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 To defend a book as yet unpublished, from attacks as yet unmade, in reviews as yet unwritten, requires unusual skills, but Mr.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

Science facts and science fiction (2012)

The Halo Halo! column from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Several news stories compete for our attention this month. The Higgs boson discovery, the revelation by religious scholars in Louisiana that the Loch Ness Monster is real and therefore proof that the Theory of Evolution is wrong (The Herald, Scotland, 24 June) and, of course, the BIG story: the marriage break-up of world famous Scientologist, Tom Cruise.

Which to choose? It’s a toss-up between the Higgs boson and Tom Cruise. (Unfortunately we can’t offer marriage guidance on this column, so we’ll have to stick to the Scientology aspect of the story.)

Can these phenomenal stories be explained in simply? Our thanks are due to the Guardian’s G2 ‘Shortcuts’ column for the following: “The Higgs Boson is an elementary scalar particle first posited in 1962, as a potential by-product of the mechanism by which a hypothetical, ubiquitous quantum field – the so-called Higgs field – gives mass to elementary particles. More specifically, in the standard model of particle physics, the existence of the Higgs Boson explains how spontaneous breaking of electroweak symmetry takes place in nature”.

Got that? Good. That should get you through even the most challenging pub discussion on the subject. Now we can move on to the advanced stuff, the minefield of theology and metaphysics that must be overcome before attempting to understand Scientology (or Tom Cruise, for that matter).

First let www.scientology.org explain why man is a spirit: “Ask someone to close their eyes and get a picture of a cat, and they will get a mental image picture of a cat. Ask them who is looking at the picture of the cat and they will respond ‘I am’. That which is looking at the cat is you, a spirit. One is a spirit, who has a mind and occupies a body. You are you in a body”.

All clear so far? Now here’s a quote attributed to sci-fi writer and founder of Scientology, L Ron Hubbard: “You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, start a religion”. Yes, it’s all beginning to fall into place.

Having got that sorted we’re ready to consider Scientology’s theory of human origins. We’ve learnt from the born-again brigade that evolution is only a theory. But according to Scientology even the stuff about Adam and Eve and the talking serpent is a bit dubious too.

What really happened is that 75 million years ago an intergalactic ruler called Xenu herded the populations of 76 planets together, dropped them into volcanoes, and vaporised them with nuclear bombs. The souls of the victims were then forced to watch a 3D movie for 36 days which implanted all sorts of misleading data into their memories. We are descended from them.

There’s a bit more to it than that, but we only get 500 words in this column. It’s covered in great detail on the internet though.

It’s almost as bizarre as believing in a virgin birth, the raising of the dead and the turning of water into wine. You couldn’t make it up, could you? Unless you were a sci-fi writer. Who needs facts when you’ve got faith and unquestioning belief?

NW

Film Review: The Master (2013)

Film Review from the January 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Master (Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.)

Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lancaster Dodd, and Joaquin Phoenix as the damaged WW2 veteran Freddie Quell.

This film is about the trauma and loss caused by war but also about hope and renewal. The opening part of the film is influenced by the 1946 US government documentary Let There Be Light directed by John Huston which was filmed at Edgewood State Hospital on Long Island, and chronicled shell-shocked soldiers entry into a psychiatric hospital, and their treatment. These war casualties suffered from debilitating emotional trauma and depression brought on by their experiences in the war.

The use of the popular wartime song Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else but Me) is reminiscent of its emotionally powerful use in the 1976 film Tracks by Henry Jaglom which starred Dennis Hopper as a traumatised Vietnam War veteran. During WW2 and after song lyrics spoke of 'seeing you in my dreams, finding you in another day'. The scars of war and the heartbreaking returns to Civvy Street prompted people's interest in other lives, memories, ghosts, science fiction stories, other worlds, and time travel.

The periods after war are fertile times for religion, spirituality, and metaphysical ideas as balm for scarred people, in fact they are ‘the opium of the people’. After WW1, spiritualism and theosophy were very popular, and after WW2 there was the 'beat generation' interest in eastern religions, and the publication in 1950 of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard.

Hoffman's character Dodd is the charismatic leader of an organisation that seems to offer light and a beacon of hope to those damaged and lost in the world such as Quell. The Master is described as ‘riffing lightly off the life of L. Ron Hubbard.’ Director Paul Thomas Anderson says the film ‘takes its lead from the beautiful ideas expressed in Hubbard's book. The idea of recalling past lives is so hopeful, so optimistic, and it is something I would love to go along with’. Anderson adds that war and death make ‘people want to talk about past lives, about where we go after we die, time travel is possible, those are great ideas’.

Hubbard's book Dianetics was criticised in the New York Herald by Erich Fromm who saw that Hubbard's mechanistic view of the mind had no need for human values or conscience, and in the New York Times, Rollo May identified the fallacy of trying to understand human nature by invariant mathematical models taken from mechanics. Fromm later identified the mental health consequences of the contradictions in capitalism between 'having' and 'being', and the need for a sane socialist society in his book The Sane Society.

The Master was shot on now rarely used 65/70mm film stock and is a cinematic treat. It is reminiscent of the stately grandeur and beauty of films like 2001 and Barry Lyndon by Stanley Kubrick.

Steve Clayton

The Passing Show: Scientology nonsense (1965)

The Passing Show Column from the January 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Scientology nonsense

It's a far cry from the day when the American L. Ron Hubbard set down his early psychological theories in a slim book under the name Dianetics. Since then his organisation has opened centres in many parts of the world and the general body of his ideas is now called Scientology (The "Science of Wisdom" whatever that may mean), but the proposition of the Engram (harmful mental impression gained during extreme pain, exhaustion or other crisis) remains the basis of his methods. He claims. and perhaps in some cases has achieved, great success for his mental "processing" as it is called, although as far as I know, no independent assessment of Scientology has yet been made, and we have to accept Hubbard's word for it. However, to say that is one thing, but quite another to hear it said that the engram is at the bottom of all our problems, from illness to war and back again. Even a fall on the ice has an engram lurking around somewhere to explain it, I was once told. That the night was dark and the ice slippery, just would not satisfy scientologists.

Over the years the Hubbard organisation has tacked onto other and wilder concepts. There was for instance the "Church of Scientology" in support of the God idea, and attempts to prove the theory or reincarnation by discovering engrams carried over from a previous life. One of their spokesmen even assured me once that we can take on different forms in different lives if we wish it—so think of this the next time you are tempted to envy your cat stretched lazily by the fire without a care in the world.

In the political sphere, Hubbard has remained implacably "anti-communist." We don't know just how much engrams Stalin or Khrushchev are supposed to have had—the Scientology people were never allowed behind the iron curtain to find out. Apart from this, Hubbard's ventures into politics seem to have been rare, which is just as well, because on these occasions he doesn't add anything useful to our knowledge . . . quite the reverse if the Nov. 1964 issue of his journal Certainty is any guide.

Three of its four pages are given over to an essay in nonsense called "Socialism and Scientology" dedicated to "our friend the late Hugh Gaitskell." It contains various gems of unwisdom, such as:

The primary danger of Socialism . . . is that it seeks to remove all dangers from the environment, which it cannot do without a huge bureaucracy . . .
The degrees of Socialism are measured by the extent to which they arrange to deny reward for individual or group contribution . . .

And how's this for a bit of double-think:

So we have no quarrel with charity, we wave no quarrel with a state devoted to it. We quarrel only with the end product . . .

There are plenty more where these came from, but they are enough to show how little Mr. Hubbard really knows about Socialism. He equates it with just about everything except what it really is, and says really so little that we wonder why he bothered at all. But the last few lines may give us a clue.

Can the great dream of Socialism succeed this time? It can if it itself accepts the help of Scientology . . . 

Can it then be a thinly veiled attempt to "sell" Scientology to the Labour Party? Just think of the fillip to his organisation if he could claim the support of such a massive body. Good for Scientology; good perhaps for the Labour Party, but absolutely useless for Socialism.

The lunatic fringe

Perhaps we are better known than you'd think. What I mean to say is, we get all sorts of letters from all sorts of people and places. Some of them (the letters I mean) are sympathetic, some are hostile and some are frankly baffling, like those we used to get from one God-fearing old lady in Canada who hated all the Royal Family except Prince Phillip, and who never used a dot or comma, probably because she was unaware of their existence. "Why doesn't he come and live amongst us Canadians who would know how to look after him not like that lot back at Buckingham Palace from yours Mrs. A M."

Well we never did work out an answer to that one and perhaps the lady got tired of waiting, because she hasn't written for some time now. Or perhaps she managed to work out for herself the answers to the posers she set us with such vigour and regularity, and decided to save the postage. But at least she was not afraid to tell us her name and address, which is more than can be said for some of the other not-so-harmless nut cases.

A package was handed to me the other day. Attached to a variety of cuttings from such high quality newspapers as the News of the World and The People was a brief unsigned message, noteworthy again for its lack of punctuation: "HERES THE ANSWER TO THE COLOURED GUYS LET THEM GET INTO BATTLE AS BRITAINS GLORIOUS HEROES DID AND WE'LL HEAR NO MORE NONSENSE FROM THEM." So look no further for the solution to the racial problem—our correspondent has found it for us, and the heroes he has in mind are the boys who disappeared by the million in the 1914-18 trenches.

He's a bit out of date in his choice of wars, of course. Few people try to pretend now that the heroism of those days did any good or solved any problems. Since then, we have had another world war and some smaller ones too, with no shortage of workers—including "coloured guys"—to fight and die. Does our nut case think that the problems of capitalism are any less pressing because of this second lot of senseless heroism? If he does, he had better think again.

In the future, capitalism will develop the African states and they will have their own armies, coloured workers trained to kill in the interests of their ruling classes. The Congo is only a foretaste of what is to come, and it will not be a very pretty story. What is needed is a great deal less heroism and a great deal more hard thinking about the Socialist answer.

Jumble sales

A recent small article in The Guardian about the decline of jumble sales took me back a few years to my schooldays. It was the period just before the outbreak of the second world war when unemployment was much greater and every penny was precious; and so it was considered particularly daring of our headmaster to decide on a jumble sale as a means of raising funds for a new radio for the school. Useless to try and squeeze the money out of the education authorities in those days, anyway.

The sale was, I remember, a great success and the school got its radio; but wandering around the building seeing the heaps of accumulated junk, I can remember wondering just where it all came from and where it would all go to. At the end of the evening the helpers tried to give away the remains of their stalls, but with limited success—nobody wanted the stuff even as a gift—and eventually it was bought by a job lot dealer.

The jumble sale is perhaps symbolic not only of working class poverty—for who would buy but those unable to afford better—but of another horror of capitalism, the veritable mountain of rubbish which it throws up. Most of it is of poor quality even when new and even the jumble sale often does not mark the end of its life. Since the end of the war, production has increased in many fields and with it the incidence of trash ("built in obsolescence" is the modern euphemism for it); ironically this has assisted in the decline in the jumble sales because the stuff is so poor after a short life that it wouldn't grace even a rickety trellis table in a musty church hall. So the faint chance of a bargain buy is even fainter now, and workers are looking elsewhere.

In this little snippet of news is a lesson we should never forget. Trash is one of the many objectionable facets of capitalist society, and even the best it can give workers is not worthy of human beings. In fact it is trash for most of us, and a trashy existence to match. 

E. T. C.