Archive for the ‘psychology’ Category
the ‘as if’ principle: or, how to cultivate happiness
William James – a surprisingly fun guy
The following post is based entirely on Richard Wiseman’s book Rip it up, which should be better known, but perhaps it is, I don’t know.
William James, Henry’s more interesting big brother, was one of the world’s first professional or academic psychologists, though I’d say more academic than professional. His most significant contribution to psychology was the utterance of a single simple sentence: ‘If you want a quality, act as if you already have it.’ It sounds anodyne and not particularly original – I’m sure a lot of us have imagined from childhood that acting as if you’re a knowledgeable, intelligent person might make people treat you like one, even if it’s all BS. I know I have.
The fact is, though, that a ton of research has shown that James really was onto something. I’m going to present an annotated list of the research, but first, some background to James’s thinking. He followed a well-worn track for original thinkers (if that’s not a contradiction, which it is) of deciding that the common-sense view of ‘x’ isn’t true, or at least needs considerable tweaking (think Newton on motion, Einstein on space and time, etc). The common-sense view on emotions is that when we feel anxious, we sweat; when we feel happy, we smile; and when we feel sad, we weep. This seems pretty well unarguable. Here’s what James himself had to say:
Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down? The common man can only say, ‘Of course we smile, of course our heart palpates at the sight of the crowd, of course we love the maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made for all eternity to be loved!’
But James had learned to be wary of the obvious, and his thoughts about emotion and behaviour were piqued by one of Darwin’s most important books, The expression of the emotion in man and animals, in which he noted how easily and reliably we can identify the emotions of others from their facial expressions. James took this in another direction. Maybe if we took more notice of our own facial expressions we would gain more insight into how we were feeling. Then he took it a step further: Maybe if we changed our expressions we could change our emotional state.
James got a little carried away with his own insight, as you do. He imagined that we really had got the causal connection round the wrong way. As he put it:
You do not run from the bear because you are afraid of it, but rather become afraid of it because you run from it.
We now know, though, that it isn’t that the causal connection is reversed, it’s that it runs both ways. Yes, we smile because we’re happy, but it’s also true that smiling makes us happier. And that’s just the start. James was no experimental psychologist – more of an armchair ideas man, so it took a while for this idea to catch on and be tested, but in recent decades we’ve really caught up. So here’s the evidence – and I’ll number and describe the research pieces (they’re not all empirical research, as you’ll see, and they’re in no particular order) and provide academic details, if any, at the end.
1. Volunteers were first asked to smile or frown, then report on their feelings. Then the experimenter, James Laird, decided a more reliable method was needed. He told the subjects he’d be examining electrical activity, and placed electrodes at various facial muscles. He explained that their emotional state might affect the experiment, so asked them to report on their feelings. In fact the electrodes were fake. Then they were asked to manipulate their faces into what we would see as happy or angry expressions, though emotional terms were never used. Instead they were asked to draw their eyebrows up or down, to purse or spread their lips, to clench their teeth, etc. Those whose faces were ‘forced’ into smiles reported feeling significantly happier than those who frowned – who felt more angry. When asked why, they had no ready answer – few attributed it to the facial manipulations.
2. Constantin Stanislavsky was the ‘inventor’ of method acting. He encouraged actors to experience real emotion through behaviour – the key idea being ‘if I was really experiencing this emotion, how would I behave?’ Many famous actors have used the ‘magic if’ principle to great effect.
3. Other psychologists, inspired by Laird’s research, used other tricks to change people’s facial expressions, such as getting people to use ‘ee’ words (as in ‘say cheese’) or ‘eu’ words (as in ‘ooh yuk’), which produced similar results to (1). A German team told half of their subjects to hold a pencil horizontally between their teeth, forcing a smile, while the other half held the pencil with lips only, forcing a frown. All results supported the power of the ‘as if’ principle.
4. Volunteers were attached to a machine that monitored heart rate and skin temperature. They were asked first to think of an event that made them feel angry, and to try to relive that event as intensely as possible. Then they were asked simply to manipulate their faces into a recognisably angry expression. These two separate tasks were repeated for other emotions – surprise, fear, disgust, happiness and sadness. Not surprisingly, heart rates and skin temperatures changed considerably when the first of the tasks were carried out, in line with the emotions being experienced. More surprisingly, the same effects were measured when the subjects simply manipulated their faces. This experiment, first carried out with western subjects, was repeated with subjects from a remote Indonesian island. The results supported the idea that the ‘as if’ principle is universal among humans.
5. Participants were placed in a brain scanner and asked to contort their faces into a fearful expression. This time there was no need to ask subjects for feedback. Instead, scientists measured directly the activity in the amygdala, known to be highly associated with fear responses.The experiment provided strong evidence that the ‘as if’ principle has a definite effect on the brain.
6. A national survey was conducted in which people rated their cheerfulness levels, from 1 (not at all cheerful) to 7 (very cheerful). 45% of the population rated themselves from 5 to 7. Then a study was conducted involving some 26,000 internet respondents. Participants were randomly assigned to various groups and asked to engage in activities designed to make them happier (e.g. encouraged to feel grateful, to relive happy memories, etc). One group was simply asked to smile for a brief period every day. When participants were asked to rate their happiness after the exercises, those who simply smiled had the most positive results. (no research data available)
7. In a study designed to determine whether walking style influenced emotional state, subjects were asked to take a 3-minute walk in 2 ways. One half were asked to take long strides, swing their arms and hold their heads high. The other half were asked to shuffle and look at their feet. The first half afterwards rated themselves significantly happier than the second half.
8. Sabine Koch has conducted research which reveals that people feel happier when they move in a fluid way, and avoid sharp, straight movements. She focused particularly on hand-shaking. She trained some experimenters to shake hands in a smooth flowing way, and others to shake hands more jerkily. Koch then asked people who’d been subjected to these different handshakes how they felt. Those subjected to the flowing handshake felt considerably happier, and closer to and more trusting of the experimenter (I like this one).
9. Clinical psychologist Emmett Velten wanted to create a happy atmosphere in the lab. He experimented by dividing volunteers into 2 groups, handing each a stack of 60 cards. For group 1, the first card, which the subject was asked to read aloud, said ‘today is neither better nor worse than any other day’. The next card read ’I do feel pretty good today though’. The subject slowly read through the whole stack, which contained increasingly positive messages. Group 2’s cards simply contained statements of fact, such as ‘The Orient Express travels between Paris and Istanbul’. After the read-through, the subjects in group 1 reported feeling in a ‘wonderful’ mood, while group 2 subjects reported no change. This striking effect led to a number of similar experiments.
10. One group of participants were asked to read aloud a short paragraph describing how their friend had thrown them a surprise birthday party. Another group read a story about how a family member had been diagnosed with an illness. The participants’ moods were genuinely affected, as if these stories were true.
11. On reading about the medical benefits of laughter, Dr Madan Kataria went to a local park with some friends. They told each other jokes and laughed loudly. It became a regular thing and soon grew into the first laughter club. When the jokes started becoming offensive, he tried a new tack, employing the as if principle. He found that laughing out loud as if you’ve heard a great joke had much the same effect (no research data)
12. Research based on laughter clubs has been carried out in the USA. Subjects were split into 3 groups. Group 1 spent a minute smiling, group 2 spent a minute laughing aloud, group 3 spent the minute engaged in an activity requiring a similar physical effort to laughing, but with no amusement factor (howling like a wolf). Group 2, the laughing group, felt happiest afterwards, followed by the smiling group. The howling group reported no effect.
13. Another popular ‘fun’ activity is dancing. Researchers split 300 students into 4 groups. Group 1 participated in an hour-long aerobic exercise class, group 2 in a body conditioning session, group 3 in hip-hop dancing, and group 4 went ice skating. Due to feel-good endorphin release, all groups felt happier afterwards, but the hip-hop group were happiest (not precisely an illustration of the ‘as if’ principle, but fuck that, let’s dance). Other research has shown that non-competitive, easily-learned dance moves have the most positive effect on mood.
14. Not surprisingly, another activity which has an overwhelmingly positive effect on mood is singing. In one experiment, choristers were asked to sing sections of Mozart’s Requiem, against controls who only listened to recordings of the piece. The singers reported far higher levels of happiness.
Okay, that’s enough. I’ve taken these research pieces entirely from the first chapter of Wiseman’s book, which focuses on happiness. Other chapters deal with romance and relationships, mental health, and the art of persuasion. Among many insights, the importance of role-playing is emphasised throughout. That’s to say. it’s not just a matter of thinking yourself in others’ shoes, but wearing those shoes that effects change. The notorious Stanford prison experiment, and the famous blue eyes, brown eyes experiment are two classic, albeit largely depressing, accounts of the power of role-play, but clearly it can be used to more positive effect. One of the most inspiring aspects of Wiseman’s book, for me, is to show that change might be easier than we think (and again that’s a two edged sword, depending on the nature of the change). The call to action is very useful, especially if, like me, you tend to be more wedded to thinking than to doing.
1.Laird, James D. (1974). “Self-attribution of emotion: The effects of expressive behavior on the quality of emotional experience”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 29(4): 475–486. doi:10.1037/h0036125.
2. Merlin, Bella. 2007. The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit. London: Nick Hern. ISBN 978-1-85459-793-9.
3. Strack, F et al. (1988) ‘Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: A nonobtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 768-77
4. Levenson, R W et al (1990) ‘Voluntary facial action generates emotion-specific autonomic nervous system activity’, Psychophysiology, 27(4), 363-84
5. Lee, T W et al (2006) ‘Imitating expressions: emotion-specific neural substrates in facial mimicry’, Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, 1, 122-35
7. Snodgrass, S E et al (1986) ‘The effects of walking behaviour on mood’. Paper presented at the American Psychological Association convention.
8. Koch, S C (2011) ‘Basic body rhythms and embodied inter corporality: from individual to interpersonal movement feedback’, in W Tsacher, & C Bergomi (eds), ‘The implications of embodiment: cognition and communication’ (pp151-71), Exeter: Imprint Academic
9. Velten, E (1968) ‘A laboratory task for induction of mood states’, Behaviour research and therapy, 6, 473-82
10. Hatfield, E et al (1995)’The impact of vocal feedback on emotional experience and expression’. Journal of social behaviour and personality, 10, 293-313
12. Neuhoff, C & Schaefer, C (2002) ‘Effects of laughing, smiling and howling on mood’, Psychological Reports, 91, 1079-80
13. Kim, S & Kim, J (2007) ‘Mood after various brief exercise and sport modes: aerobics, hip-hop dancing, ice skating ad body conditioning’. Perceptual and motor skills, 104, 1265-70
14. Clift, S et al (2010) ‘Choral singing and psychological well-being’, Journal of applied arts and health, 1, 19-34; Kreuz, G et al ‘Does singing provide health benefits?’ Proceedings of the 5th triennial ESCOM conference, 216-19
why is evolution true? (if it is): part one, the problem of fixity
some Galapagos finches
Much of my writing, especially about sciency stuff, is an attempt to own the knowledge. It’s perhaps never completely successful, especially for the non-specialist, the dilettante, who tries to own so much and to keep all those possessions together. You read about it, you cast it in your own words, you grasp it, you think you’ve grasped it completely, you move on to other things, and six months later you’re asked a curly question and in trying to answer it you find you’ve forgotten the half of it, and you wonder – did I ever really understand it after all?
So. We have the theory of evolution, or natural selection from random variation, and we have the theories of special and general relativity and quantum theory and so forth. And we have those in science who tell us that ‘theory’ is a technical term constantly misunderstood by the general public and deliberately misconstrued by those with particular agendas. And we have general talk and a lot of general ignorance about evolution.
Several years ago, when I was starting out as a teacher of ESOL (English to speakers of other languages) I observed a small community centre English class. The elderly teacher was asked by a well-dressed middle-aged African man, did she really think evolution – that we were descended from monkeys – was true? It was a polite, puzzled question. The teacher, understandably not wanting to dive down that rabbit hole, replied, ‘well, you know, it’s just a theory’, and the subject was changed. It unsettled me, to put mildly. It’s not how I would’ve dealt with the matter, and in fact I’ve twice since been placed in that position in recent times, and I’ve responded with ‘oh yes, it’s true, the evidence is in and it’s overwhelming,’ or words to that effect. Bam bam, take that and let’s back to grammar.
But of course, that response, too, is unsettling. After all, I could’ve given the exact same response to the question ‘Does God exist?’. It was just saying, an argument from my own authority.
Of course I had back-up from years of science and evolution-reading, but still I felt I was just imposing my authority as a teacher. I half-hoped for and half-dreaded being asked to elaborate.
The other night, at an atheist meet-up, the group was ‘invaded’ by three or four young street-preachers, self-confessed fundies who were apparently keen to debate evolution (they didn’t believe in it) and cosmology (the universe can’t create itself, ergo god). I didn’t engage with them myself, as I’m still recovering from a chest infection and want to avoid stress, but things got very heated over in their corner and I’ve since received an email asking for help to convince one of them of the evidence for evolution. It may be that the young man’s ignorance is wilful, but maybe not, and in any case it provides me with a useful opportunity to answer as best I can the title question.
Questions were raised about the fixity of species well before Charles Darwin was born. The most important figures in this early questioning of orthodoxy came from France. One of the founders of naturalism, Buffon, speculated that the earth might be much older than the standard biblical 6000 years, and that change, both geological and organic, might be endemic and constant. He mostly kept his views to himself, as the idea that the earth was maybe more than ten times older than the accepted figure was incendiary for the time. Lamarck, however, was the first to really go public with a theory of evolution. His essential view was that creatures adapted to their environment over time through the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Although he was generally incorrect as to his mechanism there is still some interest in his ideas today, but above all Lamarck strongly influenced future thinking on the subject as he was a first-rate scientist.
It should be noted though that all this speculation was brought on by the problems posed by evidence. The biblical fixity of species account was becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile with the discoveries of fossils of creatures not to be found anywhere, yet apparently related to current species. And then there were the fossils of ‘giants’, which had been discovered here and there for centuries, but which were not described scientifically until the nineteenth century. How could all these remains of ‘disappeared’ creatures be turning up in a world where creation was fixed? The most popular explanation was ‘catastrophism’, a view held by Cuvier, a younger contemporary of Lamarck and one of his strongest critics. It was an attempt to reconcile fixity with a conveniently biblical diluvian view, but it continued to move thinking in a scientific, evidence-based direction.
Meanwhile, however, other fields of research, such as geology, were also becoming increasingly scientific, especially in Britain, with the work of Hutton and Lyell. Through inference from present conditions, they developed a gradualist, uniformitarian theory of physical change, with a more open-ended view of the earth’s age. This was the scientific background to Darwin’s naturalism. His own grandfather, Erasmus, dabbled in evolutionary ideas, and proposed that the earth had existed for ‘millions of ages’.
Now I know there’s a view out there among fundamentalists called ‘young earth creationism’, but I don’t know much about it. It would seem to be an absolutely crackpot notion, a denial of modern geology, astronomy and cosmology as well as biology and palaeontology, and I presume people who think this way consider the whole of modern science a massive conspiracy theory. How could they not? Yet the young man mentioned above has suggested we go and see a lecture by John Hartnett, an Adelaide University Associate Professor of Physics who’s also a young earth creationist. How could this be? Well I know something of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, but still I can barely imagine what he would say to justify his worldview, and I’m not really interested in trying to rebut his specific arguments, if he has them. These people tend to have martyr complexes about their positions, and I suspect they’d be happy to spend hours trying to bamboozle you. The main thing is to be clear about your own understanding of the evidence.
However, I also have an interest in the psychology of belief. Take the case of Hartnett, which I can only speculate about, but this is an obviously intelligent person who has apparently written scientific papers on dark matter and other aspects of cosmology and astrophysics. He knows, surely, how vast the universe is, that the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest neighbour, is a barely-conceivable 2.5 million light years away, and there are billions of them beyond that, and yet he manages to square this with a six-day creation 6,000 years ago because it was written down by someone and collected much later with a whole mess of other writings by other people, compiled into a book and pronounced ‘holy’. Surely such thinking is more of a mystery than the gods themselves?
I can only speculate again, but Hartnett’s middle name is Gideon, a name inevitably associated with bible-bashing. Can it be that a person gets locked in, from earliest childhood, to a religious schema that they would never think to escape from, no matter how intelligent they are? Can cultural-familial influences have such a vice-like grip? Apparently so, but it’s unusual for someone to be regularly crossing the boundary between a rigid and dogmatic religious belief system and a highly speculative, often free-wheeling but rational and profoundly naturalist enterprise in the way that Hartnett must do. Ain’t people fascinating?
I’ve just read an article about rapid speciation among cichlid fishes in the African lakes. The authors note that this speciation, involving some 500 new species in Lake Victoria, has taken place over less than 15,000 years, unlike the famous speciation among ‘Darwin’s’ finches in the Galapagos (14 species, several million years). It’s called adaptive radiation, where ‘one lineage spawns numerous species that evolve specialisations to an array of ecological niches’, to quote Axel Meyer, writing in the April 2015 edition of Scientific American.
Yet this rapid speciation is still too much for young earth creationists, who believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old. What they make of stromatolites is anyone’s guess. Note that the term ‘earth’ is central, and presumably the universe or multiverse is of little concern to them, existing perhaps only as a fireworks show for our delectation.
As an Australian, this is all good for a laugh – though some Australians, such as John Hartnett, are full-on believers of a six-day creation a few thousand years ago – but apparently in the USA a substantial proportion of their very large population actually believes this (though to be honest, I can’t bring myself to believe the survey figures).
So, I wonder how I would deal with these young-turk young earth creationists who come to our atheist meet-ups spoiling for an argument. My hope is that I would have the wherewithal to ask these questions.
Is it your hope to convert the whole world to your view?
If you were successful, wouldn’t science classes be a lot shorter?
What would you do with those who insisted on being heretical? Preaching that the universe has existed for 13 billion years? Would you have them liquidated, or just permanently incarcerated? How about public recantations?
How come your god allowed us to be led astray by the evidence into getting it so wrong?
What would science be like if young earth creationists controlled all the levers of power? What would scientists do?
Of course I’m yet to hear what young earth creationists, many of whom are apparently highly intelligent, have to say about star formation, black holes and the big bang. They may well have the talent to bamboozle me with ingenious arguments. In the end, though, the best argument is to just keep doing the science, following the evidence. As long as we’re still allowed to.
Meanwhile, I haven’t yet answered the question – why is evolution (or more specifically, natural selection of random variation) true? But before I answer that, I believe that creationists do accept evolution of a particular kind, and distinguish between ‘micro-evolution’ and ‘micro-evolution’. I’ll pay some attention to that – but perhaps not too much – in my next post.
it’s all about evidence, part 2: acupuncture and cupping
a picture of health
Okay, having been sick myself with my usual bronchial issues, I haven’t made much progress on researching the ‘alternative’ treatments offered by Wesley Smith and his colleagues at the Wellness Centre. I must admit, too, that I’ve found it a bit depressing focusing on these negatives, so I’ve been working a bit on my Solutions OK blog (a few posts still in preparation) which focuses on being positive about global issues.
So before briefly dealing with acupuncture, I’ve discovered accidentally through looking up Mr Smith that ‘wellness centres’ or ‘total wellness centres’ are everywhere around the western world, including at least one more in Canberra itself. It seems that this is a moniker agreed on by practitioners of holistic medical pseudoscience world-wide, to create a sense of medical practice while avoiding the thorny issue of medicine and what it actually means. But maybe it does partially mean treating people kindly? I’m all for that. Laughter is often quite good medicine, especially for chronic rather than acute ailments.
It’s an interesting point – ‘alternative’ medicine is on the rise in the west, and the WHO informs us that by 2020, due to its own great work and that of other science-based medical institutions, the proportion of chronic ailments to acute ones will have risen to over 3 to 1. It’s in the area of chronic conditions that naturopathy comes into its own, because psychology plays a much greater part, and vague ‘toxins’ and dubious ‘balance’ assume greater significance. That’s why education and evidence is so important. There are a lot of people out there wanting to smile and seduce you out of your money.
Acupuncture
There’s no reason to suppose acupuncture is anything other than pure placebo. It’s similar to homeopathy in that it proposes a treatment involving physical forces that, when tapped, can produce miraculous cures, and it’s also similar in that these forces have never been isolated or measured or even much researched. In the case of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, its inventor, conducted ‘research’, but with no apparent rigour. See this excellent examination of his approach.
Acupuncture posits Qi (pronounced ‘chee’) as an energy force – apparently invisible and undetectable by mere science – which operates under the skin and is ‘strongest’ at certain nodes where experts insert needles to stimulate it. There’s not much agreement as to where exactly these nodes are, how many there are, or how deep under the skin they’re to be found. Is everybody’s Qi the same? Is the Qi of other mammals identical? If you haven’t enough Qi, can you have a Qi transfusion, or will you be contaminated by the wrong Qi and suffer a horrible death? Amazingly, acupuncture practitioners have no interest whatever in these life and death questions. Why has nobody thought to operate on a patient and withdraw a sample of her Qi, considering that the stuff has been known about since ancient times? It’s a puzzlement. And with that I’ll say no more about acupuncture.
Cupping
Cupping, or cupping therapy, is fairly new to me – I mean I’ve heard about it over the years but I’ve never bothered to research it. It was apparently used in Egypt 3,000 years ago, and it’s considered a part of TCM (traditional Chinese medicine). How it got from Egypt to China is anyone’s guess, but when used there, it’s associated with our old friend, the non-existent Qi. Yes, according to TCM, much disease is due to blocked Qi, and cupping is one way to fix it.
Briefly, there are two kinds of cupping, wet and dry, with wet cupping being the more ‘invasive’ and used for more acute treatments. The idea is to create a vacuum which draws the skin up in the cup and increases the blood flow. The cup, or the air inside it, is heated, and when the cup is applied to the skin and allowed to cool, the air contracts, ‘sucking up’ the skin. With wet cupping the skin is actually punctured, so that those nasty but never-quite-indentifial ‘toxins’ can ooze out. By the way, next time you go to your naturopath to get your toxins removed, ask them for a sample, and don’t forget to ask them to name those toxins. Perhaps you could look at them under a microscope together.
There’s very little in the way in the way of evidence to support the effectiveness of cupping, and as you might expect, the best ‘evidence’ comes from the most poorly controlled trials. Serious and obviously dangerous claims have been made that cupping can cure cancer. Here’s the American Cancer Society’s response:
“There is no scientific evidence that cupping leads to any health benefits….No research or clinical studies have been done on cupping. Any reports of successful treatment with cupping are anecdotal. There is no scientific evidence that cupping can cure cancer or any other disease.”
If cupping was effective, this would be easily provable. No proof has been offered in thousands of years, and there’s no credible scientific mechanism associated with the treatment. You’ve been warned. It’s your money. Why hand it over to these parasites?
the fall – when curiosity was shameful, and miracles abounded
the benedictine abbey of Gottweig in the Danube Valley, now enjoying more freedom as a guesthouse
I’ve been reading some medieval literature recently, and I’d like to make a brief comparison here between the writings of Benedict of Nursia (c480-547) and Pope Greg the Great (reigned from 589 to 604), and the Roman writers of a few centuries before, such as Livy, Tacitus, Cicero and Plutarch. It’s maybe a bit unfair as Greg and Ben perhaps weren’t typical writers of the sixth century, I’m hardly medievalist enough to say, but still they capture for me the tragedy of the soi-disant Dark Ages for the development of thought and ideas. I’ll be quoting from the medieval writers, but only referring to the Romans – you’ll just have to take my word for it about their smarts.
Benedict of Nursia is probably better known as Saint Benedict, but I don’t like that appellation – not because he doesn’t deserve it, but because nobody does, as in order to become a saint it must’ve been ‘proven’ that you performed miracles, and such silliness shouldn’t be encouraged. More importantly, this nominatively determined method of severing such individuals from common humanity does us all a disservice. Anyway, Benedict was the founder of 12 monasteries or communities in Italy, and he wrote rules for them which were later adopted in other regions to form the basis of the Benedictine system of monks – though there was never really a strict Benedictine order (monks who live communally under a set of rules are called cenobites). I’ve just read these rules, followed by Pope Gregory’s hagiography of Benedict, and it gives me a perspective on the closing of the European mind – if that’s not too grandiose a term – associated with the Dark Ages.
Benedict is praised for what Wikipedia calls the ‘balance, moderation and reasonableness’ of his rules, which facilitated their adoption by many European monasteries. However, moderation is a relative term, and as a rabid anti-authoritarian I probably chafe more than most under imposed rules. Still, I reckon most independent-minded modern westerners would find Benedict’s rules deadeningly stifling, and if they were considered moderate for the time, I’d hate to think about the more immoderate rules that the pious were forced to submit to. But judge for yourself.
Benedict states at the outset that ‘we are going to establish a school for the service of the Lord’. This isn’t of course a school in the modern sense, it’s more like certain types of Madrassa, in which nothing outside of sacred texts is studied. The school or institute is to be presided over by an Abbot, chosen for his personal qualities, including self-discipline, firmness, compassion and insight into the ways of the Lord. Recalcitrant souls need to be coaxed or reproved into the narrow path. However,
… bold, proud, hard and disobedient characters he should curb at the very beginning of their ill-doing by stripes and other bodily punishments, knowing that it is written, ‘The fool is not corrected with words’, and again, ‘Beat your son with the rod and you will deliver his soul from death’.
I suppose this isn’t too much worse than a lot of army-style biffo, as depicted in Full Metal Jacket and the like, but there’s more, and monasticism was a life commitment. Benedict goes on a lot about humility and seriousness – he frowns upon laughter. He also insists, ominously, on narrowness, for ‘strait is the gate and narrow is the way’ to salvation, as we all know. Clearly the lives of these life-long penitents are going to be highly circumscribed. Patience, endurance, humility and obedience are the watchwords.
The monks’ days are rigidly ordered. Prayers are to be offered up 7 times a day (more often than in Islam, even) because, according to Benedict, the Prophet says ‘seven times in the day I have rendered praise to you’. Who this prophet was I can’t ascertain, and there’s no such quote in the Bible, though Isaiah and Luke both display a fondness for the number. In any case, Benedict gives instructions about the number and type of psalms to be sung at the Morning Office, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline. Prayers are to be ‘short and pure’, in compliance with the spirit of silence that should inhabit, not to say inhibit, the school. One of the longest chapters is ‘On Humility’, in which Benedict defines 12 different degrees of humility, as the monk becomes more and more cleansed of vice and sin:
The tenth degree of humility is that he be not ready and quick to laugh, for it is written, ‘The fool lifts up his voice in laughter’.
The eleventh degree of humility is that when a monk speaks he do so gently and without laughter, humbly and seriously, in few and sensible words, and that he be not noisy in his speech. It is written, ‘A wise man is known by the fewness of his words.’
Again, Benedict doesn’t tells us where these dubious claims are written, but they don’t seem to come from the Bible. In any case, you get the idea, the fantasy that suppression of all spontaneity and originality leads through the narrow gate unto heaven.
Of course, the microcosm of the monastery doesn’t necessarily reflect the macrocosm of medieval Europe, but in a world of more or less homogenous Christian belief many of these ‘ideals’ would have been prominent. Not that the previous Roman world was that much better, as far as the nurturing of curiosity and intellectual inquiry was concerned. Roman society was also quite rigid in its structure, and philosophically, neither the Stoics nor the Epicureans thought in terms of intellectual progress. But the near-obsessive stifling of curiosity, the obsession with an obedient, humble, slavish attitude before an all-knowing master-god, that was very much a product of the Christianising of the Empire and ultimately of all Europe. The kind of reflective history-writing and philosophising found in the work of Tacitus, Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, dealing with human psychology and conduct in its own right, without reference to divine expectations, all but disappeared for centuries.
Interestingly, along with the fashion for slavishness came a flourishing of credulity. Pope Gregory the Great’s bio of Benedict teems with his miracles and fulfilled prophecies, reminding us that the age of Jesus wasn’t the dimmest for unbelievable beliefs, though it may have sparked the fashion for them. There’s virtually a miracle on every page, so I’ll quote here one of the first, from when he was a youth, having abandoned his studies to serve his Master, to give you a taste:
When Benedict abandoned his studies to go into solitude, he was accompanied by his nurse, who loved him dearly. As they were passing through Affile, a number of devout men invited them to stay there and provided them with lodging near the Church of St Peter. One day, after asking her neighbours to lend her a tray for cleaning wheat, the nurse happened to leave it on the edge of the table and when she came back she found it had slipped off and broken in two. The poor woman burst into tears, she had just borrowed this tray and now it was ruined. Benedict, who had always been a devout and thoughtful boy, felt sorry for his nurse when he saw her weeping. Quietly picking up both the pieces, he knelt down by himself and prayed earnestly to God, even to the point of tears. No sooner had he finished his prayer than he noticed that the two pieces were joined together, without even a mark to show where the tray had been broken. Hurrying back at once, he cheerfully reassured his nurse and handed her the tray in perfect condition.
Of course, this little tale is partly designed to show Benedict’s kindness and attentiveness in small matters, and perhaps that’s the best take-home message, but not all the miracles are so nice, and some display the wish-fulfilling fantasy of bringing down enemies. The point, though, is that these miracles are disseminated by the highest religious authorities in Europe, so that it would amount to sacrilege to deny them. Interestingly, when I was nine years old, my mother bought me a collection of books called ‘Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories’ – about ten books each with about ten stories in them, and every one told of a miracle much like this one (and to be fair to my mother, she hadn’t vetted them first and wasn’t aware that they were Christian propaganda). People had fallen on hard times or had suffered an accident, they prayed to God, their fortunes were miraculously reversed. They were very formulaic stories, and I steamed with annoyance on reading them, but it’s fascinating to find a template for that kind of writing from nearly 1400 years before. How the world has changed and how some aspects of it remain.
What is interesting for me, though, is the connection between credulity and authority that marks the Dark Ages. As a youngster I was free to, and took delight in, spurning the ‘authority’ of Uncle Arthur and his benevolent miracles. I’m a creature of my era and social milieu, as we all are, but there are many social milieux in our world. I’ve just seen a TV clip about the ‘fight of the century’ between one Floyd Mayweather and the Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao. I’m not much into boxing these days (I was a keen follower of the sport in my youth), but I hear this fight is being billed as goodie v baddie, because Mayweather is a convicted wife-beater and apparently something of a self-advertising loudmouth whereas Pacquiao is a member of parliament, charity worker and other respectable things. However, when I just looked at the screen I saw Pacquaio wearing a t-shirt with ‘Jesus is my Lord’ or some such thing emblazoned on it, and I felt a spurt of disgust. I have a visceral reaction to the slavishness and submission of the two most common religions on the planet. The old ‘pagan’ religions certainly engaged in seasonal placatory gestures but they didn’t practice or preach eternal submission to their invisible and undetectable masters. And not only are we supposed to accept our enslavement, but to exalt in our specialness. It’s the most horrible kind of unreality, to me. So there’s still plenty of darkness to deal with, or to avoid. Let’s remember Goethe’s reputed last words – more light.
some people really don’t like atheists
‘Atheism is not a great religion. It has always been for elites rather than for ordinary folk. And until the 20th century, its influence on world history was as inconsequential as Woody Allen’s god. Even today the impact of atheism outside of Europe is inconsequential. A recent Gallop poll found that 9% of adults in Western Europe (where the currency does not trust in God) described themselves as ‘convinced atheists’. That figure fell to 4% in eastern and central Europe, 3% in Latin America, 2% in the Middle East, and 1% in North America and Africa. Most Americans say they would not vote for an atheist for president.’
Stephen Prothero, from God is not one: the eight rival religions that run the world & why their differences matter (2010).
I should admit at the outset that I’ve not read Prothero’s book, and probably never will, as time is precious and there are too many other titles and areas of knowledge and endeavour that appeal to me. However, since, as a humanist and skeptic I have a passing interest in the religious mindset and in promoting critical thinking and humanism, I think the above quote is worth dwelling on critically.
First, the claim that ‘atheism is not a great religion’. It’s an interesting remark because it can be interpreted in two ways. First, that atheism is not a religion of any kind, great or small; second that atheism is a religion, but not a great one. I strongly suspect that Prothero has the second view in mind, while also playing on the first one. Of course atheism isn’t a religion and it’s tedious to have to play this game with theists (assuming Prothero is one) for the zillionth time, but my own experience on being confronted with the idea of a supernatural entity for the first time at around eight or nine was one of scepticism, though I didn’t then have a name for it. I don’t think scepticism could ever be called a religion. And nothing that I’ve ever experienced since has tempted me to believe in the existence of supernatural entities.
Next comes the claim that atheism has always been for elites rather than ordinary folk. This is probably true, but we need to reflect on the term ‘elite’. I assume Prothero can only mean intellectual elites. The Oxford dictionary succinctly defines an elite as ‘a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society’. Generally, therefore, the best of society, or the leaders. It’s broadly true, especially in the West, that you won’t get to the top in business without a good business brain, you won’t get to the top in politics without a good political brain and you won’t get to the top in science without a good scientific brain, and these are all positive qualities. The elites are the best, and the best tend to be society’s movers and shakers.
Yet Prothero doesn’t appear to agree, quite. His juxtaposing of the two sentences intimates that atheism is not a great religion because it has always been for elites. What are we to make of this? My guess is that he’s trying to downplay atheism but has made a bit of a mess of it. And there’s more of this. Before the 20th century, we’re informed, atheism was as influential ‘as Woody Allen’s god’, by which, I presume, he’s referring to Allen’s farce of 1975, God, with which I’m not particularly familiar. I do know, though, that it’s fashionable these days to trash Woody Allen, so the message appears to be that, before 1900 or so, atheism was very inconsequential indeed.
A reasonable person might wonder here why Prothero seems so keen to diminish atheism. A big clue is surely to be found in the subtitle to Prothero’s book. Which raises some questions: What are these eight religions? Are they really rivals? Do they run the world?
The contents page answers the first question: Islam, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoruba religion, Judaism and Daoism make up the Premier League. Presumably Jainism, Sikhism and Zoroastrianism are struggling in the lower divisions. There is some debate amongst authorities as to whether Confucianism or Daoism are recognised religions, and they’e often found blended, along with Buddhism, in Chinese folk tradition – so, maybe not so much rivals.
Surely the most important question, though, is whether these religions ‘run the world’. I have the strong suspicion that Prothero hasn’t given deep consideration to his terms here, but I’ll try to do it for him. What does ‘running the world’ entail? I’ve heard people say that multinational corporations run the world, or that various superpowers do so, or have done so, but the idea that the major religions run the world between them is a novel one to me. Of course, if I want to find out whether Prothero provides evidence for his claim, or sets out to prove it, I’d have to read his book, and I’m reluctant to do so. It’s surely far more likely he’s tossed in the subtitle as something provocative, a piece of unsubstantiated rhetoric.
A lot of ingredients make the human world run, including trade, transport, law, festivals, education, sex, empathy and new ideas. Customs, habits and religious rituals play their part for many of us too. However, there’s no doubt that, for most westerners, global networking, the take-up of higher education, multiculturalism and travel have transformed earlier customs and habits, with religion taking a major hit in the process. The places where religion is holding its own are those where such modern trends are less evident.
Prothero also seems to be downplaying the 20th century when he writes that the influence of atheism was negligible before that time, as if to say ‘setting aside the 20th century, religion has been the most powerful force in humanity.’ Maybe so, but you can’t set aside the 20th century, a century which saw the human population rise from less than two billion to around 7 billion, a century of unprecedented and mind-boggling advances in science and technology, and in the education required to keep abreast of them, and which has seen a massive rise in travel and global communication. Continuing into the 21st century, these developments have been transformative for those exposed to them. It is unlikely to be coincidental that the same period has seen ‘the rise of the nones’ as by far the most significant development in religion for centuries – or more likely, since the first shrine was constructed. Of course, correlation isn’t causation, and I’m not going to delve deeply into causative factors here, but the phenomenon is real, though Prothero engages in what seems to me a desperate attempt to minimise it with his data. I’ll examine his statistics more closely later.
Prothero also presents the ‘inconsequential outside of Europe’ argument, which, apart from dismissing Australians like me – where more than 23% professed to having no religion in the last census (2011), with some 9% also choosing not to answer the optional question on religion – seems to dismiss Europe as an aberration in much the same way as he dismisses the 20th century. Yet in the last seventy years since the end of WW2, western Europe has only been an aberration in terms of its stability, its growing unity, its overall prosperity, its high levels of literacy and other positives on the registers of well-being and civility. Surely we should hope that such aberrations might spread worldwide. Many of the western European nations are regarded and valued as ‘elite states’, where religious strife, a problem in the heart of Europe for centuries up to and including the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century, is now almost entirely confined to its immigrant populations. These are now among the least religious countries in the world.
So let’s look at Prothero’s data. He states that 9% of Western European adults are ‘committed atheists’. Why, one wonders, does he choose this category? Most atheists aren’t ‘committed’ if by this is meant proselytising for non-belief in supernatural beings. They don’t go around ‘being atheists’. As I’ve said, I consider myself first and foremost as a sceptic, and it’s out of scepticism and a need for evidence and for the best explanation of phenomena that I consider belief in creator beings, astrology, acupuncture, fairies and homeopathy as best explained by psychology, ignorance and credulity.
My view is that Prothero chooses the ‘committed atheist’ category for the same reason that William Lane Craig does – to minimise the clear-cut ‘rise of the nones’, to reduce non-belief to the smallest category he can get away with.
Prothero cites a website for his figures on ‘committed atheists’ (9% in western Europe, 4% in eastern and central Europe, 3% in Latin America, 2% in the Middle East and 1% in North America), which is a 2005 Gallup Poll. I cannot find the 2005 poll, but an updated 2012 Gallup Poll is very revealing, as it compares some figures with those from 2005. What it reveals, sadly, is a degree of intellectual dishonesty on Prothero’s part. Prothero claims that atheism is inconsequential outside of Europe, yet the same Gallup Poll from which he took his figures – but this time the 2012 version – states that 47% of Chinese self-describe as committed atheists*. Presumably this was slightly up on 2005 (the 2005 figure for China isn’t given), because almost every nation shows a rise in atheism in recent years, but the huge percentage, together with 31% of Japanese ‘committed atheists’ completely discredits Prothero’s ‘inconsequential outside of Europe’ claim.
It’s worth giving more comprehensive data on western Europe here, based on the 2012 poll by Gallup International. The 9% figure for ‘committed atheists’ is now 14%, with a further 32% describing themselves as ‘not religious’, and 3% ‘no answer or not sure’. The rest, 51%, described themselves as religious. It’s clear that, by the next poll, most western Europeans will not describe themselves as religious. Only 14% of Chinese people currently describe themselves as such – and as we all know, China will soon take over the world.
I was surprised, too, that only 1% of North Americans were committed atheists, according to Prothero. I can’t confirm this, but according to the 2012 poll, the figure is 6%, with a further 33% claiming to be ‘not religious’. The percentage of the self-described religious is a surprisingly low 57%. Perhaps Prothero combined the North American and African figures to arrive at the 1% mark. Who knows what paths motivated reasoning will lead a person down.
The 2012 poll, if it’s reliable, is revealing about the speed with which religion is being abandoned in some parts. In France, for example the percentage of ‘committed atheists’ has jumped from 14 to 29%, an extraordinary change in age-old belief systems in less than a decade.
But beyond these statistics about how people see themselves, the change is most marked, in the west, by the vastly diminished role of religion in public life. It’s precisely Prothero’s claim that religions ‘run the world’ that is most suspect. In virtually every western country, secularism, the insistence that the church and the state remain separate, has become more firmly established in the 20th century. The political influence of the Christian churches in particular has noticeably waned. Of course there are a few theocratic nations, but their numbers are decreasing, and none of them are major world powers. If you believe, as most do, that the world is run by governments and commercial enterprises, it’s hard to see where religion fits into this scheme. In some regions it may be the glue that holds societies together, but these regions appear to be diminishing. Religions these days receive more publicity for the damage they do than for any virtues they may possess. Any modern westerner might think of them as ruining the world rather than running it.
The fact is that, in every western country without exception (yes, that includes the USA), the trend away from religious belief is so rapid it’s almost impossible to keep up with. I’ve already written about the data in New Scientist suggesting that the ‘nones’ are the fourth religious category after Christians, Moslems and Hindus, numbering some 700 million. Wikipedia goes one further, putting the nones third with 1.1 billion. Of course these figures are as rubbery as can be, but its indisputable that this is overwhelmingly a modern phenomenon, covering the past fifty or sixty years in particular. It’s accelerating and unlikely to reverse itself in the foreseeable.
Books like Prothero’s are symptomatic of the change. Remember The Twilight of Atheism (which I also haven’t read)? Deny what’s going on, promote the positive power and eternal destiny of religion and all will be well.
Well, it won’t. Something’s happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Prothero?
*To be fair to Prothero, it looks like no 2005 figures for China were available, though the large figures for Japan certainly were. Also, though these figures for China have been uncritically reported by the media, the sample size, as mentioned on Gallup International’s website, was preposterously small – some 500 people, less than one two-millionth of the Chinese population. The survey was apparently conducted online, but no details were given about the distribution of those surveyed. Given the resolutely secular Chinese government’s tight control of its citizens and media, I would treat any statistics coming out of that country with a large dose of salt.
aerosinusitis
it’s all about Boyle’s Law, apparently (P1V1 = P2V2)
Aerosinusitis, also called barosinusitis, sinus squeeze or sinus barotrauma is a painful inflammation and sometimes bleeding of the membrane of the paranasal sinus cavities, normally the frontal sinus. It is caused by a difference in air pressures inside and outside the cavities.
The above quote is from Wikipedia, and it describes something I experienced on two flights recently (see previous post), though I experienced it, or felt I experienced it, in the ears (I’ve learned not to trust my own perceptions). On the first flight, I experienced a build-up of pressure until a sudden change as of a bubble bursting in some inner cavity, and then everything was fine. I’ve had similar, but less intense, experiences in a car when driving up into the hills near my home. In fact, they’ve been so mild that I’ve often looked forward to them as a physical sensation, and I know it’s common because people would ask around – have your ears popped yet? On my second flight, the pressure built up again on the descent, and I fully expected the bubble to burst as it always did. But the pain just increased, to an excruciating level, so that my face was all scrunched up and I was gasping, squealing and whimpering like a pup. By the time we landed, though, the worst of the pain was gone, and it gradually got better over the next hour or so, and although I could still ‘feel’ it 24 hours later, it was more a memory of a feeling than the thing itself. I don’t know whether my pain was severe or relatively mild as I’ve never felt other people’s pain. This was one of the first things I had ‘deep’ thoughts about as a child. When I was nine or ten years old I fell, while running, and bashed my shin against the edge of our front porch, and I still think that was the most extreme pain I’ve ever felt in my life. I screamed and screamed, and amongst the comforting remarks came the inevitable ‘come on now, stop squealing, it’s not that bad’. Of course this made me angry and resentful but it also raised the questions, ‘am I over-reacting? Would others react like this in the same circumstances? Would they feel the same pain? How could we ever know?’ And along with those questions was one that always ate at me, and probably still does – can I control my pain, can I obliterate it with the power of my mind? I’d sell my soul, FWIW, for total control. But that’s a rather too large side-issue for this post. The Wikipedia article, though, does classify aerosinusitis in terms of pain, along with other more measurable symptoms:
Grade I includes cases with mild transient sinus discomfort without changes visible on X-ray. Grade II is characterized by severe pain for up to 24 h, with some mucosal thickening on X-ray. Patients with grade III have severe pain lasting for more than 24 h and X-ray shows severe mucosal thickening or opacification of the affected sinus; epistaxis or subsequent sinusitis may be observed.
Annoyingly, my own intense but transitory experience doesn’t fit into any of those grades. I also find that this extremely technical article makes no mention at all of ear pain. Much of the focus is on the frontal sinuses, situated behind the brows and connected to the nose or nasal meatus, which naturally makes me uncertain about where my pain was located. Interestingly, the frontal sinuses still haven’t come into existence at birth, and aren’t fully developed until adolescence, and some 5% of people don’t even have them, which just complicates matters for me. As is mentioned above, the frontal sinuses are part of a whole labyrinth of hollows, bones, cartilaginous membranes and passageways known as the paranasal cavities. I’m hoping that the inner ear, or more accurately the middle ear cavity – technically called the tympanic cavity, is also part of that.
Though ‘ear-popping’ seems to be commonplace, aerosinusitis usually occurs in people who have head colds, or as the article puts it, it’s ‘typically preceded by an upper respiratory tract infection or allergy’. Of course, with my bronchiectasis, I’m effectively in a more or less permanent state of infection, so this may be a problem for me every time I fly.
So, what remedy? Well, the problem for me seems to be with the tympanic cavity or eustachian tube on one side. When I was eight, I perforated my ear drum and had to have an operation. I was told afterwards that I should never hold my nose tight while blowing it, as people do (making that horrible honking nose), as this might damage my eardrum. I remember being fascinated by this connection between the nose and the ears, and of course I’ve always followed the doctor’s advice. I didn’t want to blow my brains out of my ears.
Wikipedia suggests using decongestants or painkillers for mild forms of barotrauma, as does this useful site, which deals more with popping ears. First and foremost, though, it suggests gargling with warm salt water, which was my mother’s advice for many medical problems (she was a nurse).
I’m resisting any description of what I went through as ‘mild’.
Working the eustachian tube or tympanic cavity seems to be a good idea, for example by regular swallowing, chewing gum, sucking sweets, yawning, etc.
Sudafed is highly recommended. I’ll bear that in mind next time.
what can we learn from religion?
Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the Being of a God. Promises, Covenants and Oaths, which are the Bonds of Humane Society, can have no hold upon an Atheist.
John Locke, ‘A letter concerning toleration’, 1689
In my last post I referred to some aspects of religious belief that I think are worth focusing on if we want to get past the rational/irrational, or even the true/false debates. Alain de Botton created quite a stir recently when he claimed that arguments about the truth/falsity of religion were boring and without much value – or something like that. Typically, I both agree and disagree. There are essential empirical questions at stake, as I argued in my critique of Stephen Jay Gould here, but they’re hardly key to getting a handle on religion’s enormous popularity and endurance. That requires a deeper understanding of the psychological underpinnings of religious belief.
First, I’ve already written of the fact that, for all very young children, adults are supernatural beings. They’ve yet to learn about human mortality and limitations. They certainly learn quickly about their own pain and discomfort, but it comes as a shock when they first observe that all these competent, powerful, protective giants can be hurt, angry and frustrated just like them. These findings should hardly surprise us – children at this stage are entirely dependent on adults for their survival. These adults, they observe, can throw them up in the air and hopefully catch them, they can walk across a room in three seconds flat, they can transport them by car or plane to a completely different world, they’re not afraid of anything, and they miraculously provide all sustenance and succour.
While non-believers mostly understand such basic childhood beliefs, many are highly impatient of those who haven’t, at an appropriate age, abandoned this ‘theory of mind’ and replaced it with a more rational or sophisticated scientific worldview. The response of many psychologists in the field would be that, yes, we do change, but the idea of the supernatural, of transcending the usual limitations, has a long, lingering effect. The popularity of fairies, Harry Potter and Spiderman, which take us through early childhood into adolescence and beyond, attests to this. It’s worth noting that the nerdiest atheists are avid Trekkies and Whovians.
But none of this is really disturbing or unhealthy in the way that religious belief seems to be in the eyes of many non-believers – such as myself. The world’s most secular polities – in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, and in many European countries, are also the most law-abiding, secure and contented, as countless surveys show. As a regular dipper into history, I can’t help but note that social life in god-obsessed pre-Enlightenment Europe was far more volatile, cruel and corrupt than it is today in the era of democracy, human rights and secularism. Locke’s remarks above, have been throughly refuted by modern experience – though I suspect this is due to having a more regularised legal framework and a functioning police force than to the greater moral virtue of non-believers.
So for many of us, the point is not to understand religion, but to change it. Or rather, to neutralise it by understanding it and then applying that understanding within a more secular framework. For example, one of the themes of the religious is that you can’t be good without god x, y or z. Atheists rarely concede that theists might have a point here. The stock response is a personal one ‘I don’t need a supernatural fantasy-figure to frighten me into being good, I’m good because I have respect for others and for my environment’, etc. Psychological study, however, tells us a different story.
The Lebanese-born social psychologist Ara Norenzayan, at the University of British Columbia, points out that many of the gods of small societies have little interest in morality. Instead, ‘being good’ in these small societies is enforced by their very size, and their inescapability. Kin altruism and reciprocity, being the subject of gossip, the fear of ostracism, these are what keep society members on the right track. As numbers increase, though, a sense of anonymity engenders a greater tendency towards cheating and self-serving behaviours. Studies show that even wearing dark glasses, like the Tontons Macoutes, makes it easier to engage in anti-social behaviour. People behave much better when watched, by an audience, by a camera, and even by a large drawing of an eye in the corner of a shop.
The idea that non-believers can be ‘tricked’ into behaving better by the picture of an eye watching them should make us think again, not about gods, but about being watched. And about how we still over-determine for agency in our thinking. Civil libertarians get their backs up about CC-TV cameras on every street corner, but there’s no doubt they’ve been a success in catching robbers and muggers and king-hitters in the act, or just before or after. Even those of us with no urge to steal or who, like me, have left that urge behind long ago, tend to notice when a shop does or doesn’t feature an electronic scanning device, and if they’re like me they’ll wonder about the shop’s vulnerability or otherwise, and the trustworthiness or desperation of the customers around them. As to the painted eye, I presume it doesn’t have the deterrent effect of cameras and scanners, but the fact that it works at all should make us think again about our basic beliefs. Or does it only work on the religious?
That was a joke.
So how do more secular societies utilise the idea that someone knowing if you’ve been bad or good makes for a more moral, or at least law-abiding society? Well, it appears from the statistics that either they’ve already done so, or they’ve found other ways of being good. I suspect it’s been a complex mix of substitute gods, comprehensive education and community expectations. Large scale society has naturally subdivided into smaller groups based on family, business, sport, academic or professional interest and so on, so the age-old stabilisers of kinship, reciprocity and reputation within the group are still there, and these are bolstered by a greater set of ‘watched’ networks. Trade and travel, international relations, the internet, all of these things are always in process of being regulated to reflect community concepts of fairness. We are our own Big Brother (another supernatural agent). Modern liberal education teaches kids from an early age about human rights and environmental responsibility, so much so that they’re often happy to lecture their parents about it. The Freudian concept of the superego is a kind of internalised supernatural parental figure, finger-wagging at us during our weaker moments. The declaration of human rights, accepted by most countries today, though criticised as artificial and without teeth, surely presents a better framework for moral behaviour in the modern world than the often obscure and contradictory stories and proverbs found in the Bible and other religious texts. In short, there are many ways we’ve worked out for behaving well and generally flourishing in a secular society.
So I’m basically saying there isn’t much we can learn from religion, with respect to moral policing, that we haven’t learned already. But what about community and social bonding? In the USA and in other highly religious societies, the populace seems to be very united in its religion – especially against the irreligious. Some non-believers are concerned to replicate religion’s success in this area, and I’ve heard that there’s an atheist church, or I think they call it an atheist assembly – meeting on Sunday – somewhere in my area. I’m not particularly inclined to attend. Non-believers don’t necessarily have much in common apart from a lack of interest in religion, and I’m wary of in-group thinking anyway. I’m wary of just the kind of bonding above-mentioned, a bonding that might depend upon mutual congratulations and mocking or belittling, or despising, believers.
Non-believers are of course no less community-minded than the religious. Business, sporting, scientific and small-town communities, these attract us as social animals regardless of our views on the supernatural, and I don’t think we need a top-down ‘alternative’ to religious congregations or community spirit as advocated by de Botton.
Many of the religious point out that they’re more involved in charitable works than selfish unbelievers. Where are the atheist alternatives to Centacare and Anglicare, the welfare and social services arms of the Catholic and Anglican denominations? But these organisations have built up their considerable infrastructure and expertise under extremely favourable tax circumstances which have been a part of Australia’s religious history for a couple of centuries, so they’re always more favourably placed to win government and other contracts for social and educational services. I’ve experienced personally the frustrations of humanist organisations trying to attain the same tax-exempt status for charitable purposes. They’re not given a look-in. Nevertheless there are many powerful and effective NGOs such as Oxfam and MSF, and important human rights bodies like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, whose impetus comes directly from the secular human rights movement.
I would also argue, as a former employee of Centacare (as an educator) and of Anglicare (as a foster-carer) that one result of their having cornered so much of the education and social services market is that they’ve become more secularised. They no longer require their workers to share their supernatural beliefs, and this has enabled them to reach a wider market which they’ve been able to expand largely by downplaying or eliminating the proselytising. I’ve never heard any god-talk from Centacare or Anglicare employers, and this would surely not have been the case fifty years ago. It’s the same in Catholic schools I suspect, with so many non-Catholics sending their kids there due to doubts about under-funded state schools.
This is all to the good, as too-exclusive Christian or religious communities – as well as non-religious communities – lead to us-them problems. We need to be secure in our position on the supernatural without being dismissive.
So, what in the end do we have to learn from religion? My answer, frankly, is nothing much. We have far more to learn from history and from clear-minded examination of the evidence we uncover about ourselves and our fellow organisms in this shared biosphere.
is belief in god irrational? – that is not the question
forget them – read this!
Debates between theists and atheists have become commonplace over the past few years, for better or worse, and the topic has often been vague enough to allow the protagonists plenty of leeway to espouse their views. True or false, rational or irrational, these are the oppositional terms most often used. These debates are often quite arid, with both parties firing from fixed positions and very carefully concealing from observers any palpable hits they’ve received from the other side. Whether they’ve contributed to the continued rise of the nones is hard to say.
I heard another one recently, bearing the title Is belief in God irrational? It was hosted on the Reasonable Doubts podcast, one that I recommend to those interested in the claims of Christianity in particular, as these ‘doubtcasters’ know their Bible pretty well and are well up on Christian politics, particularly in the US. The debaters were Chris Hallquist (atheist) and Randal Rauser (theist), and it was pretty hard to listen to at times, with much squabbling and point-scoring over the definition of rationality, and obscure issues of epistemology. I found the theist in particular to be shrill and often quite unpleasant in his faux-contempt for the other side, but then I’m probably biased.
I found myself, as I very often do, arguing or speculating my way through the topic from a very different standpoint, and here are my always provisional thoughts.
Let me begin by more or less rejecting two of the terms of the debate, ‘God’ and ‘irrational’. I’m not particularly interested in God, that’s to say the Judeo-Christian god, and I strongly object to designating that particular amalgam of Canaanite, Ugaritic and other Semitic deities as capital G God, as if one can, through a piece of semantic legerdemain, magick away the thousands of other deities that people have worshipped and adhered to over the centuries. It’s as if the Apple company chose to name their next Ipad ‘Tablet’, thereby rendering irrelevant all the other tablets produced by competing companies. Of course we have marketing regulations that prevent that sort of manipulation, but not so in religion.
So I will refer henceforth to gods, or supernatural entities and supernatural agency, with all their various and sometimes contradictory qualities, rather than to God, as defined by Aquinas and others. It is supernatural agency of any kind that I call into question.
More important for me, though, is the question of rationality. I’m not a philosopher, but I’ve certainly dipped into philosophy many times over the past 40 years or so, and I’ve even been obsessed with it at times. And rationalism has long been a major theme of philosophers, but I’ve never found a satisfactory way to define it. In the context of this debate, I would prefer the term ‘reasonable’ to ‘rational’. Being reasonable has a more sociable quality to it, it lacks the hard edge of rationality. So, for my purposes I’ll re-jig the topic to – Is belief in supernatural entities reasonable?
But I want to say more about rationality, to illustrate my difficulties with the term. Hume famously or perhaps notoriously wrote that reason can never be more than the slave of the emotions. This raises the question – what are these emotions that have such primacy and why are they so dominant? I have no doubt that a modern-day Hume – and Hume was always interested in the science of his day – would write differently about the factors that dominate and guide our reason. He would write about evolved instincts as much as about emotions. Above all the survival instinct, which we appear to share with every other living creature. Let me give some examples, which might bring some of our fonder notions of rationality into question.
A large volume of psychometric data in recent years has told us that we generally have a distorted view of ourselves and our competence. In assessing our physical attractiveness, our driving ability, our generosity to others and just about everything else, we take a more flattering view of ourselves than others take of us. What’s more, this is seen as no bad thing. In terms of surviving and thriving in a competitive environment, there’s a pay-off in being over-confident about your attractiveness, as a romantic partner, a business partner, or your nation’s Prime Minister. Of course, if you’re too over-confident, if the distortion between reality and self-perception becomes too great, it will act to your detriment. But does this mean that having a clear-eyed, non-distorted view of your qualities is rational, by that very fact, or irrational, because it puts you at a disadvantage vis-à-vis others? To put it another way, does rationality mean conformity to strict observation and logic, or is it behaviour that contributes to success in terms of well-being and thriving (within the constraints of our profoundly social existence)?
I don’t have any (rational?) answer to that conundrum, but I suppose my preference for the term ‘reasonable’ puts me in the second camp. So my answer to my own question, ‘Is it reasonable to believe in supernatural entities’ is that it depends on the circumstances.
Let’s look at belief in Santa, an eminently supernatural entity. He is, at least on Christmas Eve, endowed with omnipresence, being able to enter hundreds of millions of houses laden with gifts in an impossibly limited time-period. He’s even able to enter all these houses through the chimney in spite of the fact that 99.99% of them don’t have chimneys. What’s more, he’s omniscient, ‘He knows if you’ve been bad or good’, according to the sacred hymn ‘Santa Claus is coming to town’, ostensibly written by J F Coots and Haven Gillespie, but they were really just conduits for the Word of Santa. We consider it perfectly reasonable for three- and four-year-olds to believe in Santa, and, apart from some ultra-rationalist atheists and more than a few cultish Christians and adherents of rival deities, we generally encourage the belief. Clearly, we believe it does no harm and might even do some good. An avuncular, convivial figure with a definite fleshly representation, he’s also remote and mysterious with his supernatural powers and his distant home at the North Pole, which to a preschooler might as well be Mars, or Heaven. As an extra parent, he increases the quotient of love, security and belonging. To be watched over like Santa watches over kids might seem a bit creepy as you get older, but three-year-olds would have no such concerns, they’d accept it as their due, and would no doubt find his magical powers as well as his total jollity, knowledge and insight thoroughly inspiring as well as comforting. From a parent’s perspective, it’s all good, pretty much.
Of course, if your darling 23-year-old believes in Santa, that’s a problem. We expect our kids to grow out of this belief, and they rarely disappoint. They don’t need much encouragement. Children are bombarded with TV Santas, department store Santas, skinny Santas, bad Santas, Santas that look just like their Uncle Bill, etc, and they usually go through a period of jollying their parents along before making their big apostate announcement. Santas are human, all too human.
Santa belief is, it would seem, a harmless and perhaps positive massaging of a child’s vivid imagination, but when a child’s ready for school, she’s expected to put away childish things, little by little.
And isn’t that what many atheists say about the deities of the Big Monotheisms? Yes, but too many atheists underestimate the hurdles that need to be overcome. Most of these atheists either already live in highly secularised societies, such as here in Australia, or other English-speaking or European countries. Even the USA has many more atheists in it than the entire population of Australia, if we make the conservative assumption that 10% of its citizens are non-believers. Atheists are learning to club together but the religious have been doing it for centuries, and you’re likely to lose a lot of club benefits if you declare yourself a non-believer in a region of fervent or even routine belief. Or worse – I just read today of a Filipino lad who was murdered by his schoolmates after coming out as an atheist on a networking site. So just from a self-preservation point of view it might be reasonable to at least pretend to believe, in certain circumstances.
But there are many other situations in which it’s surely reasonable to believe – I mean really believe – in the supernatural agent or agents of your culture. The first of these is that supernatural agency explains things more satisfactorily to more people than any other available explanation. This might sound strange coming from a non-believer like myself, but it’s undoubtedly true. Bear in mind that I’m talking about satisfactory explanations, not true ones, and that I’m talking about most, not all, people.
Why was belief in supernatural agency virtually universal in the long ago? I don’t think that’s hard to understand. As human populations grew and became more successful in terms of harnessing of resources and domination of the landscape, they came to realise that they were prey to forces well beyond their control, forces that threatened them more seriously than any earthly predator. Famine, disease, earthquakes, storms, the seemingly arbitrary deaths of new-borns, sudden outbreaks of warfare between once-neighbourly tribes – all of these were unforeseen and demanded an explanation. Thoughts tended to converge on one common theme: someone, some force was out to get them, someone was angry with them, or disapproved somehow. Some unseen, perhaps unseeable agent.
Psychologists have done a lot of work on agency in recent years. They’ve found that we can create convincing agents for ourselves with the most basic computer-generated or pen-and-paper images. Give them some animation, have one chasing another, and we’re ready to attribute all sorts of motives and purposes. Recognising, or just suspecting, agency behind the movement of a bush, the flying through the air of a rock, or an unfamiliar sound in the distance, has been a useful mindset for our ancestors as they sought to survive against the hazards of life. ‘If in doubt, it’s an agent’ might have been humanity’s first slogan, though of course humanity didn’t come up with it, they got it from their own mammalian ancestors. My pet cat’s reaction to thunder and lightning clearly indicates her view that someone’s out to get her.
But what about the supernatural part of supernatural agency? That, too, is very basic to our nature, and it’s another feature of our thinking that has been brought to light by psychologists in recent times. I won’t go into the ingenious experiments they’ve conducted on children here – look up the work of Justin Barrett, Paul Harris and others – but they show conclusively that very young children assume that the adults around them, those towering, confident, competent and purposive figures, are omniscient, omnipotent and immortal, until experience tells them otherwise. As children we think more in terms of absolutes. Good and evil are palpably real to us, as ‘bad’ and ‘good’ are some of the first categories we ever learn from the god-like beings, our parents, who protect us and are obsessed with us (if we’re lucky in our choice of parents), and who have created us in their image.
Given all this, we might come to understand the naturalness of religion, and its near-universality. But what about the argument, which some of these psychological findings might support, that religion is a form of childishness that we should grow out of, like belief in Santa? It’a common argument among atheists, which to some degree I share, but I also feel, along with the psychologists who have shed such light on the default thinking of children, that ‘childish’ thinking is something we need to learn from rather than dismissing it with contempt. This kind of thinking is far more ingrained in us than we often like to admit, and it’ll always be more natural to us than the kind of reasoning that produces our scientific theories and technology. Creationism is easy – a supernatural agent did it – but evolution – the theory of natural selection from random variation – is much harder. The idea that we’re the special creation of a supernatural agent who’s obsessed with our welfare is far more comforting than the idea that we’re the product of purposeless selection from variation, existing by apparent chance on one insignificant planet in an insignificant galaxy amongst billions of others. In terms of appeal to our most basic needs, for protection, belonging and significance in the scheme of things, religious belief has an awful lot going for it.
So belief in a supernatural being, for whom we are special, is eminently reasonable. And yet… I don’t believe in such a being, and an increasing number of people are abandoning such a belief, especially in ‘the west’, and especially amongst the intelligentsia, which I’ll broadly define as those who make their living through their brainpower, such as scientists, academics, doctors, lawyers, teachers, journalists, writers and artists. New Scientist, in its fascinating recent issue on the Big Questions, features a graph of the world’s religious belief systems. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but it claims 2.2 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Moslems, 900 million Hindus, and 750 million in the category ‘secular/non-religious/atheist/agnostic’. These are the top four religious categories. I find that fourth figure truly extraordinary, especially considering that it was only really recognised and counted as a category from the mid-twentieth century, or even later. In Australia, where religious belief is counted in the national census every five years, this optional question was first put in 1971. In that year the percentage of people who professed to having no religion was minuscule – about 5%. Since then, the category of the ‘nones’ has been by far the fastest growing category, and if trends continue, the non-religious will be in the majority by mid-century.
So, while I recognise that religious belief is quite reasonable, it’s clear that, in some parts of the world, a growing number find non-belief more reasonable, and I’m not even going to explore here the reasons why. You can work those out for yourself. It’s clear though that we’re entering a new era with regard to religious belief.
acupuncture promotion in australia
I tried to find a picture of the chi energy system online, but guess what, nothing to be found. Here’s a chi-reflexology map instead – from the Australian College of Chi-Reflexology, no less!
On the ever-reliable US-based NeuroLogica blog, Steven Novella reports on an interesting case of acupuncture promotion here in Oz, via Rachel Dunlop. As Novella reports, acupuncture has been studied many times before, and Cosmos, our premier science mag, did a story on the procedure a while back, reporting no evidence of any benefits except in the notoriously vague areas of back pain and headaches.
Not surprisingly, lower back pain was one of the conditions that supposedly benefited from acupuncture, according to media hype about the latest study. The trouble is, this study was being reported on before being published and peer reviewed, which, to put it mildly, is highly irregular and raises obvious questions. The Sydney Morning Herald is the offending news outlet, and Dr Michael Ben-Meir the over-enthusiastic researcher. As the article points out, Ben-Meir is already a ‘convert’ to acupuncture, having used it for some time in acute cases at two Melbourne hospitals. That’s fine, if a bit unorthodox, but it doesn’t accord with other findings, and there are therefore bound to be questions about methodology.
One of the obvious difficulties is that acupuncture can hardly be applied to patients without them knowing it. It’s a much more hands-on and ‘invasive’ experience than swallowing a tablet, and this will undoubtedly have a psychological effect. It seems to me, just off the top of my head, that acupuncture, with its associated rituals, its aura of antiquity and its oriental cultural cachet, would carry greater weight as a placebo than, say, a homeopathic pill. But in fact I don’t have to speculate here, as there is much clinical evidence that injections have a greater placebo effect than pills, and big pills have a greater placebo effect than small ones. So it doesn’t greatly surprise me that people will report a lessening, and even a dramatic lessening, of acute pain, after an acupuncture treatment, however illegitimate. I presume there are illegitimate treatments, because the ‘key meridional points’ where the needles are applied are precisely know by legitimate acupuncturists, and they apply their treatments with rigorous accuracy.
Well, actually there’s a big question as to whether or not there are any legitimate acupuncturists, because acupuncture is based on an energy system known as ‘chi’, which supposedly has meridional points at which needles can be inserted quite deeply into the skin, but there’s no evidence whatever that such an energy system exists, let alone about how such a system might function – for example, its mode of energy transmission (whatever ‘energy’ might mean in this case). Considering that we know a great deal about the autoimmune system and the central and peripheral nervous systems, it seems astonishing that this other bodily system has gone undetected by scientists for so long, and especially in recent times, with our ultra-sophisticated monitoring devices. When you look up ‘chi, sometimes spelt ‘qi’ or with other variants, you’ll find nothing more specific than ‘energy’, ‘life force’ or something similar – nothing corpuscular or in any sense measurable by modern medicine. Even so, researchers into acupuncture have come up with an attempt to measure its efficacy by comparing it to ‘sham acupuncture’ in clinical trials. Sham acupuncture uses the ‘wrong’ meridians and the ‘wrong’ depths to which the needle goes.
But herein lies an obvious problem. Sham acupuncturists insert needles only millimetres deep, while real acupuncturists put their needles between one and three or four centimetres deep: ‘Depth of insertion will depend on nature of the condition being treated, the patients’ size, age, and constitution, and upon the acupuncturists’ style or school’, according to an acupuncture site I visited at random. These are rather wide parameters, but the point that interests me is this. If you don’t put your needle in deep enough, you won’t make contact with the chi that needs to be stimulated or other wise modified to heal the patient. So goes the rationale, surely. It’s like, if you don’t put the needle for a standard vaccination in the right place, you’ll miss the vein. But veins are clearly real. If you go dissecting, you’ll find veins and arteries and nerves and muscle and fat and so on. But you won’t find chi. Yet, apparently it does have real existence. It’s between one and four centimetres down, according to real acupuncturists, depending on the above-mentioned variables (and no doubt many others).
So we can’t actually see it, or find it on dissection, but it’s locatable in space, vaguely. Or is it that chi is everywhere in the body but the right kind of chi, the bit that’s causing the pain and needs to be treated with needles at certain precise meridional points, is at a certain distance from the surface of the skin?
It all begins to sound a bit like theology, doesn’t it?
Here’s the ‘take-home’ for me. If you read about treatments that ‘work’ but you get virtually nothing about the mechanism of action, as is the case, for example, with homeopathy and acupuncture, be very skeptical. In the end I’m not impressed with clinical trials that show a ‘real effect’, even a startling one, because I know about regression to the mean, and I particularly know about the placebo effect. I want ‘proof of concept’. In this case proof of the concept of chi and of meridians. I’ve heard homeopaths defend their pills on TV recently by claiming that, ‘whatever the mechanism, clinical trials consistently prove that this treatment works’, and I can’t be bothered chasing up those clinical trials and testing their legitimacy, I go straight to the concepts and processes behind the treatment – the law of similars, the law of infinitesimals, and don’t forget succussion. These concepts are so intrinsically absurd that we needn’t bother looking at the clinical data. If there are positive results, they haven’t been produced by homeopathy. The fact that homeopaths themselves are largely uninterested in the mechanisms is a dead giveaway. You’d think that the law of infinitesimals and the law of similars would surely have myriad applications far beyond their current ones. They would revolutionise science and technology, if only they were real (and they’d also render obsolete much that we currently know).
The same goes for acupuncture, and chi. If this bodily system were real, and chi could be captured in a test tube, and its constituents examined and isolated under a microscope, how revolutionary that would be. How transformative. Chi pills, chi soap, chi breakfast cereal…
Ah but I’m thinking like one of those limited westerners, so modern, so smug, so lacking in the insight of the ancients…
bronchiectasis – the story so far
I’m sorry I’ve not been as polyphiloprogenitive (yeah) in my posting lately, with health issues both mental and physical, and work commitments having an impact. So, now I’m going to mix the personal and the general in this glimpse into the complexities of public healthcare.
I’ve been trying for some time to get a proper diagnosis on lung and airways problems that have been plaguing me for some 30 years. Today, a young doctor summarising my condition after a blood test, an x-ray, a CT scan, a bronchoscopy, a biopsy, and a series of lung function tests, used (in passing) the term ‘bronchiectasis’, not for the first time. It was first used a few weeks ago, in the radiologist’s report on my CT scan, and that was the first time I’d heard the term.
Anyway, the analyses and the reports are now done with, and the only treatment offered is a three-month course of broad-spectrum antibiotics, a half-tab a day, to try to clear up some current bugs and give me a fighting chance for the future. The antibiotics may also act as anti-inflammatories, slightly and temporarily relieving the problem of my dilated airways, but there’s no permanent solution, no cure.
Here’s what the USA’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute has to say about bronchiectasis:
Bronchiectasis (brong-ke-EK-tah-sis) is a condition in which damage to the airways causes them to widen and become flabby and scarred. The airways are tubes that carry air in and out of your lungs. Bronchiectasis often is caused by an infection or other condition that injures the walls of the airways or prevents the airways from clearing mucus. Mucus is a slimy substance. It helps remove inhaled dust, bacteria, and other small particles from the airways. In bronchiectasis, your airways slowly lose their ability to clear out mucus. The mucus builds up, and bacteria begin to grow. This leads to repeated, serious lung infections. Each infection causes more damage to the airways. Over time, the airways can’t properly move air in and out of the lungs. As a result, the body’s vital organs might not get enough oxygen. Bronchiectasis can lead to serious health problems, such as respiratory failure, atelectasis (at-eh-LEK-tah-sis), and heart failure.
This makes for very grim reading. It sounds like a slow, overall decline is inevitable, though I’m not feeling too pessimistic, perhaps because it hasn’t sunk in yet. There’s little point in trying to pinpoint the initial infection or set of infections that set the ball rolling. My latest doctor, at the Adelaide Chest Clinic, suggested a series of infections when very young, most likely in my earliest childhood, set the stage for the present situation, but that surely is the wildest speculation, with no detailed medical history to go on. Or rather, no medical history at all really. I do remember my mother saying she was worried about my health as a young child because I was so skinny, but I don’t recall that I had any lung or airways problems.
This medical journey has been interesting. I don’t really have a regular doctor, and generally avoid regular visits, in my male way, but when I need to go I visit the Hindmarsh Medical Clinic nearby, and take whatever doctor’s available. So when chesty complications arose after I got what I think was a dose of the flu late last year, I took myself to this clinic to get what I usually get when this happens, a dose of antibiotics. It was the first time I’d been to a doctor about this in a few years. I’ve been on a bit of a health and fitness kick, losing a lot of weight and engaging in regular, if low level, exercise. I like to think these efforts have helped me even with my bronchiectasis, because before that I was having to take antibiotics at least once a year for quite a few years. And before that, I would just put up with what I called ‘the wet webs’, which would wax and wane in terms of hampering my life.
However, they always did hamper my life, affecting my self-confidence, increasing my self-consciousness. I’d avoid people and crowds, worried about my breath and my tendency to break into coughing fits, or have my voice caught in the webs mid-sentence, resulting in intense and embarrassing throat-clearing. But I was also worried about the effects on my throat, which would catch at the slightest hint of cigarette smoke, dust or ‘funny air’. My experience with food and drink, too, has sometimes been a problem. Nothing worse than having a cough explode out of you when your mouth is full of lamb korma (spicy food is a ticklish subject) or your host’s best French champagne. Also, any not-quite-right cuisine would give me a ‘furry tongue’ feeling, a tell-tale first sign of a full-blown, phlegmy infection.
Anyhow, it was only after some years of putting up with this that I betook myself to a doctor, on an occasion when the phlegminess wouldn’t clear up by itself and was clearly getting worse. That was my first experience of antibiotics, and they seemed to always do the trick, so I began to rely on them, all the while reflecting on tuberculosis and consumption and marvelling that the modern world of antibiotics had saved me from the fate of Keats, Balzac, the Brontës, Chekhov, Lawrence, Kafka, Orwell and so many others, known and unknown – that of more or less drowning in my own phlegm.
So it was a bit of a surprise when, back in December and January, I found that the little magic pills didn’t work any more. I was prescribed two separate, different batches, both ineffectual. So the doctor organised a blood test and an x-ray. The blood test indicated that I was becoming anaemic, and the x-ray indicated a cloudy, indeterminate patch in my upper right lung. The Hindmarsh doctors were now slightly more animated about my condition. I was questioned closely about my medical history, especially my smoking history. I was a light smoker in my youth and gave up in my mid-twenties, over thirty years ago. The doctor sent me for a CT scan, which, depending on what resulted from it, might be followed by a colonoscopy. He was particularly concerned about the anaemia, which was unlikely to be caused by poor diet.
To over-simplify, there are 3 main types, or causes of, anaemia. First, there’s blood loss, either of the rapid kind (haemorrhaging caused by an accident or major trauma) or the slowly leaking kind, which can have a variety of causes, including cancer. Second, there’s destruction of the red blood cells (hemolysis), which also has many causes, such as bacterial infections. The third is deficient red blood cell production. I now presume my anaemia was of the hemolytic type, but my doctor probably worried about blood loss as a result of bowel or colon cancer, though I didn’t have much in the way of gastrointestinal symptoms.
So I went off for my first ever CT scan, a fascinating experience in itself, and a few days later, once Hindmarsh had received the radiologist’s report, I made an appointment to discuss the findings. When I arrived the receptionist gave me a copy of my CT scan and the radiologist’s report, which I read in the waiting room. It was pretty hard to digest. First it reiterated the finding of the x-ray – ‘ill-defined shadow right upper lobe on recent chest x-ray – pulmonary mass’. Then the radiologist, a Dr Ron Edwards, presented his own findings:
There is extensive abnormality in the right lung more marked in the upper lobe with dilated, thick walled bronchi consistent with bronchiectasis, evidence of mucus plugging and areas of confluent parenchymal density, the appearance is thought to be that of inflammatory change most probably allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis. The left lung is fully expanded and clear. No pleural abnormality is seen on either side. There is no hilar or mediastinal mass or lymphadenopathy. No abnormality is seen in visualised upper abdominal organs.
Conclusion: Extensive abnormality in the right lung particularly the upper lobe consistent with inflammatory change most probably allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis although correlation with history and clinical findings is suggested.
At first I thought this doctor just liked parading his polysyllables, but then I was prepared to give him the benefit. I’d try to tease it all out and look up the key terms on the net when I got home, and meanwhile my Hindmarsh doctor might further enlighten me.
The doctor in this consultation wasn’t my usual one, and his response to the radiologist’s report was ‘eh? I can’t make head nor tail of this’, which was kind of reassuring, but after a few minutes of examining it and looking up other references, he recovered enough to say that the next step was a visit to the Adelaide Chest Clinic for a probable bronchoscopy to try to get clarification or confirmation of the finding. He told me that aspergillosis was a fungal infection which generally required long-term antibiotic, or rather antifungal medication to clear it up. The good thing, though, was that there was no sign of cancer. I asked whether the aspergillosis, if that’s what I had, might be the cause of the anaemia, and he said, ‘oh yes, most definitely’.
So I went home, looked up as much as I could on the net, and waited to hear from the chest clinic. I soon received a letter which gave me an appointment time for six weeks later, and which pointed out that this was a consultation only. I was annoyed at the long delay, especially as my cough and my phlegm problems weren’t getting any better. Yet somehow the idea that I might have a fungal infection (and I now imagined I could feel the spores in there when I sucked air into my lungs) gave me a strange hope, as if shifting this gunk, with whatever difficulty, would solve all my bronchial problems once and for all. I read, too, about bronchiectasis, but preferred to banish it from my mind.
Eventually, consultation day at the chest clinic arrived. The doctor, a brisk young fellow of Asian appearance but with an Aussie accent, immediately asked to see the CT scans I’d brought with me. He pronounced them ‘rather alarming’ and proclaimed that I wouldn’t have been kept waiting for six weeks like this had he seen them before. The doctor’s note hadn’t prepared him for this. He beckoned me over to look at the scans pegged to the screen – ‘no, no, closer, look… This cloudy mass here, most unusual, and only in one lung. See this lung? That’s how a lung should look. But this, this… Mmmm, I don’t know… we’ll have to have some further tests.’
I already knew this, but again I was somehow reassured. If this cloudy stuff could be removed, my lungs, or rather, my lung, might be returned to its pristine state and I’d be cured.
But it seemed to me that he wasn’t aware of the radiologist’s report. I had it with me, and I mentioned the possibility of aspergillosis. To my surprise the doctor waved away the report as I started rummaging in my bag for it. He looked quite disdainful in fact. ‘We can’t tell what it is, that’s why we’ll need to do a bronchoscopy, and take some material out of the lung..’
He then began to question me on my medical history, especially my history of smoking, just as my Hindmarsh doctor had. When he asked me about how long I’d been having these throaty infections, I talked about my term ‘the wet webs’, which I’d been using since the eighties, but he cut me off, seemingly bored or irritated by this flight of fancy. He asked me about exposure to chemicals or any other potentially damaging agents, but I couldn’t enlighten him. In fact, when I began to tell him about a dodgy, salt-damp-ridden flat I’d rented more than 20 years ago, and which I’d since considered might be a factor in my ill-health, he again cut me off as if it was obviously irrelevant. Finally, he took me through the process of a bronchoscopy and a lung function test, scheduled for a week and a fortnight’s time respectively.
At the end I had to ask, ‘so do you have any real idea what this infection or blockage of the lung might be?’ He shrugged, ‘It could be one of many things. It could be aspergillus. It could be cancer – but I don’t think it’s cancer. The biopsy should clear this up for us.’
It wasn’t really until after this consultation was finished that I looked back on it with some irritation. I was particularly annoyed that this doctor had waved away the radiologist’s report. Why? Was there some rivalry between radiologists and chest clinicians as to the reading and interpretation of CT scans? If so, should there be? Surely radiologists look at these scans day in day out, perhaps over many years. Or – who knows? – maybe this report was by a young radiologist keen to impress, and the clinician had seen too many over-ambitious reports that missed the mark completely. In any case, I’d taken the report seriously, enough to familiarise myself a little more with bronchiectasis, aspergillosis, hilar and mediastinal mass, parenchymal density, and lymphadenopathy. And I don’t think these efforts were wasted. Even after a brief perusal of this report, my Hindmarsh doctor was able to assure me that I didn’t have cancer. But the clinician, having dismissed the report sight unseen, had again raised the cancer spectre. Surely this was highly irresponsible – though I was quite confident that cancer was a non-issue.
So next on the agenda was the bronchoscopy, which from my perspective was a non-event. I arrived at the hospital at about 8.30 and was released around midday. This was my first experience as a hospital patient since an ear operation as an eight-year-old, nearly fifty years ago. I’d been told of the risks, of course, which included pneumothorax or a collapsed lung as the worst case scenario, and I was nervous of hospital infections and the like, but all seemed to go well. In fact I was amazed at the magic of modern anaesthesia, because at one instant I was on an operating table with three medicos about me chatting and faffing about with tubes, and in another instant I was back in the ward, coughing and spluttering just as before, and it seemed only half an hour or so had passed. So I’d both lost and recovered consciousness instantaneously, and surely a whole book could be written about the science involved in this, and if one has been written I’d love to read it.
The aftermath was interesting though. I felt quite chirpy on being given the all clear at about midday, and we had a pleasant meal in the hospital canteen, on a balcony overlooking the botanical gardens. But by the time I got home I was feeling quite drained, and I slept on and off for the next 24 hours. I took several days to recover the old circadian rhythm. Nine days later I was back at the hospital’s thoracic unit having a lung function test, and later in the afternoon I had another consultation at the chest clinic. It was another doctor this time, a tall kindly-seeming young man who appeared to be an intern, from his general sense of unease and uncertainty. He clearly knew nothing about my case, and sat staring at some records on his computer while I waited faux-patiently. Finally he excused himself, saying he needed to consult with his boss. He returned, seemingly a little more sure of himself. He told me, as I’ve already related, that I had damaged airways, probably incurred as a very young child, and this has led to me having regular infections over the years. This would likely continue, because bronchiectasis was a difficult, essentially untreatable condition. I pulled him up on the term, saying I’d done some research on it, to which he replied, ‘Well then you’ll understand that there’s nothing more we can really do.’ I asked then about the white cloudiness in my lung, which I’d hoped could be particularly targeted. He just shrugged, as if to say it was just another one of my regular infections. I took from this that there was no sign of aspergillus after all. ‘What we can do, which should help in the short run, is prescribe for you some’ – and here he mentioned a drug of some sort, which I didn’t catch – ‘which you should take at a half-tab a day for the next three months, and that should clear up any existing bugs in your system. I’ll arrange that with your doctor, and you won’t need to come back here again.’
I felt that I’d been politely, if rather awkwardly, dismissed, and I left the consulting room in something of a daze. I took a wrong turning, and after walking down a winding corridor I found myself suddenly at the entrance to the clinic, having by-passed the reception area where I came in. I stepped outside, vaguely wondering if I was supposed to have paid some money or signed some forms, but I had no desire to turn back.
I felt something like futility, that these past few weeks had taken me nowhere. I had a diagnosis of sorts, but bronchiectasis, I knew, was an often undiagnosed and somewhat neglected condition. There was nothing sexy about it. It wasn’t life-threatening like tuberculosis or pneumonia, though it would probably be the death of me in the long run. It wasn’t of course a disease in itself, rather a facilitator of disease and infection. What frustrated me, as I reflected on the situation over the next few days, was that nobody had been straight enough with me to say ‘you have bronchiectasis, this is your prognosis – within broad parameters – and this is how you might manage your condition in future…’
I’d spoiled myself. I’d been reading one of Oliver Sacks’s recent works, The Mind’s Eye. I’d read Sacks before, and I’d been very impressed with his manner and his reflections on seeing him at Adelaide Writers Week a few years back. But I couldn’t help but notice the difference between his medical practice in good old New York City and my experience in good old Adelaide. It seems that most of Sacks’s patients not only have unusual and trend-setting neurological conditions, they also seem to be overwhelmingly talented musicians, writers, artists or fellow physicians, most of whom seem to end up becoming his BFFs and regular swimming partners. Filthy lucre never gets mentioned, of course, but it’s all a long way from my experience as a nonentity on the national health scheme, where I have to deal with an array of medicos none of whom even know me by name.
Of course I’m lucky that I get to have highly trained doctors anaesthetising me, pulling bits out of my lungs, and using sophisticated machines to light up my chest cavity or to measure my lungs’ functionality, all at very little cost to myself, but in the end there’s a condition I have, barely referred to by my doctors, with is untreatable and largely uninteresting, and I just have to live with it. Of course I should get my flu shots regularly, but no doctor has given me this advice. The fact is, I’ve learned much more about my condition through the internet than through the medical system, and that suggests my future direction. Go to reliable websites, obtain all my own medical records as far as I’m able, and become as self-reliant as is medically possible.
I’m lucky, too, that I don’t feel sick. I have the occasional coughing fit, and a more or less regular cough, but it isn’t painful and it isn’t getting appreciably worse. My situation seems to have stabilised, and I’m able to go to work regularly and do a reasonable job. I do feel tired more than I would like to, but that might be age, or it might be a psychosomatic reaction to the knowledge that I have some kind of blood-loss (i.e. not iron-deficiency) anaemia. In his book The Heretics, Will Storr summarises recent findings about the placebo effect:
A 1998 study by researchers at the University of Hull found that up to 75% of the effect of brand-name antidepressants such as Prozac might be down to placebo; Professor David Wootton of the University of York has written of one estimate that indicates that ‘a third of the good done by modern medicine is attributable to the placebo effect’; while an acknowledged world expert, the University of Turin’s Professor Fabrizio Benedetti, has gone so far as to say that ‘Placebo is ruining the credibility of medicine’.
To me, this is all more fascinating than disturbing, but it’s obvious to me that these psychological effects work both ways – if you’re told that you’re anaemic, and that physical fatigue is one of the symptoms, you’ll surely slow down more than if your anaemia is unknown to you. What’s more I have no idea how anaemic I currently am, just as I have no idea whether my bronchiectasis is severe or mild.
I saw my original Hindmarsh doctor a few days ago, almost two weeks after my final visit to the chest clinic. He hadn’t received any word from the clinic about antibiotic medication, but he had received some kind of interim report from them. To my surprise, there were signs of mycology in the lung, and it seemed they were still in the process of analysing the data, or at least that’s what my doctor surmised from the lack of communication about treatment. On this occasion I grumbled a bit more than I usually do about the slowness of the process towards treatment, and the lack of clear communication about my condition. I asked about medical records, and the doctor was quite happy to facilitate that, though I sense that I’ll have to keep on about it to make it happen. I also mentioned my anaemia, and whether I could have a blood test to see if it was improving or worsening. I also complained of slightly darker and strong-smelling urine, so blood and urine tests were arranged on site immediately. Interestingly, after the blood was taken (and I was surprised by how much was taken out) I walked home – a 15 minute walk – and immediately conked out, falling asleep at about 4pm and waking up at about 11.30 the same night, which again disrupted my sleeping patterns for a while. Yesterday I received a call from reception at Hindmarsh. Apparently some word has been received from the chest clinic, so at last I’m to have some medication, I hope.
So that’s the story so far. Interesting thoughts on perception and reality, though. Having only recently learned about mycology and aspergillus, I became more or less convinced that I was indeed suffering from a fungal infection. I could feel it in my lung. Hard to describe the sensation, but something cold and vaguely furry, spore-like. Of course I knew that the information about aspergillus was infecting my perception, and yet…
And then, at my final consultation at the chest clinic, I was led to believe that there was no aspergillus. I was to take a broad-spectrum antibiotic, not an anti-fungal, and that might or might not clear up the bugs in my system. So what was I to make of my perceptions?
Enough, though, for now, as this blog post has gone on long enough, and I’ve not posted in a long time. There will be more though on this subject, as I’ve been to the doctor again, and have obtained some interesting medical records, and the mycology question is still unresolved.