Sometimes I find myself in an odd sort of competition with friends from other countries, specifically the UK: we argue over which of us lives in the more anti-intellectual culture. I say I do, they say they do, and so we improve the shining hour.

But I have a nice little piece of evidence here. Specifically this remark:

One reason people trained as philosophers press so hard for academic jobs is that the United States offers few other opportunities to use their training. Television here, unlike its counterparts in Europe and Asia, almost completely ignores university and intellectual life. So do radio and print journalism, devoting far more airtime and space to sports.

I rest my case. Who can … Read the rest

It is well-known that most journalists write mostly nonsense most of the time. Happily, this is normally about things like Posh Spice, the g-spot or Iraq. But Zoe Williams clearly has greater ambitions, for she writes nonsense about sociobiology.

This article is so bad that it is hard to know where to start when discussing it. Take this claim:

“There are logical problems with it which it doesn’t take a degree in zoology (even from Oregon) to determine. First, it relies, as so many of these theories do, on the egregious notion that, while women’s fertility is all downhill from the moment they start enjoying The Archers, men suffer no deterioration of sperm quality till they’re one day older … Read the rest

The other article I had in mind was this one by Lauren Slater in the New York Times last weekend. It’s interesting that both articles express skepticism about the value, especially the curative or therapeutic value, of the talking cure and also of the intervention of therapists after traumatic events. At last! I’ve been rolling my eyes and making sarcastic remarks for years whenever a news story informs us that a plane crashed or a crazed gunman shot up a school/fast-food joint/post office or an earthquake leveled a town, and in the next breath added that ‘counselors are on the way’. As if that helps. As if we can all heave a big sigh of relief because at least professionals … Read the rest

There have been a couple of interesting articles on therapy in the past two weeks, each taking a fairly skeptical view of the healing powers of the…discipline? field? trade? What is therapy really?

In this one in the CHE Carol Tavris elucidates the gulf between clinical psychology and therapy on the one hand, and scientific or research psychology on the other, pointing out a number of ironic and/or horrifying facts along the way. For instance there is the fact that in many of the United States it is against the law to call oneself a psychologist unless one ‘has an advanced degree in clinical psychology and a license to practice psychotherapy’ but it is entirely legal to set oneself up … Read the rest

There is more than one kind of fundamentalism, as Terry Eagleton points out in this essay in the Guardian. Fundamentalism is not so much religious as it is textual, which means it covers a lot of ground.

Fundamentalists are those who believe that our linguistic currency is trustworthy only if it is backed by the gold standard of the Word of Words. They see God as copperfastening human meaning. Fundamentalism means sticking strictly to the script, which in turn means being deeply fearful of the improvised, ambiguous or indeterminate…Since writing is meaning that can be handled by anybody, any time, it is always profane and promiscuous. Meaning that has been written down is bound to be unhygienic…Fundamentalism is the paranoid