Author: Ophelia Benson

Alan Boyle posted Allen Esterson’s reply to Troemel-Ploetz on ‘Cosmic Log’ today. I meant to say something else about the November 20 post (the one with Troemel-Ploetz’s reply) yesterday but I forgot. (I know, I know. But I can only hold one thought in my head at a time. Be patient with me.) But it’s interesting, and it’s always coming up. It’s something Boyle said this time:

We’ve gone back and forth over the role that Albert Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Maric, may have played in the development of the special theory of relativity…and now I’ve gotten the other side of the story from Senta Troemel-Ploetz…

The other side. Of the story. But it isn’t a story, and there isn’t another side.

Or, of course, it is and there is, in a sense, but in another and more important sense, it isn’t and there isn’t. It is a story in the sense that journalists mean a story: it can be shaped into a story, it has some interest. There is another side in the sense that journalists mean another side: there is someone who said something. But that is not a very weighty sense. There is no story in the sense of a genuine, valid, difficult controversy with merit on each side of the question. There is no other side in the sense of a claim backed up by a lot of (or even a moderate amount of) genuine evidence or by compelling questions about missing evidence or shaky inferences. There is simply a claim, based on almost no real evidence (I say ‘almost’ simply because ‘our work’ could perhaps in conjunction with a lot more, real evidence be considered one piece) and a lot of wild surmise and ‘for all we know’ hand-waving. That’s not an ‘other side’ in the normal meaning of the term. But that’s how journalism does these things, which is one reason there’s so much nonsense flying up and down the corridors. Somebody claims something; with a little luck and hard work, the something makes it into a newspaper or a movie or a book or tv; the something gets passed around and discussed and chatted about, and in a few short months it has become common knowledge. And then we’re stuck with it. And then people with better sense become aware that this claimed something has become common knowledge and they point out that it is based on little or nothing and is, if one looks into the matter carefully and impartially and with an attention to evidence, wrong. But what happens then is not necessarily that everyone looks at the evidence on both sides and promptly grasps that side one has no evidence to speak of but just said something one day while the other side has abundant evidence that things were otherwise; no; what happens then is often that people simply say ‘Ah, two sides here, let us have balance and attend to both sides.’

Often of course that is just the right thing to do. Often there are, even, more than two sides. But not always. Not always. If the original claim is just…more or less pulled out of someone’s (cough) ear, then giving equal time and attention to both sides may well be just a waste of time and attention, and in addition to that it may be misleading to the unwary, who think that if there are two sides there must be two sides with a good case and sound evidence. Alas for the innocent and pure of heart.

A reader who commented at Cosmic Log sees things that way. It would be right if it were right, but in fact…it isn’t.

It seems to me that there is a fundamental difference of opinion here which can never be resolved until someone invents a time machine, and goes back to find out. Each point of view is an opinion which cannot be verified by objective fact. The fragmentary evidence which exists does not support either side of the argument except when taken out of context, because the larger context no longer exists, both parties under examination having been dead for some time.

Well, in this particular example, that just isn’t the case: the evidence does support Allen’s side of the argument – more especially since in fact Troemel-Ploetz offered literally no evidence at all. Sometimes the ‘both sides of the story’ thing can just confuse the audience.

Democracy isn’t always and necessarily aligned with justice, progress, equality, women’s rights, freedom – it’s not always and necessarily aligned with anything except majority will. Majority will can be even more tyrannical than a military dictator.

Pervez Hoodbhoy’s critique of General Pervez Musharraf as a leader and as an author, in last month’s Prospect, is depressingly familiar. Of course we wish that Pakistan was a more liberal and democratic society…But simply repeating the same liberal pieties about instituting democracy and strengthening civil society won’t change the situation…There are certainly massive problems for women in Pakistan. Human rights activists suggest that a woman is raped in Pakistan every two hours. As Hoodbhoy points out, Musharraf’s government recently failed to enact a revision of the rape laws, which would make the burden of proof placed on the prosecution more realistic (a successful rape prosecution currently requires four male witnesses to the act). However, that climbdown came in the face of intense political opposition—the uncomfortable reality is that it was democracy that prevented the reform, not the dictator.

It’s important to keep in mind that democracy and majority will are not automatically on the side of human rights.

So maybe women really do think logic is ‘a pestiferous male invention’ (The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense). It would seem so by this, anyway – Senta Troemel-Ploetz replying on Alan Boyle’s blog to Allen Esterson’s article on Troemel-Ploetz’s paper claiming that Mileva Marić ‘did Einstein’s mathematics.’ It’s a cringe-making performance, frankly. She offers no real evidence, she simply cites ‘a tradition that always attributes achievement to men even if the men themselves claim their wives were the authors’ and then gives three quotations from Einstein to Mileva Marić:

“How happy I am to have found an equal in you (eine ebenbuertige Kreatur) who is as strong and independent as I am.” “Until you are my dear little wife, we want to eagerly work together scientifically so that we won’t become philistines….” “When I look at other people, I realize what I have in you / what mettle you are made of.”

Later, Boyle says, she wrote an addendum:

Sophia Yancopoulos, an American physicist, speaks of the ‘subtler issues of collaboration,’ and we are far from knowing much about them. What we do know is that again and again the work of creative women was appropriated by men in the arts and the sciences, and men who fairly give credit to their female collaborators are the exception. Einstein was a very normal man, as I said in New Orleans anno 1990.

And that’s it. That’s really embarrassing – embarrassing the way watching ‘The Office’ is embarrassing. Offering three affectionate comments and a couple of broad generalizations to back up a claim that Einstein’s wife did his mathematics for him – and being willing to go public with that. Ow, ow, cringe.

Esterson replies – with admirable temperance – here.

In historical investigations such as this one must be guided by the hard evidence, not (as Troemel-Ploetz writes) by what is “plausible”, or “for all we know”. Nor should we take (as Troemel-Ploetz does in her 1990 article) as serious evidence the mostly third-hand statements obtained many decades after the event from interested parties taking nationalist pride in what they fondly believe to be a Serbian achievement. In his book Don’t Believe Everything You Think (2006), Thomas Kida reports the research of two psychologists who secretly recorded a meeting held in Cambridge, England. Two weeks later, the participants were asked to write down everything they could remember. Among other gross inaccuracies in their memories, many participants ‘remembered’ hearing comments that were never actually made. That puts into perspective the utter unreliability of third-hand reports provided decades later…

It looks as if Senta Troemel-Ploetz urgently needs to read that book.

Giles Fraser is getting bored.

Perhaps it’s time for a new sort of conversation about religion. The old one is getting really very tired, as in some overblown boxing match between two bruisers who just won’t topple. They slug it out. Land huge blows. Declare victory. Only for the opponent to rise again (no resurrection reference intended) and for the whole sorry circus to wind itself up for a rematch.

Well could that be because one side refuses to admit that it’s making it up as it goes along? It does tend to keep futile brawls going when people refuse to admit that. I know it’s what I always do when I don’t have any evidence or argument – I just keep talking. I don’t mind; I don’t have to be anywhere else just at the moment.

For a more interesting discourse about religion would also have to involve the reclamation of agnosticism, of the ability simply to admit that one doesn’t know.

Well, that would be an idea, but surely Giles Fraser knows that many believers don’t do that, but on the contrary insist that they do know, because they have ‘faith’ (or because they read it in the [translated] Bible or the Koran). But those people (suprise surprise) aren’t Giles Fraser’s main prey.

For the Bible constantly refuses to give God a definite shape and size. That’s what the Hebrew Scriptures call idolatry and what Marxists, following on, came to call reification. It’s turning God into a golden calf. Kant was right when he argued in the Critique of Judgement that it is the second commandment, the refusal to allow human beings a fixed view of God, which offers the most significant protection against religious fanaticism.

All right, but then if that’s true, human beings who believe in this unfixed God have no basis on which to tell everyone else what to do – except the same human secular earthy basis that everyone else has.

And those who work out their faith in a certain doubt and confusion are, in fact, the true believers. Walking by faith and not by sight, as St Paul puts it.

Fine, but then you don’t get to tell us what to do. You have no special authority, or even special insight (except whatever insight comes from the sources that are naturally available to all humans – a habit of thinking about moral questions, for instance). You’re on the same footing as everyone else. So that spells an end to clerics appearing on panels as clerics, as if that gave them some sort of expertise or inside dope. You don’t get to do both. You don’t get to insist that ‘faith’ is all doubt and uncertainty, and still pretend you have special knowledge.

Some atheists are threatened by non-fundamentalist faith. They reckon it a liberal alibi for fundamentalism, offering a more superficially plausible account of God which serves only to shelter fanatics from the sort of criticism that would put them out of business…A contrasting approach would be to work on the assumption that the most effective way to attack bad religion is with an alliance that includes good religion.

Yes – I can see that, up to a point. (Up to a point because I wouldn’t want to join such an alliance on all issues; I would always want to reserve the right to ignore god and all its works on the grounds of extreme improbability and lack of corroborating evidence.) But there seems to be so little ‘good religion’ of the kind you describe around the place – religion that is genuinely doubting and uncertain. The endless valorization of ‘faith’ may be one reason for that dearth. At any rate the god-botherers who keep haranguing us incoherently about the virtues of faith don’t motivate me to make an alliance with them. Thanks for the invitation though.