Author: Ophelia Benson

These people piss me off.

Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution. They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.

That’s not a group of people seeking understanding or enlightenment or further education or information or an interesting discussion – that’s a group of aggressive over-confident truculent aggrieved fools who think they have a special pipeline to certainty and a right to challenge people who both know more than they do and eschew certainty. That’s a pack of hostile theocrats out to dismantle every secular institution and branch of education in existence. Nothing will make them shut up, nothing will make them understand that their pipeline to certainty is a short rusty tube leading nowhere. Nothing will even make them perceive the irony of the fact that it is science, which actually revises its findings on the basis of evidence, that disavows certainty, while it is know-nothing zealots like them who do not, ever, revise their obstinate beliefs excuse me ‘faith’ who claim to ‘know’ that someone made the universe and who the someone is.

They piss me off.

…science museums and other institutions struggle to contend with challenges to the theory of evolution that they say are growing common and sometimes aggressive. One company, called B.C. Tours “because we are biblically correct,” even offers escorted visits to the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. Participants hear creationists’ explanations for the exhibitions.

Biblically correct. And people in museums have to waste their time answering hostile questions from imbeciles like that. It pisses me off.

Instead, he told the volunteers that when they encounter religious fundamentalists they should emphasize that science museums live by the rules of science. They seek answers in nature to questions about nature, they look for explanations that can be tested by experiment and observation in the material world, and they understand that all scientific knowledge is provisional – capable of being overturned when better answers are discovered.

Unlike religion – which does not overturn its ‘knowledge’ when better answers are discovered. Ever, ever! No, instead it just causes people to keep insisting more and more loudly, more and more stupidly, more and more self-righteously, on the inarguable certain truth of the fairy tales they grew up on!

It pisses me off.

There is more than one type of creationist, he said: “thinking creationists who want to know answers, and they are willing to listen, even if they go away unconvinced” and “people who for whatever reason are here to bother you, to trap you, to bludgeon you.” Those were the type of people who confronted Dr. Durkee, a former biology professor at Grinnell College in Iowa. The encounter left her discouraged. “It is no wonder that many biologists will simply refuse to debate creationists or I.D.ers,” she said, using the abbreviation for intelligent design, a cousin of creationism. “It is as if they aren’t listening.”

No wonder indeed.

More Blackburn on truth. (Maybe in a few months I’ll give you a passage or two from Stangroom and Benson on truth. That will be fun for you!)

He points out that it is important to distinguish between relativism and toleration.

In the intellectual world, toleration is the disposition to fight opinion only with opinion; in other words, to protect freedom of speech, and to confront divergence of opinion with open critical reflection rather than suppression or force…Relativism, by contrast, chips away at our right to disapprove of what anybody says. Its central message is that there are no asymmetries of reason and knowledge, objectivity and truth…It is not only that we must try to understand them, but also that we must accept a complete symmetry of standing.

So, we have a Western view of the universe, they have theirs, we have Western science, they have theirs, and so on.

And then, once the symmetry of standing takes possession of the relativist, other things may come to fill his head, and they need not involve toleration at all. The dogmatic faith in homeopathy quickly leads to intolerant rejection of double-blind tests for the efficacy of treatments, or intolerant campaigns for the diversion of funds from medicine that works to medicine that does not…The faith that wisdom and the recipe for living are written in one text or another rapidly brings cries of death to the infidel.

Eloquent, isn’t he.

From Simon Blackburn in his new book Truth. He compares skeptics, who suspend judgment on undecideable questions, with relativists.

Today’s relativists, persuading themselves that all opinions enjoy the same standing in the light of reason, take it as a green light to believe what they like with as much conviction and force as they like. So while ancient scepticism was the sworn opponent of dogmatism, today dogmatisms feed and flourish on the desecrated corpse of reason. Astrology, prophecy, homeopathy, Feng shui, conspiracy theories, flying saucers, voodoo, crystal balls, miracle-working, angel visits, alien abductions, management nostrums and a thousand other cults dominate people’s minds, often with official backing. ‘Faith education’ is backed by the British Prime Minister, while Biblical fundamentalism, creationism and astrology alike stalk the White House.

This is the problem. Skepticism that leads to caution about dogmatism is one thing, and relativism that leads to inflated, robust, blimp-like dogmatism is quite quite another.

So someone has finally told France – psst, Freud kind of got things wrong. Tiens! Sans blague?

A war of words has erupted among French psychiatrists after the publication of a “black book” that lambasts the teaching of Sigmund Freud and blames his followers for setting back mental health care in France by decades. In a country that is one of the last redoubts of pure Freudian psychoanalysis, the book has been like shock treatment for many in the white-coat establishment who accuse the authors of grovelling to the “Anglo-Saxon” trend towards behaviour-based mental therapy. The news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, which published extracts of the 800-page work last month, was bombarded with letters charging it with “fascist rhetoric” and leading a “communist-style” propaganda campaign. One leading psychoanalyst described the book as a “fanatical chargesheet placed firmly in the camp of the revisionists”, while another accused its authors of “scientism” – an excessive belief in the power of science.

Scientism! Oh no! Anything but that. Guesswork, intuition, aura-manipulation, healing touch – anything.

In France, around 70% of French psychiatrists base their treatment of depression, phobias and other mental ailments on Freudian theory. Most countries now use of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) – which works by helping a patient understand and overcome patterns of behaviour. Pure French Freudians see this as a superficial mechanism designed to return patients to usefulness in the results-based societies of “le monde Anglo-Saxon”.

Results-based! God, is that philistine or what. Those stupid empirical pragmatic Anglo-Saxons, actually wanting results when they’re mentally ill – actually wanting to get better and not feel depressed or phobic. How superficial. How trivial. How shallow. How utilitarian, returning patients to ‘usefulness’ – so much better and more authentic for them to be miserable and unable to function. Imagine, wanting to be useful – for instance to your children if you have them, to your friends, to the people you work with and for – if you’re a teacher, for instance, or a doctor, or a scholar, or a poet. Why would people like that want to be useful? So much better for them to curl up in a corner whimpering.

France is the world’s biggest per capita consumer of anti-depressants and tranquillisers as the result, the authors claim, of the failures of the couch-and-notebook school and the lack of any alternative. One section of the book entitled “Victims Of Psychoanalysis” contains painful accounts from French mothers of autistic children. Freudian theory had it that autism was caused by the mother’s “unconscious wish that the child should not exist”. A Swiss doctor accuses the French mental health authorities of being responsible for the deaths of more than 10,000 heroin addicts up to the mid-1990s by refusing to countenance methadone treatment. This was deemed by Freudians as a crude way of suppressing the symptoms of the problem, rather than addressing the inner cause.

Oh dear. So they kept addressing the inner cause until…oh dear.

According to the book, only last year Freudians persuaded the health ministry to suppress a report from the National Medical Research Institute which attested to the effectiveness of cognitive behaviour therapy. In the view of the critics, Freudian psychoanalysis is not a science but a hermetic cult “immunised against proof” which has inflicted untold damage on the nation’s mental health by opposing treatments that are known to work and by enforcing a politically correct “pensee unique” across the country.

Pensée unique. I like that – good phrase.

But the Freudians see the book as an attempt to introduce new-fangled American theories into France. Treatments such as cognitive behaviour therapy – they say – are dehumanising, merely conditioning the patient to overcome his symptoms and render him “productive” again. Freud, they argue, recognises human complexity.

But even if not feeling miserable does make one ‘productive’ again, which no doubt it does, one, that’s not the only thing it does, and two, being productive is not necessarily a bad thing, is it. It’s not just being Charlie Chaplin in ‘Modern Times’ or Dilbert. It could mean being an effective mental health doctor, for one thing. An artist, a dancer, a singer, a dentist, a gardener, a farmer. Furthermore, even if Freud does recognise human complexity, here’s a news flash: he’s not the only one who does. And a lot of the ‘complexity’ he recognises is his own invention. I’d rather just treat the symptoms, thanks.