Category: In Focus

Steve Fuller is a prolific sociologist of science, of the social constructionist school. He testified in the Kitzmiller trial in Dover, Pennsylvania in October 2005, as an expert witness for the defense. Amusingly enough, the judge cited his testimony in finding for the plaintiffs; his expert testimony turned out to be something of an own goal.

Professor Steven William Fuller testified that it is ID’s
project to change the ground rules of science to include the supernatural…This definition was described by many witnesses for both parties, notably including defense experts Minnich and Fuller, as “special creation” of
kinds of animals, an inherently religious and creationist concept…Moreover and as previously stated, there is
hardly better evidence of ID’s relationship with creationism than an explicit
statement by defense expert Fuller that ID is a form of creationism…First, defense expert Professor
Fuller agreed that ID aspires to “change the ground rules” of science and lead
defense expert Professor Behe admitted that his broadened definition of science,
which encompasses ID, would also embrace astrology.

Nothing abashed, Fuller spun some words in the Times Higher Education Supplement in December.

Secular societies insist on a segregation of science and religion that many thoughtful monotheists find arbitrary and even oppressive…In today’s secular culture, Darwin is more readily embraced than Newton as a scientific icon although Newton remains unquestionably the greater scientist…Darwin’s biography projects the politically correct image of a Christian who loses his faith through scientific inquiry. We are unlikely to see a similar exhibit for Newton because his life teaches that the Bible can provide a sure path to great science.

He was interviewed by the Guardian in January.

“The judge in the Dover case went back to the old standard of what the experts say…My guess is that Dawkins just doesn’t know enough about the history of secular humanism to realise that Darwin killed off man at the same time as he killed off God.”…According to Fuller, what does and does not count as science is the result of a power struggle between the evolutionists, who control the scientific establishment, and a marginalised ID community with a large religious following. “I see myself in an affirmative action position, voicing a point of view that would otherwise be systematically excluded,” he says. “If you were having a science studies class, all the things I was saying would be completely normal. The problem is, when you say them in a courtroom and it has a bearing on science policy, then people go ballistic.”…Historically, he says, it’s religion that has motivated people to study science. “We wouldn’t have science as we know it today if it weren’t for monotheism,” he argues, reeling off references to Newton and Mendel and their belief in divine plans.

Norman Levitt took a skeptical look at Fuller in the aftermath of Kitzmiller.

Fuller regards himself as a leader in the movement to “open up” science by nurturing and canonizing ways of “doing science” that differ radically from practices currently endorsed by the professional scientific consensus. This is a theme that plays well on the academic left, since it explicitly includes such notions as “citizen science” and “people’s science,” projects that Fuller gives leave to confront and reject the findings of established science…This bizarre project is propped up by Fuller’s dogma that one need not actually understand standard science to criticize it or to pose profoundly different alternatives. The specific content of standard science, its internal logic, the empirical results that buttress it, are not crucial elements in understanding “Science” as he maintains it should be understood. What, then, authorizes those who, like Fuller, do “social studies of science” to claim that supposedly superior understanding? “We study them [scientists] as people, not minor deities. We observe them in their workplaces, interpret their documents, and propose explanations for their activities that make sense of them, given other things we know about human beings.”

His latest gift to science studies, in March 2006, is a review of Scientific Values and Civic Virtues, edited byNoretta Koertge. It is reliable, still unabashed Fuller.

While it is relatively harmless to insist that mastery of a scientific specialty requires training in certain techniques, it is more problematic (pace Kuhn) to insist that all such specialists share the same disciplinary narrative – and still more problematic to require that they pledge allegiance to the same philosophical world-view, say, what the US National Academy of Sciences calls “methodological naturalism.” It makes for bad philosophy, bad science, and bad politics. Yet, we seem to be sliding down this slippery slope, which in the past has led to loyalty oaths and in the future could lead to the genetic profiling of people as unfit for scientific endeavors because of their propensity to belief in, say, the supernatural.

Yes, it could. As one reader of B&W dryly commented, “or, ‘in the future could lead to people having marmalade forced up their nostrils.’ or, ‘in the future could lead to people having their eyebrows shaved while dozing.’” Fuller seems to convince no one but fellow practitioners of ‘science studies’, but he makes a nice living in the process, so there you go.

Update, October 31 2009: Steve Fuller has drawn the spotlight to himself again, this time by posting an ‘obituary’ of Norman Levitt four days after his death.

Norman Levitt has died, aged 66, of heart failure. He was awarded a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton at age 24 in 1967 but his fame rests mainly on having been one of the great ‘Science Warriors’, especially via the book he co-authored with biologist Paul Gross, Higher Superstition (Johns Hopkins, 1994). I put the point this way because I imagine that Levitt as someone of great unfulfilled promise — mathematicians typically fulfil their promise much earlier than other academics – who then decided that he would defend the scientific establishment from those who questioned its legitimacy. Why? Well, one reason would be to render his own sense of failure intelligible…And yes, what I am offering is an ad hominem argument, but ad hominem arguments are fallacies only when they are used indiscriminately. In this case, it helps to explain – and perhaps even excuse – Levitt’s evolution into a minor science fascist.

I believe that Levitt’s ultimate claim to fame may rest on his having been as a pioneer of cyber-fascism, whereby a certain well-educated but (for whatever reason) academically disenfranchised group of people have managed to create their own parallel universe of what is right and wrong in matters of science, which is backed up (at least at the moment) by nothing more than a steady stream of invective. Their resentment demands a scapegoat — and ‘postmodernists’ function as Jews had previously. My guess is that very few academically successful people have ever thought about – let alone supported — what Levitt touted as “science’s side” in the Science Wars. Nevertheless, I am sure that a strong constituency for Levitt’s message has long existed amongst science’s many failed aspirants.

This ‘obituary’ has so far (four days after its posting) attracted 115 comments, nearly all of them expressing profound disgust.

In Dublin on May 20 2009 the Commission to Investigate Child Abuse released its report on abuse of children in industrial schools run by religious orders in Ireland. The period covered by the Investigation Committee Inquiry is from 1936 to the present, but “mostly from a period during which large scale institutionalisation was the norm, which was, in effect, the period between the Cussen Report (1936) and the Kennedy report (1970).”

As Patsy McGarry put it in the Irish Times, “The report, that runs to thousands of pages, outlined a harrowing account of the emotional, physical and sexual abuse inflicted on young people who attended schools and institutions from 1940 onwards.” Ireland and the rest of the world read the account with shock and horror.

A few passages from The Executive Summary give a hint of the flavour:

Artane

“Artane was founded in 1870 and was certified for 830 boys. This was almost four times the size of any other school in the State. The size of Artane and the regimentation and military-style discipline required to run it were persistent complaints by ex-pupils and ex-staff members alike. The numbers led to problems of supervision and control, and children were left feeling powerless and defenceless in the face of bullying and abuse by staff and fellow pupils. Although physical care was better than in some schools, it was still poorly provided and so imbued with the harshness of the underlying regime that children constantly felt under threat and fearful.

All of the witnesses who made allegations against Artane complained of physical abuse. This abuse is outlined in full both from the documents and the evidence of witnesses. Conclusions on physical abuse are contained at Paragraph 7.311 of Volume I and state that physical punishment of boys in Artane was excessive and pervasive and, because of its arbitrary nature, led to a climate of fear amongst the boys.”

Letterfrack

“The school in Letterfrack was founded in 1885 and was situated in a remote hillside location in Connemara, miles away from Galway or from public transport. The remoteness of Letterfrack was a common theme of complainants and of Brothers who had worked there. It was an inhospitable, bleak, isolated institution accessable only by car or bicycle and out of reach for family or friends of boys incarcerated there.

Physical punishment was severe, excessive and pervasive and by being administered in public or within earshot of other children it was used as a means of engendering fear and ensuring control.

Sexual abuse was a chronic problem. For two thirds of the relevant period there was at least one sexual abuser in the school, for almost one third of the period there were two abusers in the school and at times there were three abusers working in Letterfrack at the same time. Two abusers were present for periods of 14 years each and the Congregation could offer no explanation as to how these Brothers could have remained in the School for so long undetected and unreported.”

Goldenbridge

“A high level of physical abuse was perpetrated by Religious and lay staff in Goldenbridge. The method of inflicting punishments and the implements used were cruel and excessive and physical punishment was an immediate response to even minor infractions. Children were in constant fear of beatings and in many cases were beaten for no apparent reason. A feature of this school was a rosary bead industry that was operated from the school. This industry was conducted in a way that imposed impossible standards on children and caused great suffering to many of them. It was a school that was characterised by a regime of extreme drudgery, both in terms of the rosary bead making and the daily workload of the children.

Goldenbridge was an emotionally abusive institution. Girls were humiliated and belittled on a regular basis and treated with contempt by some staff members. It was characterised by an absence of kindness or sympathy for the children.”

The report rebuked the Department of Education:

“The Department was lacking in ideas about policy. It made no attempt to impose changes that would have improved the lot of the detained children. Indeed, it never thought about changing the system.

The failures by the Department that are catalogued in the chapters on the schools can also be seen as tacit acknowledgment by the State of the ascendancy of the Congregations and their ownership of the system. The Departments’ Secretary General, at a public hearing, told the Investigation Committee that the Department had shown a ‘very significant deference’ towards the religious Congregations. This deference impeded change, and it took an independent intervention in the form of the Kennedy Report in 1970 to dismantle a long out-dated system.”

Extracts from letters on the Letters page here also give a flavour.

Kathleen O’Brien, May 17

[T]he rosary factory was there in 1950 as well as the children making and glueing brown paper bags for shop’s,in ireland.making and sewing underware for export knitting jumpers and socks for the nuns to sell to shops ,there was no Education except Religious education, Domestic work which we had to an exam for which was cleaning and basic cooking ,inspectors came and examined our work, THAT WAS OUR EXAM.The Redress Board was set up to terrorise and frighten vonourable survivors into silenceing them forever,you are right there were only 3 girls in goldenbridge during the late 1950’s who were sent to the Outside national school…Survivors were put through more suffering at the redress board by being Insulted with infamitory remarks about the survivors parents and told it was their fault and the fault of their parents that children were sentenced into reformatories to be Beaten ,Starved,that they were NOT effected by what happened to them in Industrial reformatories But rather it was because their parents were Genetically inadequate ,this of course is so cruel,insults were thrown at survivors,many could not face going through any more and just excepted i silence ,and went away even more traumatised,hurt and deeply upset.and knew they had no choice to try and go on to the high court,they had no chance…

May Cornish, May 28

I am a 76 year old lady and I was in goldenbridge from 1935 to 1950 . We not only made rosary beeds we also Knitted all kinds of hats. gloves. Jumpers socks.
If you had no family at 16 years you were sent to hospitals and others places for domestic work you were not even a change og clothes. If you were in from infancy it was like going to a forigen country and you still had no woe to ask for help . I only found out in 1998 that I had sisters and a brother my children were brought up with no aunts or uncles and no grandparents as all my mothers letters which were written in the 40s were withell.

Internal Resources

Marie-Therese O’Loughlin, The Goldenbridge Secret Rosary Bead Factory

Marie-Therese O’Loughlin, Goldenbridge II

The lives of most women in the industrialized world have improved enormously over the past hundred years, and especially so, in social, cultural, political, and human rights terms, over the past forty. But in the rest of the world, a great many women lead lives of misery and sometimes of plain horror. They are often considered and treated as the property of men: as children they are seen as burdens, to be married off as soon as possible, and as adults they are sex tools, reproductive machines, and domestic labour. When things go wrong – when sexual rumours are floating around, when the crops fail, when a child falls ill – they are scapegoats to be punished, often ferociously. They have few if any rights, they are kept out of school as children, they are illiterate, they receive less food than men however hard they work, they are confined to the house or required to wear stifling, movement-inhibiting clothing if they go outside, they are denied medical treatment, they are forbidden to vote or drive cars, and they are whipped or beaten if they disobey.

This is not to exaggerate. Consider, for example:

• In June 2002 a panchayat, or tribal council, in the Punjabi village of Meerwala presided over the trial of a woman named Mukhtaran Mai. Her 12-year-old brother had been accused (falsely, it turned out) of having an affair with a woman from the higher-caste Mastoi tribe. In punishment, the elders ordered that Mukhtaran be raped. As several hundred people watched, four men dragged her screaming through a cotton field. Pushing her into a mud-walled house, they assaulted her for more than an hour.
• When crops fail or children die of mysterious illnesses, villagers in northern Ghana often suspect witchcraft. Fearing for their lives, hundreds of elderly women in northern Ghana have banded together for protection in sanctuaries known as “witch camps”.
• During the famine in Niger in the summer of 2005, there were villages in which women and children went hungry while there was still food in their households. Men were leaving their families in order to find work, locking the grain store while they were away. There were women in the villages who had hungry children, but no access to the stocks of sorghum and millet in the granary. There is widespread polygamy in Niger; men take more than one wife, and each woman is given a small plot to support herself and her own children. The women also have to work on the larger family fields, but they have no control over and no access to the production from these large fields.
• In Jharkhand, India, Ramani Devi was badly tortured after being branded a witch: “I was tortured and forced to eat human excreta just because I was branded a witch by the ojhas (witch doctors),” she reported. According to the crime branch of the Jharkhand police, 190 witch killings have been reported in the past five years.
• In Guatemala, a man can escape a rape charge if he marries his victim, as long as she is over the age of twelve; having sex with a minor is an offence only if the girl can prove she is “honest” and did not act provocatively; a battered wife can prosecute her husband only if her injuries are visible for more than ten days.
• In the same country, the bodies of girls and women are often found trussed with barbed wire, horrifically mutilated, insults carved into the flesh, raped, murdered, beheaded and dumped on a roadside. Bodies are appearing at an average of two a day this year: 312 in the first five months, adding to the 1,500 females raped, tortured and murdered in the past four years.

Such treatment is generally sustained and protected by a combination of religion and culture; that combination makes reform very difficult. It is worth examining the way religion and culture function to shield the oppression of women from criticism not only locally but also globally, so that it is not only councils in Punjab and priests in Nigeria who keep the shackles on, but also multiculturalists and diversity-celebrators in the rich world who, muttering apologetically about cultural imperialism, look the other way.

There are also large pockets of conservative inegalitarian treatment of women in the industrialized world, for instance among fundamentalist Christians in the US, Muslims in the UK and Europe, ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel, and Catholics in Ireland. This In Focus will collect material on the subject.

The cartoons of the prophet Mohammed were published in the Jyllands-Posten on September 30. On October 17th the Egyptian newspaper al-Fagr reprinted some of the cartoons (calling them a ‘continuing insult’). On October 20th ambassadors from ten majority-Muslim countries complained to the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who said, ‘The government refuses to apologize because the government does not control the media or a newspaper outlet; that would be in violation of the freedom of speech.’

Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs Aboul Gheit wrote to the Danish PM and the UN. In December the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, sent a letter to the Organisation of Islamic Conferences, which had complained about the cartoons. She told the OIC she deplored ‘any statement or act showing a lack of respect towards other people’s religion.’ The newspaper Berlingske Tidende reported the letter said ‘Arbour had appointed UN experts in the areas of religious freedom and racism to investigate the matter.’

A group of Danish imams put together a brochure with the twelve cartoons from the Jyllands-Posten (most of which were quite anodyne), took it to Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Turkey in December and January and showed it around. To enhance the effect, they thoughtfully added three new ones that were nothing to do with the Danish newspaper. (It appears that that fact was not heavily emphasized during the travels of the imams and the brochure, however.) One of the three added cartoons was passed off as a cartoon of the prophet in the guise of a pig, but it turned out to be an Associated Press photograph of a man at a pig-squealing contest at an agricultural fair in southern France in August. The AP was not greatly pleased with this misuse of its photograph.

The Danish imams got their way, and protests against the cartoons escalated sharply in early February. And then the pressure to submit began. From Sarah Joseph in the Guardian:

Any depiction of Muhammad, however temperate, is not allowed. There are but a few images of him in Muslim history, and even these are shown with his face veiled. This applies not only to images of Muhammad: no prophet is to be depicted. There are no images of God in Islam either.

From Paul Vallely in the Independent:

Images of the Prophet Mohamed have long been discouraged in Islam. The West has little understanding of why this should be so – nor of the intensity of the feelings aroused by non-believers’ attitudes to the founder of Islam…[T]o reject and criticise Mohamed is to reject and criticise Allah himself. Criticism of the Prophet is therefore equated with blasphemy, which is punishable by death in some Muslim states. When Salman Rushdie, in his novel The Satanic Verses, depicted Mohamed as a cynical schemer and his wives as prostitutes, the outcome was – to those with any understanding of Islam – predictable. But understanding of Islam is sorely lacking in the West.

From Jack Straw:

There is freedom of speech, we all respect that. But there is not any obligation to insult or to be gratuitously inflammatory. I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been insulting, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong. There are taboos in every religion. We have to be very careful about showing the proper respect in this situation.

From US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack:

Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images or any other religious belief.

From the Pope:

The right of freedom of thought and of expression, as contained in the Declaration of Human Rights, cannot imply the right to offend the religious feelings of believers.

From EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini, who told the Telegraph that there was a “very real problem” in the EU of balancing “two fundamental freedoms, the freedom of expression and the freedom of religion”:

The press will give the Muslim world the message: we are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression, we can and we are ready to self-regulate that right.

From Kofia Annan:

Annan condemned the drawings…as “insensitive and rather offensive,”…He said the drawings, one of which shows Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb, could be seen as vilifying a religion with more than 1 billion adherents. Annan said he defends free speech, but insisted “it has to come with some sense of responsibility and judgment and limits. There are times when you have to challenge taboos,” he said. “But you don’t fool around with other people’s religions and you have to respect what is sacred to other people.”

From a student union spokeswoman at the University of Cardiff:

A student union spokeswoman said Tom Wellingham, the editor of the paper, which won newspaper of the year at last year’s Guardian’s Student Media Awards, had been suspended alongside three other journalists. “The editorial team enjoy the normal freedoms and independence associated with the press in the UK, and are expected to exercise those freedoms with responsibility, due care and judgment.”

From the Guardian:

The Guardian believes uncompromisingly in freedom of expression, but not in any duty to gratuitously offend…To directly associate the founder of one of the world’s three great monotheistic religions with terrorist violence – the unmistakable meaning of the most explicit of these cartoons – is wrong, even if the intention was satirical rather than blasphemous…The volatile context of this issue, with its echoes of the furore over Salman Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses, cannot be ignored…The extraordinary unanimity of the British press in refraining from publishing the drawings – in contrast to the Nordic countries, Germany, Spain and France – speaks volumes. John Stuart Mill is a better guide to this issue than Voltaire.

Other people had better sense. Ibn Warraq:

The cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten raise the most important question of our times: freedom of expression. Are we in the west going to cave into pressure from societies with a medieval mindset, or are we going to defend our most precious freedom — freedom of expression, a freedom for which thousands of people sacrificed their lives? A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend…Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest.

Matthew Parris:

I’m afraid we really do have to decide whether the demand is reasonable. I do not think it is. I am not a Muslim. Nor am I a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu…But let us not duck what that “I do not believe” really means. It means I do not believe that there is one God, Allah, or that Muhammad is His Prophet. It means I do not believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, or that no man cometh to the Father except by Him…In my opinion these views are profoundly mistaken, and those who subscribe to them are under a serious misapprehension on a most important matter. Not only are their views not true for me: they are not true for them. They are not true for anyone. They are wrong.

Christopher Hitchens:

As well as being a small masterpiece of inarticulacy and self-abnegation, the statement from the State Department about this week’s international Muslim pogrom against the free press was also accidentally accurate…How appalling for the country of the First Amendment to be represented by such an administration. What does he mean “unacceptable”? That it should be forbidden?

David Pannick QC:

We respect the right of everyone to believe whatever they like: that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, Muhammad was God’s prophet, the Red Sea was parted for the Children of Israel or L. Ron Hubbard identified the path to total happiness. But there are two important limits to religious tolerance. First, I have no right to legal protection against your scepticism, criticism or ridicule. Religion is too powerful a force, and is too often a cause of injustice or evil, for it to be immune from discussion and debate…But in Europe it is not the role of the law, far less the Government, to prohibit or punish publications that sections of the community (whether Christians, Jews, Muslims or atheists) find offensive.

And Munira Mirza:

Censorship in the West bolsters the moral authority of leaders in the Middle East to censor their own citizens. Indeed, the religious leaders in Saudi Arabia and Palestine have been opportunistic in using the story as a way of galvanising support and reinforcing the view that only they can protect Muslims from victimisation. Counter to the claims of unelected ‘community leaders’, Muslims do not benefit from censorship…In Denmark, large numbers of moderate Muslims have sought to oppose the stranglehold of extremist Muslim lobby groups who claim to represent them. In Arhus, they have organised counter-demonstrations. One Muslim city councillor who was involved said: ‘There is a large group of Muslims in this city who want to live in a secular society and adhere to the principle that religion is an issue between them and God and not something that should involve society.’ It turns out that those sympathetic lefty anti-racists who believe censorship will protect Muslims are actually missing the point. Many Muslims want the same freedoms as everyone else to debate, criticise and challenge their religion.

OB

Internal Resources

What are we supposed to understand?

But how does anyone know the cartoons are of the Prophet?

Of course you can, except when you can’t

In the more innocent world of the 1950s there used to be on BBC radio a comedy programme called (appropriately) “Does the team think?” in which the participants were called upon to answer such tricky questions as “Who composed Beethoven’s 5th symphony?” An up-to-date version of this line of question might take the form “Who produced Einstein’s theory of special relativity?” Only in this case some people take the view that this is an entirely pertinent question, and indeed go further and would ask who wrote Einstein’s celebrated papers of 1905 on Brownian motion, special relativity, and the photoelectric effect.

It is not the case, of course, that they are suggesting that Einstein had no hand in writing these papers, only that he didn’t do it alone – he had a collaborator, his first wife Mileva Marić. The story goes that from their student days (1896-1900) they worked together on his extra-curricular interests in physics, and that this collaboration continued up to and beyond their marriage in January 1903. In fact, it is claimed, Marić co-authored the 1905 papers, only her name was removed from the papers when they were published in the prestigious German journal Annalen der Physik.

These contentions acquired something akin to official respectability in
the US with the broadcasting of an Australian Government funded documentary
called “Einstein’s Wife” on PBS in 2003, under the auspices of Oregon
Public Broadcasting. The documentary, Oregon PBS reported in a press release, “reveals the long-hidden relationship between Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić and the collaboration that revolutionized the world of physics.” That collaboration, we are told, was extremely successful: “In 1905, the pair submitted five papers for publication, three of which (Brownian Motion, Special Relativity Theory and the Photoelectric Effect) formed the most significant concepts of twentieth century physics. Soon after, while visiting Mileva’s family in Novi Sad, the two continued their work surrounding a particular problem. Some believe this is where Albert and Mileva discussed and debated what would become the formula E = mc2.”

In spite of these definitive pronouncements we are told: “Scholars continue to debate the scope of Mileva’s actual participation. For some, Mileva simply filled the role of a ‘sounding board’.” On the other hand: “Desanka Trubohvić, the first biographer to write about Mileva Marić, boldly suggested in her book that Mileva’s name was actually included in the original documents detailing the formula. If Trubohvić’s assertion is true, why was the name removed when the paper was published? As Dr Evan Harris Walker summarizes: ‘What are the facts? The facts are that there are about a dozen statements in Albert Einstein’s own hand stating that they were collaborating on our theory, our work, our work on the relative motion’.”

So what are the facts? The Oregon PBS press release states that the “Einstein’s Wife” documentary “reveals the truth behind one of the great scientific collaborations of the twentieth century”. On the other hand Robert Schulmann, an historian involved with the Albert Einstein Collected Papers project, and the physicist Gerald Holton have written: “All serious Einstein scholarship, by Abraham Pais, John Stachel and others, has shown that the scientific collaboration between the couple was slight and one-sided…The true collaboration which they originally planned when they intended careers as high-school teachers never did develop. Nor is there a shred of documentary proof of [Marić’s] originality as a scientist.”

In articles below I investigate the “Einstein’s Wife” documentary and the PBS website material, and closely examine the claims of the main proponents of the contention that Mileva Marić contributed substantively to Einstein’s early scientific achievements.

Allen Esterson

Internal Resources

Allen Esterson on PBS’s complicity in the dissemination of tall stories about the alleged role of Einstein’s first wife in his early scientific achievements.

Alberto Martinez on Einstein’s wife and the need to inspect historical claims carefully.

Allen Esterson issues a challenge to PBS.

Allen Esterson asks how the notion that Mileva Marić helped Einstein with his mathematics got around.

Allen Esterson offers an open letter to PBS.

An update to the open letter to PBS.

Update November 2007.

Michael Ruse has a new book out: The Evolution-Creation Struggle. He has written a number of articles and reviews and given a few interviews on related subjects in the past year or two.

There was for instance this review of Richard Dawkins’ A Devil’s Chaplain in December 2003. In it he took strong issue with Dawkins, despite, as he says, their friendship: ‘Richard Dawkins once called me a “creep.” He did so very publicly but meant no personal offense, and I took none: We were, and still are, friends.’ He disagreed (and disagrees still) with Dawkins’ criticism of religion, which he calls a ‘crusade of nonbelief’. It is his view (at least in some of his recent articles and interviews) that the two ought simply to separate, in fact to segregate: to acknowledge that each has its own area where the other has no business, has nothing relevant to say, and that that rule should operate in both directions: that religion cannot gainsay science in science’s area, and that science cannot gainsay religion in religion’s area.

The problem with this is that religions, especially the monotheistic religions which are mostly the ones at issue here, make truth-claims about the actual existing physical world, and it’s very difficult to see how or why such claims could or should be off-limits to scientific questioning or criticism. The segregation approach seems unworkable and unreasonable unless religion is re-defined into something that never makes any truth-claims about the world at all. Religion would have to be a matter of pure spirit, which by definition can have no connection with the physical world and can make nothing happen there.

Susan Haack makes this point in Defending Science – Within Reason:

The commitment to naturalism is not merely the expression of a kind of scientific imperialism; for supernatural explanations are as alien to detective work and history or to our everyday explanations of spoiled food or delayed buses as they are to physics or biology. And the reason is not that supernatural explanations are alien to science; not that they appeal to the intentions of an agent; not that they rely on unobservable causes. The fundamental difficulty (familiar from the central mystery of Cartesian dualism, how mental substance could interact with physical substance) is rather that by appealing to the intentions of an agent which, being immaterial, cannot put its intentions into action by any physical means, they fail to explain at all.

And the reality is that that is decidedly not what most people mean by religion – and it’s certainly not what the Intelligent Design movement means by Intelligent Design, since there the whole point is decisive putting its intentions into action by physical means.’

This problem seems insoluble – so rhetoric steps in to bridge the gap. Ruse put it this way in the Devil’s Chaplain review:

People like Dawkins, and the Creationists for that matter, make a mistake about the purposes of science and religion. Science tries to tell us about the physical world and how it works. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and to our place in it. Science asks immediate questions. Religion asks ultimate questions. There is no conflict here, except when people mistakenly think that questions from one domain demand answers from the other.

There are several dificulties with that passage, and with the tactic it proposes (the same tactic Stephen Jay Gould urged in his equally rhetorical, equally unconvincing book Rocks of Ages). One is that, as we’ve just noted, the dichotomy it asserts is in fact, frankly, bogus. That ‘Science tries to tell us about the physical world and how it works. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and to our place in it’ implies that those are complete and exclusive characterizations: science tries to tell us about the physical world and does nothing else. Religion aims at giving a meaning to the world and does nothing else. But it is simply not true that religion does not try to tell us anything about the physical world. It (certainly in its theist instantiations) tells us there is an omnipotent and omniscient deity who created this physical world, who heeds and sometimes answers prayers, who knows and cares all about us. A god who created the physical world can’t very well be radically separate from it. Saying otherwise is merely a kind of escape clause.

There are other problems with the passage. There is the fact that religion is far from the only system of ideas that aims at giving a meaning to the world: people do that in a variety of ways, including science: many people get meaning precisely from the wonder, excitement, interest, joy of discovery and inquiry. There is the parallel fact that religion is far from the only system of ideas that asks ultimate questions, and many other systems of ideas do a much better job of it, because they accept that there is no answer. In fact there is some evasion, again, in that formula: religion does do more than ask questions, it also answers them, with (unwarranted) certainty and finality. But the answers it gives are wrong. They are based on inaccurate truth-claims about the world, so their certainty and finality rest on false premises. (Though they do in a sense ‘work’ for many people, in that they are consoling, which may be part of the reason Ruse offers these rhetorical formulations.)

What Ruse has been arguing lately is somewhat controversial, so it is worth gathering up the controversy. Here it is.

Internal Resources

‘Aims To’

Religion Aims, Again

Meaning

Let’s Not Debate Intelligent Design

A Subtle Ruse, But It Won’t Do

Who’s Insisting?

Muddy Waters

Page Missing

Dodgy Ruse

Haack v Ruse

Up is not Down

Many people and groups have called (especially, for obvious reasons, recently) for the secularization of Islamic societies, for reform of Islam and Koranic laws, and for less attention and publicity for fundamentalist groups and putative ‘leaders’ and ‘representatives’ like the Muslim Council of Britain, and more for secular and rationalist groups and individuals.

Salman Rushdie for example:

However, this is the same [Iqbal] Sacranie who, in 1989, said that “Death is perhaps too easy” for the author of “The Satanic Verses.” Tony Blair’s decision to knight him and treat him as the acceptable face of “moderate,” “traditional” Islam is either a sign of his government’s penchant for religious appeasement or a demonstration of how limited Blair’s options really are…The Sacranie case illustrates the weakness of the Blair government’s strategy of relying on traditional, essentially orthodox Muslims to help eradicate Islamist radicalism. Traditional Islam is a broad church that certainly includes millions of tolerant, civilized men and women but also encompasses many whose views on women’s rights are antediluvian, who think of homosexuality as ungodly, who have little time for real freedom of expression, who routinely express anti-Semitic views…What is needed is a move beyond tradition — nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air.

Irshad Manji for another, in May 2005:

A Muslim woman author, once described as Osama bin Laden’s worst nightmare, is to call for the setting up of an Islamic reform movement to press for a change in the faith’s attitudes towards human rights, women and pluralist societies at a public meeting this week. Irshad Manji, a Canadian-based writer and broadcaster, is to launch her campaign for Ijtihad (independent thinking) with a claim for Islamic pluralism and the aim of setting up a foundation for young, reform-minded Muslims to explore and challenge their faith. “No community, no ethnicity, no culture and no religion ought to be immune from respecting the universality of human rights,” she said. “This, of course, is a controversial message in an age of cultural relativism. I truly believe we can become pluralists without becoming relativists. Through our screaming self-pity and conspicuous silences, we Muslims are conspiring against ourselves. We’re in crisis and we are dragging the rest of the world with us. If ever there was a moment for an Islamic reformation, it is now.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali for another:

Islam as compiled in the Qur’an and Hadith could be viewed as static. The way Muslims believe or practice their religion is dynamic. The individual Muslim can choose to change. As humans they are endowed with reason and, if free, Muslims can, as Christians and Jews have done in the past and still do, progress by means of critical self-reflection.

There is an Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society:

We share the ideals of a democratic society, and a secular state that does not endorse any religion, religious institution, or any religious dogma. The basis for its authority is in man-made law, not in religious doctrine or in divine revelation. In a theocracy of the type that Islamic fundamentalists wish to establish, sovereignty belongs to god, but in a democracy sovereignty belongs to the people. We therefore favor the firm separation of religion and state: without such a separation there can be no freedom from tyranny, and such a separation is the sine qua non for a secular state…We endorse the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenants on Human Rights without qualification. We are particularly concerned to promote and protect the rights of women and those with minority beliefs: all should be equal before the law.

Maryam Namazie, an Iranian exile who was imprisoned in Iran, speaks tirelessly for reform:

The urgent question we must all ask ourselves is how can we defend secularism, universalism and values worthy of 21st century humanity? I believe it is only via another transformative enlightenment by this century’s avant-gardes. We must give no more concessions to religion, superstition and cultural relativism; we must no longer respect and tolerate inhuman ideals, values and practices. An uncompromising and shamelessly aggressive demand for secularism is only a minimum, though, if we are to ensure that women’s rights are safeguarded and that the human being is put first and foremost. Today, more than ever, we are in need of the de-religionisation of society.

That’s just a small sample. B&W has a large collection of articles and links on the subject, so it’s time to collect them in one place.

Internal Resources

Homa Arjomand on Sharia Law and the Globalization of Political Islam

Political Islam in the heart of secular Europe.
Time for another transformative enlightenment.

Islam, Political Islam and Women in the Middle East

The conflict between minority and collective rights versus individual rights

Political Islam v Secularism.
Azar Majedi says Islamism is best understood as political rather than fundamentalist

Azar Majedi condemns the murder of Theo van Gogh

Maryam Namazie points out that defending secularism has nothing to do with racism

Maryam Namazie on The Politics Behind Cultural Relativism

Azam Kamguian on why Sharia should be opposed by everyone who believes in human rights.

Azam Kamguian on what the hijab does to young girls

Ibn Warraq takes Edward Said to task for a one-eyed view of the relationship between the Arab and Western worlds

A one-day conference was held at the United Nations in Geneva on April 18 2005, titled ‘Victims of Jihad: Human Rights Abuse in the Name of Islam’. The conference occurred during the last week of the 61st session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. On April 12, the Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution condemning the ‘defamation’ of religion. The resolution, titled ‘Combating Defamation of Religions,’ expresses ‘deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.’ The ‘Victims of Jihad’ conference cast doubt on the wording of that resolution, and the thought behind it.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Azam Kamguian, and Ibn Warraq all addressed the conference, and all kindly sent the text of their speeches to Butterflies and Wheels. Here, for your convenience, they all are.

Internal Resources

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: ‘Women Victims of Islam’

Ibn Warraq: ‘Apostasy, Human Rights, Religion and Belief’

Azam Kamguian: ‘We Need to Fight the Battle for Enlightenment’

Some UK animal rights campaigners take the movement to have won a great victory. More rational proponents of animal rights may well think the victory is decidedly Pyrrhic.

The Darley Oaks Farm in Newchurch, Staffordshire, which has been breeding guinea pigs for medical research for more than 30 years, has decided to stop because of a campaign of intimidation by ‘activists’. The owners of the farm and employees have received death threats, and the body of a relative was stolen from a churchyard in October 2004 and has never been found. Suppliers of the farm were also subject to intimidation, as the BBC reported:

Rod Harvey supplied fuel to the farm and endured four years of abuse from activists before he was forced to cease trading with the Halls. The 63-year-old businessman said he received threatening letters, including one accusing him of being a paedophile which was then sent to a number of people he knew.

Scientists and the government expressed anger and frustration at this outcome. By coincidence, a declaration of support for animal testing for medical research was published the day after the news of the Darley Oaks Farm decision, on August 24, 2005. The declaration was signed by more than 500 UK scientists and doctors, including three Nobel laureates (Sir Paul Nurse, Dr Tim Hunt and Sir John Sulston), 190 Fellows of the Royal Society and the Medical Royal Colleges, and more than 250 professors. The Department of Trade and Industry condemned the campaign of intimidation:

It is wholly unacceptable that a small minority of animal extremists should mount a campaign of fear and intimidation in an attempt to stop individuals and companies going about their lawful and legitimate business.

the Guardian reported that the closure of Darley Oaks Farm caused worries about the possibility of medical research in the UK:

‘They will make Britain a place where we cannot do clinically relevant research,’ warned Roger Morris, a leading CJD researcher at King’s College London. ‘When we talk to colleagues in Europe and America, Britain is seen as a place where you cannot do animal research.’

And Simon Festing from the Research Defence Society pointed out that guinea pig research had led to 23 Nobel prizes in medicine.

It is appalling that a small bunch of criminal extremists can close down a legitimate business supplying animals to medical research.

The Guardian quotes Colin Blakemore, the chief executive of the Medical Research Council, on the issue:

I was involved in the original declaration 15 years ago. It is as important now as it was then to show that scientists and doctors are fully aware of the importance of animal research to science and medicine. Of course animals must be cared for properly and never used unless absolutely necessary. This is how we do research and it would be illegal to do it any other way.

Blakemore discussed the issues in some detail in an interview with Jeremy Stangroom in What Scientists Think.

[T]he Royal Society has recently published a pretty comprehensive study which says that virtually every medical advance in the last century has depended on the use of animals in research at some point; or with the statement from the Department of Health, in its evidence to the House of Lords committee on animal experimentation, that the National Health Service could not operate without the foundation of the knowledge which animal research has built. The overwhelming view of the scientific establishment, and I’m not using that expression in a pejorative way, is that animal research is necessary for progress in medical science…Ninety-nine percent of physicians in the United States say that it is essential to use animals in medical research; and more than ninety-five percent of British physicians say the same thing. So whilst it is important to listen to maverick opinion, it is clear we shouldn’t put too much weight on it when one considers that the American Medical Association, the Royal Society, the British Medical Association, and the General Medical Council all state that animal experimentation is necessary.

It would be nice if all medical research could be done with computer modelling, but unfortunately that is not the case. It would also be nice if leopards and eagles and pythons all ate lentils instead of sentient animals, but that is not the case either.

Recommended Reading

Jeremy Stangroom, What Scientists Think

Home Secretary David Blunkett wants to make incitement to religious hatred a crime. A good many people are queuing up to express doubts, as they did last July, when Blunkett was flogging the idea on ‘Today’ by saying that people would still be allowed to express opinions about religion – as long as they were sensible. Johann Hari said many good (even sensible) things then:

One of the unfortunate side-effects of multiculturalism is that it has made even the left reluctant to criticise religion. Any attack on other belief systems is seen as tantamount to racism – a trend that David Blunkett seeks to reinforce with his proposals to criminalise ‘incitement to religious hatred’. This is a false link: we each choose our faith; nobody chooses the colour of their skin…The equality of human beings is integral to the Enlightenment rationalist tradition; the way to defend equality is by defending that tradition and seeking to extend it, not by adopting some fake and disingenuous notion that all ‘cultures’ – including slave-owning theocratic belief systems – are somehow equal.

But sadly, the sensible things a lot of people said had no effect, so they are simply having to say them all over again. Rowan Atkinson, who has taken part in the odd anti-clerical joke from time to time, did his bit:

Unfortunately, what is very arguable is the definition of the terms – the definition of a tolerant society. Is a tolerant society one in which you tolerate absurdities, iniquities and injustices simply because they are being perpetrated by or in the name of a religion and out of a desire not to rock the boat you pass no comment or criticism. So as not to cause discomfort to anyone, not to cause embarrassment. A society with a veneer of tolerance concealing a snake pit of un-aired and of course unchallenged views…In the draft of legislation, it is suggested that we simply substitute the words ‘racial hatred’ for ‘racial or religious hatred’, as if race and religion are basically the same thing and we no longer need to distinguish between them. Race and religion are fundamentally different concepts, even if for many individuals, the two are inextricably linked. To criticise a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous but to criticise their religion, that is a right. That is a freedom. The freedom to criticise ideas – any ideas – even if they are sincerely held beliefs – is one of the fundamental freedoms of society and a law which attempts to say you can criticise or ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed.

What the supporters of the idea say to allay worries of that kind is not as reassuring as it might be:

Sadiq Khan, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, said the bill closed a loophole which meant those who incite hatred against Christians and Muslims could not be prosecuted. “The law will not mean that comedians like Rowan Atkinson cannot take the piss out of religion,” he added.

Easily said, but how does Mr Khan know that? And what about comedians unlike Rowan Atkinson? And journalists, writers, streetcorner skeptics, village atheists, the man on the Clapham omnibus – what about any and all of us who have our quarrels with religion and don’t want to be told to keep them to ourselves on pain of imprisonment? Is Mr Khan going to tell us the law will not mean that we will have to talk about other things from now on? It’s hard to see how he can say that, when that seems to be exactly the point of such a law: to forbid people to criticise religion in any but the most anodyne inoffensive ways.

Internal Resources

Blunkett on Today

How About Religious Mild Dislike?

Return of the Repressed

This one is self-explanatory. It’s where we store the irrationalist, social constructivist, postmodernist, ‘High Theoretical’ and other Nonsense that we find. Check it often, because there is always more.

Fashionable Nonsense, as we have observed before, is a Hydra with many heads, a book with many chapters, a motel with many rooms, a folder with many files. There is, in short, no end to it. But in the great thronging crowd-scene that is Fashionable Nonsense, there is one exemplar that stands out like Abe Lincoln addressing the Munchkins. Freud and psychoanalysis are in a class by themselves for their ability to go on being taken seriously and at face value by otherwise rational intellectuals, in the teeth of all the evidence.

It’s not as if it’s a closely-guarded secret. Jeffrey Masson’s publication of the Freud-Fliess letters in 1985, for example, got a lot of attention and sparked much controversy and debate. Hans Eysenck’s Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire in the same year, E. Fuller Torrey’s Freudian Fraud in 1992, Allen Esterson’s Seductive Mirage in 1993, Richard Webster’s Why Freud Was Wrong and Frederick Crews’ The Memory Wars in 1995, Ernest Gellner’s The Psychoanalytic Movement in 1996, Malcolm Macmillan’s Freud Evaluated in 1997, and Frank Cioffi’s Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience and Unauthorized Freud edited by Frederick Crews in 1998 are some of the most prominent of a large number of recent books pointing out Freud’s errors, deceptions, evasions, concealments, and bullying of both patients and colleagues (or followers, which is what they had to be if they wanted to be part of the circle). But the word doesn’t get through – not where it needs to get through. Scientifically based (falsifiable, peer-reviewed, empirical, etc) psychology ignores Freud, but in the humanistic and to some extent in the social scientific branches of inquiry, Freud remains, intact, indeed possibly more influential than ever. For instance the Cambridge series of companions to philosophers inexplicably includes Freud in their number – Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant – and Freud? It’s difficult not to think of this as a dodge. Whatever scientific reputation Freud had is in shreds – so just move him to the philosophy department? He turns out to have been incompetent, dishonest, and cultishly authoritarian in his own chosen line of work, so to save appearances just give him a chair in a different one? His very assertive truth-claims turn out to be all bogus, so naturally the philosophy department is the right slot for him.

It seems he belongs more in a museum of errors, with studies of the four humours, the benefits of blood-letting, pre-Copernican astronomy, the forensics of witchcraft, alchemy, phrenology and phlogiston. His work on ‘hysteria’ turns out to be worthless, because he and Charcot mistook physical brain-injuries that were too small to see for emotional trauma that caused bodily effects. The operation on Emma Eckstein’s nose to cure her ‘nasal reflex neurosis’ and the half-meter of gauze Fliess and Freud left behind, nearly killing her, is well-known, along with Freud’s whimsical interpretation that Eckstein hemmorhaged in order to entice Freud, because she had a crush on him. The treatment of Dora is another bright spot, as is that of ‘Anna O’ – and on it goes.

And yet – despite all this, despite the massive documentation and examination of it, literary critics and ‘theorists’ and even some philosophers go on taking Freud seriously – very seriously indeed. (As do psychoanalysts, of course. Psychoanalysis is a highly remunerative field.) Why? That is something of a mystery. It seems to have a lot to do with the idea of the unconscious – which Freud was far from being the first to think about or discuss, but which his partisans seem to think is inextricable from his fate. It also seems to have to do with vague and vaguely-expressed ideas about human depth, complexity, profundity, imagination. The thought appears to be that if Freud goes, human psychology becomes a thing of gears and levers or of pills, with nothing of interest to say. Why this should be remains unclear – so let us investigate.

OB

Internal Resources

Allen Esterson dissects a BBC radio programme on Freud and hysteria

Allen Esterson examines an error-strewn article in Scientific American by neuroscientist Mark Solms

Allen Esterson debunks some of the myths surrounding Freud’s seduction theory

Frederick Crews replies to Norman Holland’s ‘Psychoanalysis as Science’

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen on the zero theory of psychoanalysis

Frank Cioffi on the pseudoscience question

Optimists like to think, and say, that religion and secularism can co-exist peacefully. That each has its own realm – its Nonoverlapping Magisterium, as Stephen Jay Gould so mistakenly called it – and there is no need for rivalry or conflict. That ‘science’ (which is never defined when such assertions are being made) can answer the questions in its realm, and religion can answer the questions in its. Of course, that raises the obvious question, can it really? Can religion really answer the questions that ‘science’ (i.e. rational inquiry) cannot? ‘Answer’ in what sense? In the sense of saying something? No doubt it can do that, but then so can anyone else. In the sense of saying something true? But how do we know the ‘answer’ is true? Because religion says so? But that just goes around in a circle. Because it’s written in a book? But there are other books that give different answers. Because we evaluate the answers in a rational manner as we do with any other form of rational inquiry? But then we’re in that other realm. Is there a fourth possibility? Because – what? Religious people have some special wisdom or insight? If so, where does it come from? And so on. The questions are endless, and the claim for religion’s jurisdiction over the questions that science and rational inquiry cannot answer rests on very shaky premises.

Perhaps that is why pessimists disagree with optimists about the possibilities for peaceful co-existence. Perhaps it is because we are reluctant to accept claims that are based on mere assertion and authority and tradition, and we know from experience that that reluctance makes many religious people very angry. Perhaps it is because we know that claims that rest on shaky premises are just the ones that people tend to enforce with violence.

Ill-founded claims are the ones that get backed up with sticks, car antennas, guns, threats, petitions, calls for silencing, fatwas. There is a lot of that sort of thing around. The anger at the American scholar of mythology James Laine and his book about the Hindu king Shivaji is one example. A mob attacked and vandalized the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in January, destroying books and irreplaceable manuscripts. Scholars sat in tears among the wreckage afterward. In March the state of Maharashtra where the BORI is located sought the help of Interpol in arresting and extraditing James Laine. Other scholars of mythology such as Wendy Doniger and Paul Courtright are the object of threats and worse. ‘Vedic’ science and mathematics are introduced into the public school curriculum and history textbooks are altered without the consent of their authors, as the articles by Meera Nanda and Latha Menon for Butterflies and Wheels tell us. The war against research, inquiry, secularism, independent thought, scholarship and rationality goes on and indeed intensifies. It is a trend that needs watching.

Apposite Quotations

The fury with which untenable beliefs are defended is inversely proportional to their defensibility.
Richard Dawkins: The Annual Edge Question 2004

Internal Resources

Latha Menon on the Saffron Infusion

Meera Nanda on Postmodernism and Fundamentalism

Meera Nanda on Postmodernism and ‘Vedic Science’

Meera Nanda on Postmodernism and ‘Vedic Science’ Part 2

Vaccinations are one of the great success stories of modern medicine – so successful, perhaps, that people have become complacent about the diseases vaccines prevent. At least, the bizarre panic over the triple jab for measles, mumps and rubella, the MMR jab, would suggest as much. Add a chronic background suspicion of science and doctors and the medical ‘establishment,’ along with the standards of evidence, peer review, accountability, rationality, statistics and risk-assesment that are fundamental to the way all three function, and you have the recipe for a full-blown attack of the irrationals.

In 1998 Andrew Wakefield, a research scientist at the Royal Free Hospital in London, published a paper showing that he had found traces of the measles virus in the intestines of 12 children with autism. Diagnosis of autism has been increasing in recent years, either because of increased incidence or because of improved diagnosis. As Ben Goldacre put it in the Guardian on December 11, ‘At a press conference, Wakefield suggested that MMR was dangerous and recommended the single vaccine,although with no real evidence to back this hunch. The panic began.’ The panic was then exacerbated further in late 2001 when Tony Blair refused to say whether or not his son Leo had had the jab, insisting that the health of his children was a private matter, and also insisting that he wouldn’t recommend any health measure for the public that he didn’t think was safe for his own children. Many people were not convinced.

Then there were reports that measles was returning to Britain, and the decline in the uptake of the MMR jab was thought to be the reason. One in five hundred cases of measles is fatal.

And now, in case that’s not enough of a problem, along come the entertainment industry to make things worse. A ‘docudrama,’ a fictionalized dramatized story about the mother of an autistic child and her search for reasons for his autism, her struggle with the callous brutal medical establishment, and her relief at finally finding Andrew Wakefield. A familiar pattern, naturally; the entertainment industry loves familiar patterns. This story combines elements of ‘Lorenzo’s Oil’ and ‘Erin Brockovitch,’ with dashes of ‘Not Without my Daughter,’ ‘Mask,’ and such – there is just nothing quite like a fierce impassioned mother battling a pack of cold heartless unmaternal enemies to save or cure or vindicate Her Child. And if fierce impassioned mother is played by Juliet Stevenson, well, say no more. Obviously she can’t possibly be wrong about whatever it is she’s impassioned about, because she’s so strong and brave and beautiful and good.

But alas however strong, brave, beautiful and good she is, there is much reason to think she is wrong, and almost none to think she is right. To quote Ben Goldacre again: ‘There’s a huge amount of research showing no link between MMR and autism, and no new type of autism, and no effect of immunisation on bowels; and there’s very, very little to suggest a link between MMR and autism.’ Researchers have tried to replicate Wakefield’s results, and had very little success. And it’s not as if it doesn’t matter – it’s not as if one might as well skip the jab to be on the safe side. Skipping it is not safe, it’s very dangerous. And yet apparently the people who made this tv show have no qualms about using all the arts of the screenwriter and actor to persuade people that this vaccination is dangerous. The irresponsibility is quite remarkable.

Organisations representing children’s doctors and nurses had joined forces to denounce a decision by Channel 5 to screen Hear The Silence, tomorrow night. Great Ormond Street Hospital and the Royal Colleges representing paediatricians and nurses warned that the programme was ‘reckless and irresponsible’, and could lead to a fall in the uptake of immunisation against measles, mumps and rubella…The charity Sense, which represents families whose children have become deaf or blind as a result of rubella, criticised her for her remarks. Stephen Rooney said: ‘Juliet Stevenson has no scientific or medical expertise and yet has given a number of interviews in which she has called into question the safety of the vaccine.’ But a spokesman for Channel 5 said last night that the actor had every right to make her views known. ‘Juliet Stevenson has never claimed to be a medical expert. She is expressing her views as a mother.’

Her views as a mother. No matter how ill-informed, how mistaken, how disregarding of evidence and statistics and probabilities, and how dangerous to other people – they are her views as a mother playing a mother, so they are sacrosanct. And as for the views of Channel 5 and the producers and screenwriter of Hear the Silence – well, no doubt they are the views of people in the entertainment industry in general. It’s a good story, people will watch it (especially now, with all this free publicity), it’s entertaining, it’s touching. What more is there to say?

Ophelia Benson

Internal Resources

Feisty mothers

Emotionally biased

Lorenzo’s oil redux

What Silence?

Ophelia Benson

It may seem like an exercise in administering corporal punishment to a deceased equine quadruped, to say harsh things about academic Bad Writing – but of course it’s not, for the cogent reason that the horse is not dead. Academic Bad Writing is indeed old news, and no secret. But it is also on-going: a thriving, flourishing, burgeoning industry with all too much product. The market is saturated, indeed the water is up over the second floor windows, but the rain keeps falling. The vampire keeps waking up every night to find fresh blood, so all we can do is keep pounding away on the stake through the heart.

Of course, one reason academic bad writing is evergreen is vocational. The bad writing in question is not the merely quotidian clunkiness and hack writing that’s inevitable in a vast profession under constant pressure to publish – it’s the notoriously opaque, preening, self-admiring, inflated prose of ‘theory.’ And for the moment, for whatever bizarre reason, ‘theory’ is what gets promoted and given tenure, therefore aspiring Assistant Professors and adjuncts have to crank it out, whether they actually like doing the stuff or not. But another reason, and one with a more malign effect, is the easy availability of an array of defense mechanisms. Bad writers have a set of self-flattering responses to criticism all ready and lined up, and they trot them out with alacrity whenever anyone suggests that they ought to make sense, as in this passage from the Introduction to the anthology Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin.

So the very project of theory is unsettling. It brings assumptions into question…And…it does so in what is often a forbidding and arcane style. Many readers are frightened off by the difficulty of theory, which they can then dismiss as an effort to cover up in an artifically difficult style the fact that it has nothing to say…Of course theory is difficult – sometimes for compelling reasons, sometimes because of offensive self-indulgence – but simply assuming that it is all empty rhetoric ultimately keeps you from confronting the real questions that theory raises.

There are several of the defense mechanisms at work in that one brief passage. The ‘project’ of theory is ‘unsettling,’ it brings assumptions into question. Ah – so that’s it. It’s not that the writing is bad, it’s that the readers who think it’s bad are 98-pound weaklings who turn pale and sick at unsettling projects. They are ‘frightened off,’ the poor cowardly things, by the ‘difficulty’ of theory – not the ineptitude, mind you, or the slavish imitativeness, or the endless formulaic repetition of repetition – no, the difficulty. So as a result they ‘can dismiss’ theory – not laugh at, not hold up to scorn and derision, or set fire to or thrust firmly into the bin or take back to the shop and loudly demand a refund – no, dismiss. And dismiss ‘as an effort to cover up in an artifically difficult style the fact that it has nothing to say.’ Well – yes, that’s right, as a matter of fact. We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. That is exactly what it looks like to an impartial outsider. And then even though theory is ‘difficult’ which being interpreted means ‘badly written,’ we mustn’t assume it’s all like that (fair enough, and if you show us the good stuff, we’ll greet it with a hug and tickets to the Icecapades) because that keeps us ‘from confronting the real questions that theory raises.’ Oh does it really. Surely that would only be the case if ‘theory’ were the only discipline raising such questions. But you know what? It isn’t. One can confront such questions just as well by reading people who do know how to write as by reading ones who don’t.

But of course another benefit of talking about theory-disparagers’ being frightened off is that by implication it makes the theory-lovers seem brave, daring, butch, risk-takers, rebels. Or at least that’s what it’s meant to do, but the trouble is of course it doesn’t. The whole maneuver is so transparently self-flattering that you would think such a knowing, hip, wised-up, rhetoric-conscious crowd would notice the fact, blush violently, and delete that bit of text. But no. Perhaps they think we don’t notice? Perhaps they think that because the non-theory team is by definition and invariably so frightened off by questions about language that we are entirely blind deaf and stupid about rhetoric? Perhaps, but sadly for them, we’re not, and we can see perfectly well what they’re doing.

And the same goes for the ‘difficulty’ ploy. That’s also a popular one, of course. Theory isn’t gibberish or vacuity dressed up in resounding neologisms appropriated from Lacan and Derrida – no, it’s difficult. It addresses subjects so complicated and arcane and profound that a special new language is required in order to deal with them at all. William Kerrigan, who was infatuated with theory himself at one time and then turned against it, has a skeptical view of this matter.

The speed possible in literary theory was both exciting and alarming to me. With Lacanian psychoanalysis in mind, one could zip into a poem, name the telling illustrations, play around with the jargon, and mount soaring conclusions about the ‘laws of desire’ or the ‘exclusions of the imaginary.’ For me the sense of dizzying triumph was always threatened by the suspicion that it had been a lead pipe cinch.

Would that more theorists ever had that suspicion; but no, the plea in extenuation continues to be made. Carlin Romano remarks on the familiar alibi in his review of a new anthology of essays on the ‘bad writing or difficulty’ topic, Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena.

Not a single essayist departs from a seeming party line that what Dutton and his sympathizers call “bad writing” is simply “difficult” writing that intentionally varies from formulations of common sense (a commodity much insulted in these pages from a standard Adorno/Gramsci standpoint) in order to question various kinds of linguistic, philosophical, and political status quos.

Yes, the ‘we’re doing it on purpose’ ploy, as in this dazzlingly frank admission in the Lentricchia-McLaughlin anthology:

Any discourse that was out to uncover and question that system had to find a language, a style, that broke from the constraints of common sense and ordinary language. Theory set out to produce texts that could not be processed successfully by the commonsensical assumptions that ordinary language puts into play. There are texts of theory that resist meaning so powerfully – say those of Lacan or Kristeva – that the very process of failing to comprehend the text is part of what it has to offer.

Yes, indeed there are. Now that’s what I call butch – powerfully resisting meaning in the manner of Lacan and Kristeva. Those theorists eat their spinach!

Internal Resources

An example

And another

The move by the Republican governor and legislature of Colorado to make something called the Academic Bill of Rights a part of state law raises a lot of interesting questions. At first glance it would seem to harmonize well with the mission of Butterflies and Wheels. Compare our stated goals in ‘About B and W’ with item one of the Academic Bill of Rights.

Ours:

There are two motivations for setting up the web site. The first is the common one having to do with the thought that truth is important, and that to tell the truth about the world it is necessary to put aside whatever preconceptions (ideological, political, moral, etc.) one brings to the endeavour. The second has to do with the tendency of the political Left (which both editors of this site consider themselves to be part of) to subjugate the rational assessment of truth-claims to the demands of a variety of pre-existing political and moral frameworks.

Theirs:

All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise and, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives. No faculty shall be hired or fired or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of his or her political or religious beliefs.

Actually ours is better, because there is an obvious tension between those two sentences in theirs. If no one is to be hired on the basis of beliefs, how are faculty to be hired with a view toward fostering a plurality of methodologies and perspectives? That seems like a contradiction in terms, on the face of it. But leave that aside. The fact is that we do think truth claims about the world should be made independently of political commitment – but it doesn’t follow that we feel inclined to call in the police when we think that principle is being violated. We’re not libertarians, but libertarians can remind us all of things it is useful to be reminded of, one of which is the fact that laws are not just inert statements, they imply the power of the state in the background if not the foreground. They are, in short, coercive.

That being so, the notion of a codified legally binding Academic Bill of Rights immediately suggests difficulties. Who would decide the law was being violated? What would the criteria be? What would constitute evidence? Would the testimony of students be sufficient? If so, what of the possibility that for instance a student who’d received a C, or one who’d been bored, or one who simply disagreed with a teacher would file charges? If student testimony would not be sufficient, would administrative staff sit in on classes? Would they go undercover? Might that lead to an underage hence underexperienced and underqualified administration?

And then, as this article at History News Network points out, it would not always be clear-cut where and what the political bias would be. We may think we know it when we see it, and in some cases maybe we would, but what about the more complicated ones? And what about all the issues that don’t divide along a neat left-right axis? What about points of view that aren’t really particularly political at all but that the legislature doesn’t happen to agree with? So perhaps we begin to see the advantage of dealing with such issues by means of discussion, debate, argument, books and articles and websites, rather than handcuffs and subpoenas. One side can say ‘Your bias is showing, you’re ignoring this evidence and this and this,’ and the other can reply ‘No, I’m looking at this and this,’ and readers can judge for themselves. Peer review, falsifiability, standards of evidence are really the best tools for getting at the truth in this kind of case, not fingerprints and DNA tests and identity parades.

Another aspect is the question of what David Horowitz and others take to be a highly suspicious absence of ‘registered Republicans’ in political science departments. But that sounds exactly like the irritatingly incomplete statements of uncritical proponents of affirmative action. ‘There are fewer blacks and Hispanics in elite universities.’ Very well, and that may be the result of systematic or unsystematic injustice of various kinds – but it also may not. It’s not absolutely straightforwardly self-evident that it is, so just making the statement and letting it go at that is inadequate. There may be – and probably is – a mix of factors: poverty, bad schools, taxation distorted by residential segregation, discrimination, but also peer pressure, families with little education, and so on. So with the over-representation of ‘registered Democrats’ in political science departments. It could be all bias on the part of those doing the hiring, but it could also be that the kind of people who want to read and think and write about political science (or history or sociology or philosophy) are also the kind of people who tend to vote Democratic. That could be just a fact of human life, a matter of preferences and tastes, likes and dislikes, choices and inclinations, an area of life that conservatives normally do not approve of legislating. Trying to interfere with the pattern, trying to correct a perceived problem or imbalance could well produce even worse problems and imbalances. It could in fact become pure ‘social engineering’ of the kind that Republicans usually despise.

An article in Reason further points out that the Bill extends academic freedom to students as well as teachers, and that that could lead to some dodgy outcomes.

As enforced rules, they open the door to, say, a biology student lodging an official complaint because her professor gave short shrift to Creationism, or her boyfriend demanding a higher grade because he’s convinced his poorly composed paper on the abortion debate was actually marked down for its political content. Suddenly, “academic freedom” starts to sound like an encroachment on the freedoms of the faculty.

So often the way. We talk grandly about freedom and rights, but when it comes down to it, all too often your freedom is in tension with mine and vice versa. Her right to read in peace and quiet is in tension with his right to play Dream Theater at top volume. Students’ freedom to hear views of their choosing comes squarely into conflict with teachers’ freedom to teach the subject as they understand it. It’s easy to think of any number of ways this could happen, and there would be no way to harmonize the two. Since the teachers are supposed to be teaching the students and not vice versa, it is not self-evident that in case of a tie the decision should go against the teacher. Bills of Rights can be excellent things, but they need to be used with caution.

OB

Internal Resources

What’s Not To Like About The Academic Bill of Rights

Graham Larkin on What’s Not To Like About The Academic Bill of Rights.

Letter to David Horowitz
Graham Larkin wonders if it’s really about balance.

Academic vs. Horowitzian Truth Standards
An Open Letter from Graham Larkin to David Horowitz.

More Than a Stretch
Are Stanley Fish, Todd Gitlin and Michael Bérubé really in favor of the Academic Bill of Rights? Graham Larkin asked them.

There is an entrenched idea, even among many atheists, secularists, skeptics that arguments about religion – arguments between atheists and theists, science and religion, believers and non-believers – are futile, at best a waste of time and at worst offensive if not cruel. But the trouble is there seems to be no such idea on the other side. Believers and theists seem to have no hesitation or diffidence whatever about assuming their beliefs are both true and synonymous with virtue, and saying as much. This is a peculiar arrangement, any way you look at it. The side that has it right, that considers evidence and logic and probablities, is politely silent. The side that, if forced to choose between evidence and belief, chooses the latter, is always rebuking the other side for not doing the same. There is much to be said for politeness and tolerance and not offending, but not if it’s all on one side. And in any case, even though there is much to be said, there is not everything. There is also a great deal to be said for understanding how the world is and how things come about there – whether through the actions of an omnipotent omniscient benevolent supernatural being who created a world full of disease, accident, pain, sorrow, hardship and death, or through natural and unconscious causes – in order to deal effectively with that world.

But, sad to say, all too often the much to be said for tolerance trumps the much to be said for truth. Ironically the result is not peace and harmony and mutual respect but rather that the religious crowd gets more and more full of itself, more demanding and aggrieved and truculent, more inclined to tell everyone what to do and slander atheists as immoral nihilists. That’s where tolerance gets you, apparently. The atheist side, i.e. the side that’s able to see the world as it is without the aid of absurd fictions, is (out of pity for the weak-mindedness of the other side?) all politeness and respect and tactful silence. The theist side, the side that prides itself on believing in supernatural beings and heaven and life after death, is all assertion and scorn and noisy disagreement.

So the hands-off policy is no good. That just lets the believers have it all their own way, and they use their advantage to chastise and bully the skeptics. The people who have no evidence for their beliefs rebuke and tyrannize over the people who do have evidence for their beliefs: a highly perverse set-up. Daniel Dennett wrote in a recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times of matter-of-factly telling a group of clever high school students that he was an atheist.

Many students came up to me afterwards to thank me, with considerable passion, for “liberating” them. I hadn’t realized how lonely and insecure these thoughtful teenagers felt. They’d never heard a respected adult say, in an entirely matter of fact way, that he didn’t believe in God. I had calmly broken a taboo and shown how easy it was.

As Dennett points out, this is what happens when skeptics, atheists, and secularists keep silent: they begin to seem a far smaller percentage of the population than they are: doubters feel isolated and peculiar, and believers feel superior, confident and self-righteous. It simply doesn’t answer in the long run to give way to error and bad thinking, it only encourages it.

But it’s futile, goes the cry. It’s a waste of time, it’s useless, people never change their minds about these things. So Susan Greenfield, in an interview a few years ago:

I’ve sat through many science-religion ding-dongs, and they strike me as a complete waste of time. No one is going to change their views. The Atkins-Dawkins stance treats science almost as though it were a religion, and evangelically try to convert other people. Meanwhile, the religious person can’t articulate why they believe what they do: they just do.

But people do change their views. Not all of them all the time, not easily, not necessarily even when they are confronted with evidence or good arguments. But they do change them sometimes, and it’s impossible to know in advance what those times are. People read books, they discuss, they think, and sometimes they do change their views. Sometimes from atheism to theism, alas, but also sometimes the other way. And as for ‘just believing’ something, what of that? We can all believe all sorts of things that are not true. We can believe the sun travels around the earth, or that crystals have healing powers, or that it’s a good idea to take antibiotics when we have a cold, or that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an authentic document. What is wrong with someone better-informed disabusing us of our mistaken beliefs?

I don’t believe in God but that is a belief, not some thing I know. I believe I love my husband, but I couldn’t prove it to you one way or the other. How could I? I just know I do. My particular belief is that there is no Deity out there, but I can’t prove it and therefore I would not have the temerity to tell other people they’re wrong. The coinage of proof is not appropriate for belief…

But belief in one’s own internal emotional state is not the same thing as belief in the existence of an entity in the external world. Naturally we can’t prove our own emotions to other people, any more than a bat can prove to us what it is like to be a bat. But what does that have to do with truth-claims about a supernatural being? And in any case the issue is not one of proof but one of evidence. We can’t prove our emotional states, but we can offer evidence. We can’t prove the non-existence of a deity, but we can ask why there is no good evidence of its existence. Bertrand Russell pointed out that we can’t prove there’s not a china teapot orbiting the sun, and Carl Sagan pointed out that we can’t prove there’s not an invisible odorless inaudible dragon in the garage, and both pointed out that that’s no reason to assume there is.

Of course, if we simply want to believe in orbiting teapots, or fairies at the bottom of the garden, or Quidditch, or the Easter bunny, for our own amusement, that’s reasonably harmless (except for the state of our intellects). But religion is a public matter, to put it mildly. Religion doesn’t just sit back and let the world go its own way and believe whatever it ‘just does’, religion intervenes. Religion makes truth claims about the world, and on the basis of those truth claims, it tells us all how to think and behave. That alone is reason enough to consider the assertions of religion every bit as open to contradiction and challenge and discussion as any other set of truth claims.

One way people try to protect religion from these harsh inquiries is by declaring that it inhabits a separate sphere from that of science, that it is more like poetry or story-telling than it is like science. Stephen Jay Gould wrote a surprisingly silly book making that claim a few years ago. But it won’t wash. First because of the truth claims issue: religion doesn’t act like poetry, it doesn’t just tell stories or create images, it makes assertions that we are expected to believe. Second, because religion does not have the expertise that is claimed for it, even in that ‘separate’ sphere. Gould (this was one of the silliest things in the book) repeatedly said that religion had expertise in morality among other things. But why? What conceivable expertise does religion have on moral questions? What does religion know that moral philosophers do not know? Richard Dawkins is incisive on this point in his classic essay ‘Dolly and the Cloth-Heads’:

Religious lobbies, spokesmen of “traditions” and “communities”, enjoy privileged access not only to the media but to influential committees of the great and the good, to the House of Lords (as I mentioned above), and to the boards of school governors. Their views are regularly sought, and heard with exaggerated “respect”, by parliamentary committees. Religious spokesmen and spokeswomen enjoy an inside track to influence and power which others have to earn through their own ability or expertise. What is the justification for this?…Isn’t there more justification for choosing expert witnesses for their knowledge and accomplishments as individuals, than because they represent some group or class of person?

Or there is the notion that science can answer ‘how’ questions and religion can answer ‘why’ questions, as in this item from a television discussion of science and religion.

Science can tell us how chemicals bond but only religion can answer the why questions, why do we have a universe like this at all?

But of course religion can’t do any such thing. It only says it can, which is a different matter. Anyone can say that. Anyone can say anything at all. But since the answers religions give are not true, it is not clear why their answers to the ‘why’ questions are any better than their answers to the ‘how’ questions, or any other questions. Richard Dawkins, again, puts the matter well:

I once asked a distinguished astronomer, a fellow of my college, to explain the big bang theory to me. He did so to the best of his (and my) ability, and I then asked what it was about the fundamental laws of physics that made the spontaneous origin of space and time possible. “Ah,” he smiled, “now we move beyond the realm of science. This is where I have to hand you over to our good friend, the chaplain.” But why the chaplain? Why not the gardener or the chef? Of course chaplains, unlike chefs and gardeners, claim to have some insight into ultimate questions. But what reason have we ever been given for taking their claims seriously?

Needless to say, it’s a large question. So all the more reason to pull together some material on the subject.

OB

Apposite Quotations

Unfortunately, the hope that religion might provide a bedrock, from which our otherwise sand-based morals can be derived, is a forlorn one. In practice, no civilized person uses Scripture as ultimate authority for moral reasoning. Instead, we pick and choose the nice bits of Scripture (like the Sermon on the Mount) and blithely ignore the nasty bits (like the obligation to stone adulteresses, execute apostates, and punish the grandchildren of offenders)…Yes, of course it is unfair to judge the customs of an earlier era by the enlightened standards of our own. But that is precisely my point! Evidently, we have some alternative source of ultimate moral conviction that overrides Scripture when it suits us.
Richard Dawkins: Free Inquiry Spring 1998

I am all in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.
Steven Weinberg: A Designer Universe?

What is boasted of at the present time as the revival of religion, is always, in narrow and uncultivated minds, at least as much the revival of bigotry…
John Stuart Mill: On Liberty

Religious belief is supposed to be, not tentative or hedged, but a profound, and profoundly personal, commitment. To disbelieve, or to believe wrongly, is sinful, and faith, i.e., commitment in the absence of compelling evidence, often conceived as a virtue…By contrast, although in their professional capacity scientists accept many propositions as true-some of them very confidently and firmly, and not a few pretty dogmatically–faith, in the religious sense, is alien to the scientific enterprise…As I see it, religion and science really are profoundly at odds on all the dimensions I have distinguished; and science really is, on all those dimensions, far and away the more admirable enterprise.
Susan Haack, Defending Science

Internal Resources

On Richard Dawkins

On Ruse on Dawkins

Fashionable Nonsense is a fabric of many threads, a sea fed by many rivers, a library with many volumes, a dog with many fleas. But there are also a few themes or core assumptions that play a role – that are ‘foundational’ – in most if not all of these many mansions: anti-essentialism, anti-realism, relativism, pretensions to transgression and rebellion and épater-ing; projects of unmasking, exposing, demystifying – every FNer a Toto pulling back the curtain that hides the Wizard; concern with hidden agendas and concealed power drives; and various kinds of make-believe anti-elitism.

The elitism question is a complicated matter, not least because of the widely-observed paradox that claims of anti-elitism emanate from academics who write a language of deliberately clotted opaque jargon and make a parade of not particularly relevant erudition, such as Lacan’s forced marriage of psychoanalysis and mathematics. It’s also complicated because the word elitism is thrown around with wild abandon with no particular definition being stipulated, as if its meaning were entirely transparent and self-evident and generally agreed on. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Elitism means a great many things, some of them perfectly incompatible with one another, with the result that the word does more to obfuscate discussion than to clarify it.

Another reason it’s complicated is that anti-elitism, like many of the projects of the FN or ‘politically correct’ crowd, is a stance and a project with a great deal of merit. Egalitarianism is an idea which has much to be said in its favour. This is especially the case when it is applied with care and attention and fine discrimination; when there is careful, open, truthful thought and discussion about which areas egalitarianism is appropriate for and which it isn’t, and about the ways it needs to be balanced by and take into account other important goods like accomplishment, ambition, inspiration, respect for achievement, talent, originality, learning, creativity. If it is kept firmly and honestly in mind both that it is good for all people to receive decent treatment, and that effort and discipline and talent and intellect are qualities to admire and encourage and respect.

And of course that’s exactly where things get difficult, which is why politicians spend so much time talking anxiously about equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. It’s all very well to say that, it’s a nice formula, but when outcomes keep getting more and more unequal all the time, it’s hard not to suspect that somebody has a thumb on the scale.

So, given economies and cultures that seem determined to maximise inequality and brand all attempts to reduce it as envy and class warfare, it is perhaps understandable that some people like to shout ‘elitism’ at anyone who says Shakespeare is better than John Grisham. That’s certainly easier than actually doing something about the more tangible forms of inequality. And there can be an element of truth in the charge. Veblen and Bourdieu were not wrong to point out the uses of Kulcha for giving people opportunities to feel clever and discriminating and superior to the vulgar crowd. ‘Odi profanum vulgus et arceo,’ said Horace smugly, and it’s not entirely mistaken to notice the potential for self-flattering motives underneath such avoidance. We need Totos to pull those curtains, people do have hidden agendas, it is good and useful to point them out.

But ‘elitists’ don’t have a monopoly on hidden agendas and invidious motives. One-upmanship, jockeying for position, ressentiment, self-righteousness, the thrills of disapproval and condescension and getting it right while others get it wrong – those are all equal-opportunity pleasures. Anti-elitists get their own little frissons from saying You’re a snob and I’m not. In fact, of course, it’s impossible to think anything is right as opposed to wrong, that any attitude, stance, commitment, political view, idea is better than any other, without opening the door to approval of self and disapproval of others. Quite, quite impossible. If we’re too afraid of being smug and superior and self-righteous to have any opinions at all, we just become vacuous spineless shapeless nothings, and we can never improve or correct or change anything. What could be a more conservative position than that? No, abdication of judgment is neither possible nor desirable, we have to be clear about that, and just settle down to doing it well instead of badly. Terry Eagleton puts it this way:

We should, I think, give no comfort to those who in the name of a fashionable anti-élitism would ignore real evidence of cultural deprivation, though we should remember of course that there is no single index of cultural flourishing or decline.

The elitism epithet works to inhibit judgment because it is so a priori. It assumes, without argument, that to say that any popular book or movie or piece of music or tv show is bad is a thought-crime, because doing so second-guesses majority opinion; it says majority opinion is wrong. Democracy is expanded from the political realm to that of ideas and art, and taken to mean that the popular is automatically good and the good is automatically popular. Put like that it looks insane, but what else does the elitist epithet mean?

Sad to say, if we’re going to think at all, we have to be able to think for ourselves. De Tocqueville pointed out how difficult this can be in a democracy, and he scared the hell out of John Stuart Mill, who pointed out the difficulty and the necessity even more sharply. Both the difficulty and the necessity are still with us.

OB

Apposite Quotations

We should, I think, give no comfort to those who in the name of a fashionable anti-élitism would ignore real evidence of cultural deprivation, though we should remember of course that there is no single index of cultural flourishing or decline.
Terry Eagleton: The Crisis of Contemporary Culture

Some will call me an elitist for disdaining popular self-help literature and the popular recovery movement; but a concern for literacy and critical thinking is only democratic.
Wendy Kaminer: I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional

I’ve increasingly become convinced that in order to be any kind of a public-intellectual commentator or combatant, one has to be unafraid of the charges of elitism. One has to have, actually, more and more contempt for public opinion and for the way in which it’s constructed and aggregated, and polled and played back and manufactured and manipulated. If only because all these processes are actually undertaken by the elite and leave us all, finally, voting in the passive voice and believing that we’re using our own opinions or concepts when in fact they have been imposed upon us.
Christopher Hitchens: The Nation, 12 February 2001

Internal Resources

Poetry is More Than Self-Expression
Barney McClelland on Poetry Made E-Z.

Higher education is a site where a lot of disputes, tensions, disagreements, irreconcilable opposites and incompatible goals meet and clash. Proxy battles are fought there rather than in the marketplace or the courts or government because the stakes are so much lower, having comparatively little to do with profit, prison, laws, or bloodshed. So silly or perverse or evidence-free ideas get a stage to rehearse on, and sometimes drown out better ideas – and Fashionable Nonsense is born.

We have a hard time even deciding what education is for. Many people, probably most, think it’s purely vocational. People go to university because if they don’t they’ll have to do dreary boring difficult low-status jobs for no money all their lives. The more idealistically inclined prefer to think the purpose of higher education is to teach people the right attitudes, thus making the world a better place. University is where you learn to respect the Other, to scorn Eurocentrism and elitism, to valorize other ways of knowing, to repudiate scientism and positivism and the totalizing narratives of modernism, to transgress the boundaries and question hegemonies and problematize phallogocentric discourse. And a tiny vestigial remnant thinks higher education is a good in itself, that improving one’s understanding of the world, even though it does also have vocational and political effects, is a valuable goal all on its own.

But of course no one pays any attention to them. People don’t go tens of thousands of pounds or a hundred thousand dollars into debt for the sake of furnishing their minds. Poetry and history and classics are all very well but they don’t pay the mortgage or the children’s tuition at their elevator up the social ladder. So MBAs outnumber humanities degrees and students decide, however reluctantly, to read law or medicine rather than literature or philosophy.

Murray Sperber, a professor at Indiana University, says a “beer-and-circus culture” has permeated much of public higher education, often substituting for solid intellectual growth among undergraduates. He traces this phenomenon, in part, to an attitude prevalent in society that college is merely a means to a well-paid job. “It’s always anti-intellectual when the most important thing in life is making money,” Dr. Sperber says. [Chronicle of Higher Education 21 January 2003]

It is, but resisting that attitude can seem like a very steep uphill battle when even Charles Clarke, the Secretary of ‘Education and Skills’ in Tony Blair’s government, thinks the idea of education as a good in itself is ‘a bit dodgy.’

And then there’s the university’s part in the wonderful world of entertainment. To many people in the US, the local university is a football team and nothing else. Thomas Arnold no doubt meant well when he put manly field sports at the center of education, but his success has been all too complete. A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor illustrates the point:

For Hrabowski at UMBC, anti-intellectualism in higher education was summed up perfectly in the response to a recent speech he gave to a group of academics. “I was making the case that universities should be celebrating the student who is accomplishing a lot in English literature as much, or more, than the student who’s a great basketball player,” he says. “Well, when I said that, they just laughed. They laughed! That’s the problem we face.”

So higher education is either vocational training, or attitude adjustment, or an athletic camp, rather than what it should be: where people go to provoke, stimulate, upset, and furnish their minds.

O.B.

Archaeology, Anthropology and other scientific, research-based, evidence-dependent fields of study sometimes come into conflict with indigenous peoples in the areas they examine. A particularly long-standing and deeply felt grievance has been the wholesale and non-consensual removal of indigenous artifacts and human remains, by mostly non-indigenous scientists, to museums and universities. Indignation at this state of affairs on the part of the people whose artifacts and relatives’ skeletons these are is entirely understandable, but it is possible that the situation has now been over-corrected.

Many scientists, historians, and researchers, while agreeing that some collections should never have existed in the first place, consider that others should not be returned now, because they are so old that direct tribal affiliation is impossible to establish. The issues have been brought into focus and the conflict has been intensified since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known as NAGPRA, by the US Congress in 1990. This is what George Johnson said in the New York Times Magazine in 1996 about the effect the act has had:

Since the repatriation act was passed in 1990, American Indian creationism, which rejects the theory of evolution and other scientific explanations of human origins in favor of the Indians’ own religious beliefs, has been steadily gaining in political momentum. Adhering to their own creation accounts as adamantly as biblical creationists adhere to the Book of Genesis, Indian tribes have stopped important archeological research on hundreds of prehistoric remains.

Johnson describes one case in which two Montana tribes put a stop to archaeological work that had discovered naturally shed human hairs scattered over the ground and wanted to examine the hairs’ DNA content. This wasn’t a burial site, it was just a place where some fallen hair had ended up, but the work was delayed for two years because the tribes considered the research ‘sacrilegious’. Johnson again:

Most archeologists agree with the tribes that historical remains, some taken in wars with the government and shipped to museums, should be given to their relatives for reburial. But in case after case, Indian creationism is being used to forbid the study of prehistoric skeletons so old that it would be impossible to establish a direct tribal affiliation. Under the repatriation act, who gets the bones is often being determined not by scientific inquiry but by negotiation between local tribes and the federal agencies that administer the land where the remains are found.

Adherents of the ‘Strong Programme’ in the Philosophy and Sociology of Science should be thrilled: who gets the bones is not a matter of scientific inquiry but of negotiation. Pragmatist-world, where the truth is not about the facts of the case but what we can all agree on.

The subject is hotly disputed, so clearly it’s the duty of B and W to provide a sampling of links.