Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Sofia Whitcombe began her day with the startling realization that she might not be exactly who she thought she was. “My whole life, I thought I was a Capricorn,” the 25-year-old New York publicist said. “Now I’m a Sagittarius? I don’t feel like a Sagittarius!” Countless people were astonished by the “news” in Monday’s Star Tribune in which Minneapolis astronomy instructor Parke Kunkle affirmed that the Earth’s “wobble” has shifted the zodiac signs.

The buzz has raced across the Web like a shooting star. Some people seemed angry. “I believe it’s a zodiac scam,” said Jose Arce, 38, from Fort Lee, N.J., who runs a body shop. “I’ve known myself to be a Sagittarius, I believe, since I was born. So to come up now with some new sign? It’s unacceptable!”

[Link.]

A bluefin tuna fetched a record 32.49m yen (£254,000) today at the first auction of the year at Tsukiji market in Tokyo, but the fish’s growing popularity across Asia has raised fears it will soon be fished into commercial extinction. The 342kg tuna easily beat the previous record, set exactly 10 years ago when a 202kg fish fetched 20.2m yen. Market officials are accustomed to seeing prices rise during the new year auction at Tsukiji, the world’s biggest fish market, but today’s winning bid was unexpected:

[Link.]

Catholics who receive communion at Sunday mass believe the sacred wafer they swallow contains the body of Christ. New York health officials have warned the parishioners of a Long Island church that the wafers they received on Christmas Day may have also contained hepatitis:

[Link.]

Everyone curses the taxman, but Romanian witches angry about having to pay up for the first time are planning to use cat excrement and dead dogs to cast spells on the president and government today. Also among Romania’s newest taxpayers are fortune tellers – but they probably should have seen it coming:

[Link.]

Men and women have been banned from shaking hands in a district of Somalia controlled by the Islamist group al-Shabab. Under the ban imposed in the southern town of Jowhar, men and women who are not related are also barred from walking together or chatting in public. The BBC’s Mohamed Moalimuu in Mogadishu says the penalty would probably be a public flogging:

[Link.]

Using an expanded definition of poverty, the U.S. Census Bureau said it determined that 15.7 percent of Americans — 47.8 million — live in poverty:

[Link.]

Pathfinders: Is Socialist Theory Scientific? (2005)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is Socialist Theory Scientific?

“Nobody has yet proven that this experiment was safe,” says Marina Bay’s lawyer Alexander Molokhov, in the first day’s Moscow hearing of the amateur astrologist’s £170m lawsuit against Nasa, launched hours after the successful collision of the probe Deep Impact into the comet Tempel 1. Bay’s claim that such cosmological ‘vandalism’ has altered the world’s horoscope towards possible disaster can also not be proved false, and such lack of proof is clearly enough in the eyes of some lawyers to start proceedings these days, notwithstanding Nasa mission engineer Shadan Ardalan’s curt dismissal: “The analogy is a mosquito hitting the front of an airliner in flight. The effect is negligible.” (BBC News Online, 4 July).

The Moscow court is unlikely to be bamboozled by such chancers, but the attack on science is common enough: don’t do it unless you can prove it is safe.The problem is that science, with the usual exception of mathematics, can never actually prove anything, an apparent loophole exploited by everyone from 9/11 conspiracy theorists to neo-creationist Intelligent Design advocates. Now the law is being asked to test the assertion that astronomers can’t prove while astrologers don’t have to.

Socialists have every sympathy with scientists who find themselves under attack from unscientific prejudice and blatant opportunism, since this is not very dissimilar from our own experience. For a theory to be valid it should accord well with the facts, and offer one a way to disprove it. Thus religion and creationism are not valid scientific theories, whereas evolution and gravity are.

Socialist theory fits the first criterion, but what about the second? Is it possible to disprove it? Perhaps. If capitalism fed, clothed and looked after its people in peace and without coercion, socialism would not be disproved but it would be unnecessary. If genetic research uncovers an irreducible aggression or profit-seeking gene, socialism could be said to have been disproved. But nobody has yet found this gene, or shown any other evidence that would make socialism unviable.

 Meanwhile, like Marina Bay and her enterprising lawyer, our opponents expect us to prove everything we say while they are not obliged to provide any evidence in support of their argument, and indeed airily dismiss the very large volume of evidence against themselves.

The End of Mass Production?

A big question for socialist theorists is the matter of parts and supplies. While much of food production is likely to be localised, some highly specialised parts and accessories are not going to be generally available in the region. Global transportation would be a last and expensive resort, but what if many specialist machine components could simply be … emailed?

A new generation of 3D printers is making it possible to recreate perfect three dimensional objects from a software template which can be posted through an ordinary email server. At present the ‘ink’ is confined to wax and plaster powder so the finished models have limited durability, but work is already proceeding with fine grain steel using micro-heat welding instead of glue to hold the finished article together, and laser and water-jet cutters using emailed plans can work on heavy durable materials to make components as good as traditionally machined parts.In fact, with the rise of fabrication laboratories, or ‘fab labs’, individuals can have their own designs and specifications custommade on the spot (Scientific American, June 2005).

Once the labs have shrunk from roomsize to suitcases, we may be looking at the democratization – for a price – of the production process, or in fact, the reclaiming – within limits -of the means of production. The idea that mass production may be on its way out is not new:

“Mass production, the defining characteristic of the Second Wave economy, becomes increasingly obsolete, as firms install information intensive, often robotised manufacturing systems capable of endless, cheap variation, even customisation. The revolutionary result is, in effect, the de-massification of mass production.”  War and Anti-War – Alvin & Heidi Toffler (1993, Little, Brown and Co).

Being toffs who hang around with generals, politicians, think-tank drivers and other assorted toffs, the Tofflers are never overly concerned with how their capitalist utopia will impact on the lower orders, so they describe in perfect equanimity a Third Wave capitalism which even by today’s standards would be a catastrophe for workers, with widespread ‘oceans of poverty’ around ‘hi-tech  archipelagos’ such as California, Hong Kong or the Rhineland.

Capitalism’s development of customised production could hardly be expected to benefit the toiling masses for whom mass-production is both a treadmill and a treat factory. They would never be able to afford the luxury of individual consumer targetting. Nonetheless, the ability to micro-produce with minimal waste and distribution costs remains one of the most exciting innovations socialist society could possibly inherit, and one which it could put to very good use.

Paddy Shannon

Letter: Spiritual truths? (1990)

Letter to the Editors from the May 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors

Re your article on Socialism and Ecology in last month's Socialist Standard, I am glad to say that the people who sell me the Standard are more courteous and tolerant of people's beliefs than your writer.

By what right has anyone to say that a belief in Gaia (which is symbolic modern representation of a very ancient concept), UFOs and astrology are “manifest nonsense"? Does he/she have evidence of this, or are they merely toeing the stuffy old. stoic party-line7

In which case, why does someone like myself who has an open mind about such "spiritual ' precepts bother to read your materialistic mag? Simple, it's one of the sources of an alternative politics which I can hardly get from most of the daily sewer sheets. I do however believe that there are things we can and should change, and other things we cannot.

I would just like to ask you two questions on this point, namely:

1. If much of humanity is not searching for deeper spiritual truths, then how do you explain the resurgence of the concepts your writer derides—the increasing interest in the occult, etc which began with the 60s hippies et al? and,
2. If a person has a deep faith and deep political convictions, which do you think they would drop, if forced to, by the sort of clash between them which your article alleges? I can assure you. it is bound to be the latter.

Until you realise that spiritual people can contribute as much as anyone toward a socialistic economic system and that the two viewpoints are not irreconcilable: and until you stop ridiculing potential supporters in this way, then I'm afraid you will remain what you are: a small and insignificant party, with no hope of making the world a better place.

R. E. Wilson

Warley, West Midlands

Reply:

Our correspondent, presumably, regards the view that the earth is flat as ‘manifest nonsense". How, therefore, would he answer a flat-earther who protested that this was an insult to his deeply-held beliefs? Would he not reply that the truth of a statement does not depend on how deeply or sincerely it is held but on whether or not it is backed up by hard evidence?

We take up the same attitude towards those who say that "nature is peopled by wood sprites and other spirits headed by a goddess". Our correspondent says that this is only “symbolic" (the pagan religion obviously has its Bishops of Durham too), but others take it literally:

  We who live in rural parts are lucky enough to have many sacred wells, standing stones, stone circles and oak groves where we can gather to worship or be alone with the gods and goddesses (from a letter in Green Line, March 1988).

Here, then, is an unambiguous claim that "gods and goddesses" exist and are present at the places mentioned. This statement is either true or it isn't. It can easily be tested. You simply go to some oak grove and look for evidence of the presence of these “spiritual" beings. None has ever been found.

Astrology, the doctrine that claims that the lives of individual human beings on the planet Earth are influenced by vibrations emanating from the stars and the other planets, has also never been able to produce any evidence of its validity. Not only has no astrologer ever been able to explain the physical mechanisms of how this operates but the astrological tables that appear in papers and magazines are wrong even on their own terms:

  In the past 2.000 years, the suns apparent position in the sky has slipped backwards by one whole sign of the zodiac. Astrologers have stuck with tradition, even though it is now out of step with reality. So an astrologer will tell the parents of today's newborn baby that he or she is a Cancer: "highly sensitive, moody, reserved' (Teach Yourself Astrology, Jeff Mayo 1964). If they instead looked at the sun's position in the sky. they would find the sun is in fact in Gemini, the sign of someone "communicative. witty. chatty".

(Misreading the message in the stars". Nigel Henbest, Independent, 22 June 1987).

Why do so many people believe that their lives are influenced by "occult" forces of one kind or another, whether these be God. Jesus, the stars. Satan. Gaia or whatever? Basically, because we are living in a society which is not under human control but one where humans really are at the mercy of blind, impersonal forces— the economic laws of the capitalist economy. People feel, rightly, that they are governed by forces they can't control but attribute this, wrongly, to forces operating from outside the world of experience. This is what Marx meant when he talked about "the fetishism of commodities": humans attribute mystical powers to what are in fact the products of their own activity. Astrology, paganism and other cults have revived over the past few years but largely at the expense of the traditional religions whose emphasis on personal guilt, sexual repression and the inferiority of women have become unacceptable.

The answer to our lives being controlled by impersonal forces lies not in searching for "spiritual truths" (which will never be found, because they don't exist) but in bringing about a society in which humans consciously control the forces of production.

Editors

Blogger's Note:

See also 'A plea for some rational skepticism' from the same issue of the Socialist Standard. 

A plea for some rational skepticism (1990)

From the May 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

  "There is today in the West (but not in the East) a resurgent interest in vague, anecdotal and often demonstrably erroneous doctrines that, if true, would betoken at least a more interesting universe. but that, if false, imply an intellectual carelessness, an absence of tough-mindedness, and a diversion of energies not very promising for our survival. Such doctrines include astrology (the view that which stars, one hundred trillion miles away, are rising at the moment of my birth in a closed building affect my destiny profoundly); the Bermuda Triangle 'mystery' (which holds in many versions that an unidentified flying object lives in the ocean off Bermuda and eats ships and airplanes); flying saucer accounts in general; the belief in ancient astronauts: the photography of ghosts; pyramidology (including the view that my razor blade stays sharper within a cardboard pyramid than within a cardboard cube): Scientology; auras and Kirlian photography; the emotional lives and musical preferences of geraniums; psychic surgery; flat and hollow earths; modern prophecy; remote cutlery warping; astral projections; Velikovskian catastrophism; Atlantis and Mu; spiritualism; and the doctrine of the special creation, by God or gods, of mankind despite our deep relatedness, both in biochemistry and in brain physiology, with the other animals. It may be that there are kernels of truth in a few of these doctrines, but their widespread acceptance betokens a lack of intellectual rigor, an absence of skepticism, a need to replace experiments by desires.”

—Carl Sagan in The Dragons of Eden.

Natural and Supernatural (1978)

From the April 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

While many industries are suffering from the present slump, and their workers live in fear of the sack or short time, one business has never known better days: that is, the large contemporary industry dealing with ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night. It includes religion, and also much else besides. It has often proved its usefulness to the state, which means to the rulers of the state. For the more the ruling class can persuade the workers that they have a great time coming, if they can only wait till they’re dead, the less time they will spend thinking about the system which keeps their exploiters rich, or planning to end it. The more their attention is taken up with mysticism and occult tales and supernatural forces, the less energy they will have to learn about the natural forces here and now, which the members of the ruling class will continue to own and control for their own benefit at the workers’ expense. A valuable weapon in this ruling-class campaign is a book just published, Natural and Supernatural, by Brian Inglis (Hodder and Stoughton, £9.95). This first volume speaks up manfully on behalf of spooks of various kinds, plus crafty dodges like alchemy and religious miracles, in the centuries up to 1914. (And very effective alchemy was, too—not in transmuting base metals into gold, of course, but in transmuting the true believers’ money into the pockets of the alchemists.) Volume two will bring us up to date (if that’s the right phrase).

Gnomes Rule — OK?

Bernard Levin, The Times columnist, and a friend of Mr. Inglis, sees how vital it is to inculcate a spirit of credulity among the workers, and he went so far as to produce a column vindicating the book two weeks before it was published (The Times, 6.1.78). To defend a book as yet unpublished, from attacks as yet unmade, in reviews as yet unwritten, requires unusual skills, but Mr. Levin was equal to the occasion. Exercising simultaneously the gifts of clairvoyance and prophecy, he claimed to know what would be said by reviewers as yet unchosen, and he produced at least one argument to confute it (plus some abuse of the phantom army of projected assailants—no one who refused to accept supernatural happenings after reading Mr. Inglis’s book could be “fully sane”, he said in his temperate and judicious way.) This was the argument: the fact that some people reject telepathy and the rest of it “seems to me to go far towards demonstrating the validity of the very argument it rejects”. So there you are. If you reject the belief that cows catch an illness because elves have fired prehistoric flint arrow-heads at them (the disease was called “elf-shot” 150 years ago—it still is, according to current dictionaries—and the poor cow was “cured” by bleeding it), if you are unable to accept that leprechauns cause this disease, you are merely confirming that it does happen.

Mr. Levin gave his testimony for the magical powers of, for example, Uri Geller, and illustrated his article by a picture of the wizard in person, holding some shop-soiled cutlery, and looking inscrutable. Geller is an unfortunate choice as an example of uncanny doings and psychic powers. His pretensions to be anything other than a clever conjurer have long been exploded, both by impartial investigators from outside show-business, and, even more effectively, by equally clever fellow-conjurers who are indignant at the way Geller has hogged the publicity by magical claims for tricks no better than their own (see past issues of the New Scientist and of the American periodical The Zetetic, and also The Magic of Uri, by “Randi”, Ballantine Books, 65p).

All aboard for Paradise

Fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Levin, Geller, and Inglis, in this spiritual onslaught with so much material significance, are the progenitors of the heterogeneous religious sects which have sprung up in the last decade or two and have proved so successful in promoting the prosperity of their originators and the other-worldly passivity of the workers they have converted. Not only have the leaders of the old-established religions deserved well of the capitalist class; so have such men as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon (his name alone must be worth a mint in the religious game) with his various productive schemes staffed by low-paid devotees; the well-built little guru who runs the Divine Light mission, in the intervals of seeing the world in great comfort with highly congenial companions; and Lafayette Ron Hubbard, last heard of cruising in his yacht while his Scientology Church spreads the gospel and organizes the contributions. All of them take full advantage of the mind-shattering boredom in which most workers (inevitably under capitalism) are forced to spend their working lives, a boredom which provides fertile soil for the growth of miracle men.

Another in the same line of business is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (or Veririchi, as unkind critics have called him). His international H.Q. is in Switzerland, and he runs Transcendental Meditation. He has discovered (The Times, 4.1.78) that when one per cent of the people of a town or city meditate transcendentally (and if you don’t know what that is, only £60—for six lessons— stands between you and your finding out), the cumulative effects “will wipe away its urban deprivation, and give it invincibility, peace of mind, prosperity”, and so on; “illness, crime, and accidents, decrease sharply”. This has already been proved (no doubt it depends on your standards of proof) in towns as far apart as Cleveland, Ohio, and Glossop, Derbyshire, to name but two. The same experiment is at this moment being made in Hackney. So now it’s up to 1,925 inhabitants of that hitherto lack-lustre locality, that’s one per cent of the population, if they’ve counted right, to do their stuff. If you’ve been to Hackney recently, to see a place in the process of being transformed by the power of thought, you may well have come to the conclusion that the Maharishi’s thinkers have a lot of hard meditating still to do. Poverty, and crime, and urban deprivation, are not easy to shift; but if the transcendental meditators think they have shifted them (as in Cleveland, Ohio, and Glossop, Derbyshire) it will do the ruling class no harm, will it?

Flights of fancy

Even more to the point, on the subject of Mr. Inglis's second volume; only last year the Maharishi discovered that transcendental meditation enables its practitioners to fly. It’s a real bonus: one crossing to New York under your own steam, and you’ve already paid for your introductory lessons. The faithful practise flying every morning in the front room of the terraced house which spearheads the campaign to transform Hackney; but they modestly declined to demonstrate their powers when a journalist called. “We are not very good at it yet; still a bit unstable in the air.” So New York is out, for the moment. Still, even a few quick flights to the factory or office would avoid those rush-hour journeys, not to mention saving the fare. These revelations are not to be laughed at: the more people laugh and refuse to believe these stories, the more (by Mr. Levin’s argument) it proves that the meditators do fly.

Anyway, Brian Inglis could spread himself on that in his second volume. He might like to hear of another uncanny case of paranormal powers, if he has not already written it up. A couple of years ago Patrick Moore was appearing on Pete Murray’s Radio 2 morning show. He told his listeners that while he was speaking the planet Pluto would pass directly behind Jupiter, thus increasing their gravitational pull, so that here on earth people could jump in the air and experience a floating sensation. Minutes later, “the BBC switchboard was jammed with calls from people claiming the ‘experiment’ had worked. A woman holding a coffee morning said she and her eleven guests left the ground and floated round the room” (Sun, 2.4.76). Another man “said he hit his head on the ceiling”. Patrick Moore thought he was hoaxing people on April Fools’ Day (Jupiter and Pluto could play hide-and-seek all day, and it wouldn’t affect the earth’s gravitation), but there is obviously more to it than that. These witnesses who thought they could fly because P. Moore told them they could on the radio must surely reinforce those other witnesses who thought their spoons were bent because U. Geller told them so on the radio. Or are we to accept the apparent deductions that sometimes people want to believe something so much that they succeed in convincing themselves it really is true? To help divert the workers from the economic and political realities the magical powers of Moore and Geller and the rest have an important part to play, however much scoffers and cynics may sneer. After all, the more people laugh and refuse to believe it, the more . . . Where have we heard that argument before?

Without question, Mr. Inglis is doing a great job for the ruling class. We can only hope he never bumps his head on the ceiling.

Alwyn Edgar

Reality (2012)

Book Review from the September 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Atheist’s Guide to Reality by Alex Rosenberg. Norton, 2011

A frustration shared by socialists and many scientists is the persistence of belief in a god to explain the world. This is partly because ‘god’ is such a quick and easy answer to so many important questions: How did we get here? Why should I behave morally? Why am I here? While science has provided a comprehensive explanation of how and when we got here, and what we are made of, it is less certain when answering the question, why?  Instead, many people have turned to religious or other unfounded explanations. This potentially leaves a gap in the atheist’s belief system. How can the scientifically-minded atheist explain issues like morality and purpose? In The Atheist’s Guide To Reality, Alex Rosenberg aims to prove that science can explain these matters. He argues that a consequence of science – and physics, in particular – is that we should abandon many of our fundamental assumptions.

Science – especially neuroscience – has explained the workings of our brains, and this entails that we abandon the concept of a ‘soul’. Moreover, science requires that we should also jettison related concepts like ‘mind’ and even ‘self’. As our brains are organic machines, they function by responding to learned inputs with predictable behavioural outputs. So, it is wrong to describe the brain as a ‘soul’, ‘mind’ or ‘self’. Self-awareness and even consciousness are just by-products of non-conscious, involuntary functions of the brain. This also means that the thoughts, intentions and meanings we attach to ourselves aren’t really about anything; they’re just mechanical processes. And therefore we lack free will, as well as a mind and a self.

According to Rosenberg, evolution by natural selection has led to our false assumptions about ourselves. Our ancestors survived long enough to reproduce by using the most expedient beliefs and explanatory frameworks, regardless of whether they were correct. Now, science has exposed how wrong these assumptions are, and atheists should adopt a different way of thinking about life.

Rosenberg says that this should lead to ‘nice nihilism’, a stance which combines niceness (which has been evolutionarily advantageous) with no longer believing in moral facts. He doesn’t devote quite enough space to discussing the political implications of his theory. He says that his science-based outlook should encourage “a fairly left-wing agenda” (p.292). But while he says we should act co-operatively and helpfully towards others, he also argues that we shouldn’t believe we have any purpose. This is not only because science doesn’t need non-physical concepts like ‘purpose’, but also because it doesn’t use narratives, like we use to explain how we live. So, history, sociology and politics are based on false premises, and should only be seen as a type of entertainment.

Rosenberg’s fascinating, imaginative theory is argued clearly and convincingly. If he is right, then science requires us to rethink all our beliefs about ourselves. He claims that future scientific developments won’t discredit his argument, as the basics of physics are already known. But if we’ve got the physics right, should we agree with what Rosenberg says? By downplaying the role of politics – and, by extension, economics – in favour of science to explain the world, he ignores how science is itself influenced by economic forces. It is these forces and their impact on our ideologies which shape science and how we view it. Rosenberg’s views are also influenced in this way. So, science is not the objective, all-encompassing explanatory framework he believes it to be. Despite this, his argument remains persuasive and important to all Marxists and atheists. Exercise your free will by reading it for yourself.

Mike Foster

Would you believe it? (2015)

Book Review from the June 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Towards A Science of Belief Systems', by Edmund Griffiths. Palgrave Macmillan. 2014

Edmund Griffiths has recently been a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford and this philosophical work was written as a product of his research there. His aim is a laudable one:

‘How other people think and feel, both generally and individually, seems to me to be one of the things in life that are most urgent and most compellingly worth knowing’ (p.154).

As such, this is a study about sets of ideas, their component elements and how these elements interlock and lead on from one another. Griffiths contends that the most effective way to understand belief systems – irrespective of their content or nature – is through a method he calls ‘descriptive logic’.  This is an objective method that can be used regardless of whether one agrees with the belief systems being analysed or not.

He uses it to discuss belief systems as varied as Fabianism, Gnosticism, and flying saucers. Here, below, is an illustration of it with regard to alternative historiography, where the proposition A could range, for instance, from the view that Giza is really modelled on Orion’s Belt, to ‘9/11 Truth theories’, to the view that the moon is really an artificial construction:

‘1. Official knowledge is drab, conformist, monolithic, and an obstacle to the free exercise of the imagination and of the sense of wonder.

2. Therefore, official knowledge should be refuted.

3. Official knowledge is incompatible with the proposition that A,

4. and yet some evidence can be assembled which does tend to show thatA.

5. Therefore, A.

6. Therefore, official knowledge is wrong.

7. Therefore, we are once again free to imagine for ourselves and to feel wonder’ (pp.123-4).

Griffiths has developed his descriptive logical method in a way that is underpinned by the Marxist materialist conception of history though he argues that his method is in its early stages and much more work has now to be done (including logical annotations of key representative texts to illustrate how the ideas presented develop, interlock, and link with similar types of argument presented elsewhere).

In style, the book verges from the wry and whimsical at times to the difficult – it is, after all, a theoretical work and one which is academically rigorous. Griffiths is also exceptionally well read and the text is illustrated by references that range from the pronouncements of the North Korean state to quotations from ancient poetry.

The general method and standpoint of Griffiths is not incompatible with our own. In terms of its objective (if not method) it also has some similarity with the theory of systematic ideology developed by Harold Walsby, George Walford and others. This was a group who left the SPGB in the 1940s and who became motivated by a need to understand the ideologies of the modern world – their defining features, how they interlock and particularly the limitations on their spread and development.

We have sparred with the advocates of this theory many times in the past, though ironically this is one book that might have benefited from a consideration of their ideas. This is because – whatever the flaws in their arguments – theirs was one of the very few other attempts to traverse this type of terrain. In essence, they attempted to use a dialectical method to account for why people think as they do, why types of ideas recur persistently in society, and why some seem to attract more adherents than others.

Nevertheless, it is clear Edmund Griffiths has produced a very useful and informative book that represents a significant contribution to the study of belief systems, both ancient and modern.

DAP

Sick . . . Sick . . . Sick (1985)

From the March 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Yet another circular from the Church of Scientology dropped through my letter box the other day. I must have received dozens since I bought a copy of the book Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health a couple of years ago by mail order. In this thick stew of bowdlerised psychoanalysis, electronics, hypnosis, counselling techniques, eastern mysticism and home-spun American philosophy, L. Ron Hubbard claims to be able to save the world. Since 1950 when his articles about Dianetics first appeared in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction the wilful jargon has grown steadily more dense and perverse, and Dianetics, the self-styled science, has given birth to Scientology, the self-styled religious philosophy. It uses a version of the christian cross as one of its symbols, copyrights all its signs and key words, and charges the bargain price of £2,424 for its complete library of cassette tapes. And they will not stop writing to me.

The basic message behind Scientology goes something like this: there is nothing fundamentally amiss with the natural world or even the human social world. What is causing all the problems is the irrationality of individuals, who have been mentally damaged, in some cases from their conception onwards. The only hope for the world is to cure all these people with "religious technology". But just in case that proves to be too much of a long shot, you can learn to become a theta clear, in which case you will continue to exist even if the world is destroyed by hydrogen bombs.

Scientology has obviously tapped a deep well of need because it now has "churches" and contacts all over those parts of the world which are subject to American influence. Its particular bland of pseudo-science with older religious ideas has appealed to otherwise sceptical minds. Its shift of emphasis from sin to mental illness is one that christianity has not quite succeeded in making, but the psychiatric industry has proved it to be a huge money-spinner for decades.

Scientology is not alone, of course. Transendental Meditation, Life Wave, and many other variants of Yoga and Buddhism which emphasise mental health and power have attracted thousands of followers in America, Australasia and Europe. Many of them have parted with considerable sums of money.

The world in which these religions and cults and movements have grown up is the post-war one of the nuclear threat. It is a world in which mental hospitals have grown steadily in capacity; in which the prescription of sleeping pills, tranquillisers and anti-depressants has developed into a multi-million-pound industry; and in which the consumption of alcohol, marijuana and the hard drugs has relentlessly expanded.

But the trend is a complex one. It may well be true that men and women of today's working class (and capitalist class too) are more afraid, worried, stressed, frustrated than our parents or grandparents were. But it may also be true that such forms of misery are more likely to be recognised when the more physical deprivations of hunger, disease and squalor have been somewhat alleviated. Psychiatry is treating many of the sufferers, but then the expectations of happiness and fulfilment has itself been partly fostered by psychiatry. As priests and drug pedlars long ago discovered, the really lucrative trade is one in which the commodity creates a dependency and never fully satisfies the craving.

As Professor Thomas Szasz shows in his book, The Manufacture of Madness, psychiatry took over, in the name of science, those areas of sin, witchcraft, demonology, heresy and other non-conforming or anti-social behaviour that had previously been largely the domain of the established church. By giving scientific-sounding names to feelings, attitudes and patterns of behaviour and by defining mental illness in a way that includes everyone, psychiatry has grown into an established section of the medical and penal apparatus of modern capitalist society. In the totalitarian states of Nazi Germany or "communist" Russia, psychiatry performed a role like that of the Spanish Inquisition, rooting out deviants, torturing and punishing traitors and spies. In the USA and many other states "mental illnesses" or "aggression" or some similar expression has become a way of labelling and condemning ideas and behaviour which are not approved of by the ruling class.

Psychiatry grew up with the social system of capitalism. The "scientific" approach, the focus on the individual to fulfilment and happiness, the blurring and fading of moral and social values in a money-profit orientated society, the reality of individual coercion under the guise of helping and healing — all of theses are obvious facets of the ideology of capitalism. Like the other social "sciences", psychiatry is largely a rationalisation of oppression and a means of control.

There is something bitterly amusing about L. Ron Hubbard's making up the pseudo-religion of Scientology out of the pseudo-science of psychiatry. Each stage fosters the illusion of progress, of increasing freedom and control, whereas all that is new is the jargon. Like priesthoods down the ages, those of Scientology are assisting in the frustration and oppression of their followers, not helping to liberate them.

The unhappiness and frustration felt by millions of men and women throughout the world are not irrational reactions to the world of the hydrogen bomb, the rat race and the dole queue. Our feelings of helplessness and depression, perhaps our sudden bursts of fury and destructiveness, are not symptoms of mental illness. Unless we can see the one way out of this maze, there is no reasonable way in which we can behave in such a world. We are very much like rats in a cage. "Irrational" behaviour is only to be expected. It is not even peculiar to the social system of capitalism. There is plenty of evidence to show that such behaviour was common during the ages of feudalism, and also during the slave empires which came before that. But at least serfs and slaves were openly suppressed by violence or the threat of it. No one seriously questions the fact that they were exploited to maintain the power and luxury of the ruling aristocracy. But it is not nearly so readily accepted that capitalist society oppresses and exploits in a way which has a far greater impact on the individual member of the working class.

The oppression in capitalist society is primarily economic. Lack of any access to the means of making a living (such as the serf's strip of land) forces members of the working class to sell their brains or their brawn to employers. It is this state of dependency on finding a job which is the real mark of poverty or servitude, whatever the wage or salary may be when it is obtained. And if your expected social function, for which you have been schooled and trained, is to work; and if your standard of living, mortgage repayments, heating bills, hire purchase agreements, children's clothes, all depend on it, and then you are made redundant — it is hardly surprising you feel upset or depressed or afraid of the future or even a complete failure. When the ruling ideology insists through its advertising and education and entertainment industry that every individual has equality of opportunity, the only implication can be that it is your own fault if you are not rich and powerful and happy. If realising this makes you act in a surly, unco-operative way, then it is obvious that you need strong management — even the forces of law and order — to keep you in line.

Religions, ancient or modern, play their part in this continual process of mental control, of governing the great majority of the population without appearing to use force and without stirring up consciously organised opposition. They focus attention firmly on the individual's state of mind and personal behaviour. And that is where they lay the blame for social ills. But psychiatry is the true successor to the mediaeval church. Although blame has been replaced by pity (or professional concern) and punishment has been replaced by treatment, it is psychiatrists who can now recommend committal to mental institutions "for the patient's own good", and can prescribe electric shock therapy and other punishments to save the person's soul from the devil — to make him or her a happy, useful member of society.

The misery which is being attended to by the churches and the psychiatrists or being deadened by drugs is the force for social revolution. It is the working out, through individual people, of the contradictions and conflicts which are intensifying in the social system of capitalism. It is the outcome of the increasing exploitation and oppression, but also the increasing education and awareness of members of the working class. It is the result of continually raised expectations set against repeatedly frustrated efforts. It is misery which cannot help but grow as the capitalist regime becomes increasingly obsolete and destructive. State supported or commercially opportunist ventures will, no doubt, continue to offer various mixtures of mysticism and mental manipulation to divert working class attention and anger away from the solution of democratic revolution, but these can only delay the outcome.

"Mental health", "happiness", "a state of grace", "being clear"— whatever jargon we use — the condition is impossible in a social regime where one minority class rules and exploits most of the people for profit. No doubt our fellow workers as a whole will resort to every blind alley in the maze before they opt for revolution, but there is no other way out.

Ron Cook