So Who’s to Blame?
A man receives only what he is ready to receive… The phenomenon or fact that cannot be linked with the rest of what he has observed, he does not observe
Henry David Thoreau
The present generation will probably behave just as badly if another Darwin should arise, and inflict upon them that which the generality of mankind most hate – the necessity of revising their convictions
TH Huxley (‘Darwin’s bulldog’)
Or, as Max Planck so neatly put it:
‘Science advances one funeral at a time.’
I once thought Richard Dawkins must be guilty of misleading his readers by his eccentric reading of Darwin, and his rumbustious use of language and logic. I soon realised that he was innocent of deliberate deception; but I then thought it must be a more general conspiracy of scientists out to defend the irrational for some nefarious reason.
Here too, I realised I was wrong (although I still wonder why anyone would re-publish the first, as opposed to the last, edition of Origins).
§ It’s more a case of: ‘We are all scientists; so we must stick together in the face of Religious mania and unreason; thus we must defend Materialism at every turn’. Materialism is so deeply ingrained, as was The Church dogma for medieval priests, that it is not only unquestionable, it is actually invisible and thus beyond unquestionable for most. However, some scientists are troubled by doubt but don’t know where to turn to, as they find The Church’s explanations unpersuasive and our education system has offered them no other. I hope D+ may help.
So I then wondered if Religion’s oppression of free thought had forced scientists into their folie à million of rejecting everything remotely paranormal. But any folie was of the scientists’ own choice. Just because you are a big-endian, I am not obliged to thus become a little-endian.
So who was to blame for the irrational and heartless Materialist mess we find ourselves in? I was a long way into my researches before the answer struck me. I’m sure you will have got there before me.
It’s the fault of all of us
It’s the fault of every single person who has ever swallowed any dogma unquestioned, or accepted some other party’s Belief as his own, without first checking it for veracity via SPIT or some similar process…
- Reason and logic must apply at all times.
- Any ‘law’, if applied at all, must be applied universally.
- No paradox is ever acceptable as ‘explanation’.
- Every premiss must be tested for evidence and internal logic.
- No dogma of any kind is acceptable.
- All ‘evidence’ is to be tested; none is to be rejected a priori.
- Until proved to be wrong, all ‘evidence’ is to be kept on hold.
For centuries we have blindly accepted as our own other people’s irrational fantasies and have built up a fog of superstition and mutually contradictory Beliefs. Many cultures have struggled for a free press, but freedom of speech is no substitute for freedom of thought.
§ The Yogic/Esoteric Philosophy suggests that this ‘fog’ is literally real, citing the power of thoughtforms built up over generations which obfuscate our mental world, and which require constant alertness to see our way through clearly.
This fog was surely the reason for my peers mocking me for ‘believing in’ ghosts when the issue was not a matter of belief, but of fact. But nobody was interested in discovering the facts: not my peers; not the chaplain; and certainly not the biology teacher. They were all content to drift along in their dim little clouds of selective Belief.
The biologist and the parson had both been ‘educated’ (ie, unwittingly brainwashed) into their contradictory certainties. My schoolboy peers had picked up their attitude from family and newspapers … all in awe of Science (‘Materialism’ rather than ‘science’, of course, although they would not realise this), and the steady dripfeed from our science teachers. A proper education would have helped. By ‘proper’ I mean insistence upon understanding how to think clearly, how to stick to one thing at a time, how to separate opinion from fact, how to separate the particular from the general, how discussion does not mean defence, how ‘winning’ is not the point… and the vital importance of valid premisses and the unacceptability of any form of gook. This sort of education would have knocked Materialism on the head decades ago. No doubt we will one day put ‘How to Think’ modules at the top of every syllabus from infants to degree, and be amazed that we didn’t think of it before.
I have no great hopes of this book being treated seriously. Experience has showed me that even when people accept its logic, that they will later revert to their previous confused mix of Beliefs and second-hand opinions. It seems to be very difficult for some people to change their mind or to admit that a long-held Belief might be faulty in some way (including Scientists, sadly.)
Somebody once said ‘There is nothing as dangerous as a new idea’. I would extend this to ‘There is nothing as difficult as even getting a new idea a hearing’. And the ‘new idea’ I’m referring to here isn’t even a new idea: it is simply an insistence on elementary logic.
Because of our own personal brainwashing we don’t have confidence in our own personal power to think things through for ourselves, and this has led us into the current nihilistic mess.
§ It is the previous authoritarian nature of The Church, and the self-righteousness of the present Materialist forces which have knocked our sense of our own power out of us, despite our universal (partial) education. It is this conflict, between the slight uplifting force of our feeble education and the overwhelming downdraught of Materialist dogma which has led to the current wash of bewilderment and nihilistic panomie.
Without the proper mental tools to guide us, we are likely to pick up a fragment of truth (or near-truth, or even folly or outright lie) without proper critical questioning and then to defend it as THE TRUTH as a bastion against our frightening existential insecurity. If it has been drummed into us in a seminary or madrassa or yeshiva, then the fragment becomes far more powerful, as it has been delivered as TRUTH by someone whose credentials we would never consider questioning. Hence the endless stream of religious maniacs, convinced of their righteousness even when they bomb a crowded temple, or throw acid at girls who dare to go to school.
§ And quasi-religious maniacs… I’ve seen touching television interviews with ex-members of the Hitler Youth, who had committed atrocities in Russia. They had been brainwashed throughout their childhood into believing that butchering people was ok as long as the victims were ‘sub-humans’. The interviewees looked genuinely distraught. ‘How could we have believed it?’ they asked. ‘We had no way of knowing.’ The key to Hitler’s power was this relentless brainwashing of the youth of a supine Volk, whose culture included the myth (‘Truth’) of militaristic racial superiority ever since they defeated the Romans when nobody else could.
I do feel for these people, even the Islamist suicide bombers. They sincerely believe that they have the Truth and are doing God’s will, (although tainted with a selfish desire for Heavenly Bliss or Seventy-Two Virgins, or whatever). The criminals here are the liars who filled their heads with hate. But are they criminals? Maybe, if motivated by some personal desire for power or contempt for anyone not sharing a Belief identical to their own. But often these ‘teachers’ are themselves victim of mindless indoctrination.. and so on, back up the line.
§ In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram found that many people could be persuaded to inflict electric shocks onto another person, just because the procedure was authorised by a ‘scientist’. In fact the shocks were not real and the victim was an actor, but the point was made: that if you are given an order in a society or milieu which approves of it, you are likely to obey. Hence the industrialised slaughter carried out by the Nazis: all ‘just obeying orders’. The deeper lesson of Milgram’s experiment is not that the ‘experimenter’ was forcing people to administer shocks, but that the deeply buried culture of Scientific Materialism was doing so. ‘He’s a scientist so I can trust him.’ The ‘scientist’ in question (another actor) represented the cruel depths that social darwinism and Behaviorism had become reduced to, and which had become ‘acceptable’ to society at large. It’s the identical pattern to the Hitler Youth experience which led to the twenty million murders that they and their masters carried out.
The problem is that as we need certainty and security we develop ‘blind spots’ to the faults and paradoxes that our Belief contains. We are (subliminally) desperate, so we simply refuse to see them… thus ignoring the inevitable process of:
limited info → blind spots → closing of mental options → confusion, bigotry, zealotry or fanaticism
We too easily accept the crumb for the slice, and may then go on to declare that we have the whole cake. It seems to me that a suitable word for this common failing is ‘psychosclerosis’: ‘a hardening and narrowing of the mental arteries’, leading to such arrogance as:
‘I’m interested in dialogue in the sense of stamping out religion.’
‘What’s wrong with arrogance if you’re right?’ Peter Atkins, Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University.
§ ‘Psychosclerosis’: the capacity for upgrading habit into Truth. ‘Stupidity’: choosing to act upon psychosclerotic Belief. Archbishop Usher’s heroic calculation of the age of the Earth would fit as an example here. He apparently consulted some 10,000 books, but still ended up with a silly answer because of his psychosclerotic Belief/premiss that the Bible must be literally true in every jot and tittle. ‘GIGO’, alas (see Chapter 11).
Psychosclerosis leads to distortion of language, as Certainty sees no problem in using the word ‘design’ to mean ‘no design’, and ’emerges’ to mean ‘spontaneously creates itself’ (and has no problem with morphing words like ‘rationalist’, ‘scientist’, ‘Darwinist’, ‘free thinker’ etc to mean ‘Materialist’).
It also leads to Skeptics believing that if an experiment in ESP can be faked then all such experiments must be faked. They ‘Know’ they are right, thus the ends justify the means, so… ‘We will discredit your investigations by all means possible because your explorations are Wrong, Heretical and… well, just be grateful we’re not going to burn you at the stake, but there appears to be some new pinko-liberal by-law forbidding it.’
§ As an example: Jacques Benveniste, a respected French immunologist, claimed to have definite proof that homeopathy works. Nature published his paper but then sent in what can only be described as a three-man hit squad to rubbish his results. One was the editor of Nature, the same man who advocated burning books he didn’t understand or approve of, another was a specialist in winkling out fraud in science, and the third was a professional conjuror. All three were dedicated Materialists, which is the point here. Unsurprisingly, these experts found that Benveniste’s results were indeed erroneous.
Were they erroneous? All of them? Under all circumstances? Perhaps they were, but why would a rational person take these men’s judgements as definitive, or even valid? Impartiality is the key to fair judgement, and it was clearly lacking here.
(See The Memory of Water by Dr Michel Schiff for more details of the systematic dishonesty of this investigation and of other similar abuses of the scientific method by the Materialist establishment.)
At the sillier end of the spectrum, 2010 saw a mass demonstration against homeopathy, in which dozens of people took ‘overdoses’ of homeopathic pills (‘…even Arsenic!’) to ‘prove’ that they were ineffective nonsense, or at very best a placebo. They clearly had no idea of the way homeopathy is used. Their argument is (wait for it…) that the theory is wrong, so the practice must be wrong, and never mind the empirical fact that people sometimes seem to benefit from it. For example, in 2009 the NHS treated 54,000 people with homeopathy in the four NHS hospitals that use it. Does this mean that these qualified NHS doctors are all stupid in seeing cures where none exist? 54,000 times? If so, the Skeptics should bring some prosecutions. They should also prosecute the 400 GP’s who sometimes use alternative therapies.
I know two successful farmers, neither gullible nor stupid, who use homeopathy on their expensive cattle. They are sure it works, and saves them a huge amount in vet bills. One might ask how a placebo works on a cow, who has no knowledge of the treatment and how it works (or can’t work).
Please Skeptics… take the proper empirical scientific route and work backwards from the known effects, rather than the anti-scientific approach of ‘It Can’t Work, Therefore it Doesn’t’. If homeopathy does turn out to be even occasionally effective, you will then have the fun of working out why. Everybody knows it can’t be a normal chemical effect. So what is it? (But work at the Kwangju Institute of Science and Technology does suggest that chemistry might yet apply. See Daily Telegraph Nov 8, 2001.)
The tragedy is that these people are not wicked, any more than the religious maniacs are. They absolutely believe that they are defending Truth against Madness. But they don’t realise they are victims of the Materialist fallacy, and have never questioned their own scraps of Belief seriously enough, via the acid test of the Materialist/Idealist split (see Chapter 5 above).
***
Poor old science… a brilliant idea, requiring us to trust only what is rational and reasonable, that has now become the tool of a Dogma which requires the spontaneous self-creation of something from nothing, several times over, thus breaking at least two of science’s own most basic laws. Albert Einstein is alleged to have said that ‘Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.’ He was, I think, referring to psychosclerosis here (if he ever said it at all).
Science has a bad record in the psychosclerosis department. Just about every new scientific idea has been mocked by the experts of the day. Railways will never work; iron ships will never float… just months before the Russians launched Sputnik the Astronomer Royal claimed that the idea of space travel was ‘utter bilge’; twelve years later men were on the moon. It’s the same sad story every time… the old guard, armed with their little scrap of knowledge/prejudice, defend it as Truth in the face of rational new theories: psychosclerosis in the world of reason and logic where it should never get a look in. All going to prove that a Theory, like fire and habit, is a good servant but a bad master.
§ In 1900, Lord Kelvin, himself an eminent scientist famously stated ‘There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.’ Five years later, Einstein published his first paper on relativity, and quantum theory lay just around the corner. Lord K over-reached himself more than once: ‘I can state flatly that heavier than air flying machines are impossible’; and ‘Radio has no future’.
The most outrageous example of psychosclerosis in medicine must surely be the case in the 1840’s of Ignaz Semmelweis, who encouraged medical students to wash their hands when moving from the dissection of corpses to the obstetrics ward. The rate of mothers’ deaths from septicaemia immediately plummeted from 18% to 1% and remained at a low level thereafter. Was he feted? Promoted? No. He was abused and harried by the senior medical men and even had to leave Vienna. He eventually had a breakdown which may have led to his insanity and death. Another triumph for The Dogma; a disaster for the young mothers. Anti-science. Unfortunately, ‘normal’. Perhaps most alarmingly in a ‘non-scientific’ context, and given the urgency of the situation, was General Haig’s judgement on the machine gun in 1914. ‘Make no mistake, this weapon will change absolutely nothing.’
Darwin and Wallace’s first lecture on Natural Selection was ignored by their peers; Mendel’s pioneering work on genetics was ignored for fifty years; the painstaking work of Wallace, Crookes, and thousands of others in the world of the paranormal has been abused and ignored for over a century, and counting. The current prime victim is the work of Rupert Sheldrake on morphogenetic fields and other not-strictly-Materialist areas. He is derided by the ‘experts’ of our day.
One day a peasant took a rock to show Antoine Lavoisier, the French experimental chemist. The peasant said the stone must have fallen from the sky, as it was a very odd stone, and it hadn’t been in the field the day before. Speaking as a smallholder/peasant myself, I know every stone on my fields, and so would this man have done. Did the great scientist consider this? No.. secure in his own unshakeable Truth, he said. ‘A stone cannot fall from the sky … there ARE no stones in the sky.’
§ A rather worrying note: as science is a largely left-brain activity, concerned with systematically ordering data and categories, it is also prone to the problems of left-brain functionality, including the tendency to overlook awkward data which do not fit into the standard pattern (or dogma) of the day. Hence, Man’s most rational investigative tool (scientific method) carries within itself the seed of its own fallibility including a tendency towards a purblind intellectual arrogance. (For more details of left-brain and right-brain functions see The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist). Professor Dawkins’ blindness to Darwin’s ‘Creator’ is an example.
***
For 2,000 years and more, religions (‘The Religion’ ultimately) have been shrivelled and distorted by psychosclerosis. ‘Show me a fragment of The Truth and I will batter the world into submission with it!’ might have been a motto for the Roman Church at various times. ‘Convert or I will kill you!’ has been the ‘Christian’ message more than once, loudly echoed by Islam. The personal inner Quest of ‘crusade’ (‘Take up thy cross daily’, Jesus) and ‘jihad’ has been frequently perverted into psychosclerotic massacre. Islam once valued highly the concept of ‘ijtihad’, or ‘effort’, meaning the duty of Muslims to strive for their own independent understanding of the way to be. It was this independence of thought that led to the brilliance of medieval Islamic science. ‘Taqlid’ (‘imitation’) has now replaced it. Instead of seeking a broader knowledge, many Muslims have adopted narrow-mindedness and psychosclerotic intolerance. ‘Al-jihad al-asghar’, the lesser jihad (against external enemies) has become dominant over ‘al-jihad al-akhbar’, the greater jihad (the struggle against one’s own base desires). Try The Trouble With Islam Today by Irshad Manji, for a lucid account of this.
Jews, Christians and Muslims all revere Abraham. You would think that this would mean they could live in peace, wouldn’t you? But no… Jews say Abraham gave rise to their nation via his son Isaac; Muslims say he gave rise to their people via his son Ishmael. Christians side with the Jews, somehow. Result… shouting and hatred all round. ‘Give me a fragment to Believe in and I will defend it to the death. Preferably, your death.’ I have sympathy with Richard Dawkins and the humanists in their despair at this sort of fratricidal nonsense. And as for those brawling witnesses to the Lamb of God in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, well, words fail me.
Psychosclerosis lies behind all the intra-faith wars between Catholics and Protestants, and Shias and Sunnis. Obviously, these are closely entangled with manipulative politics, but a lot of the foot soldiers see no problem in slaughtering their fellow worshipper of the One True God if his Belief Set is ever so slightly different from their own.
§ ‘Follow the sandal*!’ ‘No, follow the gourd!’ The Life of Brian is essential viewing on this subject. *Possibly ‘shoe’. It’s a while since I’ve seen it.
The monotheism of Akhenaten lost out to the old guard; the Jews reverted to worshipping a golden calf even while Moses was collecting some helpful guidelines for them, and then got bogged down in professional priestliness and the animal sacrifice business; Christianity killed off dissenters from the start, then set out on its murderous crusades, eventually sacking Constantinople, the Eastern capital of Christianity itself; Islam, ‘submission to the will of Allah the All-Merciful’, has become reduced to grooming children to commit mass murder, quite often of their brother Muslims. All down to psychosclerosis.
You might say that Theology is psychosclerosis in action: passionate interpretation of things we can barely comprehend the fringes of, but expound upon at great length.
§ Sometimes the sclerosis becomes so serious that something has to change. This occurs as a Reformation, for example the Protestant and Non-Conformist revolts against a stagnant Catholicism, or the Buddhist, and later the Sikh, reformation of an over -ritualised Hinduism. (Guru Nanak was a contemporary of Martin Luther*). Has Islam had a similar reformation? Not that I know of, but the self-obsessed sects that seem to have taken international control of it suggest that the conditions are right.
According to Hinduism, a Reformation is brought about by the appearance in the world of an Avatar, a Being of high consequence who tries to steer a great religion back onto course. Krishna or (possibly) Jesus would be examples. Interestingly, all the great religions expect an Avatar any day soon. For the Jews this is the Messiah; for Christians, ‘The Second Coming’ (or ‘Parousia’); for Muslims, the Mahdi; for Hindus, Kalki; and for Buddhists, the Lord Maitreya. This seems to me to be an extraordinary coincidence of doctrine and expectation, especially as all of them are expected to precede a gigantic, and dare one say it, ‘apocalyptic’, development in human affairs (See Isaiah 25:7 ‘And he will destroy… the covering cast over all people, and the veil that is spread over all nations.’ Note ‘all nations’; and there’s that ‘veil’ again.)
*Luther took ‘protesting’ and personal responsibility very seriously. He once smuggled a dozen disillusioned nuns out of a convent in pickle barrels.
***
We famously see psychosclerosis at work in politics. Communism, the humane idea that we should give according to our ability and take according to our needs, rapidly degenerated into mass murder, genocide etc, as the psychosclerotics massaged the original ideas to suit their own selfish wants. Placemen, yes-men, apparatchiki, jobsworths, bureaucrats… the dystopias of Kafka and 1984 were inevitable when a Grade One principle slid into the bloodless hands of Grade Five careerists.
§ See also Acts 2:44-45 ‘And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.’
No sign of bishops’ palaces here… But very definite signs of….(gasp!) ‘communism’. Where did the palaces come from?
***
Psychosclerosis rules in the arts, too. Ibsen’s Ghosts was derided at first, as was Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake; Bizet’s Carmen, too, which went on to become the most popular opera in the world. Whole artistic movements like the Pre-Raphaelites were scorned by the old guard, and the name ‘Impressionist’ originated as a term of abuse. We could add a thousand other examples, all the way from ‘A pyramid, your pharaohship?’ to Bob Dylan going electric. Unbelievably in retrospect, executives from Decca, CBS, RCA, and Capitol all turned down the Beatles, and 23 publishers, including TS Eliot, chief editor at Faber and Faber, rejected George Orwell’s Animal Farm. People do not like to think outside their box.
***
So… No-one to blame but ourselves for the socio-philosophical mess we’re in. We truly do get the government we deserve. It is interesting to consider the issue in karmic terms of endless threads of cause and effect, each initiated by an individual, culminating in how he votes.
§ ‘What luck for rulers that men do not think. ‘ Adolf Hitler
***
The upside is that we can ally our understanding of how we landed in this mess to our own free will, and then choose to change things, one person at a time, beginning with ourself.
All we need to do is to take nobody’s word for it; to examine all Beliefs and replace them with Understanding, even if this takes years; to not be afraid to say ‘Don’t know’, or ‘Not enough evidence’; to make sure we have always defined our terms; to stay open; to trust our own power and develop it; to remember that if it is paradoxical it cannot be (the whole) truth; to be aware of slippery language; to avoid pointless argument; and, above all, to remember there are no real villains: just people like you and me who are doing their best with what they have, but who have made the error of not doing all the things above thoroughly, just as you and I have in our time.
Most of us are working on our own personal follies, and the Yogic/Esoteric Philosophy tells us that we will all get as many chances/lives as we need. It is all part of the system. As we pay attention, so we learn. As we become more aware, so we evolve. Knowing this, we can choose to pay closer attention and thus find reason, and with it happiness and the security we all long for, a little faster. And the path from (rational) Understanding to (post-rational) Knowing is always open to us.
It’s just a matter of what choices we make, as the Theory of Karma points out so clearly. If we wander round like automata, allowing ourselves to be brainwashed by advertisers and egomaniacs and overweening institutions, then we are bound to reap the negative rewards of this. If we choose to wake up, stop being lazy, and hunt out some truth for ourselves, then our lot will improve. Cause and Effect: as you sow, so will you reap: seek and ye shall find, etc.
It is psychosclerosis that has enabled Materialism to develop its current stranglehold. We may choose to reject it. This book has given a few pointers only. There is far more to be developed.
‘Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.’ Albert Einstein
He’s talking to you, brother; and you, sister, and every other great spirit, who may not yet know it.
***
Dogma…. the enemy of all. Luckily, given its roots in logic, Science has only one dogma to shake off.
Religion, however, has thousands of dogmatic fetishes to chuck out. Female bishops or mullahs? Blessing with two or three fingers? Bowing or sitting? Flagellation or burning ‘idols’? All distractions and irrelevant to the Esoteric Truth, and encouraging to the psychosclerotic error.
All that religion requires is the Golden Rule and a rational understanding of the Esoteric Philosophy, at even a basic level, plus the fact that you are not alone and do have purpose and value, and are your own master.
All the rest is a nuisance. All the dogmas and accretions are what the Commandment to Moses is referring to when it talks of ‘graven images’: chasing after the shadow and losing the substance.
All you need to do is to abandon the dogmas; think for yourself, past the rules and laws until you find the principles. Then ‘realise’ that all the principles merge into the Golden Rule.
***
Many times I’ve begun explaining what this book is about, only to be met with a phrase which indicates that the other person has already made up their mind that the book is either anti-science or atheistic, or that I am a crank or a fruitcake. I am embarrassed for these people, and am sad that they have chosen to reject open enquiry.
An awful lot of us are happy to stay that way, alas. Thus do old, outdated, or simply dogmatic and stupid ideas take generations to pass away.
§ ‘People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought, which they avoid.’ Soren Kierkegaard
***
For a rational transcendental philosophy/religion, everyone matters. For an irrational and purely material one, nobody does.
A Few Conclusions
All great truths began as blasphemies
George Bernard Shaw
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela
Very little in this book is original. People have been whispering variations on its theme (out of hearing of The Church) for centuries. But since Darwin seemed to have finally blown ‘religion’ out of the water, the world has been in thrall to the Materialist zealots, who have hi-jacked words like ‘sceptic’, ‘rationalist’, ‘Darwinist’, and even ‘scientist’ to mean Materialist, and most of society has gone along with this, for a hatful of reasons.
Please tell your friends and www contacts about ‘Bad Dogma!’ if you have found the ideas in it worthy of attention. Thanks, CG.