-interpreting his evidence just a tiny bit. What did he find in his pioneering research which involved watching a popular quiz show on tv and seeing what kind of people won? He found that non-academics (or ‘housewives’ and workers, as the article oddly called them) did better than academics. Uh…gee…really? Could that be because shows like Wer Wird Millionär? don’t usually ask qestions about quantum mechanics or the Duhem-Quine thesis? On account of how most of the people who watch them aren’t academics themselves? Is this a big surprise to anyone? But the industrious researcher draws a rather sweeping conclusion from his study.

The study was in its early stages and the number of cases he had studied so far was not enough to reach final conclusions, Professor Prinz said. He plans to study more contestants and other quiz shows. “The results I have so far achieved are not conclusive, but they do prove that popular culture is just as valid and important as a good formal education.”

The results are not conclusive but they do prove something. Isn’t that a bit of a contradiction right there? But never mind that. The point is – have you ever heard anything so ridiculous in your life? Because I haven’t. Was the poor guy misquoted? That can happen, of course. Journalists will do that. But then again, if he’s silly enough to bother studying a quiz show in order to inform the world that many of the questions come from ‘showbiz, sport and pop’ then he probably did say it. So let’s ridicule him. Right, here we go. The fact that popular culture enables one to answer questions posed by a popular culture quiz show proves that popular culture is just as valid and important as a good formal education?? Full stop? Just as ‘valid and important’ (whatever on earth that means) for all purposes? Such as for instance detecting circularity in one’s own conclusions? Or asking oneself whether the ability to answer silly trivial short-answer questions posed by a tv quiz show is exactly what a good formal education is designed to do, and if so why and if not why not? Or asking oneself what one means by ‘valid and important’ and why one thinks answering questions on a quiz show is ‘valid and important’? Oh well, perhaps the Times Higher was just having a little August joke with us, and Professor Prinz is a hoax.

‘On their own terms’ again. Such a handy phrase that is (see ‘Dyslexia in Excelsis’ below). It’s behind so much woolly thinking – the notion that if we’ll all just see all ideas and truth claims ‘on their own terms’ then no one’s self-esteem will be damaged and all will be well. Of course the idea doesn’t apply everywhere – which is indeed the oft-noticed contradiction in relativism, which is the same as the old Cretan liar’s paradox. Relativists want everyone to think that relativism is non-relativistically true. Same thing with ‘on their own terms.’ We’re not supposed to take, say, skepticism about taking things on their own terms on its own terms. But religion, now that’s another story. And if we have to hem and haw, shove inconvenient things under the sofa, change the subject, rush quickly past sensitive topics, and omit vital bits of information, why…it’s all in a good cause. Protecting religious fanaticism, what could be a better cause than that?

Witness this touching article about fundamentalist Jews and Muslims transcending their many differences because of the one core thing they have in common: unwavering belief in a lot of nonsense. The article is remarkably uncritical oh excuse me ‘non-judgmental’ about it all. But at one point that amounts to downright evasion.

When the Farm Animal Welfare Council recently proposed banning the traditional Muslim and Jewish methods of animal slaughter, where the animal is not stunned before it is killed, the two bodies co-operated in their response. Iqbal Sacranie, the Muslim Council’s secretary general, who also describes relations as “reasonably good”, reels off several other examples of Muslim-Jewish unity, including sitting together on government committees on inner-city regeneration.

Notice how briskly, even indecently, we rush away from the subject to talk about something completely different. What did the two communities say in their response? Who knows. We can guess, but clearly the author of the article doesn’t want to get explicit about it. Why is that? Could it possibly be because what they said was disgusting? Could that be it? Could the author be worried that if it were put down in black and white on the page that these nice religious people we’re being invited to approve of so warmly were insisting on their ‘right’ to go on slaughtering animals in an inhumane manner, we the readers might be a little repelled by that? Might that lead us to stop taking them on their own terms and start taking them on our own terms, where religion should not trump preferences for humane treatment of sentient beings? Who knows. I don’t know, I don’t know that that’s what happened. But I can’t help wondering.

Ah well. Sometimes I worry about the possibility of becoming ever more reactionary and bilious as the days thunder past, but then other times, other times, I just throw up my hands and give in to it. There is just no alternative. For instance when reading the cringe-making ‘Mission Statement’ on the Web site of what sounds like the most cringe-making educational institution one could possibly imagine. The kind of place that makes one want to, I don’t know, dress up as a combination Wall Street shark and Ramboesque thug and roam about kicking small children and grinding the faces of the poor.

We teach of the need to heal from the traumas of living in less than a just, sacred and sustainable world; to resist the further destruction of people, planet and the more than human world; to create alternatives which inspire us to live differently in the world; to change consciousness from an objectifying and reductionist paradigm to one that is holistic and systemic; and finally of the need to overcome the fallacy of the isolated, autonomous individual and recognize the communal and ecological self.

Oh lordy. Doesn’t it just make you want to round up a crowd of your noisiest most obnoxious friends, if not that nice group of slit-eyed punks you passed on the corner, and go there and stand around and point and laugh? And then beat them all up? Doesn’t it?

It ought to be illegal to say stuff like that. But sadly it’s not. A dreadful teasing friend of mine found the Web site of my old school once and had himself a fine old time quoting bits of it to me and falling to the floor laughing. But that’s none of my doing – they didn’t talk like that in my day, I can assure you! No nonsense about forming our holistic spiritual beings, thank the goddess. I learned of the school and Mission Statement from the interesting blog Critical Mass, though for some reason Erin O’Connor passed up the chance to make fun of the loathsome fools.

This article has a lot of food for thought, about how science works and the vexed relationship between theory and experiment.

It was not theory but experiment that plucked the quark idea from near oblivion. Aided and abetted by theory, experiments made quarks real, transforming them from a wayward hypothesis into concrete objects of experience. Experiments are what ultimately discarded the science fashions of the sixties and turned quarks into hard scientific fact.

It’s interesting to think of science and physics as being centers of fashion. Who knew that quarks were a fashion until experiments provided evidence that they were actually there, were not just Platonic physics, as Riordan calls it, but ‘hard scientific fact’? Well of course in a sense anybody who’s read Thomas Kuhn knew, that’s who, but you have to admit, paradigm sounds a good deal more serious than fashion. But the point is, whether paradigm or fashion, if the experiments don’t support them that’s what they stay, and otherwise they become knowledge.

One of the great strengths of scientific practice is what can be called the “withering skepticism” that is usually applied to theoretical ideas, especially in physics. We subject hypotheses to observational tests and reject those that fail…[G]ood experimenters are irredeemable skeptics who thoroughly enjoy refuting the more speculative ideas of their theoretical colleagues. Through experience, they know how to exclude bias and make valid judgments that withstand the tests of time.

There you are, they reject those that fail. No pausing to worry about the poor little theories’ self-esteem, just Here’s your hat and there’s the door, good bye. Mathematical beauty is all very well, but Riordan points out that it’s not an adequate standard for science.

Without such a rigorous standard of truth, science will have little defense against the onslaughts of the creationists and postmodernists, for whom it is just one of many ways to grasp the world. How could we ever hope to defend science against such attacks if it were based only on the opinions of its leading practitioners? Mathematics is not enough, no matter how beautiful. Even Einstein, who helped foster this theoretical style, insisted his ideas had to have observable consequences. The essence of scientific truth rests in the requirement that it should have strong accordance with the natural world that exists outside our minds and beyond human artifice.

And here we have an exhilarating opinion piece. Exhilarating I suppose because the things it says are both so obvious and so non-trendy. (Though there’s some danger in that line of thought – or perhaps I just mean some discomfort. The woods are all too full of people who are all to willing to make you a present of their bravely unfashionable opinions. You know the kind of thing. Defiant racism and sexism, defiant urges to trample on people, defiant calls to get rid of the minimum wage. Go away.) But that being said, the fact remains that this is great stuff, and should be said more often and more loudly, especially to people who don’t know it yet:

The problem is that the cultural relativists exaggerate the supposed consensus prevalent in a culture…What is usually defined as the culture of a people is in reality the interpretation and discourse put forth by the ruling class and its allied intellectual elite. For example, the interests of the Brahmin priests and Thakurs cannot reasonably be the same as that of the lower orders of Hindu society. Similarly the Islamic message cannot be identical for the decadent class of landlords and the landless tenants and rural proletariat, but since official religion is always defined by the rich and powerful the voices of the oppressed classes and sections of society within a culture are seldom heard and rarely allowed to assert an alternative interpretation.

Just so. All that guff about Eurocentrism and respecting the Other and what a bad idea the Enlightenment was really just plays into the hands of the rich powerful male Other, not the society as a whole.

Thus if this observation be granted that cultural relativism is a poor and unconvincing basis for objecting to modern human rights, we need to establish on what basis can a non-Western culture retain its historical identity while simultaneously incorporating and internalising modern human rights within its modern identity? Undoubtedly outmoded religious practices will have to be discarded and the core universal ideas of each culture retained.

How promising that does sound.

Well here’s a piece that strikes me as completely bizarre. As if one should stare at a landscape buried under three feet of snow and say ‘How come it never snows around here?’ Or go for a nice walk in Death Valley and comment on how wet and cold it is, or eat some vanilla ice cream and say it’s too spicy. It’s like a kind of dyslexia. I suppose it’s really just the usual: confirmation bias, seeing what one expects to see and ignoring what one doesn’t. No doubt I’ll just be doing the same thing but in reverse – Elshtain sees the photograph and I see the negative or vice versa. But all the same, it does seem perverse to me to claim that we (in the US) hear more of people like Frank Lentricchia than we do of ‘serious reflection on religion.’ Excuse me? We do? Where would that be exactly?

As a result of the suppression of serious discourse about religion in many activist circles, we grow less able to appreciate what is going on in the war on terrorism. Issues of religious liberty, separation of church and state, the possibility that one might have a secular state in a society in which religions flourish, the dignity and status of women-all these matters and more can be seen clearly only if we take religion seriously, on its own terms.

Ah. Notice that final sly proviso, the last four words of the piece, slipped in at the last possible second, perhaps in the hopes that we won’t notice it. On its own terms. Oh is that how we’re allowed to discourse about religion – on its own terms. Well what if we want to discourse about it on our own terms? What then? Does that fail the test? Does that then become ‘suppression’ of serious discourse about religion? Is it serious only if done in religion’s own terms, whereas if we do it in secularists’ or atheists’ terms then it’s frivolous? If so, why?

In short here we are again, with religion demanding that everyone else take it ‘seriously’ despite its flat refusal to take non-religion seriously, and then to top it all off pretending that we don’t hear much about religion in the US. A counter-factual if I ever saw one.

What was that I was just saying the other day about people translating ‘evidence’ into ‘proof,’ thinking the two words are interchangeable, just plain confusing the two? You’d think at least science journalists would know the difference, wouldn’t you? Well you’d be wrong, apparently.

Sir Patrick said scientists used peer review “almost exclusively” to publicise findings. But he said researchers could still attract publicity “for highly questionable results even when they offered no evidence that their research had been checked”. This was evident earlier this year when the Raelian sect announced the births of human clones. The only proof the sect’s US-based company Clonaid produced to support its assertion was a photograph of one of the children alleged to have been born in Japan.

See? You’d think it would be obvious, wouldn’t you. The juxtaposition is right there, evidence in one sentence, proof in the next but one. You’d think it would be all the more blindingly obvious given the nature of the example – given the fact that supporting an assertion (and a highly improbable one at that) is precisely the subject at issue. You’d think the writer would notice – that if a photograph of a child hardly qualifies as evidence that said child was cloned, the idea that it’s proof is even more nonsensical, so nonsensical that, hey, wait, I have the wrong word here. But no. No, clearly people really do think the two words are interchangeable, think it so automatically that they don’t even know they think it. But it’s so basic! The difference between the two, and between the claims for the two, is so extremely basic! And yet apparently most people aren’t even aware there’s a difference. Which means that most people don’t have a clue how science and inquiry work. Which is a pretty alarming thought.