Jourdemayne

Sleep Paralysis: Leave Your Comments Here

2011-10-28T16:38:00.003+01:00

Following on from the article on Sleep Paralysis at Jourdemayne, here is the section for comments and recollections.

Time to Move ...

2011-09-21T17:51:00.002+01:00

Thanks for following me on Blogger. I've now moved to another platform so I can provide a few more bells and whistles. Please some to visit me at jourdemayne.com

The Heart of Darkness

2011-08-14T17:45:00.007+01:00

I grew up in Southall.

It was OK: not much wrong, not much right. I remember listening to a chocolate advert’s jangling soundtrack which proposed we were in the ‘sophisticated 70s’. I wondered how we would remember it in retrospect, and came up with the perfect word: “grey”. I know that seems strange of an era characterised by Marc Bolan, Bowie and Slade.

But the decade went out with a bang. In 1979 the far-right organisation The National Front exercised their democratic right to hold a St George’s Day meeting … in Southall. With the area housing one of the largest Asian populations on the country it was clear and deliberate provocation. The special needs teacher Blair Peach was murdered a short distance from the town centre where police, white racists and young Asian men clashed.

As a thirteen year-old, I was very intimidated by the sight of shops barricading themselves in anticipation. There was an eerie silence, completely out of place during the day. No people, no dogs, no cars, no life at all, except that behind twitching curtains.

Of course, it was hardly the last riot of the era. There was Handsworth, Brixton … Toxteth happened half a block from my cowering grandparents.

I started to pick up how serious things were getting last Monday via Twitter. We switched on the TV and were astonished. And at around midnight, the news started to come in that people were rioting in Ealing. Ealing!

By then, it had been an hour or so since our neighbour’s car had been turned on its side and left in the road. Our neighbours called the police and were in favour of leaving the car in situ, for evidence. But Mr J is a great believer in the ‘broken window theory’ and has plenty of experience turning cars back the right way up again to boot. So with our other neighbour and two groups of young Asian men who appear to have been patrolling the area and who stopped to help us, the car was returned to its normal orientation.

I directed the traffic around the obstruction but, frankly, anyone who can’t see a medium-sized group of men turning a red car over in a well-lit street should probably have their driving licence suspended pending a trip to Specsavers.

The damaged car was put onto our driveway to discourage further mischief and was picked up within the hour by a tow truck arranged by next-door’s insurance – good service! The driver had come via Ealing Common and had had to run a red light to avoid becoming mired in a group of what he estimated at around two hundred fractious people who he felt would have over-run him had he slowed down and stopped.

The Ealing bit was where it all started to go a bit strange for me. While it’s not quite the Elysian suburb with free-running Ambrosia that the media sometimes implied, it does have high property values and not much social housing in the centre. The disaffected underclass would have to bus in, unlike with parts of Islington, Westminster and Stoke Newington (where I have also lived).

The next day, I saw people I recognised being interviewed on the TV. The indignant and traumatised licensee of a bar I used to frequent described how she hid in the kitchen with her sons while people looted her alcohol and till. I think the moment her bar was hit may be caught here. And here is a parallel street where looters tried to break into a Bang & Olufsen shop.

Mr J and I stayed up ‘til about 3, by which time it had been reported that an electrical appliance shop in West Ealing had been targeted too. When we thought it unlikely that anybody else would turn over any more cars outside the house, we went to sleep.

The next day, the streets were heavy with police. Friendly police. But anyone under the impression that they may get another night of free licence would have been emphatically disabused.

Although an officer I spoke to said he was worried that looters may target businesses in Southall, I thought it one of the areas least likely to be surrendered. As somebody put it on Twitter: “Turkish and Asian groups have stood up to & chased off rioters. Bloody immigrants. Coming over here, defending our boroughs & communities.” This referred to Turkish and Kurdish shopkeepers who protected their property in parts of north London. This is what looters would have faced in Southall. Plus, as I’ve mentioned, we were assisted by what I’m sure were groups of young Asian men out on patrol.

It’s not that I haven’t seen riots in my lifetime, it’s not that they haven’t been very close by, it’s not that I haven’t been on demonstrations that got scary, and it’s definitely not that I don’t recognise the very serious issues that our poorest neighbours face. I’ve written about it here.

In addition to that, I think we all recognise that the young are being hit disproportionately in this recession. The uneducated young have very few unskilled jobs beckoning and the educated young can look forward to a few more certificates and a lot more debt before a similar (though probably ultimately, less precarious) fate. Basically, there aren’t very many young people who occupy the intersections in the Venn diagram of wages, affordability of debt and affordability of housing.

But while I will talk ‘til I’m blue on the face about those three things: housing expense (due to rarity); less purchasing power of salary for the young; increased starter debt to even get a stake in the game – these riots still seem different.

In the days that have followed, we have seen some of the perpetrators have their five minutes – but in a magistrates dock. Like a demented child’s song, a postman, a Para and a ballerina paraded before us to face the music. No matter how hard my deju vu kicked in the other night, there is something different about his one.

All riots at all times have involved looting. It’s too much to ask that there will be no opportunism at a time of even the most principle-driven protest. But here, the thieving and violence was higher in the mix. All the other riots I can recall had a political heart with a penumbra of criminality. To look at the targets of summer 2011, it seems the other way around.

Is it the stuperous ennui of materialism? Is it hi-tech poverty, where people are philosophical about food inflation running at 4.9% but aspire to a gadget with seventy ring-tones and an app for rating your farts? Did a phalanx of Yahoos, bored in the commercial breaks between ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, ‘Big Brother’ and ‘X-Factor’ go out to look for pretty stones and come back with a laptop and enough iPhones to draw attention to themselves on eBay? It seems that many eyes were bigger than many bellies on that night, as numbers of large-screen TVs were found the next morning, abandoned at wheezing-distance from their originating shops.

So what should we make of it?

I think the first thing is to remember that summer rioting is not that uncommon, and that it takes a very small number of people to make a very large impact. I think we should also remember that it isn’t just ‘the young’: we turn a generation into an alienated, feared fifth column at our own peril. The streets were full of young volunteers on ‘womble day’, cleaning up with everybody else.

Basically, I agree with those who think that there was a massive criminal component to these events, and the solution for that is normal, measured justice. No cutting off social media, no bringing in the army, no evictions for being a council tenant whose son could probably do with a very strong intervention. Now that the police are actually apparent, they appear to be doing a perfectly good job, and it’s has been pointed out by many before me that Twitter was as much a force for good as evil.

But simultaneously there is a very serious political heart to our present situation and it’s getting worse. The poor are getting poorer and somebody has pulled every other rung out of the ladder upwards.

Joseph Conrad’s seminal ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1899) famously inspired ‘Apocalyse Now’. Its theme was that the dark situations in the world parallel and reflect the darkness inside ourselves. Ideally then, we’ll address both the gripping anomie of those who think it’s OK to break a shop window for designer T-shirts, and those who have been disinherited of any real agency in their own lives.

Because the next time English cities riot, we may be facing both riot-shoppers and a more traditional crowd - people with deep and genuine grievances who are at the end of their tethers. They would be a formidable combination.

The Vampires of Rhode Island

2011-06-22T17:43:00.045+01:00

Part 1

Watch the podcast first:

If your browser is having difficulty with embedding, just go here, and come back afterwards.

Part 2

So here is a series of historical events, and a title: ‘The Vampires of Rhode Island’.

We should probably start by covering the ‘vampire’ part.

The contemporaries and friends of Mercy Brown, Sarah Tillinghast and the other unfortunate victims never referred to them as vampires: the term has been retroactively applied (perhaps first in 1979 in a local newspaper article) and applied from 'above' (by the writer of 'The Vampire Tradition' and Geroge Stetson - see below for both). Not all supernatural draining creatures are called vampires by the communities which experience them, but we moderns like the word and apply it pretty indiscriminately.

But it’s not irrelevant or inappropriate – although many of the contemporary locals find it annoying.

The original vampire of folklore came from central and eastern Europe. It came to the attention of the west at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but The Austrian Empire had expanded that era. This means the multiple reports may be understood as bemused westerners observing and reporting upon a folk practice that was probably already well-established within its own locale.

The two most oft-repeated vampire accounts are of Arnod Paole and Peter Plogojowitz, both from Serbia in vampire heartland.

The characteristics of a vampire attack are as pretty much as follows:

1 The ‘vampire’ is a person who has died suddenly, or violently, or of a ‘draining’ disease.
2 They are quite often, but not always, disliked in life
3 A series of epidemic deaths follow the death of the original ‘vampire’
4 When examined, the ‘vampire’ corpse isn’t found to be ‘suitably’ decomposed. There may be liquid blood in the vessels, viscera or around the mouth. The corpse may have moved in the grave, or ‘moaned’ when moved
5 The first victims are often the family of the ‘vampire’
6 The victims die in a pattern of what we would recognise as epidemic death

Eighteenth century New Englanders did not use the term ‘vampire’, but a few of them apparently performed rituals which would not have been out of place in Ottoman Serbia. This means one of three things:

1 Under certain circumstances, groups of people will spontaneously create rituals with similar characteristics: it’s a human constant
2 This was a common Europe-wide way of treating the dead in times of epidemic death and we only don’t know about it now because proper records weren’t kept
3 This bit of folklore was transmitted to New England some time around the eighteenth century, and was employed in desperate times.

The first point hits near the mark. Unnatural Predators do preoccupy people who are in extreme difficulty. But the ‘human constant’ theme that arises is the scapegoat. Digging up the dead is a little too specific a meme. Unfortunately, we sometimes blame the living too. Bookmark this site for 'Witch-Hunts', planned for the future.

The second thought is clearly wrong: if digging up the dead was common across Europe, why were the Austrians so repelled by it that they took to writing aghast official documents about Arnod Paole and Peter Plojogowitz? We have records of the most bizarre folk rituals, from throwing toad bones for divination, to marching lines of cattle between bonfires. Here is a fun book, full of them.

It is unlikely that this could have passed so completely under the radar for so long.

The third thought is probably the most likely. The anonymous author of ‘The Vampire Tradition’ (an article in the Arnold Collection of the Providence Public Library) thought that the tradition may have been carried by a group of French Hugenots who arrived in the area of the Rhode Island Vampires at the very end of the seventeenth century (There are more details here p183)

H. P. Lovecraft integrates this idea into his story, 'The Shunned House':

The swarthy Etienne Roulet, less apt at agriculture than reading queer books and drawing queer diagrams, was given a clerical post in the warehouse at Pardon Tillinghast’s wharf. It was freely intimated by old wives that his prayers were neither uttered at the proper time nor directed toward the proper object

The Shunned House
H. P. Lovecraft (1924)

Lovecraft called his character ‘Roulet’ after a man who had been tried and convicted of werewolfism in 1598 in Caude, France.

That would mean there was about a century between the arrival of the Hugenots in Rhode Island, and the first ‘vampire’ – Rachel Harris. It’s feasible that the folkore passed from the immigrant community to the locals in that time.

To be sure that they were the real vectors, it would be nice to know how and why the Hugenots had taken up an eastern European tradition with such gusto, and whether there are other examples of it in Hugenot communities.

If there's no trace of such a thing, there may be a third, as yet unidentified, community which is responsible: the whole subject could do with more research.

So, moving on from the ‘v’ word, we are left wondering why these occurrences happened where and when they did. If the meme had been transmitted to New England by some means, why didn’t it happen everywhere and at all times?

Let’s look at four things: the first is the history of the area, the use of its land and resources.

This part of New England was very prosperous in the late sixteen and seventeen hundreds. The soil is rocky but fertile, and decades of hard labour by slaves, indentured men, tenant farmers and independent locals, so called ‘Swamp Yankees’, led to the stones being pulled from the earth to create the miles of dry stone walls which are still everywhere. To an English traveller, this makes the region seem quite un-American and frankly more evocative of the stony parts of England like Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Cornwall.

The population of the area peaked in the late 1700s. But after that, the young and vigorous left for better prospects elsewhere, either in the towns and cities, or in the expanding territories to the west.

The region referred to, where agriculture is in a depressed condition and abandoned farms are numerous … Farm houses deserted and ruinous are frequent, and the once productive lands, neglected and overgrown with scrubby oak, speak forcefully and mournfully of the migration of the youthful farmers from country to town.

‘The Animistic Vampire in New England’
George Stetson (1896)

So by the 1800s, parts of New England embodied the depressed and darkly haunted environment described by the American Gothic Romantics like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe and H P Lovecraft.

Lovecraft even referred directly to Mercy Brown in one of his stories:

As lately as 1892, an Exeter Community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the public health and peace

The Shunned House
H. P. Lovecraft (1924)

Secondly, there is the specific nature of religiosity in the area. This isn’t Puritan heartland – that’s further north. Rhode Island was characterised by a more frontier, independent religious quality, self-authoring and authorising. Among the sectarians and free-thinkers, the Quakers and the Shakers, there was a spiritual life in which folk-practice coexisted with recognisable, conventional religion.

The independent Rhode Islanders felt free to turn to ancient beliefs, not regarding them as incompatible with either science or religion.

This independent form of living is apparent in the numerous family burial plots, such as that of the Tillinghasts, rather than central town graveyards. That may also mean that there were a great many more exhumations than we know about, as they could have been done free from outside scrutiny.

By some mysterious survival, occult transmission, or remarkable atavism, this region, including within its radius the towns of Exeter, Foster, Kingstown, East Greenwich, and others, with their scattered hamlets and more pretentious villages, is distinguished by the prevalence of this remarkable superstition

‘The Animistic Vampire in New England’
George Stetson (1896)

Thirdly, there’s the issue of epidemic death, specifically death from tuberculosis.

The tuberculosis bacillus was discovered by Robert Koch in 1882. It was, and is, a disease that associated with poverty, and the poor, cramped conditions of industrialisation.

There were no significant medical interventions ‘til the widespread use antibiotics in the 1940s, but by then the disease had already started to decline through improving social circumstances and routine pasteurising of milk, one method of transmission. Even now, it’s not a simple disease to cure or eliminate.

Because of the long, slow draining death process, consumption appears as a central theme with many folkloric Unnatural Predators, including fairies and the vampires of Eastern and central Europe.

Just like many other places at this time, New England was becoming industrial and encountering new public health problems such as TB. Even those who lived rural lives were probably living at close quarters with their family and livestock. They may also have been relatively poor and malnourished.

The fourth issue here is that the bodies had not decayed as one would have thought. They appeared to show signs of ‘life-in-afterlife’. However, knowledge about the massive variability of post-mortem changes is a modern luxury. You and I can Google the effects of temperature, soil pH and micro-organisms upon decomposition. But nineteenth century people buried their dead quickly for the very good reason that they were a source of contagion.

As odd as it seems, liquid blood at the mouth and in the viscera are not as exceptional in corpses as you might think. The relationship between the folkore of the undead and post-mortem processes are covered in this excellent book by Paul Barber. In the particular case of Mercy Brown, as we have seen, she could even have been stored semi-frozen in a crypt.

So, the eighteenth century inhabitants of Rhode Island witnessed an epidemic of a disease against which they were powerless, a disease that passed freely among family members. Death is contagious.

Without modern knowledge about decomposition, specific signs like liquid blood in the heart ‘living blood’ as it was called, were taken as an indication that the loved one hadn’t quite passed over to the other side. They remained in shadowy form, draining the life from those who remained.

Ingesting the blood or body of powerful enemy to placate it is an ancient and reasonably common ritual. Charlemagne even took the trouble to make it illegal, as it was a fairly common measure taken against witches. It’s an attempt at communion. Even established religions perform the same ritual today.

So somehow, maybe via French Hugenots, a meme passed from one community to another.

People aren’t daft, but they do get desperate. I think it would be unfair to think of the participants of these rituals as gullible yokels. George Brown was apparently unconvinced that the exhumations would work, but was persuaded to try it by neighbours. See p21 here. He can’t have been the only New Englander to reluctantly submit to the last resort.

Rest in Peace, Mercy Brown.

She bloom'd, though the shroud was around her,
locks o'er her cold bosom wave,
As if the stern monarch has crown'd her,
The Fair speechless queen of the grave,
But what lends the grave such lusture?
O'er her cheeks what such beauty shed?
His life blood, who bent there, had nurs'd her,
The living was food for the dead!

Old Colony Memorial and Plymouth County (Massachusetts) Advertiser
May 4th 1822

Massive 'thank-you's to:

Karl Derrick. Makeup effects supervisor, successful author and screenwriter. Also cameraman and enthusiastic supporter of Jourdemayne.

Arnie Koch is an awesome New York based techie-bod, logistics guy & pizza homing device. This would have been very hard without him.

John Rael is an LA based actor, director and skeptic. Have a look at some of his hilarious podcasts.

'Reversion' by Stone Idols is an ambient album by Rob Jenkins, Martin Smith & Neil Cowley. It’s my very favourite music to write to. Please support the music by downloading it here.

Further reading:

For more background on the Rhode Island Vampires, I recommend this by folklorist Michael Bell.

I LOVE this book about the differerent waves of immigration onto north America, and the cultures that accompanied them.

A facsimilie of George Stetson's classic essay from The American Anthropologist is available on the 'net here.

It's always worth reading Montague Summers for the purple prose and utterly confabulated extras. He covers the Rhode Island vampires in this book.

Sanity & Violence, or, What Happens in the Courts When Gods Outsource Smiting?

2011-05-28T17:00:00.016+01:00

Two news stories have caught my attention this week. In one, four men were jailed for an attack on Tower Hamlets religious studies teacher Gary Smith. There are news reports here and here. And a statement on The Met’s website here.

It was horrific. Mr Smith’s face was deliberately slashed from his mouth corner to his ear. He suffered leg wounds, a fractured skull, bleeding on the brain, a shattered jaw and was unconscious for two days.

It must be harder than I realise to get an attempted murder charge to stick. Akmol Hussein, 27, Sheikh Rashid, 27, Azad Hussain, 26, and Simon Alam, 19 were sentenced for causing grievous bodily harm with intent.

The attack was clearly premeditated and at least one of the assailants had mentioned death as an objective:

On the premeditation: the group succeeded on their third attempt. Superintendent Colin Morgan of Scotland Yard said:

"This was an unprovoked and premeditated attack by a group of men who were carrying weapons. Mr Smith was struck without warning, and was subjected to an appalling level of violence with no opportunity to defend himself.”

And just before the attack Azad Hussein said:

“Does everyone remember the drill? One time, bang, bang, bang, bang”

On the objective of death: Akmol Hussein had been recorded saying:

“This is the dog we want to hit, to strike, to kill.”

Fortunately, Hussein’s car had been bugged in an investigation into a suspected terrorist network. Unfortunately, the police didn’t get any information prior to the assault.

Gary Smith had invoked the gang’s ire by teaching Islam, along with other major world religions, in national curriculum lessons.

Akmol Hussain had said:

"…he's mocking Islam and he's putting doubts in people's minds…How can somebody take a job to teach Islam when they're not even a Muslim themselves?"

And after the assault he had said:

"Praise to Allah. At that time nobody was there...Bruv, I don’t care about prison as long as I’m doing it for the deen [religion] of Allah...you know what, he's not going to get up"

At Snaresbrook Crown Court, Judge Hand said:

“You believed there was a higher authority to which you were responsible and that authority dictated you must attack Mr Smith"

I was equally fascinated by the case of Lorraine Mbulawa, who had stabbed her mother four times in the arm and once in the face at their home in May 2009. There'a an account here.

Mbulawa had had a dream:

"… that seemed a bit real. It was my grandma and dad's youngest sister, Charlotte. Like they were right at the foot of my bed … my grandmother said my mother was responsible for the death of my father and I had to do the honourable thing to my father by killing my mother"

She had put on some dark clothes, gloves and a makeshift balaclava, and gone into her mother’s room with the intention of killing her.

Mbulawa was cleared of attempted murder but found guilty of unlawful wounding at Leicester Crown Court in February as reported by the local paper on February 5th.

She and her family are Christian and from Zimbabwe, where belief in witchcraft is pretty well endemic. In sentencing last week, Mr Justice Keith reiterated what had emerged in the trial, that Mbulawa and her family believed in the power of the occult, in spirit possession and that she was not responsible for what she had done. He said that her mother:

"… believed spirits can enter the body and make you do things that otherwise you would not have done”

Despite her mother saying that Mbulawa was not “her real self” while conducting the attack, the jury made their opinion known by rejecting the option of finding her not guilty by reason of insanity – an option they did have. As Mr Justice Keith pointed out:

"In convicting Lorraine of unlawful wounding the jury must be treated as having rejected her claim of being in a dissociative state. The jury treated Lorraine as if she knew what she was doing at the time of the attack"

In addition, she had been assessed by a psychiatrist who had found her to be sound.

The sentences handed down in these two cases are markedly differerent. Of Gary Smith’s attackers, three will serve at least five years and maybe more; the fourth will serve a minimum of four years, maybe more. The details are at the bottom of the page here.

Lorraine Mbulawa has presumably been on some sort of remand (I don’t know if it was custodial) since May 2009, as her contact with her mother has been supervised and she is only now allowed to return to the family home to live. She has been given a 12 month custodial sentence suspended for 18 months. She must also do 120 hours of unpaid work and attend supervision to help her understand her beliefs so she could deal with any supernaturally inspired violent urges in the future.

These contrasting sentences may be attributable to several factors.

For one, the victim impact statements each both case will have been very differerent. Gary Smith’s injuries were more severe and he may never completely recover. He is unlikely to be sympathetic to his assailants’ world-view or motivation. Sibusisiwe Mbulawa, by comparison, had lesser injuries and feels she understands her daughter’s behaviour completely.

Another is the likelihood of perpetrating again in the future: Gary Smith’s assailants were united by a life-principle that would be likely to lead to further violence and which will be highly difficult to erase. The judge clearly feels that Lorraine Mbulawa, by contrast, can be taught to deal with her worldview in a way that will reduce her chances of perpetrating in the future.

Remorse will have been another factor. It’s hard to see how the Tower Hamlets four could have plausibly pleaded moral anguish after their celebratory conversation was recorded. Mbulawa, on the other hand, told police of her intention to kill herself after she had killed her mother.

Culpability may have been yet another issue. Despite the jury’s rejection of the notion that Mbulawa may have been insane at the time of the attack, Mr Justice Keith said:

"Lorraine believes she was doing what the spirits told her to do which reduced her culpability significantly …”

whilst also still laying the responsibility at her feet:

“… since she knew what she was doing she should have fought against what she was told to do"

Acting under duress – compulsion from outside – is a defence in law. But the law restricts itself to agents such as blackmailers, people who have kidnapped your granny and so forth. Spirits don’t count, and that’s fine by me.

And I detect yet another consideration, from left of field. Mbulawa is simply more attractive, in every respect. Mr Justice Keith said:

"I believe she's a young woman with much going for her. She struck me as being unusually confident and assured, also not unintelligent with a degree of charm and poise”

She is young, pretty, was an A-level student and, unlike the Tower Hamlets four is not the embodiment of a current much-feared archetype, the regressive jihadist.

Yet for all their differences, these two crimes have one very significant theme at their hearts: people who were judged by the courts to be mentally competent were motivated to potentially murderous acts under the influence of utterly unprovable supernatural worldviews.

I spent an interesting afternoon once with a senior police officer who deals with occult-related killings. His interest in the precise nature of beliefs was limited: his focus was on whether or not an actual crime had been committed. For that, I think he deserved great professional credit: like Elizabeth I, he had: “no desire to make windows into men's souls”.

But clearly, thought processes do matter – and to the courts too. Psychological evaluations that assess culpability and fitness to stand trials must make windows into men's souls. To a certain extent, we can determine culpability and the likelihood of re-offending using those windows.

We choose the parameters of our rationality, and those parameters move from time to time. If we commit a crime under a popular delusion, we are more likely to be judged sane. With a social animal like us, it’s actually quite reasonable: the sharing of a doctrine, a cognitive concensus, is certainly a measure of our integration with our community, if not our grasp of objective physics. A person motivated to murder for Ereshkigal would be ancient Iraq’s religious fanatic, today’s whackjob.

Perhaps this is another area where Mbulawa gets off as being mad rather than bad in the UK. We’re more familiar with jihadism, but the witchcraft paradigm has been under the radar ‘til recently.

James House, for the prosecution, had noted that:

"Her mother has expressed a belief in the power of spirits common in the culture of Zimbabwe … had it happened there, her daughter would have been treated by a medicine man and would have been exorcised"

Gilbert Nyambabvu in ‘New Zimbabwe’ concurred:

“… Lorraine’s story would have befuddled few, if any, Zimbabweans”

So - here are a handful of modern perpetrators who have acted under the influence of bizarre, unprovable tenets. If you look to history, they’re not short of company: witch-hunters, inquisitors and crusaders abound. Few of them were, by the standards of the own times, mad.

It would be wrong, and in any case impossible, to legislate for anti-social supernatural beliefs. But given the potential for harm, we can reasonably stop these beliefs being monetised. The prospect of revenue creates a motivation for promotion. I suggested that payment for deliverance from witchcraft should be illegal here.

And the law already has provision for actual violence, inspired by a variety of motives, rational and irrational. Meanwhile, we are left with cases that leave us horrified ... and bemused.

Thoughts & Theology

2011-05-16T09:23:00.010+01:00

On May 13th, Oxford University website posted a press-release entitled “Humans 'predisposed' to believe in gods and the afterlife” and summarised as:

“A three-year international research project, directed by two academics at the University of Oxford, finds that humans have natural tendencies to believe in gods and an afterlife.”

Newspapers had already covered the study’s progress. You can see “Children are born believers in God” from The Telegraph’s religion section here and “Why do we believe in God? £2m study prays for answer” from The Times here.

‘The Cognition, Religion and Theology Project’ was supported by a 1.9mGBP grant from the Templeton Foundation and run by Psychologist Dr Justin Barrett and philosopher Professor Roger Trigg who “directed an international body of researchers conducting studies in 20 different countries that represented both traditionally religious and atheist societies.”

Dr Barrett had been quoted as saying that they were: “… interested in exploring exactly in what sense belief in God is natural”.

And it would be strange, I suppose, if such a thing as belief in the supernatural was not natural, given how widespread it is.

It’s a thought many have pondered: why do we as a species come up with these ideas, again and again. The father of psychology William James wrote about a quality he called ‘religious genius’.

He noted that religious instigators: “have often shown symptoms of nervous instablility … exhalted emotional sensibility .. and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological”

For James those others who follow on from these primary agents have what he called a ‘second-hand religious life’. He seems to have regarded it as a form of intellectual contagion from a concentrated source.

However, the prevailing theories about religiosity have changed since James’ day. Charismatic individuals certainly have shaped some of the specifics of our notions about the supernatural, but a spontaneous sense of it seems to be more evenly distributed among the population than he thought.

There are a couple of ideas about how we’ve become a supernatural-seeking species.

The first is that belief in a transcendent power confers an advantage upon a group. This would make religiosity a primary quality for survival by, for example, enhancing commitment to the group. One of the most notable poularisers of this theory was the father of sociobiology E O Wilson who said: “Men would rather believe than know”.

But there are several detractors to this theory, people who don’t believe that group selection is anywhere near as important a factor in survival as has been claimed. Which would leave the ‘God as an Adaptive Trait’ theory looking a bit wan.

The second – and probably more currently popular - way of looking at the issue is to see superstition and religion as byproducts of evolution.

Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and population geneticist Richard Lewontin co-opted the architectural term 'spandrel' to define something which didn’t originate by the direct action of natural selection but which later became usefully employed for a different function.

So is god somehow a side-effect of our cognitive machinery, an accompaniment to evolution?

David Hume wrote that: “We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and goodwill to everything, that hurts or pleases us”.

Taking indistinct stimuli from the environment and making them into something recognisable is a phenonmenon know as pareidolia; it’s how the Virgin Mary gets onto so many pieces of toast. Either that, or she’s got a really good agent.

Hume was pointing out what many others have noticed before and since – we see things that aren’t there and then often ascribe personalities and intentions to them.

Dr Barrett’s term for this kind of thing is a hyperactive (or hypersensitive) agency detection device” a HADD.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it that we have an:

‘Intentional stance’ and that means identifying “agents with limited beliefs about the world, specific desires, and enough common sense to do the rational thing given those beliefs and desires”

So, we can realise there are other things in the universe and that they have intentions that may differ from ours. To read someone else’s mind, you need a thing called theory of mind.

This term was created by David Premack and Guy Woodruff who defined it as:

“... the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own”

You can imagine how useful this is: it helps us to predict what others are going to do and want. It helps us to understand that they have a theory of mind about us in turn.

The issue with these agent-detection and prediction abilities is that they’re very hard to turn off. A false positive is probably not often dangerous – whoever got hurt for mistaking tree bark for a face? But a false negative is dangerous – how often do you get to ignore a hungry tiger?

Another way in which we get to see a world of our own making is to have a preference for purpose-based explanations. Psychologist Dr. Deborah Keleman of the Child Cognition Lab at Boston University is the expert here. Her work on children showed they had preferences for what she called teleo-functional explanations.

Why is polar bear fur white? So the bear can blend in with the snow (rather than because it lacks pigment).

What’s more, she found that children displayed what she called promiscuous teleology – that is applying to purpose-based explanations to both living and natural-but-inanimate things alike.

So do we naturally grow out of this kind of reasoning, or do the physics lessons at school have an effect after all?

Keleman’s work on uneducated adults among the Romanian Roma showed that giving up purpose-based explanations as we grow, is a cultural phenonomenon, not a natural event. Left to our own devices, we’d probably all be adult animists, searching for motivations of seen and unseen agents in our environments.

I’ve noticed this a great deal in my study of the folklore of the macabre. People really aren’t stupid. They know that events have proximal causes. It’s the search for meaning which helps to create the agent.

The anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard spent a great deal of time with a central African tribe, the Azande. One day, a house collapsed on someone; villagers knew that termites had undermined house but that wasn’t the question. Why had it happened when that particular person was sitting there?

They weren’t answering the question "how?". They were answering the question "why?". I've covered the kind of encumberances these two very different questions have here.

It reminds me of medieval Europeans who felt leprosy to be a disease associated with moral degeneracy. You could probably have proved the existence of disease-causing micro-organisms to our ancestors, but it may not have stopped them asking why. Why now? Why him? Why here?

This is hardly even a start on the factors which predispose us to intuit the supernatural. If you’re interested in more you could do a lot worse than buy Bruce Hood’s ‘Supersense’.

So if a sense of the supernatural is a side-effect of our biology, will ghosts and gods, phantoms and fairies always be with us?

Dr Barrett, a Christian himself, was quoted as saying that "If we threw a handful on an island and they raised themselves I think they would believe in God."

But I think this is going far too far. For one thing, that term 'god' rather than 'gods' – monotheism is the exception rather than the rule in religion. And perhaps our island-bound handful would have day to day interactions with ancestors rather than gods, in the manner of traditional African religion.

I think it would be fairer to say that they would likely end up with a supernatural model of their environment, as well as a natural one.

As anthropologist Pascal Boyer wrote:
“Having a normal brain does not imply that you have religion. All it implies is that you can acquire it, which is very different”

Mrs. God

2011-03-21T18:30:00.018Z

This weekend 'The Daily Mail' ran a story which was mined from a ‘Radio Times’ article promoting ‘The Bible’s Buried Secrets’, which is being aired on Tuesday nights on a primetime BBC2 slot.

The article warns us that there are a couple of controversial conclusions about to be broadcast. They include that Eve was not the first woman, and that the ancient Hebrew God had a wife.

“I spent several years specialising in the cultural and social contexts of the Bible and I discovered that Yahweh, the God we have come to know, had to see off a number of competitors to achieve his position as the one and only god of the ancient Israelites” writer/presenter Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou was quoted as saying.

For purposes of even-handedness and apoplexy, Anne Widdecombe was consulted for her comments. Clearly influenced by the "My dad's bigger than your dad" school of dialectic, she said:

"I would guess that most other theologians will demolish her theory in three seconds flat."

For a well-educated woman, she can be a terrible twerp. That is to say, someone ought to tell Miss Widdecombe not to hold her breath for more than three seconds, nor Dr Stavrakopoulou to get too excited about her Services-to-Originality. These ideas are quite old-hat and very well supported.

One of the keys to understanding historical Judaism is to remember that it -unlike its fellow middle-Eastern monotheistic monoliths, Christianity and Islam – was not created, condensed and made canon within a short period of time.

In their respective histories, Christianity and Islam have provided multiple instances of coercive consensus: think of the myriad movements where fellow believers have been outcast as apostates and heretics for espousing a fractionally factional view.

The creation of Judaism was more gradual, the steering of polytheistic peoples through revelation of many prophets who included Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Moses. As Raphael Patai wrote:

“In view of the general, human, psychologically determined predisposition to believe in and worship goddesses, it would be strange if the Hebrew-Jewish religion, which flourished for centuries in a region of intensive goddess cults, had remained immune to them”

p 25

(Incidentally, if you think blogging doesn’t cause suffering, just try to write ‘Patai’ without your spell-checker jumping in to change it to ‘Patio’. Three times.)

Eve first:
The text of Genesis 1:27 "male and female he created them", indicated to the early rabbis that both genders were created simultaneously. But since Eve was generated from Adam's rib later on (Genesis 2:22), it seemed that Adam must have had another wife before her. Some even identified her as the Mesopotamian-derived Lilith, who was probably an aspect of the goddess Innana.

This contradiction between paragraphs that rub shoulders with each other in the Old Testament is not unusual. Genesis shows clear signs of being assembled from two or three versions - some say more - to the point where respectable Biblical scholars have identified clear voices and given them names. ‘J’ is the ‘Yahwist’ voice (so called because it refers to God as ‘Yahweh’), concentrates on ancestral narratives and divine promise of land. ‘P’ is the ‘Priestly’ voice which stresses ritual and observance. ‘E’ is the ‘Elohist’ which refers to God as ‘Elohim’ and is concerned with dreams and prophecy.

There’s a good round up of the various theories in here. From what I can gather, there isn’t much debate about whether different people contributed to the books, but whether they were edited together in a ‘block’ or ‘interweaving’ fashion.

This ‘multiple and sometimes contradictory contributors’ factor is one of the most lucid illustrations of why the Bible should not be used as the precise technical manual that it clearly isn’t.

And God’s Wife?

Robert Graves touches lightly on the feminine inherent in the Biblical god here but if you’re really interested, you’re just going to have to spring for this.

Patai (not Patio) considers the Canaanite origins of the female in Hebrew mythology with Asherah and Anath, whom he considers to have influenced the development of the Hebrew ‘Shekhina’ – the palpable manifestation of God’s presence on earth. He then goes on to investigate the ‘Matronit’, a Kabbalistic entity.

These female numinous persons are not explicitly mentioned in the Pentateuch/Torah - the first five books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy). But that’s not too surprising as the documents, although derived from earlier works, were probably assembled into their modern format at the relatively late date of the end of the fifth century BCE. By this time, if there were any tweaks, they were done in a more Patriarchal environment.

For Patai, the female re-emerges in the Jewish mystical movements of The Kabbala in the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries (not the recent self-help movement which claims inspiration from it). It comes from the inherent grammar in the Torah (Hebrew words have a gender) and the presence of these themes in the ambient culture. It’s not the only time that an earlier theme is carried under the radar to re-surface later. As he writes:

“The best known, though not always readily acknowledged, example of this type of transformation is the re-emerence of the ancient Near Eastern mythological feature of divine triads … in the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity”

Despite the strong wording in the quote from earlier in this blogpost, it would probably be unfair to claim that Dr Stavrakopoulou thinks she’s the first on this territory. It would be a miracle if an academic of her stature wasn’t aware of all the work which has gone before. The DM article is from a Radio Times article, and bears a lot of ‘PR placement’ marks. If I wanted high viewing figures I’d have done exactly the same thing, and a press release is not as considered a document as an academic paper.

In other words, she’s probably more humble than the PR person at the BBC is on her behalf.

Besides which, it’s obvious that God must have a wife. Who else would wash his pants?

PS Just watched this on the BBC iPlayer. Excellent. Really looking forward to the others. Dr Stavrakopoulou does a great job of contextualising the Biblical myths in their historical reality.

Too Many Ghosts Spoil the Broth?

2011-02-19T13:20:00.007Z

I was one of the lucky people who spent the 5th and 6th of this month at QED, Manchester. Apart from a minor fit of apoplexy trying to decode Manchester’s city centre roads to enter the car park and later being soaked by a bus (I'm serious - I looked like one of those car wash mops) I loved the whole weekend.

It’s been interesting to read people’s online musings on the event. I think we all agree we’d like them to organise it again next year.

But there’s another strand. How many ghosts are too many?

Andy Russell wondered if it was “A little bit too ghosty …”

“Of the 12 1 hour sessions in the main hall, 2 were about ghosts (maybe 2.25 if you count the bits in Bruce Hood’s talk). I guess ghosts are quite fun and there are some serious issues related to them (e.g. exploitation of vulnerable people) but it felt like a bit too much. Surely there are other issues we should be thinking about?”

And Tom Williamson wrote:

“I’ve never got the skeptical ghost hunting thing (ghosts don’t exist, move on)”

Hayley Stevens replied that:

“Skepticism in ghost belief and ghost research is as relevant as any of ‘type’ of skepticism out there, not to mention the fact that skepticism in general DOES think about other issues way more than ghosts. Alt med for example, gets HUGE coverage, as does creationism, anti-vaccination, the list is endless…”

There have been apologies all-round which is a great credit to the manners and mutual respect of the relevant parties. It seemed to me that the ghost complaints reflected an enthusiasm for other areas of scepticism rather than just a judgement upon us supernatural-obsessed types.

But it’s a fair point and one that does deserve a reply. Why do we continue to expend so much time and energy on the supernatural when the area has been so well studied and debunked?

Some skeptics like ghost debunking; some like alt-med debuking; some prefer creationism debunking. I suspect that these differences arise from individual personality traits, quirks and preferences. And that’s OK. Those of us who rationally channel our inner-Goth would appreciate a few really high points in a weekend of other sceptical subjects.

But it also strikes me that as much as ghosts and other supernatural phenomena have been debunked, so have many alt-med practices and it doesn’t stop people spending money on them.

Alt-med is a hydra, and its endurance is probably due to the fact that it satisfies people in a certain way. They get something for their money, otherwise they wouldn’t spend it. Buying a feeling is still a commercial transaction.

In fact, I wonder whether current alt-med thrives due to the personality traits of the middle-classes: self-assertion – a certain Protestant self-reliance and independence; a mistrust of authority as being ‘better’ than oneself; a desire for devolvement of power to the patients themselves. These are personality traits which would have gotten you a clip ‘round the ear in a medieval village, but job promotion in a modern commercial environment.

Unfortuately, advanced technology and theory takes the cooperation and resources of many. The results are suitably potent. But that may be unsatisfying to the modern human need to remain, even a little, in control of your own fate. The fact is, you can’t cure cancer by yourself any more than you can get to the moon by yourself.

In this case, our human personality and social traits are worth studying because they apply across the board. Studies of alt-med must eventually come to analyses of why many so people in a modern context keep returning to it.

It’s been useful process for mainstream medicine too, which is now practiced in a far more sensitive, more participatory and less patriarchal way than before.

Do you remember when Blackadder went to the quack?

Because he went in the sixteenth century, he was prescribed leeches. The famous Dr. Hoffmann of Stuttgart was the foremost expert of the age (and also, co-incidentally, the largest producer of leeches in Europe).

Blackadder could have been prescribed magnet therapy in the eighteenth century and ‘The Water Cure’ in the nineteenth. Charles Darwin was an unfortunate recipient of The Waters and the cure sounds considerably more grim than having a few little live blood bags dangling from your nethers.

The nature of quackery changes and several fads have truly been discredited. And as I said, I think the enormous popularity of alt-med may be significantly due to social context, several elements of which are ephemeral.

But religion and the supernatural are slightly different. We’re hardwired for them. Good quality study of the supernatural must endure because, when every other fad has passed, it is the one thing to which we, as a species, always return.

It has been said that the difference between ghosties and ghoulies is that it doesn’t hurt when you get a kick in the ghosties.

But, on the contrary, I think that people are quite resistant to ghost, vampire, werewolf, blood-sucking revenant, kind god, capricious god (pick the belief-type appropriate to your culture) debunking. That’s because it’s a factory setting that requires a great deal of education to de-install. Ghosts et al are simply more enduring than homeopathy, chiropractic for asthma and magnets for menopause. (To complain about fanny magnets – arf, arf - see what Simon Perry has written here.)

In general, we skeptics are united by the desire to perceive our world in the most rational way possible – even though we’re meat-puppets and our impartiality probably has its limits.

But as a species, we do have a preference … and that is to believe in the supernatural. So we’ll always need the tools to discuss this one intelligently and persuasively.

Addendum:
Help one of the next generation of ghost-hunters! - that is to say, a student of the human mind who wonders why we believe in such things. It takes just a few minutes to complete a survey for Goldsmiths student Aaron Shalan who would is studying factors associated with paranormal belief.

Addendum 2:
More on this at The Thought Stash

Trouser Removal & Underwear Inspection: Security for the Modern Traveller

2011-02-14T11:50:00.005Z

Those of you fascinated at the attempted removal of David Allen Green's trousers at the airport last week may want to know about uninvited strangers rifling through my underwear.

Just before Christmas, I returned from the US. I had a skull in my hand-luggage and the airport security guard swabbed it for narcotics and/or explosives. The lovely security lady's smile barely flickered when I explained that it was Mr J's Christmas present. The whole thing was done in my prescence and I was glad they were taking their responsibilities seriously.

Then I got home, opened my hold luggage and found this:

Basically, it said that my luggage had been rifled in my absence. And what's more, if they had broken the locks to do this, that was my problem.

Anyone else find that really creepy?

I really don't mind them looking at luggage. They should! But since I was waiting in departures for two hours, you'd think they'd have had a few minutes to get me to the Rifling Room to help.

I'd be highly aggrieved to be prosecuted for carrying anything when I'd no proof it hadn't been placed there by a third party. And I'd be really pissed off to buy a new case every time I made a trip because someone had trashed the locks to inspect my toothpaste.

We all know that governments use paranoid times to enact the powers they'd like to have anyway. But this one is really, I'll use the word again, creepy.

I don't mind who rifles through my underwear. But I'd prefer if they had the manners to wait 'til I'm there.

Exorcism: Ancient & Modern

2011-02-13T15:41:00.007Z

Today, I'm thinking about exorcising. Not running on the spot – that’s a good thing.

I’m talking about dislodging demons.

For the self-sufficient there is the one-day course approach. Very reasonably priced at fifty-nine pounds, this was offered recently by Atlantis Bookshop in London. Their ‘leading expert’ David Goddard has been ‘an authorized exorcist for over 20 years’.

In touch with the spirit world or the spirit cabinet – I really don’t know. I didn’t go.

But I was relieved to discover that the syllabus included how to distinguish between possession and mental ill-health. Absolutely vital that.

This autonomous approach would probably suit the kind of people who crochet their own bedspreads, change their own engine oil and so forth.

On the other hand, if you’re keen on authority, you know, the sort of person who calls in an electrician to change a plug fuse, you can go with a recognised establishment, with training courses and titles, such as the Catholic Church.

In November 2010 Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois organised a two-day conference on exorcism attended by 56 bishops and 66 priests. The New York Times noted that there is a lot of cynicism surrounding the issue of exorcism in the US today and wrote that “efforts to interview the (delegates) on Friday were unsuccessful”.

Not quite as shy, is Father Gary Thomas, the Catholic exorcist for the Diocese of San Jose, who has been interviewed for this month’s ‘Catholic World Report’. His previous exposure in the media has included being the subject of Matt Baglio’s book (& now a movie) ‘The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist’.

The piece is entitled ‘Doorways for Demons’ and carries a photo of Father Thomas bearing a lightly constipated grin. He tells us that there were about half a million exorcisms in Italy. Per year, that would be an impressive feat not to mention a significant aspersion upon the moral fibre of a nation of around sixty million souls. Perhaps he means the aggregate of rituals for which the Vatican has records.

But personally in five years, he claims to have met with 100 people and performed 40 exorcisms on about five of them.

Perhaps it's like waxing - perhaps you have to keep going back.

He says:
“… there are more and more Catholics involved in idolatrous and pagan practices. That’s really why there’s more demonic activity.”

Also:
“A lot of parents today have no critical eye of faith with which to even recognize the dangers their children are in. A lot of this is going on with the Internet.”

In the study of witchcraft and demon-related beliefs, there’s a great deal of energy put into discussing whether such belief systems are, to use the lingo, ‘bottom-up’ or ‘top-down’. Are the authorities forced to deal with what are actually rank and file experiences, or do they precipitate or interpret such experiences further down the social ladder from themselves by their expectation of them.

I think most historians believe that there’s evidence of both.

Just for the moment, let’s think about witch trials in England, say.

Prior to the eighteenth century belief in witchcraft was probably pretty endemic, but really got out of hand when traditional social structures started to crumble in the Tudor era. Witches were often deeply impoverished people who had asked for charity but had been refused. If the refuser subsequently had some misfortune, they blamed the alleged witch. Let’s face it, the refuser did sort of deserve it. It’s quite a clear case of projected guilt.

Then local constable or magistrate would get involved.

Bottom up. It’s an oft-repeated pattern.

But you can perceive sinister hints in witch-hunting history about top-down phenomena too. A couple of the most celebrated English witch trials had highly educated men at their centre and it’s even questionable whether the trials would have stood, without the educated input and manic focus of these people.

In 1589, ten year old Elizabeth Throckmorton, who had recently moved to Warboys, accused her new neighbour Agnes Samuels of being a witch. Elizabeth appears to have been epileptic and quite ill. But her afflictions, characterised by massive fits, sneezing and channeling demons, were soon communicated to four of her sisters and eventually, several of their extended household.

Elizabeth’s Uncle was Henry Pickering. He was an educated man from a prominent family. And at this early stage in his witch-hunting career he conducted systematic experiments with his niece to demonstrate real demonic possession. He also took Elizabeth to live with him for a spell, made copious notes and eventually gave evidence at the trial of Agnes Samuels, her daughter and her husband.

In the case of the Lancashire Witches of 1612, Justice of the Peace for Pendle, Roger Nowell, interviewed a young woman named Alison Devize who’d been accused of bewitching a peddlar.

Roger Nowell was a Puritan whose professional remit included seeking out religious nonconformists (recusant Catholics, basically).

Alizon talked about her black dog – her family seems to have been fond of animals and this was unfortunately a characteristic attributed to witches. Somehow, in the telling of the story, the black dog became her familiar. Alizon may even have been trying to displace the blame from herself to the dog for the peddlar’s illness which was probably a stroke.

Another of the witches, an old woman known locally as Chattox, told Nowell of a ‘thing like a Christian man’ who had asked for her soul many years ago. In the religious turbulence of her lifetime (bear in mind she was probably in her 70s by 1612) - he could even have been a religious proselytiser of either Puritan or Catholic stamp. But Nowell interpreted him as the devil himself to whom Chattox had sold her soul.

Via Nowell’s questioning, the Lancashire Witches’ accounts conformed to the scholarly beliefs contained in such books as the Malleus Malificarum, William Perkins ‘Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft’ and King James’ ‘Demonology’.

The interviewees inadvertently confirmed a highly evolved metaphysical schema that Roger Nowell knew in detail and which they likely didn’t.

Agnes Samuel, her husband John and their daughter Agnes were hanged in 1593. Ten of the Lancashire witches including Alizon Devize and Old Chattox were hanged in 1612.

Those deaths were caused by, as much any other factor, highly earnest and highly educated men labouring under a gross misapprehension.

As historian Keith Thomas wrote: “men seldom seek a high degree of proof for what they already believe to be true”

He also notes about cunning men – men who found witches, that it was in their: “… interest to diagnose witchcraft, after all, because they had a near monopoly of techniques for dealing with it”

Does that ring a bell given how we started?

In 1602 there was an exchange between Lord Chief Justice Anderson and a Dr Jorden who was defending Elizabeth Jackson against charges of having bewitched Mary Glover. The Lord Chief Justice seemed unsatisfied that Jorden thought Glover’s condition neither fabricated nor amenable to medical intervention.

“Then in my conscience” he said “It is not natural”.

It’s nice that modern exorcists like freelance demonologer David Goddard and Father Gary Thomas take account of the possibility of mental illness before they get the paraphernalia out. Father Gary has a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a medical doctor on his team.

But, despite Lord Chief Justice Anderson’s protestations, just because we can’t cure it yet, it doesn’t mean it’s not natural. And if you were suffering from an as-yet undiagnosed condition which led to mental distress, do you think a man confirming your belief in the dreadful powers of Satan and all his little fiery minions would make your anxiety worse or better?

History clearly shows us that highly educated and sometimes well-intentioned people can precipitate the most dreadful of consequences.

Be nice if it wasn’t still relevant, wouldn’t it?

This blogpost was first done as a podcast for The Pod Delusion at QEDcon

Evidence-Based Job Seeking

2010-12-12T20:03:00.006Z

I get several pictures of very attractive young women sent to me every week.

No, I haven’t finally activated my month’s free trial of BiCuriousMatch.com. I am the MD of a company which produces makeup effects and props for film and TV, and we get lots of CVs from graduates.

Either being 22 and female is an intrinsically gorgeous state, or they don’t let mingers into art school. Every candidate I get to see would turn heads rather than stomachs.

The CV thing puzzled me for ages. Then I thought it must be to try and get an edge in what is, admittedly, a male dominated profession. You can’t blame a girl for using everything she’s got. By my age you’re not expected to include a photo with a job application or they might think you’re addled and have confused your resumé with your Meals-on-Wheels application.

But when you’re young and junior, could your appearance weigh more heavily in your favour?

I finally asked a graduate who was working for us. She’d been hired on recommendation, BTW. I didn’t see her CV ‘til she showed it to me and asked for feedback.

It turns out the reason all the CVs all look similar and all include a photograph in the same place is not because they have used Microsoft PimpMySkillsTM. It’s because someone comes in before they finish Uni. to teach a one day course. This person solemnly assures them that a photo is the way employers “will remember you and differentiate your CV from someone else’s.”

Hmmm.

A few years ago, at the beginning of the internet explosion, I used to put commercial websites together. At dinner one night, a teacher friend told me excitedly that she’d been on a website course at work and been told a critical piece of information: don’t put the words "child" and "play" in the meta-tags for fear of attracting paedophiles.

Now, spending a whole day teaching web design to naïfs back in the day when it would have taken you all the way up to coffee break – max - to say that you close a tag with a backslash must have left some poor bastard with another three quarters of his consultancy fee to justify. But did he have to scrape the bottom of that particular barrel? He could have spoken to one of my art graduates about designing good user interfaces, for example.

I mean, sometimes you can just tell that someone’s making it up for the sake of something to say, especially if they’re being paid by the hour.

Today, I read an article which has a bearing on the photo issue.

The New York Times has a piece on ‘Beauty Discrimination During a Job Search’ based on a paper ‘Are Good Looking People More Employable?’

Ruffle and Shtudiner of Ben-Gurion University noted in their abstract that:

“Job applicants in Europe and in Israel increasingly embed a headshot of themselves in the top corner of their CVs”

So they “sent 5312 CVs in pairs to 2656 advertised job openings.” One of the CV’s had no picture attached - but its compatriot contained a picture of either an attractive man or woman, or a “plain” man or woman.

I’m guessing they’re using the term “plain” in a politically correct way to denote “unattractive” as opposed to “unremarkable”. The terms “minger”, “munter” or “ten-pinter” probably don’t get you cited in the appropriate journals.

The first interesting thing to notice is that there was a difference in results according to whether the CVs were sent to an agency or directly to the potential employers.

Female beauty didn’t seem to matter hugely to agencies, whose ‘no photo’, ‘plain’ and ‘attractive’ rates for women are in a similar ballpark. Not identical, but close.

Male beauty, however, made a big diff to the agencies. If you take the 13.5% ‘no picture’ as a baseline, then being fit gives a man a 7.3% edge, and being frightful reduces his chances by 5.2%. Not nice.

And if the CVs went directly to potential employers?

The results for males look like a slightly squished down version of the ‘agency’ result. ‘Plain’ gives worst results, ‘attractive gives the best and ‘no piccie’ is in the middle. There’s only a 5% difference maximum & minimum values.

So good-looking men always do better when they send a photo. The degree to which their gorgeousness counts just depends on whether they’re going through an agency or not.

If you’re a male and not so easy on the eye, just avoid the visuals.

The interesting results come when we get to ‘potential employers’ and ‘women’.

Ready for this ladies?

‘No piccie’ does best of all. Tagging slightly behind - so slightly that the results could come out differently in repeated study - is the ‘plain’. And nearly 6% behind ‘plain’ is … ‘attractive’.

So if you are stunning and female, don’t send a picture to a potential employer, no matter what the one-day consultant twerp at uni. says.

Ruffle and Shtudiner attribute this skew to the initial CV screening HR department done by people who were usually female, between 24 and 36 and often single.

They go on to conclude that discrimination against attractive women was therefore influenced by envy “when confronted with a young, attractive competitor in the workplace.”

Ouch. What happened to the sisterhood?

In my own business, I’d still actually recommend the photo route for pretty young women. As I said, it’s a male dominated world and we don’t really have formal HR departments. And if you land on my desk I’ll pay more attention to your folio than your fizzog.

But for the corporate sphere, a babe had better wait ‘til she’s hungover before taking the photo or else not send one at all.

There are two substantive issues here for me.

The first and hopefully most obvious point is that it shouldn’t really matter whether you’re a honey or a honey monster. The “employers will remember your CV by your photo” strikes me as one of the most conspicuous outbreaks of bollocks I’ve heard for a while. Photos are to see what you look like, and what you look like shouldn’t matter.

I recently spoke to a US news-reporter who had been displaced in favour of – literally – a beauty-queen-news-reporter. Even if she looked like Jabba the Hut (she doesn’t), would it have affected the journalism?

Secondly, who the hell are these people giving out advice in unis., advice which flies directly in the face of the evidence? Who is paying them and why?

I’ve spoken to several people here in the US (I’m here for a short spell) and they’re taken aback at the thought that photos should be attached to anything other than crime scene reports. But their anti-discrimination attenae are a bit more finely tuned than ours.

They feel, rightly I think, that photos for jobs can be a minefield of prejudice. I bet Ruffle and Shtudiner would agree.

Prostitution Law Reform

2010-12-02T04:28:00.008Z

This is a guest blogpost from Anthony Burn. Anthony was a lobbyist for the New Zealand Prostitute Collective, which successfully campaigned for a private members bill to be passed into law in NZ in 2003.

Anthony couldn’t make it to Westminster Skeptics in the Pub on 18th October 2010 when Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon and Dr Brooke Magnanti aka 'Belle de Jour' spoke on ‘The Law and Policy of Sex Work’ which I chaired.

(There’s a podcast of the evening here and a New Statesman article by David Allen Green, convenor of Westminster Skeptics, who put the evening together.)

But over a pint or two of Pinot Grigio, Anthony kindly agreed commit his experience to pixels. And here it is:

Jourdemayne asked me to write this article after we had a conversation about the issue of prostitution law reform in the UK. I was excited to hear that some advocates for law reform were basing their proposals on the New Zealand model, a model that I was intimately aware of, having been hired as an advocate and lobbyist for the New Zealand Prostitute Collective, who successfully campaigned for Tim Barnett’s private members bill to be passed into law on June 25th 2003.

My role was to firm up public support for the bill critical to helping Tim lock in members of parliament who had previously supported the bill, but who were now wavering in the face of a ferocious alliance of radical feminists and churches, lead by the Christian lobby group Maxim. Maxim were a thorn in the side of any socially progressive movement in New Zealand, styling their tactics and presentation on American Christian right groups such as Focus on the Family.

The reform bill enjoyed its own broad coalition of support from liberal churches, victim support groups, and a wide array of public health groups. This support was at least as deep as the opposition's, but it was also quieter, and there was a real danger that the only voices the MPs would hear in the decisive three weeks before the final vote was the sky-falling-in stridency of the opposition.

By the time of the final vote, the New Zealand media was identifying the prostitution law reform bill as the most intensely lobbied piece of social legislation since the passage of the homosexuality law reform bill twenty years earlier.

Maxim and their cohorts were very adept at grasping the media megaphone and providing the kind of lurid, exaggerated claims that write their own headlines. My favourite piece of Maxim nonsense was the claim that legalizing prostitution would lead to brothel owners expounding the benefits of prostitution as a career choice at school career days. It should come as a surprise to no one that no school fairs have been visited by brothel owners since the bill passed.

If anything, the radical feminist objection to the bill was even more strident than the religious groups. One memorable moment just before the vote occurred in an interview between Tim and New Zealand television media personality Pam Corkery, a staunch feminist implacably opposed to the bill.

In a memorable exchange Pam accused Tom of authoring the most anti-women piece of legislation in New Zealand's history, and not stopping there, accused Tim of being intrinsically and irredeemably anti-women because he was openly gay. Tim did a very good job of laughing this accusation off, but what puts this exchange in context is that Pam Corkery had made her name championing myriad social causes, including many opposed by Maxim, and had once been a member of parliament for the most left-wing party in New Zealand. In almost any other circumstance Pam and Tim would have been on the same side of an issue, and yet Pam made the nastiest and most personal attack on Tim of the whole campaign.

This underlines the resonance of the emotional associations that prostitution triggers in many people’s minds, drawing together the strangest of bedfellows on the side of the opposition. It should also act as a warning to the UK advocates of reform of the many faceted vehemence they would face in the UK.

A small but noteworthy example of this was Harriet Harman’s support for the Swedish model of prostitution law reform that was also supported by some opponents of the New Zealand bill. The Swedish model was rejected by reform bill advocates because in Sweden it only exacerbated the problems of the current law by criminalizing the clients rather than the sex workers, thereby driving prostitution even further underground and compounding all the ills of the status quo, increasing the instances of unreported rape, rampant drug use, and increased HIV and other STD infections. Far from being a solution it only compounds the problem, yet it has always found favour with some feminists because it targets predominately male clients over female sex workers.

Tim included in his final speech a quote from Dr Basil Donovan, Head of Sydney’s Sexual Health Service:

“With the sole exceptions of the Cultural Revolution in China and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the law surrounding prostitution has no effect in its prevalence. Laws seeking to restrict prostitution merely promote corruption, brutality and sexually transmitted infections”

So how would the world look like to the average UK citizen if a law like this was passed? It would remain virtually unchanged to most of us who do not frequent the sex industry. The only truly viable sign of change in New Zealand for most people was the reduced presence of risqué massage parlour signs since the new law gave local bodies new powers to regulate advertising related to sex work.

But for UK sex workers the world would change dramatically as it did for New Zealand sex workers, and key to that transformation would be the sex workers’ relationship with the state. As Tim said in his comments prefacing the final reading of the bill:

“Under the Bill they (sex workers) will be under a public health umbrella. They will have the opportunity for an employment contract, the certainty of an Occupational Safety and Health Code, a safer-sex focused environment to work in. They will have new protection from a stronger law against coercion. Workers aged under 18 will not be criminalized, but their clients face longer sentences than under current law, with less opportunity to successfully defend themselves”

If there is one key campaign lesson I would immediately draw from the New Zealand experience is that the debate over prostitution reform can be highly emotive, sensational and irrational. Arguments in favour, therefore, have to be ready to provide irresistible case studies embedded into highly compelling emotional narratives to counter the emotional fire storm that comes from the opposition. Though these emotional arguments have to be made, they can and should ultimately be located back in the kind of entirely rational, pragmatic arguments that cemented my own personal support for reform.

An example of how this was effectively deployed in the debate over the bill was when Tim and the Prostitutes Collective provided a key waverer with a highly evocative case study of how the status quo was not working in her own constituency. They brought the MP into direct contact with the victims in that case study with the result that, on the night of the debate, the waverer supported the bill and cited the victims she met as the reason why she changed her mind.

A key emotive argument made on the night in New Zealand was made by Georgina Beyer, the world’s first transsexual MP and previously world’s first transsexual Mayor. Georgina recounted how, in the days when she was still a male prostitute on the streets, she was violently raped by a male client who avoided prosecution because Georgina knew if she approached the police about the rape she also would be prosecuted because of her profession.

Georgina said that voting for the reform bill that night would help put a stop to all the rapes of the Georges and Georginas out there, people who were too afraid to turn in their attackers because of the Victorian 'blame-the-victim' mindset of the current law.

Making resonant, emotive laden arguments for Prostitution Law Reform would be even more critical in a UK context, because prostitution law reform is exactly the kind of emotional political football that red-tops like 'The Sun' love to kick around for maximum shock value.

After Tim read the New Zealand Prostitution Reform bill a final time, a conscious vote was taken, with the bill passing by a single, solitary vote - 60 votes to 59, with one key, brave, abstention by the solitary Muslim MP in the New Zealand parliament.

Since that momentous (and wildly celebratory) night seven years ago, the bill has been law, and it has wrought a positive change in sex worker health, safety, rates of drug use, working conditions, worker benefits, and ability to leave the occupation at will. Needle exchanges and sexual health clinics also report a positive uptake by sex workers since the police no longer provide examples of needles and condoms as the evidence required to prosecute sex workers for their occupation in court.

I hope that the UK advocates for prostitution law reform continue to champion the New Zealand example as the way to remove outdated, biased, largely unenforced law, which leaves real problems untouched and nurtures harm.

I wish them the very best of luck in negotiating the minefield to bring about positive change in the world’s oldest profession, in the very society that brought us the Victorian moral mindset.

Intelligence Squared: Stop Bashing Christians

2010-11-20T22:24:00.003Z

Intelligence Squared events are always fun. They attract prominent and often witty speakers. This one was no exception.

“Stop bashing Christians: Britain is Becoming an Anti-Christian country” took place in Kensington on November 3rd. The event was actually very well attended given that it was a Bob Crow day. That’s like a bank holiday, but with even less public transport ;-)

Anyhow, the motion was supported by Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord George Carey, columnist Peter Hitchens and writer Howard Jacobson.

And it was opposed by Geoffrey Robertson QC, Matthew Parris and Benedictine Friar Dom Antony Sutch, who has a career in laconic stand-up if the monk thing doesn’t work out.

At the start of the evening, the vote was: for 275; against 183; undecided 181. Given that the swing vote is the one to win at these things, there was a decisive gain to be had by one side or the other.

George Carey was uninspired; Geoffrey Robertson was charismatic and amusing; Howard Jacobson was polished, funny and indulged in unforgivable levels of sophistry; Matthew Parris was clear and lucid; Peter Hitchens was … well you’ve read his Mail columns; Dom Antony Sutch was reasonable and hilarious. For the purposes of dry-cleaning, does a monk’s habit count as a military uniform or a ballgown? The dry-cleaner was as confused as you are at this moment.

George Carey pointed out that the majority of people in this country are self-declared Christian, but he saw “worrying signs that the Christian faith is being pushed to the margins”.

He went on to cite several recent situations which would be familiar to most people who glance at newspapers or the ‘net. Gary McFarlane, a senior Relate counsellor had been dismissed for refusing to offer sexual guidance to homosexual couples; nurse Shirley Chaplain who was asked to remove her cross at work; Islington Registrar Theresa Davies who refused to conduct same-sex civil partnerships; Owen & Eunice Johns who were disallowed from fostering children because of their religious belief that homosexuality is wrong.

“My concern is that the religious rights of individuals are now being trumped by other rights” he summarised.

Geoffrey Robertson QC opened by saying that the Pope had been “fawned upon by politicians”. He continued that “… the protests were all polite and good humoured with the exception of the sour faced Paisley-ite Protestants from Northern Ireland proving … the only people who are bashing Christians in this country are their fellow Christians”.

He characterised the Synod activity regarding women and gays as “puerile debates” and went on to list many ways in which Christianity, far from being bashed, was actually highly privileged in Britain.

As for Gary McFarlane, who had been cited previously by George Carey (the Archbishop had also given evidence on his behalf), Robertson pointed out that the codes of ethics of both ‘Relate’ and ‘The British Association of Therapists’ disallowed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. And Gary McFarlane belonged to and was thereby required to adhere to these codes.

“These cases are not bashing Christians” Robertson concluded. “They’re making sure that idiosyncratic and bigoted Christians don’t bash gays and other minorities at the public expense.”

Howard Jacobson started with a hyperbolic list of the putative benefits of Christianity.

“When Christianity … found you, you were warring gangs of troglodytic tree-worshippers for whom spirituality meant dancing around a goat in maxi-dresses … whose highest architectural ambition was the arrangement of big stones in small circles … From that, Christianity refined you into the people who built Ely cathedral, who listened to the music of Purcell & Handel, who spoke a language subtle and profound enough to make possible the plays of Shakespeare … without Christianity … the very temper of the English mind … would be less sophisticated”

While I fully appreciate that Mr. Jacobson’s standpoint was artfully designed to ride on a wave of wit – and he is a droll speaker – the conflation of wit and wisdom was too complete to forgive … or even disentangle.

If we assume that even just fifty percent was intended as fact, it was still tosh. Sorry.

But “… it was the French” who rescued the British from Wode, protested Matthew Parris.

As for goats and maxi-dresses, I’ve written about the insufficiency and impartiality of historical records regarding nature of pre-Christian religious practices in the British Isles here.

And the proposed direct causal relationship between Christianity and complex cultural ephemera is too ridulous to bother rebutting. Let’s just ignore the collapse of empires, the progress of epidemics, climate and economy.

Jacobson reminded us of John Dunne’s: “ … infinitely subtle matrix which makes each of us so implicative in the lives of others that damage is impossible to guage”.

On which non-sequitur he finished.

Howard Jacobson had mentioned an incident in which Matthew Parris had leapt into the Thames to save a dog. He had attributed the moral motivation for this to the Christian minset.

Parris opened with a reposte:
“I believe, as Christianity and Judaism do not believe, that dogs have souls”.

Parris started by disputing the Christian perspective as the starting point for morality and law. He rejected the divine authority of any rulebook on at least two levels: firstly, the rules in relation to specific issues such as abortion, homosexuality, birth control and so forth; and secondly, the notion that the Christian god ordains human morality.

Christians and non-Christians alike should have an equal say in political ethics he continued.

Paris continued with examples of the way in which religion has not offered the tolerance it now pleads for itself, concluding:
“Their gods care little for your freedom … give them the tolerance they would never give you, but watch them like a hawk and give them not an inch more”

With what may have seemed like whimsy, the chair introduced Peter Hitchens as “a man for whom faith has been a constant feature throughout his life”. Hitchens’ past fervour for international socialism and revolutionary Trotskyism, and his present belief in Anglican Christianity were thus framed as different locations on one continuum.

But I think it was actually an incisive insight.

Several people have developed psychological models of religiosity. They categorise things like whether a person is likely to have transcendental experiences; whether their religious thoughts are likely to permeate other situations in their lives; whether they regard the prime value of religious affiliation as social order.

For Peter Hitchens take a quick look at Extrinsic Religiosity in Allport and Ross’s ‘Religious Orientation Scale’.

Hitchens seems to be, more than a Christian, a believer in belief.
“Many who did not believe in God recognised the social benefits” he said.
“Such people as Matthew [Parris] regard Christianity’s prohibitions too high a price to pay for the great benefits we receive at its hand”, and:
“A nasty new tribal group-think is undermining the faith on which are based a unique ordered liberty of our society: its gentleness, its tolerance, its freedom, its literature, its art, its music … its law and its language”

They are: “those who like to live with its benefits but will not pay its dues”

Dom Antony Sutch is a monk who does not believe that we are becoming a nation of Christian-bashers.
“We’re living in a society that is bashing everybody” he intoned mournfully.

He also made an interesting point not made by others:
“We’re getting to the point where the media have all the headlines and we say “It must be the case”.”

Does the media aggravate these stories? Maybe.

The evening carried a few interesting themes.

The conflation of non-Christian and anti-Christian was addressed. Dom Anthony Sutch pointed out that the new movement:
“… may disagree and argue about certain Christian beliefs, but it is not anti-Christian”

He went onto say: “One of the things that worries me more than anything is Christians getting at other Christians. But if you’re a Christian getting at a Christian, you’re not anti-Christian”.

There was also a certain failure, particularly with George Carey it seemed, to appreciate the degree to which Christianity is already privileged:

The Church of England, said Geoffrey Robertson “.. loves to sit undemocratically at the heart of The Establishment”, enjoying privileges with education and tax laws.
Parliament starts every day with a prayer by an Anglican Chaplain; Church of England courts are paid for by the taxpayer because the Church is established; the monarch is its head and the archbishops are appointed by the Prime Minister; vicars live without paying Council Tax.

There are also twenty-six Lords Spiritual in the House of Lords – all Anglican. Neither did the recent White Paper on Lords reform suggest getting rid of them.

Archbishop Carey defended the Lords Spiritual system to a ripple of laughter. He protested that he had tried to get the RC Bishop of Westminster appointed too but the Vatican had declined.

Matthew Parris was also eloquent on the degree to which Christianity has institutional advantages including exemptions from discriminatory laws in employing staff, and the fact that political party leaders regularly give privileged access to religious believers

“Their real complaint is that they’re not getting their way anymore” he said. “Theirs is the self-pitying whimper of a dog that off its leash in a dominating pack would hound other creatures again without mercy”

Peter Hitchens, on the other hand, believed that the powerful non-Christian movement “seeks itself to be dominant”.

During questions, he went on to offer a chilling warning to us all. They (the new movement):
“… will leave a space … for fundamentalist Islam … where Christianity used to be … that’s where it’s all going”.

This, as though it was indisputable that social ecology has a mandatory niche - the religious niche, which will suck powerfully, destructively & indiscriminately when occupied by a vacuum.

But fervent religiosity is not a mandatory niche, surely – a gap to be plugged with a benign entity to displace a more malignant version?

In fact, Matthew Parris reminded us of what could really lurking in the fringe. And for this, we do not have to turn to our own paranoia but to history:
“Ask Galieo, ask Luther, ask Darwin about intolerance” he said. The Roman Catholic Church was an institution which “… when it could, burnt its critics at the stake, excommunicated intellectual or moral challengers, suppressed or subverted science itself …”

He also quoted John Clare’s ‘Ode to a Fallen Elm’:
‘So thy old shadow must a tyrant be
Bawl freedom loud then oppress the free’

That religion is a secondary construct rather than a primary state was visibly lost on Peter Hitchens and Archbishop Carey. Secularists are not asking for special treatment. They’re asking for a level playing field, without privilege for anyone. Howard Jacobson was inordinately more sophisticated, pleading that, as he put it, “Judeo-Christianity (has) a way of describing us to ourselves”.

Summarising, Geoffrey Robertson said that Britain is becoming a non Christian, but not an anti-Christian society. Dom Anthony Sutch said that society is becoming secular but not intolerant.

And the vote at the end of the evening? The ‘fors’ went from 275 to 216, the 'againsts' went from 183 to 378, and the 'undecideds' were reduced from 181 to 48. That probably means that 133 previously undecided people had swung to the idea that ‘we are not becoming a Christian bashing country’ … and so had 59 voters who had previously thought that we were.

Evolving Darwin Play Set

2010-11-19T15:58:00.006Z

Look what I got for a pressie!

Darwin evolves from pond slime to a chimpy-looking hominid to a nineteenth century gentleman.

Skeptics in the City of Angels

2010-11-13T18:49:00.004Z

Business has brought me to LA for a few weeks.

The up-side of going west through eight time zones is that you get up early enough to go for a run. The downside is that by dinnertime, you're slumped with your face in your food.

And speaking of eating: been busy this week, so I just bought a pile of frozen, microwaveable Mexican food. I think it's going to be a while before I can look another chimchanga in the face. Today, I am going to go and buy a vegetable.

Mr Jourdemayne and I once took a very long trip to see a writer. We were too off-schedule to stop for a meal, but had been told there were provisions at the other end. After two hours of greetings and enough rum to launch a Saturn V - all endured without fainting - we were presented with the comestibles.

It was the repast of an eighteenth century central European peasant married to a nail technician from a trailer park in Alabama. There was every kind of salted and preserved meat you can imagine. All seemed to end in 'am': ham, spam ... plus jerky.

And cheese and onion crisps.

And ONE sprig of parsley.

Mr Jourdemayne and I both fixed upon the parsley. Our eyes darted back challengingly to each other, and then that music from 'The Good, The Bad and the Ugly' played in the background.

I might have imagined that last bit.

I was as fast as a cat, but he was a fast as a faster cat. Mr Jourdemayne whipped the parsley away. He took the time to triumphantly roll it around his lips, Ermentrude-like, before sucking it down with a vigorous vacuum that made all our ears pop slightly.

The hostess looked at us resentfully. I think she kept the parsley for dressing. I don't think we were supposed to eat it. The speed with which Mr Jourdemayne ingested the thing, it may actually have been astro-turf parsley. We'll never know.

I like vegetables, and today I'm going to buy one.

But what of last night? I went to see Drinking Skeptically, LA at their usual meetup, and what a friendly bunch of people they are. It's one of the many wonderful things about skepticism, that we can go to so many cities and find friends very easily.

This Brian Hart, assistant organiser and Invesigator with the Independent Investigations Group.

And this is Derek Bartholomaus, who created the Jenny McCarthy Bodycount.

Thanks to everybody for making me feel so welcome. See you all again soon.

Hallowe'en Week

2010-10-23T11:29:00.009+01:00

Thank you to everybody who came to say 'Hi' at The Literary and Debating Society at the National University of Ireland on Thursday November 28th. The debating society's motion: 'This House Believes in the Other Side' was defeated.

I also had a wonderful evening at Goldsmiths on Tuesday 26th, where I spoke about 'Demons and Nightmares: Why do People Believe in the Malign Supernatural?' There's an audio version here

And we had a lot of fun at the Westminster Skeptics First Birthday/Hallowe'en Party on November 1st too.

What a great Hallowe'en week!

The Druid Network

2010-10-10T10:02:00.004+01:00

On September 21st, the Charity Commission published its decision in respect of The Druid Network’s application for charitable status.

The ‘yes’ hit the news networks a few days later at the beginning of this month, for example the Telegraph, the BBC and Sky News where it rather uncharitably appeared under their ‘strange news’ category.

The Druid Network is not the extant organisation to represent Druidism, but it’s the only one currently with Charity Status.

This should not be misunderstood as an aspersion upon any Druids or Druidical Institutions though. Other organisations may just not want charitable status. King Arthur Pendragon (I’m guessing he changed his name by deed poll) was reported by the BBC as saying that:

“… he would not be seeking charitable status for his own order - the Loyal Arthurian Warband - as it was a political wing and therefore had no need to be recognised as a charity”

King Arthur sounds like friendly and self-effacing kind of a bloke to judge from the interviews I’ve read over the years:

“I'm Arthur Pendragon and if people want to believe I'm some nutter who thinks he's the reincarnation of King Arthur that's their choice”

In fact it’s hard to dislike Druids in general. They seem full of good intentions, keen on environmentalism, rejecting of consumerism as a route to happiness and King Arthur likes cider – all sterling qualities.

They esteem personal revelation on the way to enlightenment, they seem to appreciate the cultivation of knowledge over received dogma and to practice meditation.

If I was forced to choose between one of the Abrahamic faiths and modern Druidry, it’d be a millisecond before I was down the pub with His Majesty.

But King Arthur was also quoted by the BBC as dropping what I regard as the biggest neo-pagan clanger – claiming provenance of his religion from the original Celtic social class of two millennia ago.

“We are looking at the indigenous religion of these isles - it's not a new religion but one of the oldest”

We actually know very little about the Celtic Druids. Most of the written evidence comes from Julius Caesar’s ‘Commentaries on the Gallic War’.

Caesar’s Gauls had structured societes with a military class and a priestly one, which “is in great honour among them”. The Druids seem to have been in charge of administering justice:

“For they determine respecting almost all controversies, public and private; and if any crime has been perpetrated, if murder has been committed, if there be any dispute about an inheritance, if any about boundaries, these same persons decide it; they decree rewards and punishments”

Caesar continues that the Druids were knowledgeable about calendars and astronomy and they spent very long periods (twenty years) committing their most sacred doctrines to memory, although they used Greek letters to write upon more mundane matters.

But there was an uncivilised facet to this nation: the Druids practiced human sacrifice.

“The nation of all the Gauls is extremely devoted to superstitious rites; and on that account they who are troubled with unusually severe diseases, and they who are engaged in battles and dangers, either sacrifice men as victims, or vow that they will sacrifice them, and employ the Druids as the performers of those sacrifices; because they think that unless the life of a man be offered for the life of a man, the mind of the immortal gods can not be rendered propitious, and they have sacrifices of that kind ordained for national purposes.”

And here is where we get our legend of the Wicker Man, a giant human-shaped container stuffed with live sacrificial victims. They:

“ … have figures of vast size, the limbs of which formed of osiers they fill with living men, which being set on fire, the men perish enveloped in the flames. They consider that the oblation of such as have been taken in theft, or in robbery, or any other offence, is more acceptable to the immortal gods; but when a supply of that class is wanting, they have recourse to the oblation of even the innocent.”

This combination of civilised and uncivilised traits may have been intended demonstrate to the Romans back home that the Gauls were simultaneously a people worth the effort of conquering but also barbaric and in need of Roman cultural influence.

In other words, Caesar’s account has to be regarded as, at least in part, propaganda. Without decent objective verification of the facts, we just don’t know.

Druidic divination by human sacrifice was also described by first century BCE Greek historian Diodorus Siculus:

"There are also certain philosophers and priests surpassingly esteemed, whom they call Druids. They have also soothsayers, who are held in high estimation; and these, by auguries and the sacrifice of victims, foretell future events, and hold the commonalty in complete subjection … when they deliberate on matters of moment, they practise a strange and incredible rite; for, having devoted a man for sacrifice, they strike him with a sword on a part above the diaphragm: the victim having fallen, they augur from his mode of falling, the contortion of his limbs, and the flowing of the blood, what may come to pass, giving credence concerning such things to an ancient and long-standing observance“

But we know so little of Diodorus’ life, whether he travelled and whether he gathered his accounts first hand, that it’s fair to draw the more probably conclusion that he worked from documents and may have been repeating hearsay.

Strabo’s ‘Geography’, covering the same subject, writes in such a conspicuously similar fashion that it seems highly likely they were both repeating from the same source. They both mention that Druids had the power to stand between armies and halt hostilities if they thought the fight unjust. And Strabo re-mentions Caesar’s Wicker Man.

Strabo did travel extensively, but he lived from around 63/64 BCE to 24 CE. In other words, he was around twenty years old at the death of Julius Caesar (100 BCE 15 March 44 BCE). His travels and writing post-dated the extirpation of the Druids and the chances of collecting first-hand data (although he may have spoken to old campaigners).

There are other classical sources but we don’t need to go through them exhaustively. Basically, I’m trying to demonstrate that our knowledge of the real, ancient Druids is patchy, propagandist and/or second hand.

I’m not at all upset, by the way, at the notion that they practiced human sacrifice. They may have, they may not have. Iron Age human sacrifice is reasonably well evidenced by corpses such as Tolland Man.

And for those with such a sanctimonous dismissal of other’s murderous practices, the Romans would have done well to remember that Gladiatorial combat probably started at the time of the Punic Wars as a barely glossed human sacrifice, a part of funerary ritual.

The point about Druidic human sacrifice is – we don’t know.

Druids turn up later in Irish folkore. But their role and identities were reduced, by the coming of Christianity, to sorcerers. Druids get a bad rap ‘til the early modern era, at which time we see the buds of a Romantic reinvention.

Modern Druidism has had many players over the centuries: people like antiquarian and proto-archaeologist John Aubrey (1626 – 1697) for whom the ‘Aubrey holes’ of Stonehenge are named; antiquarian, freemason, doctor and vicar William Stukely (1687-1785) and Welsh propagandist, antiquarian and poet Edward Williams (1747 –1826).

So was our nation’s true religion under wraps for all that time, safe in the hands of a few initiates who, continuing the practices of their antecedents, memorised all their sacred knowledge and left no texts?

Did they only emerge when it was safe to do so? Is modern Druidry an authentically original, rather than reinvented, tradition?

Margaret Murray (1863 – 1963) was an Egyptologist who is now mainly remembered for her ‘Witch-Cult Hypothesis’. Her books ‘The Witch Cult in Western Europe’ (1921) and ‘The Gods of the Witches’ (1931) proposed that the ‘Old Religion’ had gone underground but had survived intact. Covens worshipped a horned god and the sacrifice of a ‘Divine King’ figure could be seen in such historical events as the death of William Rufus and Thomas Beckett.

However, Murray’s theories are now very unfashionable and have, to be frank, been thoroughly discredited. She felt that the witch trials of Europe’s sixteenth and seventeenth ‘Great-Witch-Hunt’ era were an attempt by the Christian authorities to extirpate a genuine underground movement.

However, there are alternative, and far better, explanations of the witch hunts. Like so many human dynamics and behaviours, the Witch Hunts are too subtle and complicated for one definitive answer.

But the post-Reformation tension between Catholicism and Protestantism probably had a huge part to play, as did the economic changes of the early-modern era in which traditional means of social support and charity changed.

Where there are highly plausible explanations for one theory and virtually no evidence for another, Occam’s razor must be evoked. Sorry Margaret.

And this, I feel, must go for Druidism too.

Writing to his friend Lord Cecil about a trip to York in 1570, Archbishop Edmund Grindal expressed his dismay about the tenacity of Catholicism in the north of England:

“He lamented that holy days and feasts were still celebrated, beads were told and ‘they offer money, eggs etc. at the burial of their dead’”
p 102

Offerings for the dead are undoubtedly a vestigal manifestation of pre-Christian religious practices. Catholicism was, and is, undoubtedly a more magical religion than Protestantism. But this does not mean that the people of whom the Archbishop disapproved were self-consciously practicing anything other than that which they would have called Christianity.

At Easter, I eat a lot of dark chocolate eggs, but that makes me a gannet – not a pagan.

James Frazer, in the Golden Bough (1890) identified traces of the Old Religion all over Europe.

He cites ‘Druidical festivals’ such as the making of ‘need fire’ on Beltane - May Day, a ritual which was regarded as a prophylactic for disease. (‘Need’ fire is ‘new’ fire from first principles rather than from an existing ember.) In Ireland, Frazer recalls that the May Day rituals in which cattle were driven between two need fires had been conducted ‘within living memory’.

He also cited recent festivals of the time in Douay & Dunkirk where a giant figures made of osiers (wickerwork) were taken through the street, driven by men enclosed inside them.

But the closest Frazer gets to Murray’s recondite religion is to write:

“… that is, among a Celtic people who, situated in a remote corner of Europe and almost completely isolated from foreign influence, had til then conserved their heathenism better perhaps than any other people in the West of Europe”

This is far from suggesting that there was a coherent spiritual underground, an authentic and self-conscious maintenance of a two thousand year old tradition.

It’s not a claim that is repeated by ‘The Druid Network’ from what I can gather from their website, which is very sensible of them.

Their founder, Emma Restall Orr was associated with the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids which founded by Ross Nichols in 1972.

There are a several Druidic groups, and the recent history of the movement has a little of the ‘People’s Judean Front’ about it. But then so do most groups & movements, I suppose. I’ve seen it many times, and you probably have too.

Jo Brand said that Wiccan is Old-English for basket-case. I repeat it here because it’s a funny joke and I like Jo Brand.

But I’ll qualify that by reminding you that, frankly, they don’t believe in anything sillier than any other religions, perhaps less silly than many. As I said, just picture me and King Arthur in the pub …

But despite scoring well on the ‘no sillier’ index, should we be granting charitable status to Druids? Or any other religious groups for that matter?

Watch this space for part 2.

The Changing Face of Anti-Vax

2010-09-26T17:31:00.012+01:00

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a very well-travelled eighteenth century aristocrat whose husband was appointed ambassador to Istanbul. Fortunately for us, she was also a prolific letter writer. Her legacy is still in print today.

Lady Montagu had been scarred badly by a bout of smallpox in her youth. She was fortunate; many who contracted smallpox at the time, like her own brother, died.

So when she found out about a Turkish procedure to safeguard against severe smallpox, she had her son treated. She went on to introduce the habit to some of the upper classes in England, the Royal children among them. This was against considerable resistance from the medical profession of the time, but I’ve written about exactly how useful they were in that era here.

‘Variolation’ is the introduction of a small quantity of the milder of the two forms of smallpox – Variola minor – into a subject. Given that the dose was tiny, that it was of the mild form of the disease and that it may have been administered via a cut in the skin (rather than by inhalation), the effect was to produce antibodies against future infection, but not the full-blown disease.

Edward Jenner later used cowpox pathogens to achieve the same result. Both of these procedures are inoculation – introduction of live pathogens – rather than vaccination which uses ‘dead’, attenuated or partial viruses.

I write ‘dead’ in quotes because I seem to remember that the concept of life as applied to viruses has some considerable philosophical encumberances. It’s fascinating, but we don’t need to worry about it for the purposes of this blogpost.

Smallpox has now been eradicated. It probably exists somewhere in a military laboratory. Let’s hope the custodians are on our side.

Major efforts are being made in polio eradication too and the fight has gone well but for several setbacks, one of which was a conspiracy epidemic in Nigeria where people thought that vaccination made girls sterile. Memes can kill.

In the UK variolation was made illegal in 1840, but that was OK because the same act of Parliament provided for a free vaccine which had been developed since Lady Montagu’s day. In 1853 vaccination of small children became mandatory, and other acts covering other classes of person came in later.

In the late 19th/early 20th century, there were get-out clauses of varying efficacy for those with conscientious objections to vaccination. But by then, they were far less likely to suffer anyway, since they would have benefited from the prophylactic effect of herd immunity – everybody else’s vaccinations.

In the USA in 1905, Jacobson vs Masachusetts reached the Supreme Court where it was determined that states had the authority to impose compulsory vaccination. Sometimes, the rights of the few must submit to the rights of the many.

Which seems to have created quite a backlash at the time. I was in New York a couple of weeks ago and went to a couple of flea markets in the Chelsea district. It’s between the old meatpacking district and Hell’s kitchen. If you don’t think that sounds too salubrious, it wasn’t. Now however, it’s been yuppified and you can buy vintage brass sconces for $275 (They were pretty, but I didn’t).

Instead, I went for a few copies of ‘The Quest’: September 1926, February and April 1927’s editions. ‘The Quest’ had been published in Brooklyn for ten cents a copy, and its mission had been ‘against compulsory vaccination and animal cruelty’.

This really was a niche publication. I’ve Googled it and have had a very hard time finding out much about the magazine or the publisher. But I can tell you that Louis S Siegfried seems to have published at least one other other anti-vax publication (Spivak, John L. The Medical Trust Unmasked: The Story of a Gigantic Conspiracy - Louis S. Siegfried,1929, 1930, 1961 – a first edition seems to go for about USD25) and may have spent some time in jail for his beliefs.

Here is an article he wrote asking ‘Is Vaccination Harmless’.

In the April 1927 pamphlet we read the case of Mrs. Carolyne Burns who refused to have her son vaccinated. The Department of Education had complained that he could not attend school. Mrs Burns said:

“I demand the right of a public school education for my boy and I can’t see why he shouldn’t get it. I object to vaccination and I won’t submit my boy to such a dangerous practice.
It is un-American and unconstitutional to force this pus into the system of a healthy child … the school won’t accept him and I won’t have him vaccinated. What can I do?”

Mrs Burns was found not guilty – although quite how, I’m not sure.

February 1927 has a page on ‘What Physicians say about VACCINATION’, opposite a page which entreats people to ‘Stop Pus Squirting’.

Page 5 covers the furore surrounding a leading article in the Lancet (September 4th and October 9th 1926?) in which a causal link was claimed between death due to encephalomyelitis (inflammation of the brain and spinal-cord) and vaccination.

It’s a fascinating piece of social history. I’ve put a couple of pdfs here so you can read if you’re interested.

The Dangers of Vaccination as Told By a Medical Doctor

Vaccination Predisposes to Other Diseases

The three oft-repeated errors in ‘The Quest’ are argument from authority (there appear to have been plenty of anti-vax doctors willing to write), confusion of correlation with causation and conspiracy theories citing vested interests who were allegedly pushing vaccines for financial gains.

Plus ca change, huh?

I’m not sure whether the vaccinations I received as a child were administered under a legal compulsion. It wouldn’t have made a difference though. My grandmother’s and mother’s generations saw whooping cough, polio and tuberculosis first hand. They couldn’t believe their luck that these conditions and others could be prevented safely and for free.

But it seems we’re now taking our good health for granted. Despite the evidence that vaccinations are safer than outbreaks, anti-vax is on the rise in a generation which has not experienced much epidemic disease.

Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 'Lancet' paper drawing a link between autism and vaccination has been discredited, but large swathes of the confident middle classes – ‘over-Googled people’, as they were described to me at a US vaccination drive recently - are refusing to have their children protected.

I love vintage publications and enjoy reading the voices from history. It's interesting to see that anti-vaxers have gone from being doctors (in Lady Montagu's day), to anti-federal individualists, some with religious interests (early 20th century) to middle-class worriers with benzadrine-type levels of Google usage.

But wouldn't it be nice if the anti-vax message of ‘The Quest’ wasn’t still so current?

You Only Get Answers to the Questions You Ask

2010-09-21T10:32:00.002+01:00

This simple thought seems too obvious to state, but here we go: the very approach to an issue can dictate the type of result you gain.

Stephen Jay Gould’s elegant essay, ‘Male Nipples and Clitoral Ripples’ provides the perfect illustration. It was first published in ‘Bully for Brontosaurus’ and you’ll never regret buying an SJ Gould. So go on.

The conundrum of the male nipple is insoluble if you ask ‘why?’ They are, after all, they are of no obvious use in males. But start with ‘how?’, and we have the more useful insight that they are specialised sweat glands whose prototypal form was present in males and females before becoming more fully developed in one sex for lactation.

Male and female foetuses develop along similar lines for their first few weeks. Later, hormones start to influence differentiation into male and female. Too late to erase the nipples though. Males are left with vestigal nips with no purpose other than to indicate chill-factor, or delight that Man U has just scored.

Similarly, the Victorian female (and all her daughters, up to the 1960s) was beset with the notion that she needed to have a vaginal orgasm to be ‘mature’. Thanks Freud. After all, the purpose of an orgasm was to provide sexual satisfaction, and proper grown-up sex is penetrative sex with a penis. The function must surely follow the intent. This is the answer to the ‘why?’ question.

Except a lot of women – most actually – think their ‘G’ spot is just south of Narnia on the map, and get their climaxes from their clitorises. Or is that clitori? Who knows? Anyhow …

If you ask ‘how?’ … sort of rerun that thingy with the male nipple. Different types of tissue develop in different ways under the influence of hormones in-uteri to produce morphologically distinct males and females.

Our Victorian and early 20th century grandmothers probably suffered unusually compared to everybody else, before and since. After all, without a formidably authoritative, ideologically-driven, guilt-inducing impediment, the simple expedient of “Oy, rub this” has probably sufficed for years. We may not all have a magic button in our vaginas, but contriving sex for female orgasm isn’t that hard with an understanding partner.

So we can see that the ‘how?’ and ‘why?’ questions are of vital importance, because they are often a good indicator of the a-priori assumptions of the questioner: ‘how’ is usually asked by scientists, and ‘why?’ is asked by mystics and magicians. And the answers to the ‘why?’ often create a lot of needless guilt, scapegoating and looking for G-spots.

Peter Tatchell made a Channel 4 documentary ‘The Trouble With The Pope’ to explore the issues surrounding opposition to the Pope’s state visit to the UK in September 2010.

In it, Tatchell discusses with Fiona O’Reilly of ‘Catholic Voices’ the notion that homosexual people suffer with “a strong tendency towards intrinsic moral evil”, as Joseph Ratzinger while Cardinal put it. O’Reilly explained that (45:45):

‘What is the purpose of sex … In the Catholic understanding, sex is ordered to the creation of children and the strengthening of the union between a man and a woman. If that is the starting point, then it makes sense”

And she’s right … if you assume that it really is the starting point.

But I think that we can see from male nipples and clitoral ripples that it isn’t necessarily the starting point, unless you want it to be.

Religion is suffused with the notion that there is a meaning, which is why religious people go looking for it. There is an assumption of purpose. In ‘England’s Child Witches’ I wrote:

‘People in charismatic African churches are not looking for the ‘how’ – they know perfectly well that microbes cause diseases and cars mechanically fail. They are looking for the ‘why’: why me; why not my enemy; why now; why here. It’s a question that empiricism can’t answer without leaving the empty and unsatisfying answer: “shit happens, sometimes more to you than other people”.’

The scientific method is counter-intuitive to human beings. It takes a great deal of education to think that way. Purpose-based explanations, on the other hand, are natural. They come without prompting to children. Our evolutionary history has probably favoured people who can draw meaning from events.

The purpose-based explanation is likely to create a lot of unhelpful false positives (I walked past that tree and fell over, so that tree is probably unlucky). But a false negative would be more dangerous (I ate that lobelia, but the projectile vomiting was probably a coincidence). Wherein lies the relative value of the system.

Some Catholic theologians, including the present Pope, have concluded that gay people are “intrinsically morally evil”.

But they should not kid themselves that they are starting from first principles with their reasoning. By the time they have asked ‘why?’, a preference for mystical thinking has already been settled upon and the conclusions will bear the marks of such a choice.

Protesting the Pope

2010-09-19T11:49:00.013+01:00

Spent a great day at Protest the Pope yesterday.

The march progressed via Picadilly from Hyde Park Corner to Downing Street, had an attendance of around 20,000 (figure unconfirmed) and was organised and supported by the British Humanist Association, National Secular Society, Peter Tatchell among many others.

Fox news reported we were led by "gay activists and radical feminists, with some nasty banners" (thanks @zeno001 for the clip), but the BBC was a bit more even-handed.

A distinguished roll of speakers provided us with thoughts and often humour. Johann Hari opened by informing the police that a person complicit in cover-ups of paedophilic abuse was a short distance way and would be easy to arrest. Richard Dawkins speech is here.

Here are some pictures:

Ben Goldacre

Geoffrey Robertson QC, author of 'The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse'

Richard Dawkins

Johann Hari

I wrote about the culture of the Catholic Church in the wake of the child abuse scandal in Priests, Pederasts & Privilege.

And since I'm not exactly Annie Leibovitz, you may like to look at some superior content from @DaveTheDrummer and Paulo Ferrarini

Funny Who You Bump Into …

2010-09-16T12:33:00.010+01:00

So I got on a plane to attend to a work related matter, thinking that there would be no time for scepticism for a week or two.

But it’s funny who you meet when you least expect to.

I’ve been to more Comicons (San Diego, CA) than I can remember, but that was a while ago. And this was my first DragonCon (Atlanta, GA). It turned out to be a heart-warming collision of the geek universes – fantasy and science – that I hadn’t suspected existed in such a concrete form prior to this.

There was a full-on Skeptic presence with a program including James Randi, D J Groethe, George Hrab, Richard Saunders, Kylie Sturgess, Rebecca Watson and many others. There was a table for Skepchick, the local Skeptics and CFI.

Sorry Rebecca, tried to catch you but kept missing you.

However, I managed to say hello to James Randi twice, and got a piccie.

The sciencey/skeptic vibe wasn’t just propaganda though. Along with all the T-shirts (eg. illustration right) I could see two very practical and humanitarian strands at DragonCon.

One is well established. There have been blood drives at US conventions for a few years. Comicon and DragonCon have a friendly rivalry to see who can collect most of the red stuff.

Comicon’s ‘Robert A Heinlein’ blood drive has collected 8,736 pints of blood over the last 33 years. Attendance this year was at the venue’s capacity of 125,000 and donations were generous.

But they may have been trumped by DragonCon: despite the smaller attendance of 40,000, they had nearly 2,000 units by Sunday afternoon and thought they may be on for this year’s Elizabeth Bathory award.

Actually, I just made that award up, but I think they deserve it. ‘Life South’ is the non-profit blood centre which runs the drive. The blood stays in the tri-state community (Alabama, Georgia and Florida) and is much needed in the summer months when donations usually drop.

Well done guys.

The second strand is newer and also much needed. The ‘Hug Me I’m Vaccinated’ campaign provides free TDAP boosters for against tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis (whooping cough). At the same venue there was free HIV testing and next year they plan to add flu jabs.

Whatever scary stories you hear about the cost of American medicine, children’s vaccinations are available for free … if you want them. The government has a large budget allocation for free vaccines and complete vaccination is running at about 85%.

However, the US has suffered as much as the UK from anti-vax propaganda. Jenny McCarthy, Bill Maher (Bill how could you? – you’re so funny, especially about religion) and Oprah have added celebrity momentum to Andrew Wakefield’s discredited theories.

So ‘over-googled people’ think they’re doing their kids a favour by leaving them vulnerable to serious diseases that we could have left in the last century. The US has hot-spots of low vaccination rates and contagious disease outbreaks, such as measles in San Diego in 2008.

‘Hug Me I’m Vaccinated’ is created, run or contributed to by three organisations: The Women Thinking Free Foundation; The Centre for Disease Control and Skepchick.

By half way though Sunday, two hundred vaccinations had been given, such an enthusiastic take-up that the guys thought they may run out.

What a fun Labor Day weekend!

Theories: Splitting Linguistic Hairs and the Work of Anne Elk (Miss)

2010-08-28T18:49:00.006+01:00

The work of Anne Elk (Miss), undoubtedly one of the overlooked intellectual giants of our age, serves to remind us of the importance of theories. And indeed, how anyone can hold one … ahem!

I cannot gainsay Miss Elk’s evident expertise in the area of paleantology since I know nothing of Brontosauruses.

But I was fascinated to hear the ‘T’ word occur yet again in Richard Dawkins’ recent More4 documentary ‘Faith School Menace?’

To its credit, Madani High School in Leicester was the only religious school which allowed Dawkins access. But its openess provided a clear example of an oft-repeated error, a linguistic error, which helps millions of people to ignore the fact of evolution.

I think it may be a source of frustration to people starting out in some academic disciplines that the first two-thirds of any subject seem to be given over to redefining perfectly good words in English. The social sciences excel in this trait. I’ve certainly spent glowering and resentful evenings over what I seem to remember calling at the time “a pile of nit-picking wank”.

See how articulate I get when I’m angry?

But when the pique has passed and you’ve cleared up the broken crockery, you’re left with very precise language. It’s truly useful.

My dictionary says that a theory is:

1 a system of rules, procedures and assumptions used to produce a result
2 abstract knowledge or conjecturing
3 a conjectural view or idea: "I have a theory about that"
4 an ideal or hypothetical situation
5 a set of hypotheses related by logical or mathematical arguments to explain a wide variety of connected phenomena in general terms: the theory of relativity
6 a non-technical term for hypothesis

Do you think civilian usage tends towards definition 3? I do. If you used a thesaurus it would, under that circumstance, probably allow substitutions of ‘opinion’, ‘supposition’ or even ‘guess’.

Madani High School’s headmaster, Dr Mohammed Mukadam said to Dawkins (24:05):

“None of the reports that I have read says that evolution is a scientific fact. Just says there is a scientific theory which says evolution is there”

Which is why, I suppose, all sixty of the year ten students came to the conclusion that the Koran was filling in the missing bits.

But scientific usage of the word ‘theory’ is different. A theory can also be a fact. A scientific theory is derived from empirical data, contains concepts and testable rules, is good at predicting and is disprovable.

A scientific hypothesis is a tentative theory. It’s more in line with ‘theory’ as used by Dr. Mukadam - definition 6 in the list.

It’s a shame the word ‘theory’ covers such a wide gamut in English, because it leads to a lot of misunderstanding in relation to the theory of evolution. Which is a fact.

That’s my theory. It is mine and belongs to me and and I own it and what it is too. Ahem!

Friday the Thirteenth

2010-08-13T10:16:00.001+01:00

“Some mathematicians believe that numbers were invented by human beings, others, equally competent, believe that numbers have a sufficiently independent existence of their own and are merely observed by sufficiently intelligent mortals”

E T Bell
The Magic of Numbers

‘The Magic of Numbers’ is still available today. Amazon bills it as:

“a stimulating account of the origins of mathematical thought and the development of numerical theory”

and

“… exploring the ways in which "number magic" has influenced the development of religion, philosophy, science and mathematics”

These days, Bell’s quote may find agreement among physicists and scientists. We can create models of the universe – things which we can’t possibly see or experience directly – with the aid of mathematics. And these models reflect real occurrences and relationships of objects and forces.

I’ve used the royal ‘we’. I actually mean ‘people a lot clever than me’. The highest end of mathematics and theoretical physics is an exclusive club. We all benefit from satellites in space but not many of us could get them there or make them work when they’d arrived. We may all one day benefit from String Theory, but it probably wouldn’t bankrupt you to buy a drink for each of the people who *really* understand it.

Numerology is an older concept of how numbers underpin the universe. As alchemy is to chemistry, it may have been the first steps in what has become a (very different) modern discipline.

Numerology is a system of magical thinking, a fairly basic magical concept, based on the idea that something can be expressed numerically, even reduced to its most basic identity - by numbers.

The idea was probably given extra traction by the Hebrew writing system which had no separate letters and numbers, so alphabetical symbols could stand for numbers too. Thus, it was easy to translate a name or word into a numerical version to examine its ‘hidden’ characteristics.

By this method, Jourdemayne becomes:
1 + 7 + 6 + 2 + 4 + 5 +4 + 1 + 1 + 5 + 5 = 41
4 + 1 = 5

The letters reduce to numerically to five and the word contains more fives than any other number than one (also five).

Fives are restless, live on their nerves and fascinated by the bizarre and unusual.

Don’t know what they mean.

The dark side of a five nature may also manifest as excess, debauchery or perversion.

It’s a nice idea, but work’s a bit demanding at the moment and I’d rather get the sleep.

Anyhow, like other magical systems, numerology can provide an insight into human cognitive patterns and reflect the preferences of specific cultures.

So now that it’s Friday the thirteenth, it seems the time to go over why this day seems to have such a bad rep.

Numerologists work the significance of numbers out from philosophical precepts and then cite examples as evidence.

There are some numbers which are always going to be significant to human beings.

We have ten sets of digits and toes which may account for the popularity of base 10. However, with the rise of computing, the usefulness of binary has become more apparent. I keep a hexadecimal chart next to me to specifiy web colours, for example.

There are seven orifices in the male human body. The eighth, in women, is the one through which new life emerges. So it is easy to consider eight as a female number and for it to be associated with change or rebirth.

These rationales are based on biological constants.

In addition, we are the inheritors of middle-eastern religious traditions so other patterns that emerge reflect that.

Two is bad because it is the first to split from one – the devil from god. Remember that this notion seems indisputable only to monotheistic religions such as Judaism and Catholicism. If we were the cultural inheritors of dualism - the philosophy that opposites are dynamic tension, evident in religions like Catharism and Mithraism – modern European numerologists may not have disliked the number 2 so much.

If we start with the idea that two is bad, we can go searching for evidence: in Noah’s ark the ‘unclean’ beasts went in two by two, for example (the ‘clean’ ones went in, in sevens). For thoughts on how beasts get to be ‘clean’ or ‘unclean’ see this.

The first human to be created was Adam. Eve was the second and she precipitated The Fall. So the first woman was a separation from the perfection of one and the cause of all the trouble.

Told you this was culturally specific reasoning.

Four is doubly female: (2+2 and 2x2) … so you can guess this isn’t going to be good.

Four is solidity: four points are needed to construct a three-dimensional object, a tetrahedron. After that come the cultural preferences and taxonomies: there are four weeks in a month, four seasons, four phases of the moon, four elements in classical physics, four humours in classical medicine, four cardinal points, menstruation once every four weeks.

This means it’s earth-bound and practical.

“Sweat, misery and defeat are the lot of man on earth and the lot of 4-people in numerology” says one of my books on one of its less jolly pages.

So getting to thirteen … 1 + 3 = 4. Oh dear.

Thirteen reduces to a very unlucky number. So you know the drill by now: use your cultural biases to work out a rationale, then go looking for supporting evidence in appropriately authoritative tomes -

Thirteen is a supernumerary number. Twelve is perfect; it (reduces to three 2 + 1) – the number of the Trinity. Twelve is complete – twelve signs of the zodiac, twelve months of the year, twelve disciples. The twelve months of the year is a fudge BTW: the Babylonians has a sneaky extra one to account for the thirteen lunar cycles in a year. The thirteenth at the Last Supper was Judas and we all know what happened to him.

Thirteen becomes the Death card in the tarot. But cussedly, it’s not such a bad card. It’s about rebirth and new opportunities, moving on.

That’s thirteen. What about Friday?

The Sumerians based their calendar on the moon’s phases with a few extra days after the 4 x 7 when the moon isn’t visible. At the end of every 7 day cycle, there was a day which was sacred and evil simultaneously.

This is probably where our Sabbath comes from – an uncanny day on which it is best to be fairly inactive in order to avoid the danger which is about.

This sycratic confusion of ‘powerful & potentially malign’ with ‘holy & in need of reverence’ is a common idea in magical thought. Powerful supernatural beings are often called by kindly names in an attempt to charm them and to avoid evoking the creature itself. As Robert Kirk wrote, fairies were referred to euphemistically because “… the Irish usually bless all they fear harm of”.

Names can be hazardous hyperlinks, potential shortcuts to entities themselves.

This the fairies were ‘The Good People’, ‘The Honest Folk’, ‘The Little Folk’, ‘The Gentry’ and more. The Devil went by ‘Auld Clootie’, ‘Auld Scratch’ or ‘Auld Hornie’ in Scotland, ‘Grime’, ‘Grim’, ‘Old Harry’, ‘Old Nick’, ‘The Old Gentleman’ and many others in England. Hecate, the powerful and fearsome godess of witches was called ‘The Good Goddess’ and also in Greece the Furies were called the ‘Eumenides’, which means ‘The Kindly Ones’.

Even Harry Potter’s friends and associates are too nervous to say the name of the dark magician ‘Voldemort’!

But back to Friday: Friday is ruled by Freya the Nordic goddess of love, war and death. Not an intuitive grouping for us, but there we go. She has occasionally been rebranded as a witch, which might account for the uncanniness of her day.

Jesus was crucified on a Friday.

And Chaucer in the ‘Nun's Priest's Tale’, the tale of Chauntecleer the proud rooster and Reynnard the fox, writes that: “And on a Friday fell all this mischance”.

So that’s pretty clear then. There are sound reasons for believing Friday the thirteenth to be unlucky.

But the thing about fear of Friday the Thirteenth is that it doesn’t seem to figure much before the nineteenth century. If the day really was unlucky, you’d think that knowledge would be a human constant. And in some Mediterranean countries, like Greece and Spain, it is Tuesday the thirteenth which is thought unlucky.

I have no certain explanation for the rise of the superstition then, but a couple of ideas.

The first one is that there are plenty of ideas in the collective conscious which are not explicitly stated. Perhaps the nineteenth century was the first time that Friday the Thirteenth was noted and written down.

The second one, and more likely, is that the nineteenth century saw a Renaissance of occult thought and activity with participants such as Eliphas Levi, S L MacGregor Mathers, Helena Blavatsky and August Strindberg, and societies like the Theosophical Society and The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Perhaps Friday the Thirteenth is a manifestation of nineteenth century nouveau occult numerological ramblings.

Of course, like all magical thinking, these ideas reveal more about human factory-installed software and cultural biases than about the world in an objective sense.

That’s why it’s important to understand and appreciate the importance of the cultural biases which may predetermine thought patterns. These, in some ways, are the most potentially dangerous as they most easily go under the radar.

Not that all magical thinking is wrong or useless, but it often is.

However evolution has favoured those who look for patterns - and some of those causal relationships that we intuitively posit actually exist and help us to survive. Some false positives (I can see god’s face in the clouds) are less dangerous than some false negatives (I didn’t see that tiger’s face in the forest).

It’s a numbers game.

England’s Child Witches

2010-08-08T11:21:00.005+01:00

“The spirit is hiding in the children … the fire burns brightly, the spirit of witchcraft”

Pastor
South London Church, 2010

Those who visit regularly will know that I’m interested in contemporary manifestations of African witchcraft belief.

I wrote about witch hunts centring on children in Nigeria, after an award-winning ‘Dispatches’ which followed the work of child-welfare campaigner Gary Foxcroft. ‘Saving Africa’s Witch Children’ can be seen here.

I also wrote about attacks on children in magical rituals in Uganda after reports on the BBC’s ‘Newsnight’ and ‘Crossing Continents’ by Tim Whewall. While I disputed the statistics implied in Whewall’s ‘Newsnight’ piece, I don’t doubt that there is a widespread belief in the efficacy of witchcraft in Uganda and that some children have been harmed.

Now, there has been another ‘Dispatches’ production, concerning the witch-related religious practices taking place in African churches in the UK – specifically London.

‘Britain’s Witch Children’ followed an undercover journalist psuedonymously named ‘Buki’ (23, passing for 15) whose ‘mother’ is seeking spiritual assistance after her daughter has become argumentative following a holiday back to Africa.

‘Buki’ and her mother went to three churches and found diagnoses of possession or witchcraft in all cases, and very quickly.

Spiritual assistance against witchcraft does not come cheap. The pastors do not seem to publish a scale of charges, but encourage people to give what they can. When offered £170, one church gave ‘Buki’ access to an open and communal session, upon which attendance she was expected to pay more.

“… some people give one thousand pounds. It’s for God, not for us …” explained one pastor.

The deliverances varied from intimidating ranting in rooms to large services where adults threw themselves to the floor, vomited, spat and screamed. The documentary makers noted that there were no child protection officers present, and the fear on children’s faces was clear to see.

This isn’t just about psychological abuse of children – although that would be bad enough.

Victoria Climbie was abused and killed in the belief that she was possessed. The Metropolitan Police’s ‘Project Violet’ was set up to explore cases of child abuse connected to spiritual beliefs. So far, some parents have been prosecuted, but no pastors.

The whole thing must be a difficult balancing act. As Mor Dioum of the Victoria Climbie Foundation pointed out:
“People in those positions of responsibility do not want to be seen as policing culture or religion, or … accused of being racist”

That same issue had been raised about Victoria Climbie by Neil Garnham QC, Counsel to the Inquiry into her death.

Reasons for belief in witchcraft are many and complex. I believe at least one to be the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, which can be inferred from historical witch trial accounts from Strasbourg to ‘Salem. I’ve written about sleep paralysis and supernatural belief here.

“… what do you normally see in your dreams … if there is a spirit fighting you it can come in the form of a dream … do you ever see someone trying to molest you in your dream … or sleep with you? …” asked Pastor James of ‘Buki’.

In case we simply ascribe witch belief to immense stupidity or naivete, it’s also worth remembering that magical beliefs are a natural state for human beings. We need educating into the empiric.

To recap from ‘Nigeria’s Witch Children’ regarding witch hunts in Europe:

“… the natural assumption would be that witch hunts belong to eras with magical religious traditions, rigid social strata, simple technology, agrarian economies and pre-Renaissance thought patterns … In actual fact, large scale witch hunts in Europe were a phenomenon of the Reformation.”

In the early modern era, traditional power relationships, social structures and economic models were changing. It produced dislocation and unsettled psyches, some a little paranoid, in need of certainty.

So where people are uncertain, isolated or economically disadvantaged – such as being part of a new immigrant population – it isn’t surprising to find supernatural rituals aimed at manipulating events in the real world. And there is also more likely to be a dependence on established and recognisable forms of authority, such as pastors.

People in charismatic African churches are not looking for the ‘how’ – they know perfectly well that microbes cause diseases and cars mechanically fail. They are looking for the ‘why’: why me; why not my enemy; why now; why here. It’s a question that empiricism can’t answer without leaving the empty and unsatisfying answer:
“shit happens, sometimes more to you than other people”.

So what about ideas for constructive interventions?

I’ll reiterate my position, stated in each of the previous African witch blogposts: I don’t think it’s constructive in the short term to simply challenge supernatural beliefs. For people who hold these worldviews, the truth of their convictions is self-evident.

It’s ethically dubious, and in any case impossible, to legislate on thought and belief. Previous attempts have ended in mass murder for believing that matter and earthly life were instrinsically evil (see the Albigensian Crusade), and life-long house arrest for believing that the earth orbited around the sun (see Galileo).

As prosperity and certainty enter a life, dependence on supernatural explanations tend to leave.

Interventions must be aimed at actual acts. To this end, several African states have enacted laws which make it illegal to denounce children as witches.

The Child Rights Act of Nigeria:

“… prescribes up to 15 years’ imprisonment without the option of a fine, or both, for offenders in child stigmatisation, accusation of witchcraft or torture cases. It empowers the government to seal off premises of any organisation used to perpetrate child abuse”

In ‘Nigeria’s Witch Children’, I wrote:

“In the short term I believe that the single most important intervention would be to aggressively target professional witch hunters. Witch hunts employ specialists who, for obvious reasons, ensure that the hunt is self-begetting. Inquisitors in Europe have their counterparts in modern Nigeria, pastors who specialise in finding witch children and performing rituals to denature them – for a price. Stopping witch hunters would not stop accusations of sorcery nor fix Nigeria’s social and economic problems, but it may confine the issue of sorcery back to local levels.”

It’s hard to know how cynical the pastors are: whether they believe in any part of the supernatural scheme they are paid so well to manipulate. But their integrity is immaterial: they are the most critical level at which an intervention can and must be aimed.

Oddly enough, a new law against accusations of child witchcraft may have been unnecessary if the old ones hadn’t been superceded.

The Witchcraft Act of 1735 reversed the presumptions of its predecessors, that witchcraft did exist and could cause real harm. Instead, it provided for penalties for those who pretended to have such powers. They were treated as con-artists.

That was superceded in 1951 by the Fraudulent Mediums Act which covered much the same ground. This Act, in turn, was superceded by European consumer directives.

These two required that psychic services must be declared as being for ‘entertainment purposes’.

But here’s where we give religion the respect that other forms of magic don’t get. Can you imagine communion billed as ‘for entertainment purposes only’? Yet in some strands of Christianity, transubstantiation – the change of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ – is accepted as real.

Charismatic churches are getting in under the umbrella of respectability conferred by more established organisations.

So here’s another idea, but one that would be very controversial and would probably prove impossible to institute: the removal of charitable status from religious organisations.

Many religious organisations do real and good charitable work, such as providing crèches and Mums’ clubs, safety schemes for victims of domestic abuse, support for substance abusers, food for the homeless etc.

But these strands should be completely separated – managerially and financially - from the primary mission of providing a centre for people of like-minded metaphysical notions. I’ve no objection to people worshipping – I simply think they should do it at their own expense.

It may sound complicated – it isn’t. Plenty of businesses separate their accounts and activities into discreet entities. One company may own and carry a mortgage on the premises, another owned by the same directors rent the space and manufacture goods in it, perhaps even another market and distribute the goods.

If we could tease the ‘inculcation’ strand from the ‘good works’ strand of religious institutions, it would be a good thing for society at large and would favour those religious organisations who really do outreach to others.

And I emphatically do not propose that ‘exorcism’ should count as charitable work for the purpose of tax relief.

What is the moral justification, after all, for giving tax breaks to an organisation which is characterised solely by its insistence on utterly unprovable postulates? It’s an historical oddity, and would be untenable if we were to invent the system from first principles today. We must end the idea, enshrined in our tax structure, that holding supernatural beliefs is necessarily virtuous.

In this model, the Salvation Army would do very well (a great worship to social work ratio) and some witch-accusing churches, I venture, would do very badly indeed.

Faces & Statutes

2010-07-16T11:42:00.005+01:00

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin, was published in 1872. It was very controversial at the time, and for a long time afterwards for two reasons.

Firstly it implied a continuity between the expression of some sentiments with people and beasts ... as though we are somehow related!

Secondly it implied a hardwiring of our expressions – a biological lingua franca that bridged gender, race, geographical distance, culture and time. You can’t make up your own smile or your own frown any more than you can make up your own fingers. They’re simply there, biological mechanisms which universally fit a purpose across a species.

This issue, of intrinsic facial expressions, was still being argued about through the twentieth century. But repeated work done across cultures including with very isolated peoples finally demonstrated that humans all frown, grin and sneer in the same way for the same reasons.

Pop psychologists and inspirational speakers often remind people of how important the physical component of our presentation is when we communicate. Albert Mehrabian’s 7% spoken words, 38% voice tone and 55% body language is probably the most oft cited, although these figures come with their own caveats which he stated but are not often repeated.

However, whether we can put a consistent percentage value on these things is irrelevant. The fact is that physical presentation matters. It nuances and assists verbal content. Look at how, disembodied through cyberspace, we still use emoticons on digital communications :-D

Evolution simply doesn’t take time and effort to produce highly complex, utterly useless systems.

In fact, seeing a discontinuity between facial expressions and verbal output puts us on alert. Nietzche wrote:

"One can lie with the mouth, but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth"

And watching another’s expressions can help us to empathise. As Edgar Allen Poe had it:

“When I wish to find out how wise or how stupid or how good or how wicked is anyone, or what his thoughts are at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart”

And perhaps we’re not the only species sensitive to the facial expressions of other humans. A team at Lincoln University led by Dr Kun Guo discovered that dogs have left gaze bias when looking at human faces – not other objects or other animals - just humans. The idea is that we may reveal our emotions more authentically on the right side of our faces and gazing left helps the dog to intuit the human state better. Probably more work needed, but it’s an intriguing notion. If we attain simpatico through our facial expressions, why should our longest serving friends not have got in on the act?

The modern master of facial studies is probably Paul Ekman, a professor of psychology at the University of California Medical School. With his colleague Wallace Friesan, he catalogued the 43 distinct muscular movements that the human face can make with its over 50 muscles, calling them action ‘units’. Taking combinations of up to five action units at a time, they catalogued over ten thousand combinations and then noted the three thousand which meant something, the reflection of an authentic human state.

The face is simply the most exquisite piece of biological communication machinery in existence. Can you think of a better one?

In this light, it hard to see how deliberately covering a face can be seen as less than an assault on personality, on individuality. It’s an attenuation of a person’s relationship with the world and the other people in it, a hobbling of the natural medium through which we emote and communicate, even when not speaking.

This week, French MPs voted to pass a law which will forbid the wearing of facial covering in public places. This will, no doubt, be distressing to people who wear motorcycle helmets to restaurants and balaclavas to the theatre. But its real intention is to forbid the wearing of the veil by a minority of muslim women.

Given what we now know about faces, shouldn’t we all regard this is a virtuous law?

I don’t think so.

The Harm Principle' is one of the principles upon western liberal thought is based. As John Stuart Mill wrote:

“… the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

It’s difficult to see how the wearing of a veil harms others.

There are exceptions of course. Minors shouldn’t be able to wear a veil any more than they should be able to get a tattoo. In sensitive security situations such as passport control or entering buildings, people must be required to show their faces. In professional situations such as teaching, there must be no impedance of communication and therefore no veil.

But if a woman chooses to walk down the street completely covered, that surely must remain her own business.

Of course, she may be being coerced by a man. The proposed French law places far lighter penalties upon women than on the men who force them to wear veils.

But considering this situation carefully, how on earth could the law prove coercion without a full disclosure from the coerced? It’s probably unworkable.

At its worst, this law could further restrict the free movement of women who are subject, for economic or social reasons, to the dress codes imposed by husbands and fathers.

It’s hard to see what the French law will achieve but resentment. It’s unlikely to move the willing veil wearer to a secular philosophy, to move the oppressed veil-wearer to liberty or to move marginalised muslims to fuller integration with French society and values.

In my view, as a personal practice, the wearing of the veil is to be deplored, but the French law looks like sanctimonious bullying.

Buns of Steel or Buns of Suet? Laugh Yourself Slim with the Daily Mail

2010-07-14T16:31:00.005+01:00

The Daily Mail has an article entitled ‘How to Laugh Yourself Slim’. Laughing burns calories apparently.

Well, I read the tips and they provided the laugh component. I’ll let you know about the weight loss in time.

They’re ‘medically proven’, so that’s OK then.

"Sprinkle cinnamon into a yoghurt each day to burn fat. The spice is a powerful metabolism-raiser. Half a teaspoon a day is enough to burn an extra kilo a month"

This seems a rather alchemic approach. But perhaps gurning and puking burn more calories than I had realised.

"Train with friends and you'll lose a third more weight than if you go on your own. You'll maintain motivation by exercising socially, and benefit from mutual encouragement."

I can’t dismiss this one out of hand, but there is the important variable of who your friend is. What if it’s Johnny Vegas? (Masterful comedian, not an athlete). I’ve spent enough time in gyms watching people who use leg-press machines as armchairs to know that you need to be with someone focused or you’re better off solo.

And this one interested me most:

"Exercising first thing in the morning helps you to burn fat faster. You'll shed a kilo quicker than at any other time, as your body will be forced to tap into your fat reserves for energy."

Erm?

I’m trying to remember the details of respiration and ATP from years ago. As I remember it, we have several fuel sources available to us and we use them in different combinations at different times.

There’s the glucose in your blood: highly available but there’s only a small quantity.

There’s the glycogen in your muscles and liver: pretty available, more plentiful but there's a limit.

And there’s the fat: very energetically dense, loads available (even in slim people) but a bit less immediate. And you need carbohydrate to burn it, like the priming charge of an explosion.

In an absolute emergency, there’s protein. But nobody wants to go there. It’s a desperate last measure and it hurts.

Anaerobic (energy metabolism without oxygen) exercise uses a lot of carbohydrate (glucose and glycogen) for fuel but produces by-products like lactic acid which soon inhibit performance. This kind of exercise is for emergencies and ‘sprinting’ – sudden, short-lived bouts of great effort like weight training with large weights, sprinting and jumping out of the way of buses.

Aerobic (energy metabolism with oxygen) exercise uses fat and carbohydrate, and gives a smoother performance over time. This type of metabolism is suited to sustained effort like walking or running steadily.

So exercising at a reasonable (not punishing) rate should tip the scales towards the fat-burning end of the continuum, whether you’re working out early or late.

If you run out of glycogen, that’s what cyclists call the ‘bonk’ and runners call the ‘wall’. It hurts. I’ve never done it. Jeff Galloway’s classic book on running describes it thus:

“Glycogen can be processed from fat, and from muscle protein. This is a very uncomfortable process and leaves a lot of waste … When nearby fat stores are used up and the exercising muscle absolutely demands glycogen, exercising muscle itself may be broken down”

So far, using fat for exercise seems to be primarily determined by the type of exercise. Unless of course, you’re so desperately short of glucose and glycogen first thing in the morning that you go straight to the ‘wall’. How carb. depleted are you in the morning then?

I’m shortish and female, so my recommended calorie intake is probably around 1800-2000 per day, I would imagine. (The NHS reckons about 2,000 - this is an average for women irrespective of age and height - and this more detailed BMR calculator reckons 1881)

Let’s call it 75-83 calories per hour to stay alive. That means that if I sleep for 8 hours, that’s a generous 600 to 660ish calories spent digesting, snoring and rolling over on the cat. That’s actually extremely generous, because I’m less active in bed than while awake … perhaps that’s my age ;-) Anyhow …

I run at about 9km per hour and am told by the machine that I’m burning about 650 calories per hour.

Marathon runners hit the wall at around 18-20 miles, 28-32km. At that rate, I’d hit it between 3.1-3.5 hours (Yes - I know I'm not Paula Radcliffe). Call it 2,000 calories. Most of running magazines concur that that’s about the right value.

That probably means that most of the time I have around 2,000 calories' worth of glucose in my blood and glycogen in my muscles and liver. The glucose will vary a bit, from around 4 or 5 mmol/l in the morning to a bit above 7 after a meal (I know this one, because a diabetic friend gouged me savagely with a needle while I was eating a lump of chocolate for pudding, and the blood test came out to 7.2). In any case, the nett glucose in your body is very small; the serious carb. reservoir is the glycogen.

So let’s say I spend about 600 (carb and fat?) calories sleeping and have a reservoir of about 2,000 calories before I hit the wall – then I have at least 1400 carb calories to spend on running when I get up. That’s over two hours of running.

I’m diligent, but not that diligent.

I can’t see how this ‘scientifically proven’ tip can work. I can also assure you that, despite running first thing in the morning without eating, I don’t hit the wall. I’m sure I’m still running with my glycogen reserves, in other words - same as if I was running in the evening after two meals.

If you're an exercise scientist, please tell me if I'm missing something.

I don’t suppose any of this matters in the grand cosmic scheme of things. Except that I worry that people feel they have to do all sorts of exotic things to be fit and healthy. I wonder if ‘scientifically proven’ lists like this actually create impediments to fitness.

In my experience, if you can get to the gym/park – just go. Don’t worry about the time of day.

Stop reading the Daily Mail for health tips.

And for god’s sake, don’t put cinnamon in your yoghurt!

Lucid Dreaming: the (Un)Official New Scientist Addendum

2010-06-18T17:06:00.012+01:00

Oh goody. This week has me almost vibrating in and out of conventional timespace with joy; there are two brilliant articles in the New Scientist.

The first is about wolves.

It turns out that their family/pack structure may be a strong determinant of their hunting habits and, consequently, whether those habits will be destructive or helpful in the context of their environment.

I’m told that wolves are inedible, so the motive for hunting such beautiful creatures in remote spots escapes me. In any case, regular readers will already know what I think about testosterone-infused fuckwits with big guns.

However, it turns out such people may be offending against more than my moral sensibilities. The article says that:

“Studies … have shown that intact wolf packs boost the diversity of plants and songbirds, and increase populations of beaver and amphibians”

The tendency has been to regard wolves as individuals and to cull to numbers; this disrupts family groups and sometimes picks-off highly-experienced individuals who are still teaching the young good hunting habits.

It is highly atypical for wolves to attack people, so I wonder if one of these decimated wolf packs was responsible for the death of Candice Berner, killed while out jogging in Chignik Lake, Alaska.

Please do buy The New Scientist and read it all.

I would normally have banged on about wolves for ages. I’m in the middle of preparing a ‘European Werewolf Trials’ presentation now, as coincidence would have it. But the second part of this week’s NS beckons even more urgently.

Lucid dreaming is awareness that you’re dreaming while you’re dreaming. If you get good, you can have lucid dreams at will, and eventually control the content.

It’s like a theme-park with psychic powers – wish it, and it will be so.

Lucidity has traditionally been so strongly associated with either hedonism or exotic spiritual practices that its scientific significance has been a little underplayed. In addition, the Freudian-inspired psychodynamic model which was influential for so much of the twentieth century created suspicion of anything which interfered in the dreamstate; it was regarded as a critical and sensitive interplay between the putative parts of the personality. Intervening would have been regarded as sensible as letting off a firecracker behind your mechanic while he’s fixing your brakes.

But the humanistic schools of psychology allowed for a less prescriptive and more evidence-based approach to psychology. Many have done their bit for oneirology (yes, it’s got an important-sounding title of its own). Stephen LaBerge has made a very respectable academic career of studying lucidity building on the work of Paul Tholey among others, and Susan Blackmore has done a great deal for the study of alternate mind states in general.

In addition, brain imaging techniques have allowed us to examine the neural correlates of all sorts of subjective states, lucidity among them. So now we can be reasonably sure that lucidity is a unique brain state, and not just a few people fibbing that they can do cool things while everybody else is just unconscious.

The New Scientist article starts by pointing out that lucidity can help us to understand the phenomenon of consciousness, a slippery concept. Primary consciousness is defined as simply being aware, and secondary consciousness is being aware that you are aware – a self-reflective state.

Secondary consciousness is thought to be limited to humans and has been difficult to pin down in a neuroscience-type way. However some liken regular dreams to primary consciousness. This means that measuring the difference between primary (normal) dreams’ and secondary (lucid) dreams’ neural activity could give meaningful data, free of the confounding variables which plague waking investigations into the same phenomenon.

The differences observed between normal dreaming and lucid dreaming included a 40Hz brainwave in the frontal regions and greater synchronised activity between the frontal and parietal regions. There may also be raised activity in a small part of the frontal lobes – the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex – but that research is still being peer-reviewed.

None of this answers that enduring question: how does brain activity give rise to subjective experience of consciousness? It’s the trickiest question in neuroscience.

But some hope that the understanding of consciousness may help in the design of interventions for those with altered versions of it, such as people suffering from schizophrenia. This understanding of the brain regions that need to be subdued and those that need to be boosted may ultimately lead to a treatment approach, claims Ursula Voss, University of Frankfurt, in the article.

It’s all baby steps, but it’s just great to see lucidity brought into a respectable scientific sphere.

The New Scientist article is clearly written by a good technical reporter who’s never seen the state from the inside, apart from one fleeting moment after training. As such, the tips for attaining lucidity good do with some beefing up.

So if you want to try lucidity, here is my Mark II checklist. This is far from exhaustive, but it’s a good start.

Start by keeping a dream diary. You’ll notice themes popping up where you weren’t aware of them before. Emotional states, people, activities. When you have a couple of weeks’ worth, you’ll find patterns. When you’re aware of them, they’ll serve as indicators that you may be in a dream.

For example, despite being just a girl ;-), I score well on spatial awareness tests (more averagely a male trait). I’ve been vaguely obsessed with how buildings go together since I was a child, and it turns out I do this in my dreams too. But it’s something I wouldn’t have noticed unless I had written it down in a dream diary.

If I find myself wondering if the first-floor balcony projects too far over the ground floor curtain wall, or whether the stairs have had one or two ninety degree turns, chances are I’m dreaming. When you become aware you’re dreaming – that’s lucidity.

Also get into the habit of performing reality checks during the day. Pick certain times or events (at least five per day) and use them to notice the distinct qualities of reality around you. How can you be truly sure you’re awake?

This technique is really only a kind of mindfulness, a Buddhist technique of awareness of the moment. It was first developed for lucidity (to my knowledge) by German Gestalt therapist Paul Tholey. It’s recounted well by Stephen LaBerge.

Constantly look for oddities in life. Whichever habits you practice during wakefulness, you will find yourself doing in dreams too. If you wonder whether things are odd, when they are (pink cats, trees floating by) you’ll realise you’re dreaming.

Definitely make one of your reality checks reading. It’s very difficult during lucidity. After much practice, I can sort of do it but the words don’t make a lot of sense.

The New Scientist article recommends getting up an hour before normal and going back to bed later. It’s a tip in the right ballpark, but for serious results get up after four hours. Stay awake for a couple and read about lucidity before you go back to bed. Buy a New Scientist and read the article, for example. Then go back to bed. This tip is for the weekends, or for those with a very understanding boss.

This technique works by what is termed ‘REM rebound’. The early half of your night’s sleep is very light on REM. REM is associated with the sleeping cycles during which we are more likely to remember dreams (it is no longer thought to be the only part of sleep during which we dream).

If you remove the opportunity for REM just as your body would naturally be doing it, it will grab it with both hands when you go back to sleep. This forced method of jumping into dreams produces more lucidity. Perhaps it’s because the break between normal consciousness, the loss of your secondary consciousness in other words, and dreaming is far shorter.

Finally, if you find yourself in a lucid state and it starts to ‘slip away’ (it will!) then create a somatic sensation – I rub my hands vigorously together. Other people like to spin on the spot. No idea why this works, but massive sensory input of the kinaesthetic or orientation variety seems to help.

These ‘waking from inside your dream techniques are called DILDS (dream induced lucid dreaming). There are other techniques, such as Mnemonic Induced Lucid Dreams (MILDs) and Waking Induced Lucid Dreams (WILDs) but don’t worry about those ‘til you’ve got DILDs licked. WILDing consists of falling asleep consciously. It’s a toughie and I’ve only ever managed it once.

If you want to bypass all the mental discipline, you could invest in a device called a Dreamlight. It’s a mask-like contraption which fires little light impulses at your eyes when it detects rapid eye movement. If you’re in a dream and notice these light flashes, you can then become self-aware that you’re dreaming – lucidity. I’ve never tried a Dreamlight, so let me know your results.

There are also pharmacological aids to lucidity. They broadly work on trying to increase certain neurotransmitters to assist with levels of concentration, awareness and memory. I don't know of anyone with a better grasp of the area than Thomas Yuschak.

However, ‘watch out, you might get what you’re after’ to quote David Byrne. Lucidity is the sibling of sleep paralysis. Here’s a diagram wot I drew earlier:

In my experience, sleep paralysis and lucidity are different sides of the same coin. (A quick catch up on sleep paralysis is here).

In fact, everything you do to avoid sleep paralysis, you do to attain lucidity. Sleep on your back, upset your sleep cycles, nap during the day …

You can see from the illustration that waking mind (ie. secondary consciousness) and sleeping body can occur simultaneously: when the real world is perceived it’s sleep paralysis; when the dream-world is perceived it’s lucid dreaming. It’s a tiny bit more complicated than this – sleep paralysis is often associated with dread, for example – but I broadly believe they’re basically the same states acted out in different arenas.

This is why I really don’t recommend the pharmacological approach for beginners. You can get stuck in ugly places. Here’s an excerpt from my dream diary after my first attempt with galantamine, an acetycholerinesterase inhibitor derived from snowdrops and used in (much) larger doses by people with Alzheimer’s:

“Nightmarish with several false awakenings … made me nervous of taking G with a daytime nap again”

I’m philosophical about waking up screaming from nightmares about six times per month (long-suffering Mr. Jourdemayne, less so), so if an experience made me nervous, it should probably make others nervous too. I remember that experience clearly and it wasn’t good. Luckily, the next one was better and I’ve been fine ever since.

Out of Body Experiences (OBEs) may also be connected with lucidity. Anecdotal evidence suggests this is so. But that’s a huge subject and I’ll need another blogpost for it.

The New Scientist article mentioned the potential of beneficial mental health applications for the understanding of consciousness through lucidity. But is there any value in it for regular Joes?

I think that firstly, it’s huge fun. Why wouldn’t you do it?

Secondly, it can be akin to meditation in value. The whole point is the mental discipline which is both the route and the reward.

Tibetan Buddhists have been doing this for years and developed the practices which are being rediscovered today. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche writes:

“The real point is to develop the flexibility of the mind and to pierce the boundaries that constrict it”

Ideally, the skills you develop will help you to think more creatively and expansively, and to concentrate.

His techniques for lucidity will sound familiar from the earlier part of this blogpost. He recommends meditation, avoiding the three pitfalls of agitation, drowsiness and laxity. His four foundational practices of lucidity are: recognising the dream-like nature of life; remove grasping and aversion; strengthening intention; cultivating memory and joyful effort.

At this point, I would like to remind everyone that I am a Jedi and have complete control over my dreamstates.

However, that would be telling big fat fib. It is my experience that the state is subject to a whole host of factors, some beyond your control. You can practice lucidity and even get good at it, but you’ll find that it’s frustratingly affected by many extraneous factors.

These include age: dreams usually peak in teenage years and seem to drop slowly off after that.

Hormones also play a very decisive factor. Sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming has been noted by many to peak just before a menstrual period. The physician and alchemist Paracelsus thought that the menstrual flux engendering phantoms in the air. This meant that “convents were seminaries of nighmares”. The old-fashioned use of the word ‘Nightmare’ in this context refers to sleep paralysis and incubus attacks.

If you’re female and going to try lucid dreaming therefore, the two or three days before a period will be the most likely bring results.

Finally, there is some correlation with depression, anti-depressants and serotonin status.

Hufford (p49) has wondered if sleep paralysis is associated with depression, and I’ve seen the idea mooted repeatedly by sufferers on internet chat boards. SSRI antidepressants have been noted to reduce sleep paralysis in some.

It’s hardly suprising that an emotional state should have a neurotransmitter correlate, or that that correlate could be linked to other states, like lucid dreaming. But the precise causal mechanisms are, to my knowledge, unknown. It’s a fascinating area for future research.

When that research is done, I look very much look forward to reading the New Scientist article. Just to make that week complete, perhaps they could revisit wolves again too?

Homeopathy & Witchcraft

2010-06-02T08:53:00.005+01:00

“Homeopathy is witchcraft” said Dr Tom Dolphin, deputy chairman of the BMA’s junior doctors committee at their annual conference in May. It seems the rest of the delegates agreed, since they passed a motion denouncing the use of alternative therapies where there was no evidence for their effectiveness.

I’m no expert on medicine or homeopathy. Witchcraft on the other hand …

Is the good doctor right? Or is he recklessly impugning homeopaths? Or witches?

Let’s start with a definition of witchcraft. In ordinary English dictionaries, the terms ‘witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’ are broadly synonymous. But in anthropological writings, there is a subtle difference: this has arisen for the historical reason that the classic work on ethnological witchcraft was done on the Azande people of north central Africa (mostly modern Congo & Sudan) by Edward Evans Pritchard.

The Azande regard witchcraft and sorcery as slightly different (as do many other non-European peoples), so the distinction was and is useful, which is why it has lasted.

Both sorcery and witchcraft involve the manipulation of supernatural forces to produce magic. Sorcery is the production of magic using self-conscious ‘formulae’ – rituals and activities. Anyone with the ritual knowledge can perform sorcery. Being a witch involves qualities more intrinsic to the person: somebody can be born a witch, and even cast their evil inadvertently (such as with the evil eye).

Broadly, you are a sorcerer by your deeds and a witch by your nature.

So sorcery is the appliance of science to the supernatural: the consistent application of objects, words and rituals to produce consistent results. In fact, ideally:

“A spell need never go wrong, unless some detail of ritual observance had been omitted or a rival magician had been practicing stronger counter-magic”

(p 46)

So in sorcery, there is a standardised product – not an unusual phenomenon in religion (anyone for Mass?) There is also a standardised result – expected in sorcery, but not in religion, expressed thus:

“a prayer … (is) a form of supplication: a spell (is) a mechanical means of manipulation”

ibid

Sorcery assumes the existence of a more subtle world than we can perceive with our natural facilities, that this subtle world has influence over us and that we can transact with it. That’s not necessarily so weird. I believe in electricity even though I can’t see electrons.

Many complimentary therapies also have unproven concepts such as meridians, or chi. But that doesn’t really matter: the map is not the territory. At school, they told you that atoms were like little coloured snooker balls whizzing around other snooker balls - that isn’t quite true either.

But the difference between acupuncture meridians and ‘snooker ball’ atoms is that one is a good scientific model, and the other is a person with lines drawn on their body.

The measure of a scientific model not so much whether it describes the truth; the truth is, after all, a philosophical concept. The measure of a good scientific model is whether it can be used to consistently predict results.

Strictly speaking, sodium atoms don’t have extra red snooker balls in their outer shells, nor chlorine atoms lack blue snooker balls in their outer shell. I’m assured by better qualified people than I that it’s all a bit more complicated than that. However it’s a bloody good model, because we know what happens every time sodium and chlorine get together.

So for magic and homeopathy to be scientific, we don’t necessarily have to have yet validated their theoretical postulates. Many things remain yet to be discovered, after all. We would simply have to be convinced that their models produce consistent and predictable results.

Do they?

Let’s stick to homeopathy. The answer may be ‘yes’.

Homeopathy appears, in some, to offer the same kind of results that placebos do. In other words, results not beyond what can be achieved with utterly neutral substances.

Placebos are a fascinating phenomenon. They appear to invoke some kind of natural health assistance via a belief mechanism. Modern studies demonstrate that he placebo effect certainly works in some people and we even seem to have subconscious preferences about the relationship between effectiveness and potency: the colour of pills matters, as does the dosage (two pills are better than one) and whether or not the pill is branded.

The effects of the placebo’s malevolent sibling, the nocebo have also been noted as powerful from time to time, when a human target of a powerful curse obediently gives up the ghost and surrenders to their maliciously prescribed fate.

Nicholas Humphrey’s postulated ‘health management system’ proposes that natural defensive bodily functions such as vomiting or fevers are marshalled at an appropriate time to combat illness in a ‘top-down’ (from the cognitive to the subconscious/physical parts of the brain) mechanism. The triggers for the engagement of these powerful tools are, in this model, a compelling experience, such as a shamanic/religious ritual (or administration of a medicine by an authority figure such a qualified practitioner in whom you have trust).

Studies on the modern counterparts of shamanic rituals - faith-healing – have found that while the participants have subjectively felt and improvement in their conditions, that they have objectively not improved1. Furthermore, psychometric tests suggest that the participants who benefited from these rituals ‘engaged in denial and disregard of reality’2.

So what makes prescription drugs different from homeopathic medicine if homeopathic medicine also works?

The use of empirical techniques, such as randomised controlled trials (RCTs), demonstrate that prescription drugs work more than placebos. They affect something more than our natural, and distressingly moderate, ability to rally our own defences.

As fascinating as the placebo effect is, it doesn’t work on enough people or consistently enough to count as being as potent as medicine.

I started with a cussedly detailed differentiation between witchcraft and sorcery because I assumed that you, dear reader, are interested in such fine distinctions. You have, after all, visited the blog of a woman depicted on a broomstick.

But I think it has a further application in some complementary and alternative therapies.

I would say that ‘spiritual healing’ and ‘psychic healing’ bear more relation to ‘witchcraft’, in the anthropological sense. They employ the ‘intrinsic’ model of a naturally gifted practitioner.

Practices such as homeopathy and reflexology bear more relation to ‘sorcery’, in the anthropological sense. They provide for recipes or rituals, consistent with established models imparted during standardised courses of study.

But in the European sense and in day-to-day English, ‘witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’ can pass for the same thing.

Dr. Tom Dolphin said “Homeopathy is witchcraft”

I believe he’s right.

Thank you to Tessera2009 for nagging me to write this. I've been a bit behind for a month or so, and wouldn't have done it without the gentle nudge.

Footnotes:
1 'The Psychology of Religious Behaviour, Belief & Experience' Beit-Hallahmi & Argyle citing Glik (1986) and Pattison et al (1973)
2 Minnesota Personality Multiphasic Inventory

Botox and Being

2010-05-22T11:52:00.011+01:00

I started to write this blogpost a few weeks ago, prompted by a post on Derren Brown’s site. A nap and a chronically low metabolic rate intervened, but I don’t want to let the post go because it’s an interesting subject. So even I’m a little behind the curve with this one, I hope you still enjoy.

Can Botox diminish your experience of emotion?

“Anyone going in for botox is probably gnawing away at themselves from within with repressed rage at unfairness of the passing of time anyway” offered Journojulz in the comment section.

The entry had been filed under ‘Interesting Theories’ by Abeo and he provided a link to Neurophilosophy blog which discusses an experiment done by David Havas of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, due to be published in the journal Psychological Science.

Our experience teaches us that emotional states go from the inside out – just observe how your shoulders slouch when you’re depressed.

But do they also go from the outside in – can a facial expression or body state contribute to an emotional one?

Broadly put, the point of the Havas experiment was to test whether the ability to experience emotional states was attenuated by the paralysis of the corrugator supercilii, the so-called "frown" muscle of the face.

The media may have, in fact, over-hyped the results - who’d have thunk it?

Here are some hyperlinks to the hyperbolae:

The Metro’s: Botox ‘could also damage your social life and emotions’,
The Times: it could ‘cost you your friends’
New York Daily News: Botox may kill your wrinkles, but it could also cost you your social life
More from them
... and the Express ‘How Botox Freezes Out Friends’

The paper itself (curses - I can’t get hold of a copy, but here’s a quote from it) concludes: that Botox “selectively hinders emotional language processing”.

But an article on the NHS website does a nice job of drawing attention to the experiment’s limitations and concludes:

“Overall, it is questionable whether these findings … can be interpreted to imply that a volunteer’s emotional processing was different before and after treatment. What is more certain is that this study does not provide evidence that people who have Botox will lose their friends, as many media reports have implied.”

Countering the calamitous, Botox has also been proposed in the past as a therapy for depression by cosmetic surgeons. The reasoning is the same: if you can’t express anger facially, it’s harder to feel it emotionally too.

Looking like a scrotum has never been one of my ambitions. But the reason all this interests me is not the effects of an incipient beauty therapy upon my relationships and social life (although all this Botox talk has made Mr. Jourdemayne suggest I get some in my jaw muscles) – it’s that I’m interested in the issue of the integration of body and mind.

The idea that your body informs your cognitions is not new. As most of the blogposts on this story pointed out, the notion has a distinguished champion in the form of Charles Darwin who wrote:

"… the free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it...[whereas]...the repression...of all outward signs softens our emotions. He who gives way to violent gestures will increase his rage; he who does not control the signs of fear will experience fear in a greater degree; and he who remains passive when overwhelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering elasticity of mind.
These results follow partly from the intimate relation which exists between almost all the emotions and their outward manifestations; and partly from the direct influence of exertion on the heart, and consequently on the brain. Even the simulation of an emotion tends to arouse it in our minds.."

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

The idea has been revisited regularly by psychological luminaries such as William James.

So to what degree are our minds dictated by our bodies – our psyches dictated by our somas.

Richard Wiseman’s ‘59 Seconds’ (p 182) gives a good account of Brad Bushman’s experiment in which he investigated the effects of contrasting behaviour - aggressive and contemplative - upon mood and recovery, after a frustrating experience.

Bushman’s results suggest that, no matter what your hippy therapist told you, acting out may not be so good after all. Management of the stance may lead to management of the sentiment. Who says a stiff upper lip is such a bad thing?

Paul Ekman is a professor of Psychology at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California Medical School. Probably his most notable claim to fame is the co-development of FACS – the Facial Action Coding System – which describes the combination of muscle contractions which produce expressions, revealing emotions.

Practical applications of FACS have included the observations of ‘micro-expressions’ – revealing and fleeting moments of muscular change before the conscious mind takes over to present a more composed façade - and understanding expressions of pain in those unable to express themselves verbally. FACS has obvious applications in law-enforcement and Ekman has worked with the CIA and FBI, among others.

While Ekman and his co-author Wallace Friesen were going through the painstaking process of codifying each twitch, they reached the ‘anger and distress’ section.

“It was weeks before one of us finally admitted feeling terrible after a session where we’d been making one of those faces all day” he remembered (p 106). Ekman and Friesen’s expressions were dictating their moods; physiology was creating feeling.

Later experiments with a colleague named Robert Levinson confirmed the very real physiological consequences of pulling faces, as did a German study where people had to either hold a pen in their lips (impossible to smile) or between their teeth (impossible not to) while they watched cartoons.

I think there’s evidence that goes even further – that our conscious minds will work to create a rationale for the physiological feedback they receive.

In an experiment done in 1974, researchers compared the reactions of two groups of men to being given the phone number of an attractive researcher who had just conducted a survey with them. One group had only just crossed a fear-inducing high bridge; the other group had crossed the bridge but been allowed time to recover from any physical reactions such as a raised heartbeat. The men who were still in the throes of nervousness followed up the phone call far more than the calm group.

They, at some level, appear to have ‘rationalised’ their heightened physical state to attraction. They had misattributed their physical state.

Perhaps we’re really not as good at consciously establishing the source of our states as we think. Perhaps management of our thoughts and physiology is the simplest intervention in mood.

This is perhaps the key difference between traditional psycho-dynamic therapy and the modern humanistic approach.

So it seems that our bodies do contribute to our sense of self more, perhaps, than we are accustomed to thinking. Freud thought that: "The ego is first and foremost a body-ego. It is not merely a surface entity, but is in itself a projection of a surface."

In ‘The Disembodied Lady’, Oliver Sachs described the case of a woman who had suffered a severe neuropathy. Different nerve fibres serve different functions, and ‘Christina’ had lost the ones which provided ‘proprioception’, a sense of where her body was in relation to itself.

Sachs described proprioception as the sixth sense – one upon which we depend for an integrated sense of self, but of which we are normally unaware. We so take for granted the very concept of embodiment that it is hard to imagine Christina’s handicap in a way that it isn’t as hard to momentarily imagine blindness of deafness. From the more commonplace inability to balance without looking to the more abstract loss of sense of self (she described herself as ‘pithed’), Christina’s attenuated body sense affected her whole experience of being.

‘Blimey’, I hear you say, she gone a bit off topic on this one. Where’s the spells and the vampires?

But I find mind/body issues incredibly fascinating because of the dualistic models of many religions, their insistence that we are composed of at least two elements, one physical and one ethereal. (Of course, several religions have even more than two elements to being: the Ancient Egyptians had a Ba, a Ka, a Ren, a Sheut and an Ib as well as the body; Zoroastrianism has an urvan and a fravashi as well as the body).

Despite being one of the developers of empiricism in the modern era, Descartes was an adherent of dualism, regarding the body as a kind of machine. At least he allowed for the influence of the body upon the mind, traffic flowing in both directions. This was unusual at the time.

But Descartes would probably be surprised at the degree to which modern techniques and psychology have revealed that our bodies drive our minds, often without us even knowing it.

Which means his most famous utterance ‘Cogito ergo sum’ ("I think, therefore I am") has different entailments in modernity than when he created it.

Descartes believed that the mind interacted with the body at the pineal gland. The non-physical soul could act in this world through this connection with the body.

But what if we say, as many scientists do, that the mind is what the brain does. In that case, our thoughts are still the creation of a physical organ, an organ which is undoubtedly affected by other mundane physiology such as hormone levels, experience of pain and the subtle effects of arousal from walking over high bridges.

These two aspects, mind/soul and body of our being are nowhere near as discrete and inseparable as some traditional religious thought would have it.

Our sense of self derives so strongly from our body sense that I would be hard to see how we could survive as ourselves without our bodies. Would we feel ‘pithed’, like Christina?

If there’s an ethereal afterlife awaiting us, I think we can say for certain that it will be a profoundly different existential experience than our earthly one. It seems we are our bodies - more than we know.

* Dutton, D. G. and Aron, A. P. "Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

2010-05-20T08:46:00.006+01:00

Sorry, Dear Reader, for such a prolonged absence.

It turns out that the remaining half of my thyroid gland (the other half retired to an incinerator in Hammersmith hospital years ago) has been, like an inadequately viagra’d octagenarian, been pumping away to diminishing returns. I’m glad the doctor spotted it (albeit very eventually) because I was starting to think it was normal to cry at adverts and regret waking up. Also, my arse had started to look like a reflection in a fun house mirror.

Oddly enough too, I became scared to leave the house without ventolin. I gave a talk to a lovely bunch of people at SitP Oxford, all the time wondering if I was going to keel over of hypoxia. It turns out that there may well be a link between asthma and hypothyroidism in some people.

My new familiar got the blame for the allergies/asthma (she moved in five weeks ago), and was on the verge of being sent back on the same broomstick she rode in on.

However, since the thyroxine dose has gone up (by a lot, BTW), the asthma, the extra weight & the bleak outlook have largely gone. In just three weeks! The cat has stayed.

So enough of excuses. The blog has recommenced!

Last night, a group of Jack of Kent's supporters went to Church House, Westminster for the announcement of the 'Orwell Prize' awarded for political writing.

For those of you who have been on Sabbatical to the moon, Jack of Kent was shortlisted in the 'blogging' section, along with Hopi Sen, Laurie Penny, Madam Miaow , Tim Marshall and Winston Smith

Despite all our crossed fingers (do you know, I don't think that works) Jack didn't win. But I know I'm not the only one who thinks he did brilliantly to get as far as the shortlist. Here are a couple of piccies.

Jack of Kent and Kenan Malik

Night Jack and Jack of Kent

BTW, the winners were:
Book: Andrea Gillies 'Keeper'
Journalism: Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday
Blogging: Winston Smith

New post on Botox on the boil - keep visiting. J x

Priests, Pederasts and Privilege

2010-04-04T14:15:00.015+01:00

Henry II was regrettably given to childish tantrums during which his “grey eyes that glowed fiercely … grew bloodshot in anger”. He also fell to the floor and chewed straw.

Perhaps it wasn’t just emotional incontinence. He kept a large empire together in difficult times, expanded and, in many ways, improved it. It may not have been bad psychology for the people around him to fear his wrath.

Whether the rage was real, Henry’s contribution to normalising and centralising the law of his kingdom cannot be doubted. He energetically travelled miles to supervise legal proceedings, championed the use of juries and established the Royal Magistrate Courts. He also oversaw the decline in the outmoded use of trials by ordeal and combat.

One of the key themes of Henry’s legal efforts was the restrictions of the rights and privileges of the clergy and of Rome. Like a slowly rising dough, the Church tended to expand inconspicuously into all vacant crevices and proved remarkably intractable once it got into them.

However, an attempt to deal with ‘crimonous clerks’ in the form of the ‘Constitutions of Clarendon’ of 1164 proved all too much for Thomas Becket, who objected to the King’s intention to try clergy for common crimes once they had been defrocked in an ecclesiastical court.

Beckett’s issue was with ‘double jeopardy’ – the intrinsic injustice of being tried twice for the same crime. This, of course, could have been solved by just allowing the secular courts a judicial monopoly, but it’s not an abandonment of privilege that Beckett or the Vatican would have stomached.

Henry’s big issue was that there was a two tier system of justice: one for the clergy and one for the laity. Henry’s motivation may have been the issues of fairness or of jurisdiction – it was more probably jurisdiction.

But the ‘fairness’ part really resonates with most moderns. Since this justice system systematically dispensed milder punishments to the ecclesiasts, it was unfair.

At the very beginnings of Christianity, the persecuted minority were theoretically subject to the laws of the Roman Empire in which they lived, yet St Paul seems to reserve the right of the Church to judge its own:

“Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to the law before the unjust, and not before the saints?"

1 Corinthians 6:1

The establishment of the Church within the Roman Empire under Constantine rendered this less of a dichotomous situation, but tension between the legal rights and jurisdictions of States and the Church have continued.

‘Benefit of clergy’ was the medieval notion that a clergyman could call for the right to be tried under canon law rather than in the secular courts

Popes reiterated their hegemony over justice to clerics. Innocent III maintained that even where the parties – clerical and civil – were both amenable to secular authority, that the ecclesiastical privilege could not be forfeited. It was a right of the whole Church body, not the right of an individual churchman to renounce.

The Catholic Encyclopedia phrases it thus:

“Likewise, not all persons are to be judged by secular courts. The Church could not permit her clergy to be judged by laymen; it would be utterly unbecoming for persons of superior dignity to submit themselves to their inferiors for judgment.”

Eventually, the term ‘benefit of clergy’ became elasticated to include everybody - non-clergy and women too. It was, in effect, a way of getting a more lenient sentence for your first offence. We do similar things today, in the recognition that a first-time offender has the capacity to change and improve.

And a glance at European history tells us that the practice of two separate strands of law, one for the laity and one for the clergy, has been dissolving to the point that it had been imperceptible in modernity. A blizzard of changes has created a world where, one hopes, a priest could find himself in a secular court for burglary, driving while drunk or (eventually) failing to pay the HP agreement on his stereo.

But what about child rape?

The arguments for and against “Crimen sollicitationis” of 1962 have, in the last few weeks, been used by both sides of the child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.

Defenders say it is a way of protecting the privacy of alleged perpetrators, victims and witnesses before the establishment of guilt or innocence. It does not preclude the surrender of the perpetrator to secular justice.

Others, like Father Tom Doyle, canon lawyer and ex Vatican employee says it is:
“… an explicit written policy to cover up cases of child sexual abuse by the clergy to punish those who would call attention to these crimes by the churchmen”

The personal role of Josef Ratzinger, in particular, has come in for a great deal of scrutiny. Should he be investigated as complicit in crimes against children? Or even be given or denied immunity as a Head of State?

For me, the most interesting parts of the child abuse affair are the cultural attitudes that I see leaking out from around the edges of the public responses and behaviours of the Church, the kind of reflexes which betray more of the subconscious of the entity than its analytical output.

We are left with the suspicion that the Church has felt, on more than one occasion, that she could ‘take care of her own’. This could be an edict from the highest, or an oft repeated behaviour from lower down; it could derive from a conviction that the Church is a self-contained magesterium of its own or be just a matter of PR expediency.

Whichever is the case, the fact is that instances of abuse have been ‘occult’ - hidden. It has exploded like a bloated corpse – well after the rot had set in. That’s a mistake for which the dioceses of Wisconsin and Chicago are paying financially, and the wider Church will continue to pay in loss of respect.

It reveals a Church at odds with the rest of us – we who thought that the days of priests getting away with lighter penalties in ecclesiastical courts had melted away with the Black Death and tithes.

It’s incredibly anti-modern. If the Church appears to be caught like a bunny in the headlights (or should that be headlines?), it may be because it is struggling with a cultural norm which prevails within it but not without.

I also doubt that that the Church will own that its own peculiar attitude to sex may have contributed to the behaviour or selection of some of its priests. In an ad in the New York Times, Bill Donohue, the Catholic League President said:

“The Times continues to editorialize about the ‘pedophilia crisis,’ when all along it’s been a homosexual crisis. Eighty percent of the victims of priestly sexual abuse are male and most of them are post-pubescent. While homosexuality does not cause predatory behavior, and most gay priests are not molesters, most of the molesters have been gay.”

(Cited by Maureen Dowd)

It would be good to know where Donohue gets his figures from, especially since his attempt at a snow job conflates two very different sexual behaviours – one of them legal, consensual and between adults.

Actually, it would be nice to know a lot about the sexual attitudes and behaviours of priests so that we can get an empirical picture.

Perhaps Catholic priests are more likely than average to be homosexual and enter the priesthood as a rejection of their sexuality; perhaps more pederasts enter the priesthood because of the opportunities for intimacy which such a profession affords; perhaps there is no difference whatsoever between an average groups of Catholic priests and the lay population in their sexual preferences.

The point is we’re unlikely to ever know because of the Church’s strange attitude to this, one of our most basic human functions.

It is a great shame that Rowan Williams has today offered an apology for saying that the Church in Ireland has lost all credibility in the way it has handled the issue of paedophile priests. I don’t know what pressure he has been under, and from whom, but it was a mild statement, considering.

The only sensible way forward is for the Vatican to make perfectly clear that it regards the idea of Benefit of Clergy in the same way that the rest of us do – as a fascinating entry in a history book.

As Father Tom Doyle put it:
“Cardinal Ratzinger, now as Pope, could tomorrow get up and say: 'Here's the policy: full disclosure to the civil authorities, absolute isolation and dismissal of any accused and proven and convicted clerics, complete openness and transparency, complete openness of all financial situations, stop all barriers to the legal process and completely co-operate with the civil authorities everywhere”

So why the delay?

Thank you to Andrew Copson, David Pollock, Vera Pegna and JKN of CDS for their kind help. Any mistakes are, of course, my own.

Well Done Simon Singh

2010-04-01T12:32:00.004+01:00

Paragraph 34:

"We would respectfully adopt what Judge Easterbrook, now Chief Judge of the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, said in a libel action over a scientific controversy, Underwager v Salter 22 Fed. 3d 730 (1994):

"[Plaintiffs] cannot, by simply filing suit and crying 'character assassination!', silence those who hold divergent views, no matter how adverse those views may be to plaintiffs' interests. Scientific controversies must be settled by the methods of science rather than by the methods of litigation. … More papers, more discussion, better data, and more satisfactory models – not larger awards of damages – mark the path towards superior understanding of the world around us." "

England and Wales Court of Appeal (Civil Division) Decisions
British Chiropractic Association v Singh [2010]
EWCA Civ 350 (01 April 2010)
Crown copyright

For interviews at the scene, go to James O'Malley
It's also covered in the Guardian
And will not doubt be the subject of a Jack of Kent blogpost very soon

Beware Teenage Boys Carrying Chihuahuas

2010-03-13T09:30:00.013Z

The idea of tough-dogs is a fluid concept and the breed du jour has varied with the era.

When I was growing up, it was definitely German-Shepherds, then Dobermans. By 1976 this identity had been grafted onto Rotweilers, probably by people who had seen the demonic dog in the first Omen film. By the mid-80s, gangs in blighted urban America were using pit-bull types for security purposes, and for the first time a breed’s reputation equated pretty directly with its majority use.

The UK government is considering a revisit of dog control legislation. The last law, the Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991, is controversial and considered by many to have been a knee-jerk reaction by a parliament whose members were scared of looking insipid prior to an election.

The new proposals from DEFRA contain several measures, some of which I think are quite good, and one of which is just daft.

Firstly, it recommends that dogs are microchipped.

A quick call to my local vet revealed that in my area around fifty percent of dogs at that practice are microchipped already, This procedure costs a very reasonable £25, and you’d think it would be a tolerable compulsory overhead.

The government would also like to have compulsory third-party insurance.

So I called Pet Protect, one of the market leaders, and was quoted £253 per annum to insure a five year old male cross-breed.

This part of the recommendations has provoked hyperventillation in some areas of the media. However, that £253 is mainly medical coverage for the dog. When I asked them to decouple the third party element, I was told I couldn't, but that it represented just 3% of the total premium - £7.59 per year.

Microchipping and medical insurance, it strikes me, are both of primary benefit to the dog - which is OK if you’re a responsible dog owner. If you can’t afford £4.87 per week to insure your dog, you can’t afford the thousands it could cost for a chronic condition, or even the hundreds for, say, a broken leg.

So third party insurance. Just how likely are you to be attacked by a dog anyway? Well, there’s a problem with the figures.

Hospital Episode Statistics Online says that:

“Over the past ten years there has been an increase in the number of finished consultant episodes attributed to being bitten or struck by a dog”

But that phrase – bitten or struck – shows a deficiency in the way the stats are collected.

A dog bite is pretty quantifiable. There are probably a few accidental bites, but not many. A dog strike is a different thing entirely. If your labrador is so delighted to see you that he jumps up and causes you to bang your head on the kitchen unit – that’s a dog strike.

Conflating these things can’t be helpful.

As well as illustrating that reports of dog bites and strikes have gone up the HOS information also reveals some other interesting demography. The injury rate to male humans is roughly double or more than that to female humans. (This gender difference peaks between the ages of ten and fortyish).

And the chance of your being attacked by a dog are inversely proportional to your age. So as a 15-19 year old male youth, you are roughly four times more likely to experience an incident than a 75-79 year old man.

I’d be interested to index these figures with dog ownership. Perhaps teenage males are four times more likely to own a dog than retirement age men. But that’s probably not the case. Probably, young males are simply more likely to act like twerps around dogs, or to associate with breeds of dog they consider to be tough and thereby provoke the problematic behaviour.

In fact the relationship between perceived dog aggression and breed may be counterintuitive. According to ‘Breed Differences in Canine Aggression’ by Duffy, Hsu and Serpell (2008), the most dangerous dog breed is – wait for it – the sausage dog … followed by the Chihuahua and the Jack Russell. These breeds are snappy in several contexts: with their owners, with strangers and with other dogs.

In relation to pit bulls, the report points out that the attack:

“… pattern is consistent with the view that this breed has been selectively bred for aggression toward other dogs rather than humans”.

The problem with pit bulls is that their physiology means that an incident is more likely to involve significant injury. In fact, traditional ideas about large dogs and aggression may well be skewed towards indicting big dogs because their bites are more likely to require medical attention and therefore to be reported.

Another recommendation by DEFRA is that prospective dog owners should be required to take a test.

Wouldn’t this be great if it did what it said in the tin? However, you only have to look at driving to realise that intention does not automatically create outcome. It’s my guess that everybody who gets a dog already knows they’re supposed to get it micro-chipped and walk it a couple of miles each day.

There’s no guarantee that the person who takes the test will even be the dog’s primary custodian. If you get the swottiest member of your family to take the exam, and then leave your pit-bull puppy in the wrong company. Well you don’t need a crystal ball.

I think the figures show that with both driving and dogs, the problems peak in young men. It’s not the tests - it’s the testosterone.

The fact is, if you’re worried about being physically attacked, you should be on the alert for young men of around 17 years old. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 2006, there were just over eighty thousand convictions or cautions for violence against the person in England and Wales. The majority of offenders were male (80%) and the offending rate peaked at age 17.

Of course, young men principally perpetrate against each other, whereas dogs – certainly in those headline grabbing cases – perpetrate against children too.

One of the most vociferous groups in relation to changes in dog control is the Communication Workers Union, who represent postal workers. They seem to have a valid point: at the moment, dogs are required to be under control in public places, but private places like homes and gardens are different.

The new proposals therefore include provision for a dog ASBO – a so called dogbo – and hopefully this would help to catch the animals who are really causing the contemporary problems: injuries to strangers on domestic property and injuries to young family members.

Ultimately, I think we all know what the real issue is. Some people don’t want a fuzzy friend, they want a status animal. Dog mismanagement is most likely to occur with the combination of dogs perceived to be ‘tough’ and young men. Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to legislate for either attitude or age.

The major worry about the new legislation is that, the already conscientious would be targeted because they’re easy.

This situation must surely have been exacerbated by the fact that the government has violated an unwritten covenant with its citizens in such areas as motoring infringements which have come to be a kind of informal taxation. Will dog laws end up doing the same?

Let’s hope not.

ADDENDUM:

Published in the Telegraph this week, three small dogs intimidate passers-by on a street in Jindong, China. No-one could get near to help their drunken, unconscious owner, including police and ambulance teams. Who needs a pit-bull anyway?

Hilary Mantel & Teenage Mothers

2010-03-06T15:31:00.008Z

Novelist Hilary Mantel has claimed that girls are ready to have babies when they are fourteen, saying that a ‘male timetable’ is dictating their activities away from the natural course.

"Having sex and having babies is what young women are about, and their instincts are suppressed in the interests of society's timetable" she said in an interview to ‘Stella’, the Telegraph’s Sunday magazine.

Firstly, I am sympathetic to Ms. Mantel, as endometriosis left her unable to have children. A teenage pregnancy is likely the only way she could have become a mother, and this thought must surely make her wistful from time to time.

Secondly, there's the implication that a biological drive is sufficient to create a virtuous outcome. This one is easy. I am biologically driven to eat chocolate eclairs at each meal, but I resist because I don't think it's a good idea.

Thirdly, (and less frivolously), I really wish she hadn’t blamed men. It’s very simple to lob rotten tomatoes as the traditional targets, but in this case I think she’s very wrong.

It seems to me that the real culprit is our technological/industrial economy.

In agricultural economies, children are useful workers and your pension plan, all rolled into one. A study of peasant Javanese families in 1976 showed that by twelve to fourteen, boys were contributing around thirty-three hours per week useful labour. Girls of nine to eleven were contributing around thirty-eight. (Benjamin White)

A 1977 study of families in rural Bangaladesh showed that male children were producing more than they consume by age thirteen and had, in effect, repaid all the effort that had gone into them by the time they were fifteen. (Meade Cain)

However, our technological/industrial economy means that our young need to be educated to prosper. I don’t necessarily even mean educated with degrees - just experienced and useful.

(I’ve added the word ‘technological’, because the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were industrial AND provided many work opportunities for children – up chimneys or in mills, for example.)

A technological/industrial society requires massive investment – you’re well into biological adulthood before you start making decent money.

Such a society also has high infrastructure overhead. When road maintenance consisted of shovelling the cow shit off the path, or when treatment for puerperal fever consisted of leeches and crossed fingers, there is simply a logical limit to how much it could all cost.

When housing consists of ten people in one earth-floored, wattle-rendered room, nobody needs to spend half their income for twenty-five years on its purchase.

But there are compensations for modernity. Post partum survival rates for both mothers and babies are higher than they have ever been, meaning that breeding is no longer a race. Chances are all your children will be at your funeral (if you haven’t pissed them off, obviously). And because modern children are nett consumers rather than nett contributors to the family economy, you’re unlikely to want a football team.

Girls who have babies when they are fourteen may turn out to be very productive indeed over the long run, but they’ll need a lot more external support to do it. The ideal modern model is that you get to the age where you can produce a surplus, then use it to rear your own children.

But there’s something else: these days women are under extra pressure to delay pregnancy until very late into their potential reproductive career.

However I don’t think that’s down to entirely our technological/industrial economic model and I don’t think it’s because of ‘men’ either. I think it’s because our standards of living are falling.

A shortage of housing in the UK, plus the decrease in the real value of wages over the last forty years, means that pairing up in your twenties, buying a home and starting a family quickly is atypical. Given that few people ‘aspire’ to move down the social/economic ladder, many are waiting ‘til the economic indicators are right before they jump.

We’re told that some modern parents are apparently lucky if their ‘kidult’ offspring are able to leave the family home by their mid-twenties.

And books like ‘The Crowded Nest Syndrome: Surviving the Return of Adult Children’ by Kathleen Shaputis discuss the modern phenomenon of the ‘Boomerang Generation’. These adults in their twenties and thirties boing metronomically on an invisible umbilical, unable to make escape velocity from the parental home.

It’s hard to know what to do. Degrees are not the guarantee of prosperity that they once were. Some categories of degree are, in financial terms alone, best not taken at all. Many people in their twenties now find themselves in exactly the same competitive position for work, relative to their peers, that they were when they left school – except now they owe fifteen or twenty thousand for their educations.

While I simply can’t agree that fourteen year olds averagely make good mums, I do think the impediments on reproduction for women of twenty five and over are ignored at our peril.

Good Luck Simon Singh

2010-02-23T09:55:00.012Z

Simon Singh and Sile Lane of Sense About Science

What a great night at Westminster Skeptics.

The keynote speech was made by medical doctor, philosopher, humanist and polymath Dr Raymond Tallis. David Allen Green contributed a legal overview.

We were addressed by the 'Libel Survivors': Simon Singh, Ben Goldacre and Dave Osler. And Dr Peter Wilmshurst was also there. It's a name so many of us know. Great to put a face to it and to hear about his ongoing case.

Sile Lane from Sense About Science told us about the campaign to change the Libel Laws and the way forward.

The scrum for the bar at half time was followed by Dr Evan Harris MP and a panel which was joined by Professor David Colquhoun.

I was chairing and couldn't take many piccies or notes for a full write up like I normally would.

So here are some 'quotes of the evening'. There were many more, including a few from Evan Harris (who may have a future in stand-up if the politics thing doesn't work out).

Best of luck to Simon Singh at the Royal Courts of Justice today.

"It would be no great advance if scientific truth were to be decided by the litgant with the deepest pockets than if it were determined, as in the past, by the priest, the shaman, or by the alpha male with the most powerful fists"

Dr Raymond Tallis

"Evidence-based scientific medicine represents not only triumph over nature, but a triumph over human nature in the very place where the temptation to deceive others and one's self is overwhelming"

Dr Raymond Tallis

About 'Grand Rounds' in medicine, a peer review process:
"It's a sort of perverse form of S and M because, like the Catholics, we know it's good for us"

Dr Ben Goldacre

"Censorship doesn’t begin in the courtroom, or with the angry letter you get from the lawyer, or even from your home computer. Censorship begins inside your head, it’s the voice that tells you not to write an article in the first place"

Sile Lane, Sense About Science

"The law is now more patches than trousers"

Robert Dougans
Solicitor for Simon Singh

24th Feb: Update
The hearing seemed to go well for Simon. Here's a summary from Jack of Kent

Westminster Skeptics: Does Political Blogging Make Any Difference to Political Events?

2010-02-10T18:33:00.006Z

Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy, Mick Fealty of Slugger O'Toole, Jonathan Isaby
of Conservative Home, Guido Fawkes and Nick Cohen

Apologies - still slammed. I'd love to give you all a report on what happened on Monday night at 'The Old Monk Exchange' in Strutton Ground, Westminster. In fact, may well do tomorrow.

'Til then it seemed only fair that all you lovely people should have a chance to look at the photos. Our fantastic panel is above. Thanks guys for an informative and energetic debate.

And below, you can see that the attendance was great (about 160 people, I think) and that our new venue is spacious with very good access to the bar. We have the place to ourselves, and they do nice food.

Jack of Kent also has the photos and may get to a report sooner than I do, so check him out.

Addendum:
I've just read Dave Cole's post on the evening, so I won't write it up. He's said it all, and very well.

The Exotic Vendibles of New York & The Gangs of Southall

2010-02-09T15:19:00.006Z

Sorry for the break. Broomstick took me to LA for work. Long flight, and cold over Greenland at this time of year, but at least the in-flight food made it all worthwhile.

Came back via New York and was lucky to get the sunshine sandwich between two weeks of snow. The sun was accompanied by an unutterable cold though, so I spent most of the time squeaking nervously at the prospect of the outside world, accompanied by five cats to whom I appear to be massively allergic.

Given that cats can sense these things, they each found a station on me to sit simultaneously, making us look like a Cirque-du-Soleil endurance balancing act.

A bracing walk always cleared the nostrils of cat-dander. So it was a choice between hypothermia and anaphylaxis. Should have just put the sleeping bag in the apartment block lobby, I suppose. Having people step over you without missing a beat in their conversation would have been the quintessential New York experience. And having combined full-strength anti-histamine with Margharitas from Cilantro, I could have passed for any variety of smackhead.

I took a couple of free hours to visit my favourite shop. Which is now gone. Bollocks!

And also walked down Canal Street – and was shocked to find this:

Apparently, the city raided loads of stores and shut them down.

Canal Street was well known for its knock-off goods. I never bought any perfume there in case it caused eczema. Never ‘Chanel’, always ‘Canal’, this was a place where the labels and budgets could be attended to simultaneously.

I’ll lay my cards on the table: I think buying designer goods – real or fake – is atrociously gauche and vulgar, a sign of status-consciousness levels that surpass dignity.

As a worker in the media, I also deeply respect intellectual property rights and see the moral right in their being protected.

However, I was under the impression that copyright and trademark infringement were civil issues. As such, the burden is on the injured party to press for justice. If the law has changed, do let me know. I could do with some public money to pursue a very ex-friend who nicked my idea for a graphic novel and had it published; I also have at least two close friends who’ve had screenplays ripped off. Is there a New York City form I can fill in to apply for my grant?

I haven’t been to NY since Obama was elected, so this probably isn’t breaking news there. There were civil legal attempts to deal with the Canal Street by the intellectual property owners before the property stepped in and there are sales tax issues etc. Also, there is governmental support for luxury goods trademark owners everywhere, not just the US.

Given that the wearing of luxury goods is usually a sign of social rank, sumptuary laws have been used throughout history to identify social rank and to attempt to hinder social mobility. They were at their height in England for a few centuries after the mid-fourteenth century. Peasants were freed from their indentured obligations, not least by the Black Death which made labour a sellers market. This was a time of social change in which the middle classes emerged and experienced the desire to act & look more important than their birth station would have allowed in previous times. The ruling classes were alarmed.

These days, no-one would dare suggest that another human being isn’t inherently good enough to own an item provided they can pay for it, but the payment structure is tautologously designed so that most people can’t. These days, Chavs wear Burberry and receptionists can have D & G handbags, but the price to earnings ratio is massive unless you buy a knock off.

Yes, I know there can be quality issues. But come on, quality is available for less money too, and most people don’t buy designer goods for quality – they buy them to show that they can afford to pay too much for something. Design certainly takes time and money, but a handbag from Tesco has to be designed by someone. Good materials take money, marketing prestige items takes loads of money. Sticking an excluding price tag on an item reflects less the overheads than the desire to occupy a high market niche.

This is why I find the very notion of designer goods odious.

The modern form of sumptuary laws seems to be getting the government to do your trademark and copyright enforcement for you.

I’ve returned to the UK to find a strange echo of futurepast. As with so many religious issues, it seems we’re on a cyclical treadmill.

Retired Sikh judge, Sir Mota Singh, has criticised schools over their handling of the issue of the kirpan. This is a ceremonial dagger, one of the five requirements of the Sikh faith. Singh can’t see why Sikh children should be disallowed from wearing the kirpan in public spaces and points out, rightly, that we’re hardly on the crest of a wave of Sikh stabbings. If there is no violence, surely there is no issue?

Whether Sikh children are missing out on their religious obligation is up for debate, but at least one may be missing out on his education. Last year, a schoolboy from The Compton School in Barnet was refused permission to wear his kirpan at school. He was offered the compromise of a smaller knife which was welded into a metal sheath, but his parents refused and withdrew him. Let’s hope they’ve found educational arrangements which will serve him as well as continued attendance at the school.

I grew up in Southall, west London, and I remember an anecdote told me by a lecturer at Southall College of Technology.

At the time, the town was a fighting ground for two gangs, the ‘Holy Smoke’ and the ‘Tooti Nung’. There was at least one fatal stabbing that I can remember, and the area was festooned with gang tags, LA style. I believe the heroin trade is conducted at a more subliminal level now, but in the eighties it was brash.

A young Sikh man turned up at college wearing what some would call a kirpan, and some a fucking big and sharp offensive weapon. I don’t know whether he was a gang member or not, but his timing was bad given the era.

So the college principal had a dilemma … which he solved by consulting with the elders at the local Gurdwara. They ruled that the wearing of the kirpan was ceremonial, and represented a Sikh’s preparedness to fight for his faith. This militaristic aspect is not suprising, given that early Sikhism was forged in the Muslim Mughal regime in the Punjab which was repressive to minority religions.

So since the kirpan was representative, its physical presence could be attenuated to a small and symbolic dagger worn around the neck. A young man’s affiliation and willingness to fight bravely could not be doubted, but his ability to impale someone at very short notice was.

This judgement was delivered by elders who had probably been born in India and realised that one of their religious tenets was in danger of being misused in a series of testosterone-fuelled, second-generation turf-wars. I think their judgement was probably religiously sound and was certainly societally sensible. Racial tensions were high, and the community would not have benefited from any excuse to criticise them.

For me the core issue is whether, in a secular country, allowance for religious practice privileges some people over others. The right for Sikh to bear functional weapons while others may not do so, falls into this category.

I don’t know if those elders of Southall are still around, but perhaps they could spare an afternoon for Sir Mota who, however many years he has spent as an eminent man, could still pick up a thing or two from them.

Went to Westminster Skeptics last night. Great night. Watch this space for piccies and a report. Right now, it's Mr Jourdemayne's birthday and we have to go out for birthday fun.

'Do You Believe in Dog?' or 'Scabies, Rabies and Babies'

2010-01-23T17:47:00.017Z

When I was about three years old, my mother was one day alarmed to see that our dog was foaming at the mouth. A prompt investigation revealed several pertinent facts:

It wasn’t rabies

I had been cleaning the dog’s teeth, which accounted for the foam

The dog did have a toothbrush – it was ‘this one’

‘This one’ was also my Mum’s toothbrush

I had been doing this regularly

I’d like to convey the fear and hysteria which surrounded that incident and the scars it left of my half-formed psyche – it would explain a lot of personality defects for which I don’t care to take responsibility.

But I can’t. My mother was a sensible woman who, while not delighted, also knew she wasn’t going to die of Parvo that afternoon. As soon as she was able to stand again, we went shopping for a new toothbrush and she explained to the three year old me that we had other arrangements for the dog. That was the end of it.

Some people seem to have a vague sense of contagion about animals, and about dogs in particular. If you ask them why, they always cite the old ‘snuffling their own gonads in mixed company’ issue, but to be fair to dogs, I know a lot of men who would do the same (albeit in private) if they could reach.

Some also cite canine furniture frottering: this unselfconsciously exuberant affection with upholstery can precipitate the Vapours among even the borderline bourgeois, and an emergency trip to the dry-cleaners among those who have run out of their Xanax. However, it’s hardly an insurmountable difficulty. Just asking the dog to stop usually works unless it’s a very badly trained dog, or a very attractive sofa (in which case, the sofa’s obviously been asking for it).

“He’s just helping Mammy polish the furniture”, as Dave Allen so wisely had it.

This sense of contagion has been formalised in some religious traditions too.

Leviticus 11:27 says:
“And whatsoever goeth upon his paws, among all manner of beasts that go on all four, those are unclean to you”.

So while not named as one of the definitely ‘unclean’ animals of Leviticus (like pigs, weasels and snails), the dog probably falls without the boundaries of approbation.

In general, the New and Old Testaments use dogs as an allegory for low status and low morals:

“Outside are the dogs, the sorcerers, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying.”

Revelation 22:15

There are also plenty of Biblical references to people being eaten by dogs after a moral lapse, which implies justice in an ignominious death and suggests there were sizeable, low-status dog populations. And the Talmud entreats people to “Breed not a savage dog”.

Rules against breeding savage dogs seem reasonable enough though.
And, despite Leviticus, many Jewish families have pet dogs.

Where dogs are mentioned in the Koran, it is not in the capacity of a pet, but as a working animal. There is an example of dogs as hunters:

“All good things are lawful to you, as well as that which you have taught the birds and beasts of prey to catch, training them as Allah has taught you”

Koran 5:4

“If the hound catches the game for you, eat of it, for killing the game by the hound, is like its slaughtering”

Hadith – Bukhari 7:384

And the ‘Sleepers of the Cave’ had a guard dog:
“We turned them about to right and left, while their dog lay at the cave’s entrance with legs outstretched”

Koran 18:16

So Islamic tradition has generally extrapolated that pet dogs are haraam – forbidden, but working dogs are OK. For example:

“Whoever keeps a dog, a qiraat from his good deeds will be deducted every day, except a dog for farming or herding livestock”

Hadith – Bukhari 3:515

In another story, the angel Gabriel was supposed to visit Allah’s messenger, but did not come. He explained his absence by:
“ … we (angels) do not enter a house in which there is a dog or a picture”

Hadith – Bukhari 3:515

It was reported in the Times in July 2008 that guidelines were being drawn up by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) to avoid offence to Muslims with the use of working dogs, such as sniffer dogs, in their mosques and houses. Where it was vital to deploy the dogs, it was suggested that they should wear bootees, previously only used to protect the dogs where there was broken glass.

But I imagine this is something of an over-reaction. By the criteria above, sniffer dogs would probably be regarded as legitmate ‘working dogs’ by most Muslims. Imam Ibrahim Mogra told the Times that:

“In Islamic law the dog is not regarded as impure, only its saliva is. Most Islamic schools of law agree on that. If security measures require to send a dog into a house, then it has to be done. I think ACPO needs to consult better and more widely.”

Dog saliva is mentioned in the Hadith, and not in an hysterical way, but in a context which we’d likely all agree with today:

“If a dog drinks from your vessel, wash it seven times”

Hadith – Muwatta 2:36

So if you count hot water and Fairy Liquid as a modern equivalent of thorough washing …

And the Hadith also has a story of mercy to a dog. A prostitute was forgiven by Allah because she took off her shoe and drew water from a well to save a dog which was just about to die of thirst. (Hadith - Bukhari 4:538).

In fact, it has been proposed by many anthropologists, historians and others that injunctions against certain animals are, in effect, a pre-germ theory, prototypal attempts at a science of hygiene. Again, the Hadith:

Disease:
“Five kinds of animals are mischief doers … the rat, the scorpion, the kite, the crow and the rabid dog”

Hadith – Bukhari 4:531

Not dogs in general – just rabid ones.

For example, it has been suggested that pigs were trefah/haraam (forbidden whether you are Jewish/Muslim) due to the likelihood of ingesting a pork tapeworm, taenia solium, or roundworm, trichinella spirialis.

There’s definitely the germ (ha!) of a thought there, but this reason alone would not account for why people in some places developed an aversion, while others raised pigs or kept dogs, with no less a likelihood of contagion.

We share diseases with many animals. It’s to be expected, since bacteria and viruses are competing as vigorously as we to thrive. Any ecological niche opened by the new proximity of one species to another is a fab chance for a pathogen to upgrade to better real estate. The pathogen starts by being able to transmit from animal to human, then mutates to the point where it can transmit from human to human, at which point you potentially have a human epidemic.

We do share diseases with dogs and pigs. But we predictably also share them with other animals with which we live closely. Tuberculosis, brucellosis, smallpox and measles originally came courtesy of cattle. Flu originally came courtesy of birds, anthrax from sheep and goats.

(In fact, our pre-agricultural ancestors were remarkably free of epidemic diseases. These have better opportunities when animals are stationary - living near their own sewage - and when animals of different species start to live together.)

Religious and cultural traditions don’t treat all animals the same in this respect. So there’s something else going on.

The anthropologist Marvin Harris proposed a refined version of a similar idea. For him, so much behaviour was to do with the availability and sources of protein in an environment. He points out that:

“The ancient Israelites arrived in Palestine during the early to middle Iron Age, about 12,000 BC, and took possession of the mountainous terrain which had not been previously cultivated. The woodlands in the Judean and Samaritan hills were rapidly cut down and converted to irrigated terraces. Areas suitable for raising pigs on natural forage were severely restricted.”

So an omnivorous animal such as the pig, in the absence of a forest to forage, could do nothing but compete directly with humans with their food. And needing cover from the sun, they were high maintenance to boot.

The economic environment of the ancient Near East favoured the development of ruminants which could eat things that humans can’t – scrub and grass – and turn them into protein for human consumption. If the land didn’t have much wild game, then supporting hunting animals would represent a poor cost/benefit balance. People in the ancient Near East didn’t need to keep hunting dogs in quite the same way that people in, for example, northern Europe did.

An outlying, old Norse colony in Greenlan d provides some clues about the status of dogs under different economic conditions. In its heyday, the people of this settlement seemed to regard their dogs with a great deal of affection, even burying them after death. So finding dog bones with butchery marks was a sign to archaeologists of an extreme event or era. In fact, these Norse colonies of Greenland died out within a relatively short period in a mini-ice age of the fourteenth century. They ate their dogs, but only as a last resort before they themselves perished.

Like most predators, dogs aren’t good for meat unless you’re really short of meat-bearing animals. The ancient highland Mexicans ultimately domesticated turkeys, ducks and dogs for meat, but this was in the absence of better ruminants.

I’d recommend any of Harris’ books. They’re elegant and readable, and must have been a source of inspiration for the latest incarnation of this train of thought, Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs & Steel’.

So I think that a quick trawl through history shows that dog distain probably isn’t related to them truly being filthier than other animals.

In some cases, dogs have a very positive affect on human health. In one of the most deadly public health miscalculations ever, the Corporation of the City of London in 1665 ordered a general cull of domestic dogs and cats, with the intention of stopping the plague. There must have been a general sense that they were ‘dirty’.

However, the dogs and cats were the chief controllers of the real plague vector – the rat flea. It’s a caution against any intervention, unless you have a really good grasp of the system you’re dealing with.

In any case, it seems our own species is not as generally hygienic as the propaganda and adverts for antibacterial gels would suggest. We’re not all clamouring for soap. A 2007 survey co-sponsored by the Soap and Detergent Association found that about 25% of people don’t wash their hands after going to the loo, potentially exposing themselves and the people for whom they cook to some pretty serious nasties like E. coli and norovirus.

If you really want to expose yourself to an indiscriminate biohazard, a sentient dirty bomb, go visit a toddler. They’ll put their fingers anywhere – then right up your nose.

When you have recovered from the first wave of infestation, they’ll go to playgroup, stick their fingers up other kids’ noses and bring a fresh plague back to you.

Repeat up to eight times yearly for about seven years. Then it gradually tails off ‘til they get to an adult rate of around four colds a year or less.

It’s other humans we have to be careful of. Being members of our own species, they are more likely to harbour bacteria compatible with our bodies - far more compatible with us than those of our dogs. If your dog is wormed regularly and you clean his teeth (not with your mother’s toothbrush, BTW), you should be in no particular danger.

Cultural and religious norms are an intuitive way of understanding the universe, and they’re often far from useless. But there is a danger point when lore passes into law. Unlike other laws, religious ones are rarely amenable to change under the influence of evidence. ‘Unclean’ was a very useful concept two thousand years ago. Now that we have microscopes, we can move on.

With our dogs, of course.

Uganda's Child Sacrifices

2010-01-10T12:56:00.014Z

On Thursday night, the BBC brought us news of witchcraft and child-sacrifice in Uganda via two media: Radio 4’s ‘Crossing Continents’ and BBC2’s ‘Newsnight’ (19 mins to 33 mins) both carried reports by Tim Whewell.

In northern Uganda in the last year, police reckon there have been around two dozen ritual killings and 120 missing persons. People in the affected area and campaigners believe the numbers may be much higher, reflecting under-reporting to the police. So far, no-one has been prosecuted.

Whewall’s narrative followed the activities of a former child-sacrificing witchdoctor named Polino Angela who has spent the last twenty years attempting to move witchdoctors away from their murderous activities and to Christianity, in which time he claims to have made 2,400 converts.

Angela’s initiation happened in Kenya in what must have been 1968. A thirteen year old boy was slashed open so that he could be doused with his blood: the function of this was to bestow Angela with the commercial advantage of the ability to speak many languages (although English didn’t appear to be one of them).

Under instruction he went home to murder his own son, an action which made him: “… so hardened, I had no mercy for anybody”. During the years of his active career, he reckoned that he had been involved in the ritual demise of around seventy people while under the influence of a demon.

Angela was filmed visiting a witchdoctor named Santerino Okelo, whose shrine was eventually torched with its owner’s consent. Before the conflagration, the crew filmed the contents of the shrine, a tin of blood and a liver (of which provenance, it was impossible to say).

Okelo admitted that his customers captured other people’s children for sacrifice, usually while petitioning the spirits for wealth. The blame for the “ugly things” in which he had been involved was displaced from him, since the transaction was between the spirits and the customers: he was just a medium.

Okelo was bound by fear: fear of the people whose children had been taken, fear of the police if he confessed, but most of all fear of the spirits for abandoning them.

In northern Uganda, Peter Odongo showed us the grave of his three year old son who had been murdered a year ago. A post-mortem revealed that organs including the heart, liver and pancreas were missing from the boy’s corpse. He had also been slashed across the left hand. An eighteen month old girl named Robina had been found a few miles away with a slashed throat, and parents have understandably started taking their children everywhere with them for protection.

Later this year, some alleged witch doctors will be tried using the testimony of surviving victims, such as George Mukisa, whose penis was chopped off. George was found bleeding to death. Prompt action by surgeons saved his life, but his parents understandably despair for his future.

Shafik Kazike was seized in the street but the female witchdoctor to whom he was taken rejected him as an unsuitable sacrifice because he was circumcised. This is consistent with ritual sacrifice in other cultures that I know of: the god must always be given the ‘perfect’, the best. Parents are now circumcising their sons and piercing their daughters’ ears to make them ‘imperfect’.

In response to these deaths, in January 2009, the police set up the ‘Anti-Human Sacrifice and Human Trafficking Taskforce’. Assistant Commissioner Moses Binoga said that 2009’s twenty-six cases with a ritual element, were up from just three in 2007.

But why is there an increase now?

Assistant Commissioner Binoga echoed witchdoctor Santerino Okelo. It is: “ … caused by a desire for people to get wealth“

And Eunice Apio, the Director of FAPAD (Facilitation for Peace & Development) showed Nigerian Horror films to Whewell. It was not clear if the one they were watching were from Helen Ukpabio’s ‘Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries’ execrable back-catalogue, but Apio confirmed:

“These movies …. are actually very popular, and not for the entertainment factor alone. The unemployed who are the majority of the youth … it comes with a message: you let blood … you get an easy route to wealth … people become desperate and they believe anything that is dangled before them”

It has been alleged that there are bodies under many of Kampala’s new buildings. This is a well-known magical practice called ‘foundation sacrifice’, whose intention is either to appease the local spirits into blessing your enterprise, or to bind the spirit of the person who you have killed to do the same job.

The fact is, as Whewell pointed out in his documentaries, Uganda is going through a period of severe social and economic dislocation, with a great deal of wealth to be had … by some. Just like Nigeria, it has an incredibly fractious political past and a hot modern economy which has, so far, not served all equally.

In addition, like Nigeria, it is a varied country by many criteria. There are two languages (Bantu in the south and Nilotic speakers in the north), two religions (Christians of different denominations make up about 84%, Muslims about 12 %).

In the north, the centre of the present concerns about human-sacrifice, the Lord’s Resistance Army has been involved in a long-running civil war with the Ugandan government. Their appalling human rights violations include the forcible recruitment of child soldiers.

Regular visitors will remember that I wrote and post on witch-hunting in Nigeria here.

Although that was witch-hunting (where there was probably no witchcraft) and this is witchcraft, I think that a lot of the observations still stand.

I’d like to restate my position from there, that belief in the supernatural is a necessary but not sufficient factor in large-scale witch-hunts and malign witchcraft. The key factors in social movements like these are religious, social and economic dislocation. It must be hard to see others thrive around you, to be shut out of the party and to be essentially impotent.

Witchcraft is a way of using force to claim your bit. With a worldview where religion, sorcery and science are essentially different parts of the same spectrum, it’s not so unusual.

It’s just that the stakes, potential rewards and therefore motivation have changed.

Even august governmental ministers such as James Buturo, Minister of Ethics & Integrity, declares a belief in spirits that doesn’t sit well on rationalist, secular ears:

“they do (exist) … we accept they do in every society mind you, but we don’t have to listen to them”

When the interviewer asked if it would be more helpful to deny the existence of the spirits, he replied:

“If we were to do that, that would be false because they are there anyway and people are not foolish … it’s as well we speak the truth about these matters … there is no merit that you can attach to these evil spirits, but they are there”

Disavowing the power of the supernatural and its power to the populace of Uganda would probably be a counter-productive intervention, I believe; the supernatural is a self-evident part of many people’s lives. In the short term, working within people’s belief systems will probably be more productive.

So although I found it a delicious irony was that an anti-human sacrifice ceremony was led by man solemnly carrying the logo of the largest human sacrifice cult the world has ever known, a cross, I can’t fault the tactics. Polino Angela seems a sincere Christian, and I think he stands ten times the chance of grafting people from one form of supernatural affiliation to another than trying to convert them immediately to atheism.

Personally, I wouldn’t worry about Minister Buturo’s beliefs. Many western leaders believe things every bit as peculiar out of context. It doesn’t necessarily mean that his campaign against magic will be insincere or ineffective.

One approach to the problem explored by Whewell is to regulate traditional healers so that ‘imposters’ can be filtered out. At an outdoor academy for traditional healing, where students wear T-shirts with slogans like ‘traditional healers: we care’ and ‘stand up for children, reject child sacrifice’, tutor Dr. Yahya Ssekagya, said:

“One can pretend to be a healer and cheat the client … we have had spirits for many millenniums but there hasn’t been child sacrifice … we need to be recognised as a legal entity, then we will filter ourselves out”.

Dr Ssekagya’s qualifications are real – he’s a dentist – but I find his conviction that regulation will take care of the problem quaint at best and potentially dangerous at worst. Those who visit me regularly will know what I think of regulation in cases where the profession is anything other than potentially deadly (proven medicine and auto mechanics being two examples). It usually, IMHO, is a way of promoting the status of a trade, restricting practices, protecting a practising elite and driving fees up. Customer protection comes a few places down the list.

In addition, I think that the profession was/is probably regulated already. Admission and training were likely traditionally restricted by social connections and perhaps ability to pay for tuition. Very few societies had any professions worth a light which weren’t ‘managed’ in some way, or they would have become worthless. Dr Ssekagya’s proposed regulation is probably a more modern, ‘cerficated’ form of restriction with legal backing. Given that he appears to run an academy, I can see his incentive to campaign for his product to be restricted.

His comments suggest that he feels that the power of traditional medicine is real but ethically misdirected by rogue practitioners. When asked the difference between TM practitioners and witchdoctors, he says:

“Witchcraft was a western packaging of African science. A doctor can kill because he knows the medicine that kills but he can also secure life”

In other words, the intention is different but the power is the same.

Whether African traditional medicine provides results above placebo level, I don’t know (it would be hard to believe that generations of practitioners hadn’t left a legacy of surgical and herbal knowledge of some quality). But where there is a clear and strong financial incentive to use your ‘power’ for evil, a club with certificates is hardly likely to provide a compelling counter-force. This is especially true where the deployment of the law is so profoundly subject to irregularities and corruption. As one victim’s mother said in a heart-wrenching combination of plaintive and philosophical:
“I have nothing to do – that is our country”

Besides, there was evidence that witchcraft is already regulated by forces far stronger than a governmental statutory body.

The witchdoctor Santorino Okelo claimed to have seen clients, on average, three times per week and was paid 500,000 Ugandan shillings (£160/$265) each time. This is massive wealth in a country where most of the population live below the poverty line of $2 per day.

However, little of Santorino’s earnings were apparent in his surroundings: the explanation was that he had surrendered most of them to his ‘boss’. “I’m supposed to remain like a servant” he explained.

He was just part of a nationwide network which, it seems, is taxed at highly prejudicial levels by senior management. Asst. Commissioner Moses Binoga thinks that there are five or six witchdoctor protection rackets in the country. And where there are large sums of money and murderous activities, we can reasonably expect the management to be less than benign.

This is probably the single best place to target efforts in the short term – the higher, organised levels of the witch-doctor racket. But it would take a great deal of effort and involve tackling any corruption.

Dr. Ssekagya’s claim that child sacrifice is new should also be subject to some scrutiny.

I can agree that with social changes and the increased aspiration to wealth, the desire for strong magic and human sacrifice may have increased. However, Polino Angela gave up his ‘gruesome work’ twenty years ago and during his active twenty-two year career prior to that he claimed to have killed seventy or so people.

This means that human sacrifice was common enough in the seventies and eighties for one man to have a self-confessed river of blood on his hands, even if his claims are exaggerated. And the practice can hardly have been suddenly invented in 1968, when Angela was initiated.

While we’re on Angela’s figures, they do seem to me to be hyperbolous.

Angela claimed to have assisted in the demise of seventy human victims over twenty years: this is a reasonably modest 3.5 per year for a profession which has three clients a week (to judge by Santerino Okelo’s numbers). He also claims to have converted 2,400 witchdoctors in the last twenty years. That’s an average of 3.5 deaths per witchdoctor per year, and 120 converted witchdoctors per year since 1990.

That’s 8,400 lives saved per annum per practitioner after twenty years, or over the course of the twenty years, well over eighty thousand. Even if Angela’s converts were not as prolific as he, and worked at half the rate, it’s still over forty thousand. In a country of around thirty-two million, those are significant numbers. I’d be interested to see whether Uganda’s missing persons figures are commensurate.

I’m not denying that some Ugandan parents are going through hell right now, but I do think that the whole area could do with some sober statistics. I wonder, in fact, if Angela’s ‘2,400’ are converts to Christianity rather than active child-sacrificing witchdoctors.

Ultimately, it is to be hoped that a meritocracy will grow in Uganda, and that people will feel they can thrive by education and endeavour rather than witchcraft.

In the meantime, although I don’t think direct assault on supernatural world models will help, a sound scientific education, ideally in a secular institution, could be good over the long-term. The 70s and 80s were a bad time for education in Uganda, and the adult literacy rate was measured at 50% in 1990. This means that a huge swathe of the now-middle-aged population may lack the intellectual tools to dismantle a supernaturally-based worldview.

If you got a few quid going spare, I’d direct you to a page on the New Humanist website. The Mustard Seed School is a secular school based on humanist ideas of free inquiry, scepticism and rationalism. One of its mission statements is to:

“... demystify dogmatic and irrational ideologies based on religious fiction, fallacies, witchcraft, superstition”

It’s a start, and a good one.

ADDENDUM:
On Lay Science, where most of my blog posts also appear, Akheloios drew comparisons with the Satanic child abuse scare in the US & UK. He wrote:

"I'd have thought it would be very difficult to hide the evidence of large scale human sacrifice. But I'm certainly not saying that it doesn't happen or even that it hasn't happened to such a scale here. I just feel wary at taking evangelical christian converts claims that their direct opposition is performing large scale human sacrifice at face value without forensic evidence of such a large scale operation."

I replied that:

"I think your point is very well made, and not high enough in the mix of my post now that I reread it. I felt the subject originally seemed worth a post because of the incongruity of the figures which I go through at the end."

Thanks for the comment Akheloios. I hope this addendum addresses the 'high enough in the mix' issue.

Does anybody want a quick round up of why sacrifice even makes sense? Let me know using the email link to your right, and I’ll either write it or get knotted, accordingly.

Bloomberg and the Bible

2010-01-02T17:31:00.009Z

On January 1st 2010, Michael Bloomberg was sworn in as New York Mayor. This past Democrat and Republican is now incumbent as an Independent after campaigning to change the city’s term-limits law to allow his third term.

In the chilly New York air outside City Hall, the re-elected Mayor raised his right hand to Judge Jonathan Lippman and repeated the oath while his left hand dropped to his side.

The Bloomberg family Bible also dipped out of the proceedings, held by his two daughters ‘til he appeared to remember his omission and briefly touched it. Oops.

It must have been an oversight rather than a subversive gesture. The Bible was surely not intended to be inconspicuous, having had a press release of its very own stating its provenance (it had belonged to his mother and was printed in 1909 by the Canal Street Hebrew Publishing Company).

Mayor Bloomberg is pro-business and the free market. As a very wealthy, self-made man, he has a lot to thank capitalism for. He is also socially liberal, supporting embryonic stem-cell research, gay marriage rights and vigorously defending abortion rights.

He is a Reformed (progressive) Jew, but seems to keep his religion out of his politics. Even if he were an undercover atheist (and his silence on religious issues suggests it may be possible), as an experienced politician he’d know well-enough to keep his mouth shut in America. (Having said that, if you were to go godless there are worse places to start than NYC.)

Religion has a prominent, and some would say, disturbing place in American politics. A great many issues split cleanly down religious fault lines and religious groups are good at mobilising voters. It is very difficult to contemplate an American politician without a religious affiliation of one kind or another.

The only one I'm aware of at the top is Senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado) who grew up in a Presbyterian family but states his current faith as ‘unspecified’.

Far from being a pallid cop-out, the Senator's declaration is likely as far as you can realistically go at the moment. No Senator is self-declared atheist or agnostic.

However, according to the 2001 census, fifteen percent of the American public are. And the non-believers’ ranks may be swelling. According to the American Religious Identification Survey of 2009, the no-religionists had nearly doubled since 1990.

The Pew Forum’s analysis of religion in the elections campaign of 2008 found that most Americans still stated that it was important for a president to have strong religious beliefs. However both Democratic and Republican frontrunners, Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani among them, were seen as being the least religious politicians. So something of a discontinuity between reality and perception there.

Mitt Romney, former Governor of Massachusetts, was regarded by the voters as the most conspicuously religious of all, even more than George W. Bush. But this advantage was mitigated by the fact that the voters were nervous of his Mormon faith.

However, being a Mormon was still less of a liability than being an atheist, for whom a whopping sixty-one percent would have had difficulty voting (as opposed to 45% for a Muslim or 7% for a Catholic).

Americans still seem to be resolute and relatively unchanged on the traditional red/blue issues. A slim majority (52%) support abortion rights in most or all cases while 43 percent oppose it; 36% favour gay-marriage rights and 55% oppose it.

So where did the religion go in the 2008 election and has it gone forever?

I don’t think so. 2008 was fought on principally domestic issues (the economy, healthcare, the environment and the Iraq War). White, evangelical Protestants were the only major group in which a majority said that social issues like abortion and gay marriage would be very important in their presidential voting decisions.

But a rise in American atheism may be reflected in politics eventually. Organisations like the Secular Coalition for America (tagline: ‘Atheists, Agnostics, Humanists, Americans’) have joined the traditional meleé and will hopefully be able to reassure the religious that atheists are not without morals – a distressingly common misapprehension.

As Jacques Berlinerblau, (associate professor at Georgetown University and atheist) writes:
“American voters … sometimes have difficulty permitting the private sphere to remain the private sphere. This deprives them, again and again, of credible political candidates”

Goodbye 2009

2009-12-31T18:57:00.011Z

Just a quickie. I'm going to follow up on a couple of earlier posts.

But firstly I'd like to thank you, dear reader, for your visits over the last few months. I've had a lot of fun writing, and I hope you'll continue to visit in 2010.

The Supreme Court has dismissed, by a slim five to four majority, an appeal against the ruling that the state-funded Jewish Free School in north London had breached the Race Relations Act with their admissions procedure. A case had been brought by a child who had been deemed admission on the grounds that his convert mother was not considered properly Jewish by the Office of the Chief Rabbi.

I originally covered this in Sins of the Mothers.

The judges were clear that the school has not been “racist in the popular sense of the word” and that the Race Relations Act may require amendment for such cases.

Personally, I’d rather that we didn’t contort the Race Relations Act into any kind of inconsistent ideological pretzel to appease a form of bias which, if it were less established, would leap out as obviously unpalatable. Let’s just get on with educating our young in an inclusive way.

Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association said:
“It puts beyond doubt the position that, even though there may be a religious motivation for doing so, discrimination against children in admissions on racial grounds is illegal under any circumstances … This is not a matter of restricting ‘religious freedom’ or otherwise: that the admissions criteria of a state-funded faith school have been found to be racially discriminatory should be enough impetus to look carefully at the criteria all faith schools use to discriminate in their admissions.”

And for those of you holding your breath for the reply from the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, I’m guessing that you have a light touch of rigor-mortis by now. The church proposes that a common sleep disorder is a spiritual problem and offers “services for spiritual cleansing” which will “break any curse”. The original blog is here.

I'm guessing the secretary is off or the typewriter is broken.

A very happy New Year's Eve and 2010 to all.

J x

My Yule (B)log

2009-12-24T18:20:00.008Z

So who is thinking about the man who will bring us all a warm and happy feeling of cheer on Christmas Day? No, I don’t mean the man behind the counter at Threshers.

Santa Claus didn’t visit the baby Jesus in the manger, but you’ve probably remembered that bit. So had Reverend Paul Nedergaard, who upset the citizens of Copenhagen in 1958 by reminding them that he was a ‘pagan goblin’.

Rev. Nedergaard may not have had career prospects in diplomacy, but he was right. Santa/Father Christmas is an American/European syncrasy derived ultimately from pagan origins. He started out with a green cozzie, which gives a hint. He seems originally to have been a kind of trickster figure – the Fool, Mischief – a representation of the capricious elements of nature – appropriate, given that he appeared at the most bleak time of year.

The role of the Fool, in folkore as in a court, could be frightening and disobedient. But this danger came with wisdom and a mandate to say that which others daren’t. The Roman winter feast of Saturnalia hinted at the same reversal/conflation of diifferent social roles.

In Holland, Santa is accompanied by Knecht Ruprecht, or Black Peter. He’s often played by a man with a blackened face. I can’t help but see the resemblance. What do you think?

Jacob Grimm thought that the Odin gave out a cry of “ho, ho ho” as he led the Wild Hunt across the European skies, quite often in the spring or autumn, but most often at Yule – the twelve day pagan midwinter feast. The Hunt is preceded by the sound of baying, barking and shouting. Then a rider on a horse erupts onto the scene, thundering through the air followed by a host of strange spirits. The rider is often black, sometimes headless and sometimes (especially in Germany) bears the battle-wounds that would have caused his mortal demise. Fire spurts from the mouths and noses of the phantom horses and hounds which are often only two or three legged. And sometimes, the spirits of the recently dead are seen in the infernal train.

Would you leave mince pies and beer out for such entities?

You should. In folkore, as in life, attempts to mollify the dangerous can start with prezzies. Sheaves of grain were left out for Odin’s mounts. In a tough environment, such a gesture was also a statement of faith that things will get better.

Not breathing fire, but in charge of lugging the Christmas Spirit around, Rudolph was created for the Montgomery Ward group of stores in 1939.

That has been a long-standing concern among Protestants that the non-Christian accoutrements of the festive season would undermine the Christian message of Christmas. The seventeenth century English Puritan government famously banned the pagan elements of Christmas. And when I lived in the US, there were evangelist Protestants still loudly worrying that belief in Santa would help to undermine belief in God. Well, when you finally get to that stage when you are forced to realise that an airborne being won’t grant all your wishes …

Best wishes of the season to you all.

J x

Campaign for Libel Reform

2009-12-09T19:11:00.029Z

This morning, a merry band of celebrities, journalists, lawyers, assorted press and bloggers joined representatives of of English PEN, Index on Censorship and Sense About Science at the Law Society to launch the Campaign for Libel Reform

Their recent ‘Free Speech Is Not For Sale’ has provoked a welcome response from Jack Straw who has set up a group to respond to it. He, like many in the Conservative and Lib-Dem parties, seems to now be amenable to change in English libel laws. Evan Harris MP said:
“There are reasons to be encouraged … there’s a kind of moment around the issue of free speech”. In fact, the timing is crucial.

Journalist Nick Cohen pointed out:
“Across the developed world, money is flowing out of journalism. There isn’t the money to fight libel actions. Newspapers back off all the time”

Perhaps we’re at what A. C. Grayling called a “sewerage moment”, a reference to the mid-nineteenth century ‘great stink’ when Parliament was finally forced to confront a contamination by its arrival at its own front door. As a river running with cloaca precipitated the building of a network of sewers, will super-injunctions be the midwife of fairer libel laws?

It’s not just an esoteric or academic issue. Tracey Brown of Sense About Science reminded us that libel chill in the UK affects many areas including human rights reporting, academic standards and medicinal research: as Edzard Ernst put it: “libel law has the potential to kill”. Nick Ross added: “It’s about bullying … done under a veneer of respectability and decency”.

The campaign has the public support of many, including Stephen Fry, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Jonathan Ross. I spotted Dr. Raymond Tallis, Professor Edzard Ernst, Dr. Simon Singh, Professor Chris French, Professor Richard Wiseman and Professor A. C. Grayling for the academics. Dr. Evan Harris MP, a stalwart of evidence based-policy and major supporter of libel-law reform was there too. Journalists included Roger Highfield, editor of The New Scientist and Observer regular Nick Cohen. Legal types Mark Lewis, Robert Dougans and Jack of Kent joined media folk Robin Ince, Dave Gorman, Nick Ross, Dara O Briain & Alexei Sayle.

Apologies if I’ve missed anyone out.

The ruinous cost of libel in the UK was reiterated. Simon Singh has spent eighteen months in time and £100K in money, and he’s nowhere near finished yet. Dr. Peter Wilmshurst could be ruined if he loses against NMT Medical - although he may not be much better off if he wins, as The Guardian found out when Matthias Rath took issue with an article by Ben Goldacre. They won, but are still out of pocket by £175K

Alexei Sayle, said that he’d once been sued for libel:

“… the thought that I could lose everything for damaging someone’s reputation … it would have been cheaper if I’d stabbed the fucker”

Let’s hope we’re seeing the beginning of a successful campaign. As Mark Lewis, Dr Peter Wilmshurt’s solicitor, put it:
“Libel laws were a more civilised replacement for duelling. There’s something wrong when people say “Maybe duelling wasn’t so bad after all”.”

BBC coverage

Jack of Kent

Buy This Book

2009-12-08T18:08:00.011Z

“Not since Sandra Bullock in ‘Speed’ has a woman utlised a bus with such skill” said Rebecca Watson, introducing Ariane Sherine to a fully packed Skeptics in the Pub last night.

Sherine is presently doing The-Big-Book-Tour with ‘The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas’ and appears to be covering more ground than Santa in a month of Christmases, so catch her if you can. Her talk about the conception and growth of the ‘Atheist Bus Campaign’ is extremely funny and I, for one am always delighted by the incongruity of appalling language from such a diminutive and affable person.

The campaign famously started with no more than a whimsical thought in Sherine’s Guardian column, was picked up enthusiastically in the comments section and launched in a small kind of a way after that. The publicity wasn’t grand and the total raised wasn’t huge. It wasn’t ‘til the Telegraph headline ‘Atheists fail to cough up for London Bus Ad’ that a large herd of heathen cats were motivated to try herding and some synchronised sponsoring, all to massive effect.

“I’ll burn in hell for being gay anyway, so what’s £10”, wrote one donor.

The book is a follow-up project edited by Sherine. It has the old favourite science contributors such as Simon Singh, Richard Dawkins, Ben Goldacre and an impressive bunch of media types such as Ed Byrne, Mitch Benn, Lucy Porter and David Baddiel. In total, they number forty-two, to accord with the Cabbalistic Constant from The-Good-Book (‘Hitchhikers Guide’ … surely I didn’t need to say that?) The writers’ profits are going to the Terrence Higgins Trust to somewhat counterbalance that the Pope thinks condoms cause AIDS.

Sherine (and her partner in crime, Richard Dawkins) is presently involved with another campaign, the BHA’s ‘Don’t Label Me’. There was a tiny hitchlet in that the child models (above) turned out to be from an evangelical family, but hey ho. In all, the message seems to have reached many people who didn’t realise that atheism could be so positive. At the very least, as Alexander Armstrong said:
“Being told that god doesn’t exist may make a chap think twice before blowing himself up on the top deck”.

Westminster Skeptics: Christmas Drinks

2009-12-03T13:32:00.001Z

Just a quickie this time. Enjoyed myself very much at the Skeptics Westminster Christmas drinks last night. The place was stuffed full with bloggers, writers, nerds, political activists and campaigners - great company all.

There was a good atheist turnout despite the Biblical weather conditions. Here are a few pics for those of you who couldn't make it.

Ariane Sherine & Simon Singh

Dr. Ben Goldacre, Dr Evan Harris MP and Tracey Brown of Sense About Science

Crispian Jago of Science, Reason & Critical Thinking, Professor David Colquhoun and Martin Robbins of Lay Science

And remember that Ariane Sherine will be visiting London Skeptics in the Pub at Penderel's Oak on the 7th. See you there!

‘Raped by Demons’ or ‘The Haunted Cheese Sandwich’

2009-11-21T14:31:00.011Z

I’ve read my latest free copy of ‘City News’ – have you? It’s a fab free publication by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, an international Pentacostal organisation of Brazilian origin.

Reading about other people’s problems to alleviate desperation at your own may not be the most morally sound pastime, but it’s a human constant. My eye was caught by this one:

"This may sound bizarre and unbelievable, but since a long-term relationship break up I have been getting feelings of something having sex with me. I can fell myself being pushed down and this thing on top of me ..."

The reply is as follows:

"I certainly do believe you and trust me when I say that you are not the only one that is going through this problem. Surprisingly, it’s quite common but people are often embarrassed to seek help for it and often, if they do seek help, they do so in the wrong places. The good news is that we have helped thousands of people overcome this problem. As it is a spiritual problem and not a physical one, it must be fought using spiritual weapons. I would like to invite you to participate in our Friday services for spiritual cleansing. You will receive strong prayers against all negativity and to break any curse. A pastor will be able to give you advice on what else you will need to be totally free from these attacks."

I first saw an article of this type by the UCKG in ‘City News’ Nov/Dec 2000:

“Some examples of Spiritual Attacks which include persistent dreams, sexual attacks, the feeling of being choked in dreams and the paralysing attack where one feels as if an overwhelming force comes over him and takes control of his whole body, except his mind. He can see what’s happening around him, but has no strength to react”

The Church again recommended attendance at its ‘Deliverance Services’.

Digging through history, it isn’t hard to find other examples of this phenomenon. Here are a few more:

“I sleep – for a while – two or three hours – then a dream – no – a nightmare seizes me in its grip, I know full well that I am lying down and that I am asleep... I sense it and I know it... and I am also aware that somebody is coming up to me, looking at me, running his fingers over me, climbing on to my bed, kneeling on my chest, taking me by the throat and squeezing... squeezing... with all its might, trying to strangle me. I struggle, but I am tied down by that dreadful feeling of helplessness which paralyzes us in our dreams. I want to cry out – but I can’t. I want to move – I can’t do it. I try, making terrible, strenuous efforts, gasping for breath, to turn on my side, to throw off this creature who is crushing me and choking me – but I can’t! Then, suddenly, I wake up, panic-stricken, covered in sweat. I light a candle. I am alone.”

Guy de Maupassant
'Le Horla' (1887)

“... a difficult respiration, a violent oppression on the breast, and a total privation of bodily motion ... In this agony they sigh, groan, utter indistinct sounds, and remain in the jaws of death, till, by the utmost efforts of nature, or some external assistance, they escape out of that dreadful, torpid state. As soon as they shake off that vast oppression, and are able to move the body, they are affected with strong Palpitation, great Anxiety, Langour, and Uneasiness”.

J Bond
‘An Essay on the Incubus, or Nightmare’ (1753)

“persons suffering an attack suffer an incapability of motion, a torpid sensation in their sleep, a sense of suffocation and oppression, as if from one pressing them down, with inability to cry out, or they utter inarticulate sounds. Some imagine often that they even hear the person who is going to press them down, that he offers lustful violence to them but flies when they attempt to grasp him with their fingers”

Paulus Aegineta
Physic in Roman Alexandria

“ … one passion is almost never absent – that of utter and incomprehensible dread … In every instance, there is a sense of oppression and helplessness … he [the victim – J] can hardly drag one limb after another … his blows are utterly ineffective”

R Macnish
'The Philosophy of Sleep' (1834)

“You are dreaming and you feel as if someone is holding you down. You can do nothing only cry out. People believe that you will die if you are not wakened” and “I remember waking up flat on my back. Paralyzed … Terrified beyond anything I’d ever experienced before … Sensation of pressure on my chest. The terror! The terror was both from being paralyzed and I knew there was something else in the room.”

Quoted by David Hufford
‘The Terror That Comes In The Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assaults’ (1982)

Even Jonathan Harker, seeing Dracula advance upon him says: “ … I would have screamed out, only that I was paralysed”.

And here’s a well-known pic by Henry Fuseli.

At this point, I should declare my competing interests: I get attacked by demons too. Or ‘sleep paralysis’, as we call it in the real world. It’s not that unusual, and there’s really no evidence that it’s caused by demons.

David Hufford (cited above), listed what he felt were the primary features of the experience, which were an impression of wakefulness coupled with immobility and a feeling of fear. In addition, he noted that a person’s actual setting was correctly perceived in contrast to a dream state where their surroundings could be distorted or false.

Common secondary features included the sleeping position – 90 percent of Hufford’s sample were supine. Pretty much every writer on the subject, to my knowledge, has also noted this aspect. He even found some evidence that a disproportionate number of attacks are suffered by people in traction, or people who were doing systematic relaxation training such as yoga.

Other secondary features include a feeling of pressure on the chest and a sensation of threatening intent or evil nature from a supernatural being. Sounds are also often heard, such as the sound of door or ‘footsteps’ – ‘whooshing’ or ‘shuffling’ noises.

Only slightly less frequent was the sensation that the victim would die: “The dread of suffocation, arising from the inability of inflating the lungs, is so great, that the person … generally imagines that he has very narrowly escaped death” Waller wrote in his “A Treatise on the Incubus, or Nightmare” of 1816. In some rare cases, victims reported an odour. There is also often a sexual element.

It’s easy to understand why people have historically regarded it as a supernatural affliction. “If you didn’t have the notion of ‘evil’, you’d have to invent after an encounter like that”, as one audience member put it at a lecture by Chris French on sleep paralysis at Goldsmiths on November 10th this year.

But more mundane causes have been sought since the time of Galen, who thought the affliction due to gastric disturbance – hence the old advice about not eating cheese before bed-time. It appeared as an explanation of nightmare as recently as 1902 in The Chambers Encyclopedia. The theory underwent a minor change at the turn of the twentieth century, when it was wondered if it was the circulation rather than the digestion which was so critically afflicted by sleeping supine, which in turn caused nightmares. Kant had even formulated the idea that nightmare (the word used in its traditional sense) was a beneficial process which alerted a sufferer to the circulatory distress of his heart.

King James in his Daemonologie of 1597 ascribed them to a “naturall sicknesse … a thicke fleume [phlegm – J], falling upon our breast into the heart, while we are sleeping” while others thought it nothing more than too deep a sleep. Freudian psychoanalyst Ernest Jones attributed nightmares down to mental conflict over repressed sexual desires.

In the modern age EEG technology has helped us to understand the different stages of sleep. Sleep paralysis, described broadly, is when your waking and sleeping functions mistime and collide: there is the normal paralysis of a sleeping body in the REM state (or you’d act your dreams out) but a conscious, rather than dreaming, mind; there is the depressed breathing rate of a sleeping body but panic at what may seem to be insufficient breath; there is the correct perception of your environment, but accompanied by dream phenomena such as dream hallucinations.

Sleep paralysis has been a major contributor to the folklore of fear. One day, when I’ve finished my book, you can read about Maras, Hags, Cauchemars, Civatateos and their kin (which probably includes aliens).

Meanwhile, if you have any weird experiences and can’t afford the bus fare to your local UCKG, take comfort from the fact that the attacks are a well-known, well-described phenomenon, are usually sporadic and will probably just go away. The following precautions are sensible, and probably all you’ll ever need:

Don’t sleep on your back – sew a cotton reel to the back of your pyjamas, nightdress or leather gimp suit. Folk tales and historical accounts overwhelmingly place the victim on their back when a position is mentioned

Try to sleep regular hours and not to get over-tired. Since sleep paralysis is associated with REM sleep colliding with wakefulness, it is more likely to occur when a person goes quickly into deep sleep - when they are exhausted

Don’t nap during the day while you’re going through a phase of SP. Although the majority of Hufford’s reported attacks took take place at night, the number during daytime naps was disproportionately large considering the fraction of total sleep hours they represented

Ask your sleeping partner to listen for laboured breathing

Try gently and calmly to move. Start by moving your eyeballs; they’re not paralysed during sleep. As soon as a person recovers their ability to move, the attack ends

Dr. Michael Persinger has worked on the possibility of a link between strong magnetic fields and certain types of brain activity. Try moving objects which produce strong magnetic fields, such as clock-radios, to a distance while you sleep

When the hideous hag/demon/alien/Cadbury’s Smash Robot (go on, laugh at my pain!) advances on you, to your best to feel love and acceptance. Sounds weird. It works. They turn into bunnies, kittens … lovely things. The fear is self-begetting and counter-productive

... which is why is bothers me profoundly that people who offer an intervention, do so by encouraging a belief in demons.

The UCKG’s publication is clear in several respects:

“it is a spiritual problem and not a physical one, it must be fought using spiritual weapons”, and the most appropriate service is for “spiritual cleansing” which can “break any curse”.

Although there is a disclaimer in tiny print on the back page that the spiritual advice is “a compliment to scientifically proven treatment you may be receiving”, it neglects to mention that more mundane explanations and interventions for sleep paralysis exist at all.

Perhaps they don’t know.

Well, they will by next week – I’ve written to them. I’ll keep you posted.

Hag created by Cesar Alonso
Demon from http://dark.pozadia.org/wallpaper/Demon-forever/

Westminster Skeptics in the Pub: Evidence-Based Policy or Policy-Based Evidence?

2009-11-17T18:47:00.013Z

Professor David Nutt, Dr. Evan Harris MP, & Dr. Ben Goldacre

at Westminster Skeptics in the Pub

“This talk has been approved by the Home Office and so may be damaging to your health” started Professor David Nutt last night at a crowded Skeptics Westminster. For such a serious subject, the evening produced a lot of laughs with the Professor, his fellow guest Dr. Evan Harris MP and visitor Dr. Ben Goldacre.

Professor Nutt started by restating the basics of the area: there are different legal classes of drugs (medical etc) and whether their use was restricted. And that the original intent of restricting drug use was to reduce harm by having a system of relative based harm and appropriate penalties.

He spoke specifically about ecstasy and cannabis, reminding us that neither of them was harmless, but that we needed an empirical approach to measure precisely what harm they caused. Both substances seem to be good case studies of how political fervour can trump empirical evidence. Queen Victoria used cannabis for pain during childbirth, and “MDMA only got banned when people started having fun with it”.

Government implementation of drugs policy has changed significantly over the years. In what many people regard as an ideologically driven era, even the Thatcher government of the 80s was in fact more evidence based in this area: it implemented needle programs, for example.

In fact, prior to the issue of cannabis being reclassified, the advice of the ACMD had only been rejected once since 1971. But in modern times, we appear to have other motivators for policy. Two seemed particularly important.

The first is the undoubted power of the tabloid press.

The second is the attitude of the police, which appears to have changed since the ‘90s when they seemed interested in downgrading MDMA (E) and cannabis because of a lack of public disorder consequences. This has changed and it’s not entirely clear why.

In fact, there are other (than health) serious consequences to using drugs, and getting a criminal record is prime among them. Professor Nutt cited an Australian program where cannabis was decriminalised: it apparently improved users’ relationships with the police, made them more able to seek help for substance dependency and (perhaps most importantly of all) improved users’ employment prospects.

Dr. Evan Harris MP started his presentation deeply abashed:
“I never smoked pot. It’s embarrassing … I was never offered it. It wasn’t big in my chess club”

So clearly inexperienced, but with nerd credentials intact (chess?!), Dr Harris continued by describing himself as a “yappy dog around the ankles of, usually, health secretaries”. His forays into evidence-based health policy had started with questioning the two-week referral time for a possible cancer (apparently, the money spent this way doesn’t produce the best outcomes). Since then he has tackled emotive, polarising and tabloid-friendly subjects, such as drug-induced early-stage abortion and prostitution.

With prostitution, for example, the ‘demand for prostitution’ offence in which police target potential clients has been cited as a concern in the NHS (I’m afraid I didn’t catch the specific citation). There is good reason to suspect that legal measures which alienate the women and their profession further will increase their vulnerability.

Dr. Harris freely admits that governments have many, and often good, reasons for certain policies, ideology, public opinion and financial considerations among them. But when these are the real motivations, a government must admit to that, rather than attempting to dictate or discard scientific advice & evidence. Although there are notable exceptions (he cited Dr. Lynne Jones MP, Paul Flynn MP and Charles Clarke MP), he feels that this government doesn’t really understand evidence based policy: do they think a peer review is “A Baroness casting an eye across something”?

His reports of conversations with members of the government sounded frustratingly meandering and circular. And he was clearly appalled at the timing of Professor Nutt’s famous rebuke from Jacqui Smith, the then Home Secretary, which coincided with her expenses scandal. Anybody trying to knock herself off the front pages, by any chance?

As a member of the Science and Technology committee, it is to be hoped that Dr. Harris can help to make a change. Next week, a set of principles for the treatment of independent scientific advice will go to Lord Drayson for his consideration. See Sense About Science for more.

The evening was fascinating and funny: did you know that you are statistically more likely to suffer a reaction to peanuts than to MDMA? We were all tickled by the complaints of a Dutch cannabis researcher in the audience who complained bitterly that her subjects had scoffed all her biscuits. And Professor Nutt dispelled some of the softer attitudes to heroin use by reminding us that it is a potent respiratory depressor which causes many inadvertant deaths.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects was the role that the media, especially the tabloids have to play. Both speakers managed to convey a sense of how the government is driven by fear of the tabloids and it is, to a certain extent, understandable. Newspapers clearly have an idea of what they regard as a sexy subject, there being a massive weighting of fatality reports toward the narcotic ‘bete du jour’*.

One the other hand, surveys reveal that the public are often considerably more liberal than those ministers running scared of newspapers. So who buys the news and votes as they’re told? “Who is the constituency for stupid drug laws?”, as one audience member asked.

We were all stumped.

I think that last night’s proceedings managed principally to convey that science mangled to provide a justification for policy dishonours both government and science. As Evan Harris always says to Anne Widdecombe about sex education:

“Never more ignorance”

See also Revolutions & Drugs Policy

And Dave Cole at WSitP

* Alasdair J. M Forsyth ‘A Qualitative Exploration of Drug Fatality Reports in the Popular Press’

The Sins of the Mothers

2009-11-14T17:41:00.010Z

In ‘The Merchant of Venice’ Lancelot tells the Jewish convert to Christianity, Jessica, that there is no mercy for her in heaven as she is the daughter of two Jews. Her only hope is that her mother got her with another man. In Lancelot's worldview, Jessica’s actions in life clearly cannot eradicate her ancestry on one hand, nor her mother’s adultery on the other. She says:

“That were a kind of bastard hope indeed, so the sins of my mother should be visited upon me”

In June this year, the Court of Appeal found that the Jewish Free School in Brent had discriminated against a child on racial grounds. The school has an excellent Ofsted ranking, is constantly oversubscribed and is able, under the present rules, to pick and choose its pupils when there is a surplus of candidates. At the JFS, there always is.

The issue with ‘child M’ is that his father was born Jewish, but his mother is a convert. The Office of the Chief Rabbi does not recognise her conversion as valid, since the ritual was performed under Progressive, rather than Orthodox, auspices. Child M is an observant Jew, as are the members of his immediate family.

So it’s not the practice - it’s the paperwork.

Lord Pannick QC, for the school, which operates under Orthodox rules, argued that the discrimination was not ethnic: “… a faith school is entitled to adopt an oversubcription policy that gives priority to those children who are members of the religious faith as defined by the religious authority of the faith.” And the ‘religious authority of the faith’ here clearly likes to maintain a good degree of control over the validity of conversion rites.

I think this tortured issue is difficult, and even distasteful, to a modern, liberal mind for a few reasons. They revolve around the issue of identity in a modern context.

Firstly, there is the ethnic element – and there undoubtedly is one. Dinah Rose QC, representing child M, has pointed out that the JFS would accept a child of ethnically Jewish atheists but exclude others with non-Jewish mothers even when they were “Jewish by belief and practice”. And it occurs to me that as the OCR normally holds Jewishness to be matrilineal, this problem would presumably not arise with an ‘improperly’ converted father; his ethnicity would be irrelevant in relation to his child’s religious identity. So there are gender equality issues too.

Secondly, I think it jars with the modern trend to individuality, the permission to ‘self-declare’. We would resist being told which football team to support, which way to vote and which clothes to wear. We create our identities by our choices and we expect to be able to choose our religion: “Jesus is my saviour”, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God”; it’s unusual, in a modern context, to be excluded from a group after that.

There is an historical tradition of religions as guilds – protected organisations where you were ‘admitted’ rather than where you ‘joined’. Initiation into the Mithraic Mysteries was influenced by your class and profession (and certainly by your gender). Entering a medieval religious house was also encumbered, as you usually needed to bring money with you. Perhaps it’s a sign of demand that a group can afford to be so picky. It isn't a particularly modern model.

Thirdly, there is a modern sense that as an individual, you should pay the price of your own mistakes and benefit from the bounty of your own successes. We aren’t supposed to inherit sins or privilege. Horace’s "For the sins of your fathers you, though guiltless, must suffer" is often sadly true - babies are born with defects from alcoholic mothers, for example. But in a modern context it’s an sometimes admission of regrettable causality, not a mission statement.

For example, there is a class of indentured labourers in modern Pakistan called the haari who have been likened, even by organisations as august as the UN, to slaves. They are landless peasants with debts to pay before they gain their liberty, but these debts are not self-incurred. When a child of a few months has a debt that will take years to pay off, we have a sense that he is a different case than a man who has just blown the equity on his house in a poker game.

The Appeal Court in June appears to have judged that the tradition matrilineal test of Jewishness was by definition discriminatory: whether “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist” this “makes it no less and no more unlawful.” “The requirement that if a pupil is to qualify for admission his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or conversion, is a test of ethnicity which contravenes the Race Relations Act”.

It pointed out that: “If for theological reasons a fully subscribed Christian faith school refused to admit a child on the ground that, albeit practising Christians, the child’s family were of Jewish origin, it is hard to see what answer there could be to a claim for race discrimination.”

The issue has certainly created a great deal of discussion within the Jewish community and there are probably significant splits of opinion between different groups, not least between the liberal and orthodox.

The school went to the Supreme Court to ‘appeal against the appeal’* at the end of last month. We await the final outcome.

But for me, the point of the matter is that in our own times, we expect a person to be defined by their practice rather than their provenance. It seems that the fact of this court action has achieved this in some measure, as the JFS’s new admissions policy gives weight to charitable works and attending the synagogue.

Personally, I support the BHA’s call to phase out religious schools “unless they too can be persuaded to become inclusive and accommodating institutions”. Where tax-payers' money is involved, it seems only fair.

(Jack of Kent – if there’s a proper term for this, do let me know!)

Revolutions & Drugs Policy

2009-11-07T11:31:00.014Z

The idea that the sun revolves around the earth went unquestioned for along time, supported, as it was, by an unassailable authority - scripture. The relevant passages (King James) are:

“the world is stablished, that it cannot be moved”

psalm 93:1

“the world shall be established that it shall not be moved”

psalm 96:10

the Lord … “who laid the foundations of the earth that it should not be removed for ever”

psalm 104:5

“the world also shall be stable, that it be not moved”

1 Chronicles 16:30

Heliocentrism – the new idea that the earth revolves around the sun – was probably considered in Classical times, but the credit for its reintroduction in the early modern era goes to a German/Polish cleric and astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus. Although he had worked on his theories & calculations for around thirty years, his ‘De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium’ (‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’) was only widely published in 1543, shortly before his death.

The book attracted a little controversy: not much and not immediately. In fact, it was dedicated to Pope Paul III. It was another sixtyish years before the book was ‘suspended’ in 1616.

So who threw the frog among the gherkins? One of Copernicus’ champions, an astronomer and philosopher named Galileo, was instructed by the Inquisition not to hold or broadcast his heliocentric ideas, a request with which he initially complied. When finally invited to publish and comparison between the two models, his work became grounds for his trial for heresy in 1633. He was found guilty and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Which leaves us with a conundrum: why did it take so long for the Church to get its hair-underwear so contorted in its pious crevices? If the issue really was heresy, surely this would have been clear immediately, and actionable upon first appearance?

Galileo’s personality has been cited as a factor, and it’s a valid point. He had explicitly been invited to publish a comparison of the two celestial models, but seems to have made his own viewpoint clear in rather insulting terms. Perhaps he was attempting to trade on his good relationship with Pope Urban VIII, a bond which dissolved under such provocation. Or perhaps he was just a passive-aggressive pillock with autistic-spectrum levels of social intuition.

But I think there may be another factor – timing.

The idea of heliocentrism took a while to gather both a momentum and a backlash. This period co-incided roughly with the Counter-Reformation (reckoned to have started with the Council of Trent: started 1545) and the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). During this vulnerable period, the Catholic Church protected its magisterium even more vigorously than before. An edifice on the back foot was engaged upon a propaganda war.

It took ‘til 1835 for Copernicus’ and Galileo’s books to be dropped from the Church’s Index of Prohibited Books. The episode is seen today as an attempt to use blunt political force to suppress empirical and scientific evidence, to hold the world back in favour of received opinion and pre-determined knowledge. The ‘wisdom’ came before the evidence; the cart was put before the horse.

The Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, has sacked Professor David Nutt as chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. In July, Professor Nutt gave a lecture on the assessment of drug harms. This included a drug-harm scale with nine parameters which are:

Physical harm (acute, chronic and intravenous)

Dependency (intensity of pleasure, psychological dependence, physical dependence)

Social harms (intoxication, other social harms and health-care costs).

In this lecture, the Home Secretary claimed, Professor Nutt had crossed the line from science to policy.

But since the contents of Professor Nutt’s lecture could probably have been anticipated since 2007 when his ‘Development of a Rational Scale to Assess the Harms of Drugs of Potential Misuse’ was published in the Lancet, the Home Secretary’s outrage now is harder to understand.

The controversial aspects of Professor Nutt’s approach seem to be:

The inclusion of legal drugs, specifically alcohol and nicotine/smoking, with the illegal ones in the scale. Indeed, the placing of alcohol and smoking shows them to be more potent dangers than their availability would suggest.

Disagreeing with the reclassification of cannabis from a Class C to a Class B drug

Applying statistical comparisons to drug use which illustrates their danger in comparison to other leisure activities. Jacqui Smith was famously upset that he compared horse-riding and ecstasy use.

Alan Johnson has defended his action, saying: “He was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy”.

But on what is that policy based if not evidence?

Especially when the sole justification for restriction of certain substances is that they cause harm.

Professor Nutt’s sacking has been followed by the resignation of other highly-qualified scientific advisors on the ACMD. Not surprising really: if your academic integrity (therefore reputation and career) must be sacrificed to tow the governmental line, then there will be fewer capable and qualified experts on the payroll.

It’s all the more of a paradox that Professor Nutt has been fired by a government which legislated to allow 24 hour drinking hours. The view of the ACMD’s former chair on alcohol use in general? ‘I believe that dealing with the harms of alcohol is probably the biggest challenge that we have in relation to drug harms today’.

But then the present government changed the licensing laws several years ago in a very different political climate. It is now an edifice on the back foot, engaged upon a propaganda war. Perhaps in the future, we’ll regard Professor Nutt’s dismissal as an attempt to use blunt political force to suppress empirical and scientific evidence, to hold the world back in favour of received opinion and pre-determined knowledge, to put the ‘wisdom’ before the evidence, the cart before the horse.

That’s the marvellous thing about history - it’s all about the present.

Jourdemayne would like to thank one of her familiars for the inspiration for this blog.

Ladders, Webs & Death as Recreation

2009-10-28T20:04:00.023Z

A primate with severely attenuated ethical capacity,

and an olive baboon, Papio anubis

If a species being non-endangered was sufficient criterion to make it a fair candidate for random slaughter then, let’s face it, ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ fans could be in the cross hairs. I have nothing at all against them – I know several nice ones – but you have to admit they’re ubiquitous.

Olive baboons are common in Tanzania, and not at all endangered. So by the ‘Strictly’ model, they’re absolutely fair game for a good blasting. At least A. A. Gill thought so. The reconstructed approach to safari is to take pictures and leave footprints. Many thousands travel to Africa each year, restrict themselves to the photographic approach and yet don’t feel they’ve wasted their airfare.

But A.A. found himself overcome by testosterone in “a truck full of guns and other blokes in hats”. Apparently, you can’t be in this environment long before you get the urge to “do baboon”. So he selected his candidate, raised his rifle, then “a soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out…. Not a bad shot”.

“I know perfectly well there is absolutely no excuse for this” reflected A.A. “Baboon isn’t good to eat, unless you’re a leopard. The feeble argument of culling and control is much the same as for foxes: a veil for naughty fun.”

Tee hee.

If any killjoy is worried that there is some unsound psychology behind this, be assured that he only did it to "... get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger".

And in other naughty fun this week, Sandy the Jack Russell puppy (left) had her head fatally flattened in one stamp while wagging her tail at three hoodies in a park in Cambridgeshire.

Sandy wasn’t edible either.

Although I understand that you can only spend so much time in such an environment before it’s inevitable that you’ll get the urge to “do puppy”.

Her horrified owner witnessed the attack and tried to resuscitate Sandy. She is a teenager who had been given a pet to help with her ADHD.

I do hope they find these three young men, since they and A.A. should be Facebook friends. Modern social networks are so strongly characterised by common interests and pursuits.

Recreational deadly assault of sentient mammals must be up there with Salsa dancing and book clubs?

I think there are two issues here: firstly, there is 'moving towards' element, the enjoyment or satisfaction in the act; secondly, there is the 'moving away from' element, a moral impediment sufficient to overcome that enjoyment or satisfaction. A.A. Gill and the puppy stamper experienced a surfeit of the former, and a shortage of the latter in order to perform the actions they did.

Having no idea what would possess anyone to partake of the first (except, perhaps, an inappropriate tumescence at the domination of a creature less well armed than oneself) I'll stick to musings on the second.

I used the word 'sentient' earlier. My Collins dictionary defines it as:

"having the power of sense perception or sensation; conscious"

The term has historically been jealously guarded for human beings. We are the only animals who can self report, after all. (Cogito ergo Sum/I think, therefore I am) The dualistic notion of bodies and souls as separate, necessary for Christian theology and influentially formalised by Descartes, left animals as just bodies since only we have souls. Hence, animal expressions of pain were regarded as a kind of biological clockwork, a mechanistic performance that did not reflect real suffering the way that human being would understand it. This was believed to the degree that live vivisections on unanaesthetised animals were acceptable and not uncommon.

Another concept maintained by a Christian worldview was the Scala Naturae. It means ‘natural ladder’ but we usually know it in English as ‘The Great Chain of Being’. It is a cosmic hierarchy which accommodates every being and object, from God at the top to dirt at the bottom.

Sub-divisions are made on the basis of factors such as spirit/matter. For example, angels (all spirit) are higher than human beings (half matter/half spirit) which are higher than animals (all matter).

Examining other sub-divisions, it’s clear that it’s a highly anthropocentric schema. Animals are split according to the nobility and independence (lions are above goats), insects are split according to their usefulness and niceness (bees are above flies) and earth is split according to its quality (fertile soil is above scrub and sand). Social rungs naturally accommodate kings above peasants.

The Scala Naturae has been used to regard animals lower down the chain as facilities, ‘given’ to us to use for our own ends.

With the growth of science and empiricism, notions like ‘sentience’ and 'consciousness' have become more complicated. We have new conceptual and technological tools to work with. When we consider the ability to conceptualise and deduce, to have an inner life, to plan, to think in abstract terms and to experience things like pain and pleasure, we no longer automatically exclude all animals. We sometimes now look to them as fellow travellers; different, but fellow travellers nonetheless.

The rejection of dualism and the Scala Naturae is a triumph of the Enlightenment legacy. It is a way in which science, and particularly Darwinism, has made us better. We no longer sit majestically astride a conceptual dungheap, shitting on those beneath us. We have a place in a web and have to be careful not to tug our thread so hard that we pull a vital strand loose.

Can someone please tell A.A. Gill?

It's Question Time

2009-10-24T16:08:00.008+01:00

Regular readers will know that I spent a few years in the US. It was the late 80s/early 90s and we had no new media, no internet, no Twitter, and there was still a significant cultural gap between the two countries. Seems strange to say, especially when I could go out and speak my own native tongue and be relatively well understood, but the culture shock was hard.

I didn’t know how to buy milk that tasted OK (the fat levels were very different) and I had never before conceived of the need for a whole shop with one hundred different types of pasta (I bought the mushroom flavour and decided it was a winner). I couldn’t find a clothes shop without satin and shoulder pads (although, to be fair, I was trawling through an Italian area in the late 80s) and the TV was nigh-on un-watchable.

Since I pulled off I 95 at Raleigh, North Carolina, the old broomstick never did make it to Mississippi, one of the poorest states in the union. Or Alabama, or Kentucky. Which was a shame, because a visit to those states (among many others) would have supplied another culture-shock experience, an anthropological curiosity that I had never encountered in the UK.

‘White trash’ is an American pejorative term which applies to under-educated, under-employed, low social status Caucasians. They exist on the economic margins of society. They don’t share the Puritan, middle-class values of deferred gratification, education and the value of work for its own sake. If the only work available is minimum wage and there’s no way up, why bother? Such a class is maintained on welfare or the lowest-paid work possible. They are socially gauche and a sometimes a cruel source of humour for those higher-up the social and economic ladder.

I, like 7,999,999 other people, watched Nick Griffin on Question Time on Thursday night. The next day’s news stories suggested that Griffin had done badly: he “gave a twitchy performance and described homosexuals as "creepy"” (The Independent*) and he “gave a shaky and erratic performance” (Daily Mail). He was a “smug bigot” (The Sun) and he “left with his tail between his legs” (Kevin Maguire, The Mirror). The racist was routed.

This was not, I have to say, my impression.

Instead, I felt that the program’s whole format had been altered to enable two thirds of its running length to be devoted to direct attacks upon Griffin. And he was bullied directly by David Dimbleby – the putative moderator who drove home points of his own instead of pushing for answers to others’ questions. I suppose the BBC had a delicate line to tread. Having been criticised so heavily for even allowing Griffin a platform, there must have been terrific pressure to make sure he didn’t look good.

It’s no shock to point out that the educated and liberal speak largely to themselves, and in addition, this in particular is an emotive subject where all seek to be conspicuously politically correct. But I thought yesterday that this tendency may actually work in the BNP’s favour … and today, a YouGov poll reveals that twenty percent of people would now consider voting for the BNP.

We were all patting ourselves on the back prematurely. Shouting Griffin down has made him a more sympathetic figure to his constituency. I agree that he made several appalling comments, but he still wasn’t allowed sufficient rope hang himself.

There have been massive changes in the UK in my lifetime. One of them has been the creation of our very own ‘white trash’ underclass – a whole raft of people whom we’re happy to keep chronically unemployed. In the last ten years, they have been squeezed in two critical directions by the appearance of masses of imported unskilled labour, mostly from new EU countries. Housing has been squeezed and the chances of getting an unskilled job for a reasonable wage have gone down. There is now a great deal of competition for both. The benefits system is structured in a way that makes it very difficult to aspire. The abandonment of the 10p tax band was a disaster. Complaints about cheap eastern European labour have been roughly shoved aside as racism. It was necessarily a black Englishman who asked Jack Straw “Have Labour’s immigration policies contributed to increased support of the BNP?”

If you didn’t manage your GCSE in English you may not be as articulate as we’d like for the telly. And as for the rest of us, we who got our qualifications, spell reasonably well and broadcast to each other, we have words like ‘chav’ to make you seem like an inconsequential charicature. In short, the unskilled working classes of this country have been treated with contempt … and now they’re listening to Nick Griffin.

Nick Griffin is odious but he’s not stupid. I’m no expert political commentator, but study of the supernatural leads you read a lot about scapegoating. I believe it to be one of the most fundamental mechanisms of human social behaviour. It’s the search for “… an original cause which (can) be rectified”, “a pertinent cause on the plane of social relationships” as the pioneering anthropologist Evans-Pritchard described it. It’s a potently satisfying relief mechanism and a strong bonding experience for individuals within a group.

Jews in medieval Europe were accused of sacrificing children in blood rites (for example, William of Norwich and Hugh of Lincoln). People have even dug up corpses in order to perform ceremonies intended to halt the plague (email me if you want to read about Pitton de Tournefort’s encounter with the Vampire of Mykonos). Nigeria’s social ills are manifesting as child abuse in the name of witch-hunting. And people have, from time to time, looked askance at their black and brown neighbours. It’s a lot more natural (and significantly easier) than seeking a complex reason for your pain.

My maternal grandmother was hard-up throughout her whole life. She was an economic migrant to London from Newcastle in the 1930s. She wasn’t daft, neither were her seven surviving siblings, but having left school at fourteen, her prospects were poor. She was a career cleaner, in factories and middle-class households. However, she always managed to work (as did her husband) she managed to send two children off to professional training (my mother was nurse, my uncle was an engineer) and she also managed to buy a small flat. Actually buy a flat! Something that many graduate couples can’t do today.

The fact is that nice middle-class people should have been paying more for cleaners, shop workers, nannies and gardeners over the last ten years. There was home-grown labour of all colours, but we wanted it even cheaper. Middle-class jobs and wages haven’t been undermined, theirs have. As a result, a massive group of people have been excluded from our upwardly-mobile society.

Today The Times proposes that ‘History shows that BNP will follow Mosley’s Fascists down the drain’. However, I believe that the Mosley’s demise is not as relevant an example as The Times would like to think. The thing that did for Mosley was not the activists at Cable Street (my paternal grandfather among them), nor an unswervingly fair British moral temperament. It was the war with Hitler.

I don’t think that Griffin’s supporters will ever be in a majority or ever form a government. But you don’t have to be that large to be that troublesome. I was a teenager living in Southall during the riots of 1979. Blair Peach was murdered a little way down the road. I remember all the shops boarded up and an eerie silence at four in the afternoon, prior to expected troubles. No cars, no people, no dogs even. Then we locked ourselves in the house and hoped it wouldn’t get too close to us. To a fourteen year old, it was terrifying.

I’d prefer to never see that again. But I think we may. We have a looming recession, a chronically unemployed class and a man who is happy to tell them that they’re disenfranchised partly because of their black and Asian neighbours. And the best chance anybody had to publicly expose the basic flaws in his thinking was lost in a smug onslaught of preaching to the choir.

* I don’t actually remember that wording – I thought he described seeing two men kiss as ‘creepy’, but I’m quoting.

Jan Moir

2009-10-17T16:50:00.004+01:00

It takes a real talent to write entertainingly about things that piss you off, to be articulate and funny without being nasty. Cattiness reduces all the potential observation and irony to the bitterness nursed by an inadequate personality.

Jeremy Clarkson has it. If I met him I’d probably disagree with every other thing he says, including “please pass the sugar”, but he’s a good and funny writer. So does Charlie Brooker, a man with more bottled bile than a Traditional Chinese Medicine Shop.

I’ve just read my first Jan Moir column, and she really doesn’t. She’s received a lot of attention this week for her comments about Stephen Gately’s death in which she observed that our idols sometimes “live a life that is shadowed by dark appetites or fractured by private vice”. Gately’s death also apparently strikes another blow to the “happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships”.

The internet (including the comments section on her own ‘Daily Mail’ page) is awash with people who expressing their outrage at her tramping her size nines inappropriately through a family’s grief at a tragic and natural death, so I don’t need to add to that.

But I did take the time to read the rest of her column. As I result, I’m proposing the theory that she may not be specifically homophobic, but just an equal-opportunities shrew.

The two other pieces this week were both about women. The first target was Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, who wore the kind of dress that your Mum used to make you put a nice warm coat over:
“Tara, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you are too old for that look” says Jan, “In fact, everyone is too old for that look, unless you happen to be Timmy the Tranny, the hat-check personage down at the My-Oh-My supper club in Brighton”.

And the second piece is entitled ‘I'm in the mood for spanx pants’ in which she told us that the Nolan comeback tour was a “giant triumph of spirit over depleted oestrogen”. The Nolans’ costumes had “a white panel down the front which gave the illusion of the girls being nipped in at the waist. Or, in some cases, of actually having a waist.”

Didn’t we used to just call those kinds of comments bitchy?

Since Jan Moir has such strong ideas about how women should look, I thought I’d furnish you with a photo. Next to Tara Palmer Tomkinson. People in glass houses shouldn’t eat so many bacon butties.

PS If you want to register a protest about the Stephen Gately article, there's a Facebook page here.

Westminster Skeptics & Simon Singh's Appeal

2009-10-14T12:32:00.011+01:00

Hurrah, the inaugural meeting of Westminster Skeptics. By my count, a very near-capacity crowd of a hundred or so gathered at the Barley Mow to hear David Allen Green, Nick Cohen, Ben Goldacre and Simon Singh discuss English libel law. And we weren't the only people interested - Newsnight turned up too. We're at 37:33.

The Trafigura case and The Guardian's challenge to a reporting ban on Parliamentary questions has helped to make libel law a higher-profile issue than it would already have been. As David Allen Green reminded us in his opening:
"This is not about protecting Simon Singh, it's about protecting the public who are missing out on news reporting".

Nick Cohen followed and spoke of his impression after his first meeting with Skeptics at Penderel's Oak earlier in the year by saying "I was staggered by the sight of geeks in arms".

Cohen's passion about and knowledge of politcal campaigning is clear and he reminded us that change is actually acheivable. In what sometimes seems to me to be an era of very limp political fervour, he said it was naive, lazy and apathetic to think that there could be no change. The right to vote, rights for women - all of these were at one point ideas which were fought for and finally acheived.

Twitter and blogging have undoubtedly made a difference to the Singh campaign. In the era of electronic publishing, he said "You are all journalists now" to which David Allen Green ominously added "... and the law regards you as publishers"

Ben Goldacre reminded us that very vigourous peer review is an integral part of the scientific process. Hospitals have highly robust meetings, usually once a week, where difficult cases are discussed and all possible options reviewed. Medicine can sometimes do dreadful things with the very best of intentions, and open criticism is the only way that this phenomenon can be effectively managed.

By contrast, libel law is sometimes misused simply to shut people up. It's anti-science.

At the beginning of the Simon Singh case, I remember Jack of Kent writing that a libel action's winnability was not the only factor to take into account: cases can also backfire, bringing loud and counterproductive publicity, something seen in the McLibel case.

Goldacre evoked the phenomenon by saying that although the rich and powerful could serve writs and bring actions, the public could "... make it like chewing on a mouthful of wasps ... people will learn that this is not a good way of managing their reputations".

The BCA didn't heed Jack all that time ago, but must surely have taken this on board by now.

Simon Singh was last to speak. He reiterated that Engish libel law was unlike others: for one thing, English libel cases are one hundred times more expensive than their equivalents on mainland Europe. This means that they are usually ruinous to any target - even if they win!

By now, it is also apparent that English libel laws also lack international credibility. The case of Rachel Ehrenfeld, an American author sued in London by a Saudi national, prompted a series of state's laws in the US that has prevented foreign judgements being enforcable in the US if the foreign law did not protect freedom of speech to the same extent as the American version.

Singh's case was highlighted at the recent Liberal-Democrat conference by Richard Dawkins. And Singh told us that he had also spoken to Labout politicians and recently Ed Vaizey, Shadow Minister for Culture about libel law reform.

As his for appeal hearing tomorrow:
"I did a PhD in particle physics and I find the law, frankly, baffling"

Good luck Simon. And good luck Skeptics Westminster. Great first event.

PS.
As I write, the tweets are flocking: apparently Simon Singh has been given leave to appeal. Latest from Crispian Jago. Details and more soon, no doubt, from Jack of Kent. Plus the implications on the original ruling for Article 10 of the Human Rights Act at Tessera

PPS
Video with Simon Singh after today's hearing: