Is there anything good about Freud’s legacy?

August 31, 2017 • 1:30 pm

Lately I’ve been talking about Fred Crews’s new 600-page critique of Freud, Freud: The Making of an Illusion, and you can find my take (postive) here. The book, in concert with Crews’s earlier work, and many other critics, pretty much demolishes not only the scientific pretensions of psychoanalysis, once Freud’s big gift to the world, but also the man himself, who is revealed, as he is increasingly being shown, as pretty much of a charlatan. Not just an incompetent, but someone who actually realized that he was making up stuff and consciously lying, but doing so because he had a desperate drive to be famous.

If psychoanalysis is on the way out, as it is, and Freud is pretty much known to have made up a lot of the clinical stuff he wrote, including his supposed “cures” (which weren’t), then what remains of the man? His theories of hysteria and neurosis, of the Oedipus complex and repression of early trauma, have been debunked. Even his view that we’re driven by unconscious factors was not original with him, and assumes a completely different meaning now that neuroscience is on the scene.

In a new piece in the New Yorker, which doubles as a review of Crews’s book and a chronicle of Freudianism’s downfall, staff writer Louis Menand tries desperately to find some good bits of Freud’s legacy. His article, “Why Freud survives” (subtitle, “He’s been debunked again and again—and yet we still can’t give him up”), unfortunately fails to redeem Freud’s legacy even a little bit.

By and large, Menand agrees with Crews’s conclusions: that Freud was a man corrupted by ambition, and who devised a watertight, non-refutable theory of human behavior that, in the end, led to a practice that was no better than placebo, drugs, or other talk therapy. Menand’s main criticism of Crews’s book is that it’s too critical:

That year [1998], in an interview with a Canadian philosophy professor, Todd Dufresne, Crews was asked whether he was ready to call it a day with Freud. “Absolutely,” he said. “After almost twenty years of explaining and illustrating the same basic critique, I will just refer interested parties to ‘Skeptical Engagements,’ ‘The Memory Wars,’ and ‘Unauthorized Freud.’ Anyone who is unmoved by my reasoning there isn’t going to be touched by anything further I might say.” He spoke too soon.

Crews seems to have grown worried that although Freud and Freudianism may look dead, we cannot be completely, utterly, a hundred per cent sure. Freud might be like the Commendatore in “Don Giovanni”: he gets killed in the first act and then shows up for dinner at the end, the Stone Guest. So Crews spent eleven years writing “Freud: The Making of an Illusion” (Metropolitan), just out—a six-hundred-and-sixty-page stake driven into its subject’s cold, cold heart.

The new book synthesizes fifty years of revisionist scholarship, repeating and amplifying the findings of other researchers (fully acknowledged), and tacking on a few additional charges. Crews is an attractively uncluttered stylist, and he has an amazing story to tell, but his criticism of Freud is relentless to the point of monomania. He evidently regards “balance” as a pass given to chicanery, and even readers sympathetic to the argument may find it hard to get all the way through the book. It ought to come with a bulb of garlic.

Well, unrelenting revelatons of Freud’s unsavory character and work isn’t by itself a criticism, for Freud may have been a pretty dubious character and his work largely bogus.  That is in fact the take I get from what I’ve read about Freud (including his own works: The Interpretation of Dreams is, to a scientist, a long and torturous exercise in confirmation bias).  So why strive for a nonexistent “balance” if there isn’t one? Menand also psychoanalyzes Crews’s speculation that Freud had an illicit affair with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays (not a trivial matter for a psychoanalyst who boasted that he never did anything like that, and indeed, there’s some evidence for this affair) by saying “A Freudian would suspect that there is something going on here.” He’s referring to Crews’s discussion, and this is simply an ad hominem remark, a way to diminish Crews’s criticisms by saying that they’re coming from his previous infatuation with Freud and subsequent disappointment. But scholarship is scholarship, and Menand can’t find a chink in Crews’s armor here.

Well, Menand tries to find some “balance”. But he comes up with only two good things to say about Freud’s legacy—even after admitting, with Crews, that “Freud was a lousy scientist.”  Menand mentions talk therapy, but adds that psychoanalysis is no better than placebo and that there are other talk therapies, with no evidence that psychoanalysis is superior to others. (Indeed, cognitive behavioral therapy seems to work better for many issues, and true psychoanalysis demands that the patient give up years of time and many dollars.). But there’s also the unconscious:

People also find appealing the idea that they have motives and desires they are unaware of. That kind of “depth” psychology was popularized by Freudianism, and it isn’t likely to go away. It can be useful to be made to realize that your feelings about people you love are actually ambivalent, or that you were being aggressive when you thought you were only being extremely polite. Of course, you shouldn’t have to work your way through your castration anxiety to get there.

Exactly. This contribution is pretty much independent of the whole complicated armamentarium of psychoanalysis.  So if you want to say that Freud’s legacy was, along with others, to make us aware that we’re not 100% conscious of why we do what we do, then let him have that. But realize, too, that neuroscience, combined with materialism, offers an even deeper explanation.

And then there’s this special pleading for Freud (my emphasis):

As Crews is right to believe, this Freud has long outlived psychoanalysis. For many years, even as writers were discarding the more patently absurd elements of his theory—penis envy, or the death drive—they continued to pay homage to Freud’s unblinking insight into the human condition. That persona helped Freud to evolve, in the popular imagination, from a scientist into a kind of poet of the mind. And the thing about poets is that they cannot be refuted. No one asks of “Paradise Lost”: But is it true? Freud and his concepts, now converted into metaphors, joined the legion of the undead.

Sadly, what “unblinking insights” that Freud offers into the human condition aren’t mentioned by Menand. But if Freud is turned into a “poet of the mind”, one whose insights “cannot be refuted”, then how can he give us any insight into the human condition? For surely if those insights are true, they must be shown to be true by rationality, repeatable observations, testing, and experimentation, not by poetry. And they must be capable of being refuted! Here we have the New Yorker‘s frequent claim that there are “ways of knowing beyond science.”  Yes, insofar as poets appeal to our personal love of language, and make us think about ourselves and our lives, they can’t be refuted, for they’re offering a personal and subjective experience. But they can be refuted if, it’s claimed, they tell us something about human behavior. Why doesn’t Menand see this?

Finally, Menand ends with another watery encomium towards Freud (my emphasis):

Crews’s idea that Freud’s target was Christianity appears to be a late fruit of his old undergraduate fascination with Nietzsche. Crews apparently once saw Freud as a Nietzschean critic of life-denying moralism, a heroic Antichrist dedicated to liberating human beings from subservience to idols they themselves created. Is his current renunciation a renunciation of his own radical youth? Is his castigation of Freud really a form of self-castigation? We don’t need to go there. But since humanity is not liberated from its illusions yet, if that’s what Freud was really all about, he is still undead.

Okay, so Freud helped liberate us from our illusions—and I’ll credit him with a clearsighted atheism. But what other illusions? What insights did he offer? Menand doesn’t say. Freud’s still undead the way other miscreants are undead: their bad ideas are still around. You can find them in many college humanities departments.

Anti-vaxer denied visa to Australia because his message is “dangerous”

August 31, 2017 • 12:00 pm

One could, I suppose, make a case that an anti-vaxer speaking in public is more dangerous than a Nazi or white supremacist speaking in public. After all, it’s clear that anti-vaxers have been able to persuade even reasonably intelligent people to stop vaccinating their kids, whereas someone of that ilk hearing a Nazi wouldn’t become another Nazi.  And the danger of antivaxxers accrues not just to those who are converted, but to other kids as well because of the threshold phenomenon of “herd immunity.”

But even though I’d be much more likely to protest an anti-vaxer speaker than a Nazi speaker, I don’t think either should be censored or banned from speaking. After all, anti-vaxers do publish their stuff, where I suspect most people drink that Kool-Aid, and we need the opportunity for counter-speech and protest, which you can get only when someone like this speaks. And in the U.S. it’s not a violation of freedom of speech to talk about the bogus dangers of vaccination. If we ban anti-vaxers, shouldn’t we also ban homeopaths or chiropractors, who themselves could do (and have done) serious damage.

But in Australia it seems to be okay to censor someone like this. Or so reports the Sunshine Coast Daily, which reports that Kent Heckenlively, a prominent American anti-vaxer (see his books here, and Orac’s takedowns here), has been denied a visa to give a lecture tour of Australia:

THE self-prescribed “world’s number one anti-vaxxer”, Kent Heckenlively, has been denied permission to enter Australia.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said Mr Heckenlively would not be able to come to Australia for a planned lecture in December.

“Kent has not got any travel plans to Australia because we are not going to allow him to come here, we are not going to issue a visa for this particular individual,” Mr Dutton told Sydney radio station 2GB.

“These people who are telling parents their kids shouldn’t be vaccinated are dangerous people and we have been very clear in having a look right through this particular case and it is clear to me that it is not in our national interest that he should come here.”

The Turnbull government was under pressure from Labor to stop the American science teacher from coming to Australia.

Labor wrote to immigration minister Peter Dutton earlier this month demanding a travel ban on Mr Heckenlively after it was revealed his department had the anti-vaxxer under watch.

Mr Heckenlively was planning a lecture tour of Australia in December to spread his dangerous and incorrect message that vaccines are bad.

As part of his “Dangerous Science” tour he was planning to call for a five-year moratorium on childhood vaccinations.

Here’s the reason (I can’t access the letter referenced):

“Labor is alarmed that Mr Heckenlively may be allowed to promote this dangerous nonsense in Australia,” Ms King said in the letter obtained exclusively by News Corp Australia.

“While our immunisation program has historically been effective, there is growing evidence that anti-vaccination advocates and their political allies like Pauline Hanson are now undermining our success – as shown by the doubling of measles cases between 2013 and 2014.

“I write to urge you to deny entry to Australia to the dangerous anti-vaccination zealot Kent Heckenlively.”

And it worked.  But just as I urge free speech for Nazis, even if they’re promoting mass extermination of Jews, so I urge free speech for anti-vaxers, as well as homeopaths, naturopaths, chiropractors, crystal healers, and other quacks whose nostrums are either ineffective or dangerous.  Without the freedom to combat these ideas, they go underground and remain largely unopposed. Of course Heckenlively’s speech poses possible dangers, but it can also open a dialogue about how dangerous vaccinations are (answer: they’re not). I think it’s a bad move to ban the guy from Australia, and I wonder if they’ll ban other speakers who say things about health that, if followed, pose dangers.

Do you agree with the government, realizing that this is banning speech? And if so, would you prefer to see Heckenlively banned over a Nazi?

Kent Heckenlively

h/t: Steve C.

Three Cheers for Bari Weiss on cultural appropriation

August 31, 2017 • 9:15 am

Staff editor Bari Weiss is the columnist we needed at the New York Times, as she’s a progressive liberal who has no time for the Control-Left (see my three posts about her here). She must have snuck into the regressive Times under their radar! Yesterday she wrote the piece below (free access; click on screenshot), which is pretty much the way I feel about accusations of “cultural appropriation”.

Such accusations are often used so that ethnic groups can absolutely control discourse about their culture as well as determine who can rightfully borrow elements of their culture, including food, clothing, hairstyles, music, and so on. In general I think borrowing from other cultures, ethnic groups, and so on is a good thing, for it’s a form of flattery that says, “Hey, I like this and want to use/eat/do it myself”. Only under two circumstances do I find it inappropriate: when it’s used to make fun of or demean a group (I’d see a “Muslim terrorist Halloween costume” in this way, though I wouldn’t say it should be banned); and when the cultural appropriation actually reduces the well being of the people who are appropriated, as when a musician borrows a group’s style of music, hires some of the group as backup singers, and reaps all the profits while the singers get very little. This is exactly what Paul Simon avoided when he started writing and singing South African music, using the group Ladysmith Black Mambazo on his “Graceland” album, but making sure they got plenty of credit and money. Had he not done that, it would have been an inappropriate form of cultural appropriation. Simon went on to produce their first solo album in the U.S., which won a Grammy. He’s done the right thing.

The way cultural appropriation is supposed to work, according to the Control-Left, is that you’re only allowed to “borrow down”, that is, you can borrow elements from a “dominant culture” (again, here we have to decide upon a hierarchy of oppression), while borrowing “up,” say white Americans wearing dreadlocks or making the wrong kind of banh mi sandwiches, is wrong and requires all sorts of ancillary admissions, apologies, and reparations to absolve yourself. “Borrowing up”, of course, carries the two dangers highlighted above, but usually I can’t get excited about anybody wearing dreadlocks or Americanizing foreign cuisine, which hurts nobody. Most of the time, I think, the “damage” done by cultural appropriation is imaginary. Or rather, it offends people’s feelings, but that’s all.  And often it shouldn’t, as when white artist Dana Schutz painted a sincere homage to the murdered black teenager Emmett Till, a painting that many black artists said should be removed from her show or even destroyed. My response to that is not charitable; it’s “just live with it.” We needn’t take every complaint seriously, but of course the Left does that because we’re sensitive to the feelings of the underdog.

In the article below, Weiss echoes my sentiments, showing how ridiculous things have gotten when the MTV Video Music Awards yields three separate instances of “offensive” cultural appropriation. (Her words are indented.)

I haven’t watched MTV’s annual Video Music Awards since Bill Clinton was president. I was wearing a plastic choker and Alanis Morissette won for “Ironic.” But I wish I had tuned in this Sunday night. The award show was a veritable orgy — not of sex, but of cultural appropriation.

First up was Kendrick Lamar, whose backup dancers wore ninja outfits as they scaled a wall of fire. While the popular rapper went home with an armload of trophies, he was criticized for borrowing Asian dress. Later, Katy Perry, who just recently finished an apology tour for her previous sins of cornrows and kimonos, “snatched” off her long blond wig — a bit that was torn apart for caricaturing African-American women. Luckily for Ms. Perry, the floodlights lingered longer on her nemesis, Taylor Swift, who unveiled a new video that was immediately blasted for appropriating Beyonce’s “Lemonade.” Speaking of Queen B, I’m just waiting for the charge that she’s exploited Persian culture by naming her new daughter Rumi after the 13th-century Sufi poet.

And that’s just the rap sheet from a single night in pop music. Charges of cultural appropriation are being hurled at every corner of American life: the art museum, the restaurant, the movie theater, the fashion show, the novel and, especially, the college campus. If there’s a safe space left, I’m not aware of it.

. . . The logic of those casting the stones goes something like this: Stealing is bad. It’s especially terrible when those doing the stealing are “rich” — as in, they come from a dominant racial, religious, cultural or ethnic group — and those they are stealing from are “poor.”

Few of us doubt that stealing is wrong, especially from the poor. But the accusation of “cultural appropriation” is overwhelmingly being used as an objection to syncretism — the mixing of different thoughts, religions, cultures and ethnicities that often ends up creating entirely new ones. In other words: the most natural process in a melting-pot country like ours.

. . . It’s no longer just the online hordes that will string you up for your unintentional sins, though the cost of that public shaming can be devastating. In Portland, Ore., activists recently created a list of “white-owned appropriative restaurants” for residents to boycott on the grounds that white people probably shouldn’t make banh mi or dosas. This summer, the University of Michigan posted a job for a “bias response team” employee to “enact cultural appropriation prevention initiatives.” I wonder if they’ll go after people for using algebra (thanks, Muslims).

. . . These days our mongrel culture is at risk of being erased by an increasingly strident left, which is careering us toward a wan existence in which we are all forced to remain in the ethnic and racial lanes assigned to us by accident of our birth. Hoop earrings are verboten, as are certain kinds of button-down shirts. Yoga is dangerous. So are burritos and eyeliner.

(Do check out some of her links to see how ludicrous things have gotten.)

Weiss gives some examples of the kind of cultural appropriation that’s not only harmless but valuable: the singing of classical music by the great black soprano Jessye Norman, the writing of “White Christmas” by the Jew Irving Berlin (I’d add the heartbreaking “Old Man River,” a lament by a black slave stevedore, written by two white Jews), and the widespread aping of American culture by other countries. Cultural appropriation borrows both up and down, as what people like is no respecter of Hierarchies of Oppression. Further, decrying it isn’t going to work, for borrowing has been characteristic of human culture ever since different groups met without killing each other. (Even then they borrowed each other’s weapons!)  And the downside—the largely nonexistent dangers of stealing someone’s livelihood or making fun of them—is way overbalanced by the beneficial effects; as Weiss notes (even giving a caveat):

The point is that everything great and iconic about this country comes when seemingly disparate parts are blended in revelatory ways. That merging simply doesn’t happen in places where people are separated by race and ethnicity and class. And it’s not only what makes American culture so rich, but it is also a big part of the reason America is so successful. When we see a good idea, we steal it; when we have a good idea, the rest of the world is welcome to it as well.

. . . None of this means that all cultural appropriation should be cheered: Sometimes it’s just in plain old bad taste. (See under: ear gauges.) But so long as the impulse is one of homage and not derision, we should encourage borrowing. Culture should be shared, not hoarded.

What refreshing words to hear in the NYT! Think about your own culture; would you be bothered if people borrowed from it? As a secular Jew, I’m pleased that non-Jews like bagels with lox and a schmear, or bialys, or use Yiddish jargon like “mensch” and “chutzpah.” That’s surely borrowing up, but I don’t give a damn. The more the merrier. Do people need to bring up the Holocaust when they say “chutzpah”? Hell, no! I don’t need any apologies or verbal reparations.

But of course we have our naysayers, one being Eric McAdams from Paste, who’s already attacked Weiss’s article in an essay called “NYT opinion writer supports cultural appropriation, doesn’t know what cultural appropriation is.” He calls Weiss’s article “the act of a troll”, with an argument “dumb as dog shit.” Never mind that the referenced examples Weiss gives really have been called out for cultural appropriation. More important, I looked in vain for McAdams’s own definition of what cultural appropriation really is, and at the end it seems that his arguments come down to “borrowing up”, which is not okay. That borrowing up, says McAdams, must be accompanied by “consequences” that the borrower must face—presumably some sort of abject apology or additional homage to the appropriated culture.

McAdams:

You’ll notice that Weiss makes sure to consistently highlight people of color “appropriating” other cultures—people of color that she thinks should get more backlash because she doesn’t understand cultural appropriation. She never comes out and says this, but this focus is because she clearly thinks that white people get undue backlash for their appropriation, and that white people should be allowed to borrow from culture as much as she thinks minorities do. She ignores the struggles people of color have to go through to put out this art and this culture, as though people of all cultures have a perfectly level playing field when that’s obviously not true.

Don’t read this article. It’s just yet another writer whining because they can’t steal whatever idea they want and face zero consequences, another writer who thinks white people deserve accolades when they take an idea from a marginalized culture and abuse it like it’s an accessory they own, another writer who thinks these marginalized cultures should just shut up and be happy that white people are paying them any attention at all.

I’m not sure how “level playing fields” are any more relevant here than they are in arguments for abridging freedom of speech (see yesterday’s post on ACLU director David Cole). This is the same argument for why only white people can be racists, for, in the new definition, “racism = power + privilege.” Anyone who isn’t white therefore can discriminate on the basis of ethnicity or race, and it’s not racism. In the same way, it’s okay to borrow down but not up. When you borrow down you don’t have to apologize.

h/t: Merilee

Readers’ wildlife photos

August 31, 2017 • 7:30 am

Reader Paul Doerder sent in some photos of a mass emergence of one species of periodical cicada. I’ve been lucky enough to see some of these swarms (you can, too, by following the first link below), which are marvels of nature and enigmas of evolution (we have no idea how this weird life cycle evolved, though there are hypotheses). His notes are indented:

In response to your recent plea, here are some photos of last year’s 17-cicada event here in Ohio.  I should have sent these last year in a more timely manner, and perhaps there are too many and the text too long.  Your judgment prevails.  The following describes the photos.

It’s more than a year after the event, but there’s still evidence in the form of dead tree branches of last year’s 17-year cicada show.  In May/June 2016 Brood V of Magicicada septendecim emerged in Ohio.  After sunset on the evenings of May 26-28 at our place in Holmes County Ohio, thousands, more correctly tens of thousands, of cicada nymphs crawled out of the ground onto tree trunks, shrubs, tall grasses, posts, benches, fences, foundation walls, even our legs as we stood to watch.  Those climbing the tree trunks resembled a reverse waterfall, the numbers were so large.  Some crawled only a few inches, others perhaps 30 feet or more onto maple and oak branches and their terminal leaves. Following 17 years of sucking sap from tree roots (maple and oak are favorites), the nymphs emerged from the ground to complete the transition into breeding adults.  By an hour after sunrise, most had molted, leaving the exoskeleton behind, but many were still shedding their “skin”, emerging as soft, white adults that gradually inflated their wings and acquired adult color.  When done, they flew clumsily to high branches and joined in a chorus. Some, of course, failed to make it, succumbing to unfortunate timing, a developmental defect or predation.  A flock of ~50 Cedar Waxwings (Bombycilla cedrorum) had a feast, eating throughout each day. The birds picked defective cicadas from tree trunks and caught others in flight. Apparently, it’s typical of waxwings to gorge.  Squirrels ate the cicadas as did our dog; and though there are recipes on line for cooking the egg-rich females, we did not indulge.

After mating, female cicadas laid eggs in slits cut into twigs and small branches.  Sap often dripped from the wounds.  The process of cutting into twigs and branches often killed the branch, forming what are called “flags”.  Damage was quite heavy to a mature maple and one young black gum (mysteriously, the second young black gum a few feet away was spared). It’s a natural pruning mechanism.  I did not get photos of the ant-sized nymphs that after hatching drop to the ground, attach to a root and begin the cycle again. I give a brief description of each photo.

Skins and cicadas clustered on maple leaves.

Pile of skins and carcasses on ground.

Emerging from the skin.

Expanded wings, hanging onto skin.

Acquiring color.

Not everyone makes it (17 years underground and no chance to mate once above it).

Cedar Waxwing eating cicada.

Squirrel eating cicada nymphs.

Sap oozing from cicada wound.

Series of slits on branch. Such damage often kills the branch, a natural pruning mechanism.

Cicada eggs.

Dead branches on a young black gum tree.  The tree survived the winter and seems to be thriving.

Holes from which nymphs emerged; a natural method of soil aeration.  Newly hatched nymphs perhaps use these tunnels to gain access to tree roots for their 17-year cycle.

Thursday: Hili dialogue

August 31, 2017 • 6:30 am

Well, we’ve reached the last day of August, as it’s Thursday, August 31, 2017, and yesterday Honey was back for lunchtime (but not breakfast)—skittish as usual. It’s National Trail Mix Day, in case you’re going hiking. It’s also the Day of Solidarity and Freedom in Poland honoring the Gdańsk Agreement on August 31, 1980 which allowed some democratic reforms, including independent trade unions, in a Communist-run state. This followed the Solidarity movement led by Lech Wałęsa, later the country’s President.. I’ll be in Gdansk giving a talk on Sept. 12; I believe it’s in an auditorium in a pub so stay tuned for further intriguing details.

On this day in 1864, Union troops led by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who burned his way across the South, began their assault on Atlanta during the Civil War.  On August 31, 1897, Thomas Edison patented the first movie projector, the Kinetoscope.  On this day in 1920, the Detroit radio station 8MK (now WWJ) broadcast the first news program on radio—ever.  And you may remember that the German invasion of Poland, the formal beginning of World War II, began on September 1, 1939. Well on the day before that (78 years ago), the Nazis conducted a fake attack on a radio station in Gleiwitz, near the border (they even killed prisoners and dressed them in Polish uniforms), giving Germany a bogus excuse to invade Poland. Finally, and you’ll know this well if you’ve been listening to the news, it was exactly 20 years ago today that Princess Diana, as well as her beau Dodi Fayed and their driver Henri Paul, died in a car crash in Paris, presumably avoiding paparazzi.

Notables born on this day include the Roman emperor Caligula (AD 12, probably a different calendar), Arthur Godfrey (1903), Alan Jay Lerner (1918), and Van Morrison (1945). Here’s Van doing my favorite of his songs (I had no idea he played the sax until I saw this video). I ignore the religious bits where his love is directed toward God:

Those who died on this day include the man who painted my favorite of all paintings (The Isenheim Altarpiece, which I’ve never seen): Mathis Grünewald (1528), John Bunyan (1688), Charles Baudelaire (1867), John Ford (1973), Henry Moore (1986), Princess Diana et al. (1997; see above), and David Frost 2013).

Here’s the world’s greatest painting (do I need to add that this is my subjective judgment?); it’s a two-way tripyich designed to be in an ancient hospital where people could contemplate their fates as they suffered from plague or skin disease (note that Jesus has skin disease). I can’t ignore the religious iconography but I find this, even as an atheist, a deeply moving and freaky work of art:

Feel free to name your favorite painting below!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is dissing the staff while using them as mattresses:

Hili: He has already read this book.
Cyrus: Humans have a short memory.
In Polish:
Hili: On już kiedyś tę książkę czytał.
Cyrus: Ludzie mają krótką pamięć.

My old college friend Moto sent a Facebook video containing a black cat with a bizarrely deep meow. Click on the screenshot to go to the video:

Matthew, who’s finally admitted to me that he’s addicted to Twi**er, nevertheless produces fruits of his addition, and today they include a nice find.This one’s a fly mimicking a spider:

https://twitter.com/SteveRoast/status/902911003440160769

And lovely picture of A CAT ON A CAT, sussed out by reader rjc:

Wilson’s book on Darwin trashed again, this time in the Guardian and the Evening Standard

August 30, 2017 • 12:00 pm

A. N. Wilson, prolific but seemingly sloppy biographer, at least of Darwin, has published two excerpts of his new book, Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker (out on September 7 in the UK, December in the U.S.). One was in the Evening Standard, and the other in the Times, but both were misguided and splenetic. (I haven’t yet read the book, just the excerpts, but those are a good guide to what the book will be like.)

Two reviews of the book have just appeared. The first, in the Standard, which published the first excerpt, is short and not very sweet (click on screenshot to go to it):

Author Adrian Woolfson is a Wellcome Research Fellow at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, and the Charles and Katherine Darwin Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. That, I think, gives him scientific cred. And in typical polite British fashion, he gives with one hand and takes with the other. The taking is more vigorous than the giving. Two excerpts:

Wilson’s Charles Darwin, published by John Murray — the original publisher of On the Origin of Species — is for the greater part a lucid, elegantly written and thought-provoking social and intellectual history. His extensive use of the Cambridge Darwin project archives enables him to detail Darwin’s life, and reconstruct the origins of “Darwin’s dangerous idea”, in a fascinating and scholarly manner.

When it comes to the author’s speculations on evolutionary theory, however, the book is fatally flawed, mischievous, and ultimately misleading. It leaves the reader as the unfortunate witness to the uncomfortable spectacle of a magnificent social biographer being consumed by the alluring quicksand of hubris and scientific ignorance. In so doing, Wilson opens himself up to some of the very same criticisms with which he taints the ghost of Darwin.

By the false lights of Wilson’s selectively tutored imagination – and egged on and seduced by a theory whose outward simplicity invites, siren-like, the commentaries of those least qualified to do so –  the foundations of modern biological science are unsound, and “Darwin was wrong”. Not content with damning his evolutionary theory, Wilson proceeds to transform the charming, self-effacing, beetle-crazy and endearing gentleman naturalist into a ruthless egomaniac whose evolutionary theory was retrofitted to defend an unwholesome ideology and furnish a mandate for the excesses of Victorian materialism.

. . . Although grudgingly conceding the indisputable facts of evolution, Wilson incorrectly argues that the “science of the new genetics delivered its death blow” to Darwinism, that “Darwinism has been supplanted by scientific evidence” and that it is a “theory which had collapsed”. He challenges two key aspects of the Darwinian mechanism. First, the gradual nature of evolutionary change that Wilson regards as “metaphysical”, and second the Malthusian-inspired “struggle for survival”.

Well, surely there are better biographies that detail Darwin’s life: I can’t imagine, for example, a better “social and intellectual history” of Darwin than Janet Browne’s magisterial two-volume biography, which is not only comprehensive but written superbly.  If you want the story of Darwin’s life and accomplishments, that’s the go-to book. If you want to see Darwin trashed—if, for instance, you’re Michael Egnor or another mushheaded creationist—this new one is your book.

The other review, even more damning since it doesn’t have a word of praise, is in the Guardian. Its author is Kathryn Hughes, described as “a contributing editor to Prospect magazine and also writes for the Times Literary Supplement and the Economist. Her particular interests are Victorian history and contemporary popular culture.”

Some excerpts:

What Wilson is engaged in here, then, is not just a demolition of Darwin’s science, which he maintains is mostly bogus and outmoded, but an assassination of the man’s moral character. Darwin, Wilson contends, was not the nervy but benign magus of Down House, labouring patiently for decades in rural Kent to unlock the origins of human life for the benefit of all mankind. He was actually an egotist with an unfailing eye for “the main chance”, determined to go down in history as the greatest scientist of all time. According to Wilson’s long charge sheet, Darwin routinely stole ideas, couldn’t be bothered to go to family funerals and wasn’t keen on sex, despite having 10 children (some of whom were “notably plain”). Despite dying seven years before Hitler was born, he apparently paved the way for the Nazis’ love affair with eugenics. To cap it all, his unsavoury insistence of having a “privy” in the corner of his study meant that he probably smelled of his own poo.

First, let’s take the science. Wilson concedes with a smirk that Darwin “was among the foremost experts on the earthworm” but not much else. Specifically, the big picture stuff was beyond him, which is why he gobbled up other people’s theories about evolution, including those of his grandfather Dr Erasmus Darwin, and then passed them off as his own. Indeed, Darwin-as-plagiarist is one of the chief poison darts in Wilson’s argument. What actually happened, of course, was that Darwin absorbed the hints and hypotheses of an earlier generation of science writers, including those of his grandfather, and embarked on a painstaking programme of data-gathering that allowed him to substantiate what had previously been merely a widely held hunch. That there remained gaps, dead ends and errors in his narrative account of how life unfolded on earth over multi-millennia was something Darwin was always quick to acknowledge. It was in response to the questions and corrections that flooded into Down House from around the world that he continued to modify his arguments. This, one might think, is what scientists do, especially ones who are committed to the concept of evolution, the slow adjustments of shape and form over time. For Wilson, however, Darwin’s constant need to revise his published work is evidence of nothing more than the narcissist’s terror of being caught in the wrong.

Although Wilson will just about allow On the Origin of Species a credible place in the history of science, The Descent of Man, published 12 years later in 1871, is his holy terror. . .

. . . Instead of subtitling this book “Victorian Mythmaker”, Wilson might have more accurately called it “J’Accuse”. For despite a few pious throat-clearings on the dust jacket to the contrary, he has no interest in balance, no desire to be nice about the man whom he blames for pretty much everything that went wrong in the 20th century, from totalitarianism to the decline of organised religion.

You get the idea.

It’s a risky business these days to trash not only evolution, but Darwin himself. He wasn’t perfect, but the facts of his life are sufficiently well known that to accuse him of being a miscreant simply won’t stand. And, of course, we know about the intellectual history of the idea of evolution, and Darwin’s contributions, which were to disgorge in one stupendous book an argument so compelling that not rational person has seriously questioned it in the past 158 years. That he gets the lion’s share of the credit for the theory of evolution is a proper encomium.

ACLU legal director explains the need to defend free speech

August 30, 2017 • 10:30 am

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has decided, in the wake of the Charlottesville melee, that it will no longer defend protestors who carry weapons. I don’t have any argument with that one, for although open or concealed carry may be legal according to the courts, it’s not a First Amendment right and thus can take lower priority over the many cases where freedom of expression is being suppressed. What did worry me were intimations in the press that the ACLU was rethinking its policy of defending speech in a “neutral” manner; that is, defending speech of all sorts from across the political spectrum, and that includes “hate speech”, such as that promulgated by white supremacists. In other words, there were rumors that the ACLU would ratchet back in defending those promulgating “offensive” speech.

Well, those of us with that worry can rest easy, for the ACLU is not changing its policy. In a new piece in the New York Review of Books, ACLU legal director David Cole—also a Professor of Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University—explains “Why we must still defend free speech.”

First the bad news: a lot of younger folk don’t respect the First Amendment:

The future of the First Amendment may be at issue. A 2015 Pew Research Center poll reported that 40 percent of millennials think the government should be able to suppress speech deemed offensive to minority groups, as compared to only 12 percent of those born between 1928 and 1945. Young people today voice far less faith in free speech than do their grandparents. And Europe, where racist speech is not protected, has shown that democracies can reasonably differ about this issue.

Well, democracies can and do differ, but not “reasonably”. There’s a very palpable downside to prohibiting racist or offensive speech—one described by Mill in On Liberty. If we don’t even get to hear racist speech or other forms of speech that we see as too odious for any rational person to embrace, then we don’t get to formulate our counterarguments. Indeed, this is happening now in campuses, and is why Ben Shapiro, for instance, is easily able to take down Leftists who hate his conservative message. In response, all they can do is stand up, yell, and sputter, because they’ve never thought about the issues. When Shapiro talks about affirmative action, citing studies and figures, what ammunition do they have in response? None! Further, as the counter-arguments disappear because the speech itself is banned, over generations they’re forgotten.

This is why, for instance, I adamantly favor allowing Holocaust denialists—not allowed to speak in Germany or Canada—to make their case. If they don’t, what evidence do we know of that the Holocaust not only happened, but was part of the Nazi regime’s plan? Saying “it’s obvious” is no argument. What can you say in response to the accurate claim that there is no piece of paper on which Hitler ordered the Endlösung—the Final Solution? There are of course good and decisive responses, but how many of you know them? And this is why hate speech must be allowed. Further, if it’s banned, it doesn’t go away, it just festers underground and never gets a public airing. It is a good thing that Trump’s election emboldened the white supremacists to come out and spout their message, for now we can not only refute them (NOT WITH VIOLENCE!), but see how odious and pathetic they really are. I see no reason for any democracy to have laws against offensive speech.

As I’m leaving soon to have FUN, I’ll simply give a few excerpts from Cole’s admirable piece, which should stand as the last word on why the ACLU should keep doing what it’s doing. Cole’s words are indented.

On not defending armed protestors.

What about speech and weapons? The ACLU’s executive director, Anthony Romero, explained that, in light of Charlottesville and the risk of violence at future protests, the ACLU will not represent marchers who seek to brandish weapons while protesting. (This is not a new position. In a pamphlet signed by Roger Baldwin, Arthur Garfield Hays, Morris Ernst, and others, the ACLU took a similar stance in 1934, explaining that we defended the Nazis’ right to speak, but not to march while armed.) This is a content-neutral policy; it applies to all armed marchers, regardless of their views. And it is driven by the twin concerns of avoiding violence and the impairment of many rights, speech included, that violence so often occasions. Free speech allows us to resolve our differences through public reason; violence is its antithesis. The First Amendment protects the exchange of views, not the exchange of bullets. Just as it is reasonable to exclude weapons from courthouses, airports, schools, and Fourth of July celebrations on the National Mall, so it is reasonable to exclude them from public protests.

On why the ACLU should defend “hate groups” and offensive speech rather than concentrating exclusively on oppressed minorities.  

The argument that free speech should not be protected in conditions of inequality is misguided. The right to free speech does not rest on the presumption of a level playing field. Virtually all rights—speech included—are enjoyed unequally, and can reinforce inequality. The right to property most obviously protects the billionaire more than it does the poor. Homeowners have greater privacy rights than apartment dwellers, who in turn have more privacy than the homeless. The fundamental right to choose how to educate one’s children means little to parents who cannot afford private schools, and contributes to the resilience of segregated schools and the reproduction of privilege. Criminal defendants’ rights are enjoyed much more robustly by those who can afford to hire an expensive lawyer than by those dependent on the meager resources that states dedicate to the defense of the indigent, thereby contributing to the endemic disparities that plague our criminal justice system.

Critics argue that the First Amendment is different, because if the weak are silenced while the strong speak, or if some have more to spend on speech than others, the outcomes of the “marketplace of ideas” will be skewed. But the marketplace is a metaphor; it describes not a scientific method for identifying truth but a choice among realistic options. It maintains only that it is better for the state to remain neutral than to dictate what is true and suppress the rest. One can be justifiably skeptical of a debate in which Charles Koch or George Soros has outsized advantages over everyone else, but still prefer it to one in which the Trump—or indeed Obama—administration can control what can be said. If free speech is critical to democracy and to holding our representatives accountable—and it is—we cannot allow our representatives to suppress views they think are wrong, false, or disruptive.

Should our nation’s shameful history of racism change the equation? There is no doubt that African-Americans have suffered unique mistreatment, and that our country has yet to reckon adequately with that fact. But to treat speech targeting African-Americans differently from speech targeting anyone else cannot be squared with the first principle of free speech: the state must be neutral with regard to speakers’ viewpoints. Moreover, what about other groups? While each group’s experiences are distinct, many have suffered grave discrimination, including Native Americans, Asian-Americans, LGBT people, women, Jews, Latinos, Muslims, and immigrants generally. Should government officials be free to censor speech that offends or targets any of these groups? If not all, which groups get special protection?

And even if we could somehow answer that question, how would we define what speech to suppress? Should the government be able to silence all arguments against affirmative action or about genetic differences between men and women, or just uneducated racist and sexist rants? It is easy to recognize inequality; it is virtually impossible to articulate a standard for suppression of speech that would not afford government officials dangerously broad discretion and invite discrimination against particular viewpoints.

This last argument is dispositive. It’s not just Nazi speech that some find “hateful” and want to suppress: all manner of views can and have been deemed odious and worthy of censorship. Those include affirmative action, claims about genetic differences between sexes and groups (remember Charles Murray at Middlebury State?), and, of course, criticism of Islam, which has gotten people murdered in the West. This is truly a slippery slope and not a bogus one. The best solution is, I think, the one the U.S. courts have hit on: all speech is permissible so long as it’s not defamatory, does not involving harassing individuals in the workplace, and does not incite imminent violence. Which brings us to the last issue:

On why free speech can call for non-imminent violence.

Some white supremacists advocate not only hate but violence. They want to purge the country of nonwhites, non-Christians, and other “undesirables,” and return us to a racial caste society—and the only way to do that is through force. The First Amendment protects speech but not violence. So what possible value is there in protecting speech advocating violence? Our history illustrates that unless very narrowly constrained, the power to restrict the advocacy of violence is an invitation to punish political dissent. A. Mitchell Palmer, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joseph McCarthy all used the advocacy of violence as a justification to punish people who associated with Communists, socialists, or civil rights groups.

Those lessons led the Supreme Court, in a 1969 ACLU case involving a Ku Klux Klan rally, to rule that speech advocating violence or other criminal conduct is protected unless it is intended and likely to produce imminent lawless action, a highly speech-protective rule. In addition to incitement, thus narrowly defined, a “true threat” against specific individuals is also not protected. But aside from these instances in which speech and violence are inextricably intertwined, speech advocating violence gets full First Amendment protection.

In Charlottesville, the ACLU’s client swore under oath that he intended only a peaceful protest. The city cited general concerns about managing the crowd in seeking to move the marchers a mile from the originally approved site. But as the district court found, the city offered no reason why there wouldn’t be just as many protesters and counterprotesters at the alternative site. Violence did break out in Charlottesville, but that appears to have been at least in part because the police utterly failed to keep the protesters separated or to break up the fights.

I remain proud of the ACLU—far prouder than I am of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is now demonizing true reformers.

h/t: Mizrob