Sceptics can take this comfort: they now make up the biggest denomination, followed by Catholics and then Anglicans. But this puts Australia only about midway in a list of the top 50 non-believing nations.
All the same, we’re getting there. Agnostics and atheists together = 30%, a figure that in my youth would have astonished my parents’ generation – and delighted my father. Continue reading »
At the New Yorker, Joan Acocella has an intelligent and typically graceful essay on the Dracula thing – origins, romantic form of, subsequent treatments of, annotated versions of – very thorough treatment. She brings the story up to the current teenage hit, Twilight, and its sequels. (Number one son says Twilight is sort of OK but the sequel is rubbish.)
She asks, Why is there a cult about this particular figure? Good question, I reckon, speaking as one untouched and untouchable by stories, films, plays or essays about Dracula.
. . . cults often gather around powerful works of the second rank. Fans feel that they have to root for them. What, then, is the source of ?Dracula? ?s power? A simple device, used in many notable works of art: the deployment of great and volatile forces within a very tight structure.
That assumes that the supernatural, for the reader, counts as a ‘great and volatile force’, even if we gloss the supernatural in the various ways it has been: as strange forms of desire, Continue reading »
I have always been puzzled by the cult of Lacan within literary circles.
The extreme, the dazzling implausibility of the ideas themselves is matched by the bottomless lack of evidence for them. Take the ‘mirror stage’ for example, the one idea everybody knows in Lacan.
Lacan began by describing an experiment called the ?mirror test? which his friend, the French psychologist Henri Wallon, had performed in 1931. Wallon had compared the reactions of human infants and chimpanzees to seeing their reflection in a mirror. He found that at around the age of six months both humans and chimpanzees begin to recognise that the image in the mirror is their own. However, Wallon claimed there was an important difference between the subsequent reactions of the human infant and the chimpanzee. The human infant becomes fascinated with his reflection, and leans forward to examine it more closely, moving his limbs to explore the relation between image and reality. The chimp, on the other hand, quickly loses interest, and turns to look at other things.
Lacan used this observation as a springboard to develop an account of the development of human subjectivity that was inherently, though often implicitly, comparative in nature. Human subjectivity was only understandable by contrasting it with that of our nearest relative, the chimpanzee.
This is by Dylan Evans, a Lacanian apostate, now a Darwinian. My only reaction to this proposal has always been the same – Huh?
Not so (at first) Evans, who went so far as to practise Lacanian psychotherapy. His undoing came when at last he found a place where people asked the right questions.
I returned to the UK in 1997 to take up a place in the philosophy department at the London School of Economics, a college of the University of London. The atmosphere there could not have been more different from that in Buffalo. The department of philosophy had been founded by Karl Popper, one of the
giants of analytic philosophy, and his influence was clearly visible. The qualities admired in writing here were clarity and concision, not empty rhetorical flourishes and baroque digressions.
And above all, people demanded evidence. No matter how obvious (or how weird) your opinions seemed to be, they were worth nothing unless you could back them up.
That’s when I began to realise, with growing alarm and shame, that I had never really asked myself what the evidence for psychoanalysis was! I had simply been carried along by the panache and stylistic flourishes of two great wordsmiths – Freud and Lacan – without pausing to ask the most important question of all: on what evidence did they base their far-reaching claims?
Shhhh.
Number 1 son decided yesterday that he’d heard quite enough from father about the perfidy of the Royal Society and the madness of stock markets. He emerged from the local library with a bundle of his usual gory arcana and – for me – a copy of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. After reading the first chapter on the Mississippi Scheme I feel better. That was the episode shortly after the death of Louis XIV in which a Scottish adventurer won the confidence of the Regent, commandeered the heights of the French economy and led the nation straight down the gurgler.
The resemblance of the chap on the right to a younger Alan Greenspan is a bit of a worry.
I suppose it had to happen, the Royal Society recommending that creationism be taught in schools. From the Times article it seems probable that the decision has been made to show ‘sensitivity’ to guess who, Muslims and fundamentalist Christian students. The Royal’s director of education says as much.
Professor Reiss, a Church of England clergyman, said: ?Just because something lacks scientific support doesn?t seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson.”
Expect astrology soon, and lab sessions in casting the runes and an incursion of witches. Ridiculous, you say and you’d be right, because there’s no influential, well-funded and in the Muslim case, scary lobby group pushing for them.
What follows is old news in two ways – familiar gist, year-old link – but it’s what’s on my old mind.
Suppose we asked a group of Presidential candidates if they believed in the existence of atoms, and a third of them said “no”? That would be a truly appalling show of scientific illiteracy, would it not? And all the more shocking coming from those who aspire to run a technologically sophisticated nation.
Yet something like this happened a week ago during the Republican presidential debate. When the moderator asked nine candidates to raise their hands if they “didn’t believe in evolution,” three hands went into the air-those of Senator Sam Brownback, Governor Mike Huckabee, and Representative Tom Tancredo.
I don’t know whether to attribute the show of hands to the candidates’ ignorance of the mountain of evidence for evolution, or to a cynical desire to pander to a public that largely rejects evolution (more than half of Americans do). But I do know that it means that our country is in trouble. As science becomes more and more important in dealing with the world’s problems, Americans are falling farther and farther behind in scientific literacy. Among citizens of industrialized nations, Americans rank near the bottom in their understanding of math and science. Over half of all Americans don’t know that the Earth orbits the Sun once a year, and nearly half think that humans once lived, Flintstone-like, alongside dinosaurs.
Thus biologist Jerry Coyne at The Edge
While we’re having fun, let me add something I read lately, source now forgotten. To shore up the Flintstone thesis, which of course is contradicted by the fossil record, creationists now argue that God so really, really didn’t love the world that after the Flood had stifled the sinners, he proceeded to extirpate every last trace of them, right down to the atoms of which they were composed.
It’s not exactly fun, is it, when we recall just how many people voted for Huckabee? Is it really so melodramatic to claim that in the US, the values we inherit from the Enlightenment are threatened?
Couldn’t happen here? Well no, not in that form. But consider:
I brood. And read Voltaire.