Contemplative wonder and limitless scientific knowledge – at odds?

The Face to Faith commentary section in today’s Guardian contains this article, by Mark Vernon, a priest turned agnostic journalist and author of Atheism: Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life.

Vernon argues that if we view scientific knowledge as being limitless in its scope, we are eroding our ability to engage in “contemplative wonder” at things which science cannot explain.

He draws a distinction between contemplative and “instrumental” wonder: the instrumental variety is the sort of wonder we might feel when solving a puzzle, a wonder that fires a desire to see the puzzle solved; the contemplative variety is the wonder “which does not undo, but lets be” – this type of wonder is the type our ancestors might have felt on seeing an approaching storm: an awestruck sense of connectedness between human beings, the natural world and the divine.

Having no problem with either type of wonder, one may be forgiven for asking what all the fuss is about. It turns out that Vernon is worried that our obsession with the instrumental type of wonder means that nothing is left sacred. There are some things, he asserts, that are beyond the comprehension of science: “consciousness, morality and existence itself” he gives as examples.

Apparently, the artistic, religious and moral imagination are well-equipped to ponder these matters. This leaves one thinking that the effect of Vernon’s assertions about the nature of contemplative wonder is to set up a series of intellectual “no-go” areas where science cannot and should not probe.

The examples he gives of consciousness and morality in particular are areas where science is just starting to have the ability to explore. There’s no problem with the idea of contemplating something “as it is” without wishing to probe any further, but seeking after a particular area of knowledge should not be prohibited simply because someone thinks it ought to be “sacred”.

Auguste Comte said that mankind would never know the nature of the stars shortly before the invention of the spectroscope which yielded a treasure trove of information about their structure. Although he didn’t make a moral case for not inquiring as to their nature, where would humanity’s knowledge of astronomy be if everybody had believed him and turned their attentions elsewhere?

Vernon’s remark about contemplative wonder being something which “does not undo but lets be” sounds a little like Tolkien saying “He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom”. Although in the case of a computer it might well be a bad idea to trash it in order to find out how it works, in particle physics it is more or less the only way that progress can be made.

If we set up arbitrary barriers to knowledge on the grounds that some things must be sacred, we risk depriving ourselves of a valuable insight into the human condition. A life without meaning is indeed an impoverished one, but there’s absolutely no reason why we can’t create our own meaning.

Postmodernism

It’s hard to take seriously a subject where one of its foremost exponents equates the penis with the square root of minus one, but this is what I have tried to do with post-modernism.

Struck by the question “What does post-modernism actually mean?” and concerned at my lack of knowledge of the meaning of the terms “jouissance”, and the much-used but little explained “deconstruction”, I bought a popular introduction to the subject by Appignanesi and Garratt: Postmodernism, A Graphic Guide to Cutting-Edge Thinking.

Nearly two hundred pages later, I was none the wiser. I still couldn’t give a quick definition of the word “post-modernism”, and I suspect that that is the way its proponents intend it to be. Fortunately, Wikipedia comes to the rescue saying that post-modernism “tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or interreferentiality”.

This is putting it politely, throughout the book, one has to fight one’s way through passages like:

“The male child resolves his Oedipal “murderous” conflict with the father by identifying with his Phallic Power. He can do this because he possesses a “signifier” – his penis – which in the Signified realm represents the Phallus or Sexual Power. The position of power in language is the phallus which imposes the Symbolic order.”

Exactly what this is supposed to mean is anyone’s guess. Signifiers were used earlier in the book in the context of language, and the Freudian idea of the penis as a symbol of power is a familiar, if discredited idea from psychoanalysis. But here the two seem to have been thrown together without any regard for meaning, or even coherence. The definition above comes to our rescue: post-modernism embodies lots of contradiction and ambiguity.

Another trait of post-modernist thinking is a reaction to the rationality of the sciences, and the notion that, at heart, science is merely a “narrative”, a social construct, or a myth. On page 109 we find that “Critiques of science… have attacked [it] for its notion of truth and rationality as well as the alleged objectivity of the scientific method. All this criticism has established that science is a social process, that scientific method is little short of a myth, that scientific knowledge is in fact manufactured.”

Strange to find then, that in common with other dubious disciplines, post-modernism seems to yearn for the imprimatur of science to lend it an air of respectability. The authors point to several theories and concepts in science which they seem to think support their ideas, but their explanations contain a number of errors which I find disconcerting: enough to make me think that the authors have not themselves understood what they are trying to explain. It is also unclear exactly why science supports post-modernist thought.

For example on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: “it states that there is always uncertainty in simultaneous measurements of the position of a particle”. The uncertainty principle actually says that if you try and measure the position and momentum of a particle, you will find that the more certain you are of the position of the particle, the more uncertain you are of its momentum, and vice-versa. Note to lay readers: in this context momentum can usefully be thought of as the particle’s speed in a particular direction.

On Theories of Everything: “we discover that the atom not only consists of protons, neutrons and electrons, but all varieties of gluons, charms, quarks”. Although quarks are a constituent of protons and neutrons, “charms” are not constituents of anything; charm is the somewhat whimsical name for a property of one particular type of quark, the charm quark, which in any case does not form part of the everyday matter we are familiar with.

In science or mathematics, a person whose writing betrays a serious misunderstanding of the subject he is talking about may be safely ignored. The chances of him establishing new knowledge or manipulating existing knowledge in a meaningful way are vanishingly small.

However, in post-modernist writing, this stricture is clearly not important: a person who has not understood an important component of the idea he is trying to establish can continue his outpourings. Here is the French cultural theorist and post-modern philosopher Jean Baudrillard talking about the first Gulf War:

“It is a sign that the space of the event has become a hyperspace with multiple refractivity, and that the space of war has become definitively non-Euclidean” – Baudrillard 1995 p. 50

One wonders what a Euclidean space of war would look like. A flat plane extending to infinity in every direction? The idea of a hyperspace with multiple refractivity is a meaningless concept in physics. The quotation above I took from Sokal and Bricmont’s excellent book, Intellectual Impostures, which deals with the abuse of scientific concepts by post-modern thinkers.

Another idea in post-modernism is that of deconstruction. Introduced by another French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, a definition of exactly what the term means is hard to come by. The closest one seems to be able to come is that it is a way of showing how a text subverts its own meaning:

“the term ‘deconstruction’ refers in the first instance to the way in which the ‘accidental’ features of a text can be seen as betraying, subverting, its purportedly ‘essential’ message” (Rorty 1995)

Though quite why this is important is not made clear. It’s also just about impossible to get an example of deconstruction in action.

I’m reminded of a philosophy lesson attended by the scientist Richard Feynmann, recounted in his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynmann. The discussion in the class was all about “essential objects”, which were being spoken of in a technical way. These were extremely important to the argument, and Feynmann, who was only there to observe, was asked by the class instructor if, being a physicist, he thought an electron was an essential object.

To clarify the concept in his head, Feynmann responded with a question of his own: is a brick an essential object? To his enormous surprise, no one could agree on whether or not a brick fell into the category of essential object. Feynmann’s point was that it was not surprising they got nowhere when they couldn’t even agree on basic definitions.

Much the same thing seems to happen with post-modernist thought: not only is it difficult to follow the arguments, there are also no accepted definitions of what their terms of reference actually mean. The resulting scope for confusion is enormous. I feel sorry for people stuck on a cultural studies course, or another course with high post-modernist content. They can take comfort in the thought that when it comes to writing their dissertations, there exist post-modernist document writing generators on the internet that can produce a lengthy essay, with footnotes, in seconds. Here’s one for example.

And I still couldn’t give a definition of what post-modernism means, although jouissance is supposed to mean jollity or merriment. And the person who equated his penis with the square root of minus one was Jacques Lacan.

Gwyneth Paltrow and George Orwell

A recent reading of George Orwell’s 1946 essay “How the Poor Die” brought back memories of the 2004 photograph of Gwyneth Paltrow at a New York film premiere.

Gwyneth was pictured sporting half a dozen circular bruises on her back, which were widely believed to have been the result of a treatment called “cupping”. Cupping is now described as an alternative therapy, part of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

The treatment involves reducing the pressure inside a cup by heating it, and then quickly applying the inverted cup to the skin. The sucking effect this produces is the reason for the bruising. This therapy is often used to treat muscular aches, frozen shoulder, and conditions which affect the chest, such as colds, flu and pneumonia.

There is a variant on this technique, wet cupping, in which the practitioner punctures the skin before applying the cup. Blood is then sucked out of the wound by the cupping process. This technique recently featured on the BBC programme, Michael Palin’s New Europe, and is believed to remove toxins by its advocates.

As with all traditional Chinese treatments, the aim is to unblock and restore the flow of Qi (Chi) around the body. Qi is variously described as a flow of “energy” around the body, or as a “life-force”, which if blocked can cause the signs and symptoms of illness. Qi is a metaphysical concept rather than a scientific one, and as such, its existence can be neither proved nor disproved. With the salutary example of the invisible beer pixie with inaudible hiccups in my garden shed to guide us, it is important to remember that being unable to prove or disprove something is no reason to suppose that its existence is probable.

Cupping as a treatment for illness is not unique to traditional Chinese medicine. Indeed, it was used by the ancient Greeks in the fourth century BC, who believed that the body is filled with four basic substances (humours) which are in balance when the body is healthy, and in imbalance when the body was unwell. Cupping was one of many methods used to try to “rebalance” these humours. The technique has a long and venerable history in Europe, but had died out in Britain in the late nineteenth century: George Eliot, writing in the 1860’s, pokes fun in her novel Middlemarch at provincial doctors who clung to the humoral notions of the ancient Greek, Galen.

George Orwell underwent this remedy involuntarily whilst being treated for pneumonia in a Paris hospital. He writes:

As I lay down I saw on a bed nearly opposite me a small, round-shouldered, sandy-haired man sitting half naked while a doctor and a student performed some strange operation on him. First the doctor produced from his black bag a dozen small glasses like wine glasses, then the student burned a match inside each glass to exhaust the air, then the glass was popped on to the man’s back or chest and the vacuum drew up a huge yellow blister. Only after some moments did I realize what they were doing to him. It was something called cupping, a treatment which you can read about in old medical text-books but which till then I had vaguely thought of as one of those things they do to horses.

The cold air outside had probably lowered my temperature, and I watched this barbarous remedy with detachment and even a certain amount of amusement. The next moment, however, the doctor and the student came across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without a word began applying the same set of glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few feeble protests that I uttered got no more response than if I had been an animal. I was very much impressed by the impersonal way in which the two men started on me. I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to you or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you. They only put on six glasses in my case, but after doing so they scarified the blisters and applied the glasses again. Each glass now drew about a dessert-spoonful of dark-coloured blood. As I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I reflected that now at least they would leave me alone.

What struck me about the article was Orwell’s astonishment that such a treatment still existed. He clearly felt it ought to belong to a previous century, and linked its use explicitly to ignorance and poverty in his essay that refers to events that took place in 1929. It’s alarming that 75 years later, there’s such a resurgence of irrational belief that this “barbarous remedy” can be undergone by a rich, well-educated celebrity, and be worn as a token of open-mindedness to alternative medicine.

Is the structure of water different after homeopathic dilution and succussion?

Homeopaths have long been searching for a possible mechanism of action for their remedies, even though they lack that most basic prerequisite for an effective medicine: evidence that it works better than a placebo. In the last twenty years, homeopaths have come to focus on something called “the memory of water”, as being a likely candidate for this mechanism. Briefly, the story is as follows:

Homeopathy is supposed to work on the principle of “like cures like”. Its founder, Samuel Hahnemann, convinced himself of this during his research into the properties of cinchona bark, a potent source of quinine. Quinine was, and is, widely used for the treatment of malaria, and Hahnemann discovered that ingesting large doses of it produced malaria-like symptoms in a healthy person. This led him to believe that what caused symptoms of a disease in a healthy person, could also be used to cure a person suffering from that same disease: “like cures like”.

The trouble was that the doses of the substance that Hahnemann used to produce the said symptoms were so high as to be positively toxic. He therefore decided to work with dilutions of the substances he was testing. He soon discovered another curious thing: the substances, when prepared using a method that involved vigorous shaking (which he called “succussion”) of the substance between dilutions, were just as good at producing symptoms, although just as curiously, no-one else was ever able to replicate the effect. Bizarrely, Hahnemann proposed that, when diluted, the original substance was effective as a treatment against the disease whose symptoms it produced in a healthy person; moreover, the more the substance was diluted, the more potent the effect!

Hahnemann was working in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and knew nothing about the molecular basis of chemistry. He can thus be forgiven for claiming increased potency with increased dilution. Nowadays, we know that the dilutions that he used were so high as to make it improbable that a single molecule of the original substance remained in the water. We therefore have no excuse for claiming anything other than that homeopathic remedies are indistinguishable from plain old water.

Such minor considerations as these have not shaken homeopaths from their convictions: starting in the 1980s with French immunologist Jacques Benveniste and continuing through to the 21st century with the work of Madeleine Ennis in Belfast and Louis Rey in Paris, homeopathy proponents have tried to show that water somehow retains a “memory” of the substances that were once dissolved in it. This memory, they say, accounts for the supposed therapeutic effect.

Benveniste started it all with a paper published in the journal Nature in 1988. His team exposed human basophils (a type of white blood cell that can be stimulated to secrete histamine, a chemical involved in allergic reactions) to solutions of water that had once contained human antibodies, but were now diluted to the extent that not a single molecule of anything once dissolved in it could remain. Amazingly, the basophils responded by secreting histamine, as they would have done if the antibodies had actually been present. More intriguingly, the effect only worked when the solution was shaken violently, a la homeopathic succussion. The basophils had also been exposed to water that had never contained human antibodies, and when this happened, they did not release histamine.

Benveniste published his paper in Nature, who sent a team to investigate his work. The team discovered that, in the original experiments, the experimenters had known which solutions had once contained antibodies and which had only contained pure water. When the experiment was repeated in such a way that the experimenters did not know which solution was which, the effect disappeared. Benveniste was forced to retract his paper. His reputation was destroyed, not so much by this experiment, but by his refusal to accept that there was no such memory of water, and by his later claims, which became increasingly odd, and which culminated in a 1997 paper stating that the effect could be transmitted over telephone lines.

The idea, once ignited, refused to go away. In 2003, the Swiss chemist, Louis Rey published a paper in Physica A, a reputable journal specialising in statistical mechanics. Rey was using the phenomenon of thermoluminescence to study the structure of solids. The technique involves bombarding a cold sample with radiation, warming it up, and analysing the light emitted, which reveals something of the structure of the sample.

Rey diluted solutions of sodium and lithium chloride to homeopathic levels (probably no molecules of the original substance remained), succussed them, flooded them with radiation, and warmed them up. He noticed that the thermoluminescence peaks were characteristic of the original substances that were dissolved in the water, even though the original substances were long diluted out of the solution. His interpretation was that the networks of hydrogen bonds in the samples were different, retaining thus a “memory” of the substance that was originally dissolved in them.

Unfortunately, it seems no-one has yet replicated Rey’s experiment to show that such an effect exists. Other experts in the field of hydrogen bonds in water are unconvinced by his methodology, and given the known problems due to the experimenter effect with many other such attempts to show that water has a memory, one would not be optimistic about an early resolution to the issue. I have no reason to doubt Rey’s integrity, but the example of Jan Hendrik Schon should suffice to warn us that unique results from one person or group should be treated with caution.

Society of Homeopathy

The previous article, written by the author of the quackometer website mentions that at least one homeopath affiliated to the Northampton-based Society of Homeopaths has claimed that homeopathy is efficacious against a number of named diseases like asthma. This appears to violate section 48 of the Society’s own Code of Ethics, (they’re not supposed to advertise , explicitly or implicitly that homeopathy can cure “named diseases”) although there may be some legal argument as to the whether a statement of efficacy is the same as claiming a cure.

Nevertheless, it’s not hard to find practitioners on the membership roll who do make such claims. For example, the claim by homeopath Helen Bewers, at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/nick.bewers/About%20Me.htm
on the “About Me” page of her website that she became interested in homeopathy after her daughter was “treated by a professional homeopath for asthma and successfully cured”?

Would this fall into the category of “advertising [that] expressly or implicitly claims to cure named diseases.”? It’s on the website advertising her practice, albeit not in the main section. Looked at from the perspective of a parent seeking an alternative treatment for an asthmatic child, it’s hard not to conclude that the homeopath is claiming that a cure is possible, and has happened. Where does that place the Society’s enforcement of its Code of Ethics?

The Gentle Art of Homeopathic Killing

Below is a reproduction of the full text of an article on the Quackometer blog, part of a website where, among other things, you can enter the web address of a site you suspect of making unproven claims, and it comes back with the likelihood that the site contains quackery. I particularly like the use of the “canard” as a unit of measurement.

The author of this blog posted an article about the Society of Homeopaths’ reluctance to deal with a proportion of its members who continue to promote the dangerous and untrue idea that homeopathy is effective against malaria.

The Society of Homeopaths responded with legal threats which have forced him to remove the article from his blog. On the grounds that this is a moral outrage, I include the text of his article below.

The Gentle Art of Homeopathic Killing

The Society of Homeopaths (SoH) are a shambles and a bad joke. It is now over a year since Sense about Science, Simon Singh and the BBC Newsnight programme exposed how it is common practice for high street homeopaths to tell customers that their magic pills can prevent malaria. The Society of Homeopaths have done diddly-squat to stamp out this dangerous practice apart from issue a few ambiguously weasel-worded press statements.

The SoH has a code of practice, but my feeling is that this is just a smokescreen and is widely flouted and that the Society do not care about this. If this is true, then the code of practice is nothing more than a thin veneer used to give authority and credibility to its deluded members. It does nothing more than fool the public into thinking they are dealing with a regulated professional.

As a quick test, I picked a random homeopath with a web site from the SoH register to see if they flouted a couple of important rules:

48 • Advertising shall not contain claims of superiority.
• No advertising may be used which expressly or implicitly claims to cure named diseases.

72 To avoid making claims (whether explicit or implied; orally or in writing) implying cure of any named disease.

The homeopath I picked on is called Julia Wilson and runs a practice from the Leicestershire town of Market Harborough. What I found rather shocked and angered me.

Straight away, we find that Julia M Wilson LCHE, RSHom specialises in asthma and works at a clinic that says,

Many illnesses and disease can be successfully treated using homeopathy, including arthritis, asthma, digestive disorders, emotional and behavioural difficulties, headaches, infertility, skin and sleep problems.

Well, there are a number of named diseases there to start off. She also gives a leaflet that advertises her asthma clinic. The advertising leaflet says,

Conventional medicine is at a loss when it comes to understanding the origin of allergies. … The best that medical research can do is try to keep the symptoms under control. Homeopathy is different, it seeks to address the triggers for asthma and eczema. It is a safe, drug free approach that helps alleviate the flaring of skin and tightening of lungs…

Now, despite the usual homeopathic contradiction of claiming to treat causes not symptoms and then in the next breath saying it can alleviate symptoms, the advert is clearly in breach of the above rule 47 on advertising as it implicitly claims superiority over real medicine and names a disease.

Asthma is estimated to be responsible for 1,500 deaths and 74,000 emergency hospital admissions in the UK each year. It is not a trivial illness that sugar pills ought to be anywhere near. The Cochrane Review says the following about the evidence for asthma and homeopathy,

The review of trials found that the type of homeopathy varied between the studies, that the study designs used in the trials were varied and that no strong evidence existed that usual forms of homeopathy for asthma are effective.

This is not a surprise given that homeopathy is just a ritualised placebo. Hopefully, most parents attending this clinic will have the good sense to go to a real accident and emergency unit in the event of a severe attack and consult their GP about real management of the illness. I would hope that Julia does little harm here.

However, a little more research on her site reveals much more serious concerns. She says on her site that ’she worked in Kenya teaching homeopathy at a college in Nairobi and supporting graduates to set up their own clinics’. Now, we have seen what homeopaths do in Kenya before. It is not treating a little stress and the odd headache. Free from strong UK legislation, these missionary homeopaths make the boldest claims about the deadliest diseases.

A bit of web research shows where Julia was working (picture above). The Abha Light Foundation is a registered NGO in Kenya. It takes mobile homeopathy clinics through the slums of Nairobi and surrounding villages. Its stated aim is to,

introduce Homeopathy and natural medicines as a method of managing HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria in Kenya.

I must admit, I had to pause for breath after reading that. The clinic sells its own homeopathic remedies for ‘treating’ various lethal diseases. Its MalariaX potion,

is a homeopathic preparation for prevention of malaria and treatment of malaria. Suitable for children. For prevention. Only 1 pill each week before entering, during and after leaving malaria risk areas. For treatment. Take 1 pill every 1-3 hours during a malaria attack.

This is nothing short of being totally outrageous. It is a murderous delusion. David Colquhoun has been writing about this wicked scam recently and it is well worth following his blog on the issue.

Let’s remind ourselves what one of the most senior and respected homeopaths in the UK, Dr Peter Fisher of the London Homeopathic Hospital, has to say on this matter.

there is absolutely no reason to think that homeopathy works to prevent malaria and you won’t find that in any textbook or journal of homeopathy so people will get malaria, people may even die of malaria if they follow this advice.

Malaria is a huge killer in Kenya. It is the biggest killer of children under five. The problem is so huge that the reintroduction of DDT is considered as a proven way of reducing deaths. Magic sugar pills and water drops will do nothing. Many of the poorest in Kenya cannot afford real anti-malaria medicine, but offering them insane nonsense as a substitute will not help anyone.

Ironically, the WHO has issued a press release today on cheap ways of reducing child and adult mortality due to malaria. Their trials, conducted in Kenya, of using cheap mosquito nets soaked in insecticide have reduced child deaths by 44% over two years. It says that issuing these nets be the ‘immediate priority’ to governments with a malaria problem. No mention of homeopathy. These results were arrived at by careful trials and observation. Science. We now know that nets work. A lifesaving net costs $5. A bottle of useless homeopathic crap costs $4.50. Both are large amounts for a poor Kenyan, but is their life really worth the 50c saving?

I am sure we are going to hear the usual homeopath bleat that this is just a campaign by Big Pharma to discredit unpatentable homeopathic remedies. Are we to add to the conspiracy Big Net manufacturers too?

It amazes me that to add to all the list of ills and injustices that our rich nations impose on the poor of the world, we have to add the widespread export of our bourgeois and lethal healing fantasies. To make a strong point: if we can introduce laws that allow the arrest of sex tourists on their return to the UK, can we not charge people who travel to Africa to indulge their dangerous healing delusions?

At the very least, we could expect the Society of Homeopaths to try to stamp out this wicked practice? Could we?

Labels: homeopathy

posted by Le Canard Noir at 6:37 PM