Cults

An interesting news story today: A video has been leaked of Tom Cruise going on about his views of Scientology. I’ve posted the video below. I find it particularly interesting as it almost makes sense - but not quite.

Like many pseudo-spiritual or pseudo-scientific arguments I have seen, Cruise makes use of similar kinds of general statements to those of conventional religious systems - ‘helping people’, ’solving problems’, ‘linking cultures’ - but without ever going into specifics, or getting into the sort of detail that’s actually quite crucial to understanding the basis of their beliefs. Now, this video could have been edited to make Tom Cruise look foolish, but I believe that it’s been put together like this deliberately by Scientology film-makers.

Why make general statements like this? It’s because people like simple answers to problems., and headlines let us make snap judgements without having to bother about actually learning about an issue. This is why politics works. For example, Ian Pearson - the Science Minister - recently said ‘we have put up investment in UK physics by 13.6%’; it takes a little digging to work out that it’s all eaten up by complications such as FEC, VAT, fixed international subscription limits and so on. But voters care about headlines.

Similarly, when we think about religion it’s easy to pigeonhole people based on headlines about them. Scientology gives more traditional religious beliefs a bad name, because it plays on the headline-grabbing psychology which is hard-wired into our busy, subject-hopping brains. But consider this: if religious and philosophical belief were simple enough to work out in 5 minutes, then people wouldn’t have been arguing about it for thousands of years, which of course they have.

Ask yourself another question. Which book has undeniably had more influence on human history than any other? Obviously, it’s the Bible (or maybe you don’t believe that - but think about what other book has had such an impact). Now, whether or not you believe it’s all claptrap or think it’s good or bad, have you actually read any of it? Before you come to a premature judgement, read up on the subject, so you can make your own mind without headlines. But what do I know? I’m a Virgo and it’s well-known that Virgos don’t believe in astrology.

I’ll leave you with Tom in all his glory in edited highlights below. The full video is here.

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January 16, 2008 | Filed Under Life, Philosophy, Posts, Science | Leave a Comment 

I’m calling my teddy bear Jesus

During the English Civil War iconoclastic Puritans travelled Britain, and between bouts of doing away with Cavaliers, spent their leisure time destroying images, stained glass windows, altar rails and other church paraphernalia, and by this left the churches of England today very different from their more colourful Catholic neighbours over the channel. The difference is so great, and our great English churches so austere, that they have coloured our views on aesthetics, and what churches and domestic buildings look like today - anyone for Dulux white with a hint of pink?

But why did the Puritans wish to destroy the items so venerated by their Roman (or quasi-Roman) opponents? At one level, they wished to return to the supposed simplicity of the early Church, and therefore to eliminate the superstition and idolatry they held that churchgoers were apt to. By destroying images in the manner of Moses destroying those of Aaron, they sought to enforce this view by denying others a focus for their idolatry. But why bother? If such idols have no power, why pay them any attention? But, like Moses who ground up the golden calf and forced the Israelites to drink it, the Puritans were more superstitious than they cared to think of themselves. By wishing to destroy icons, they admitted that icons had power, not only over their enemies, but also over themselves. Paradoxically, an iconoclast is also an idolater.

What does this have to do with teddy bears? If you’ve been reading the news in the last two weeks, you will know that Gillian Gibbons was jailed in Sudan last week for ‘insulting Islam’, and has today been released under special presidential pardon: in actuality, Gibbons’ ‘crime’ was to allow her children to name a toy after the Prophet (PBUH), so it’s still a bit unclear to me how she is culpable for the actions of some under-tens. But in any case, why on earth does the average Muslim care what name a teddy bear has? It seems the average Muslim doesn’t, but there is a vocal minority that appears to think that Gibbons’ actions (whatever they may be) deserve death, a fairly extreme view. Ostensibly, one reason stems from the concept of ‘excessive veneration’, where the excess is calling a toy after the Prophet. However, it seems that Gibbons’ class chose ‘Mohammed’ as many boys the children knew had that name; I’m unconvinced that calling a teddy bear Mohammed is any worse than calling so many children by the same name. From my reading of the Qu’ran, one of the key features is the idea of not raising man up to the same level as God - isn’t this risked in when naming so many children after the Prophet, no matter how illustrious the man?By the way, I’m curious how the BBC comes up with the fact that Mohammed (and its variants) is the second-most popular name for UK babies now. It’s hard to make that out from the National Statistics data (I shall check properly at some point).

Without the excessive veneration issue, what remains is that you have an object named ‘Mohammed’. So, why should anyone care about that? There is the obvious idea that it just an insult, a sort of Golliwog: offensive, especially in our sensitive times, but hardly a death sentence? And anyway, Gibbons looks like a revival of the sort of Victorian gentlewoman adventurer that travelled to Eastern shores in times past, and therefore almost certainly (like myself) an Islamophile of sorts. It seems harsh to ask for the death of a bumbling close friend. All that is left then is that some people really seem to fear an inanimate object with a particular name, as if it could steal some of the power from the object of their veneration. Like the iconoclastic Puritans, this view is virtually animistic, and therefore by its nature opposite to the basic tenets of Islam. In some ways, it has parallels to the nutters who opposed ‘Jerry Springer, the Opera’. I can call these people nutters because they’re Christians, by the way…

But what do I know? Like Gillian Gibbons, I am just a bumbling Brit; I would appreciate some explaining to me what the fuss is all about.

Of course, it could be plain old conspiracy: the whole thing was set up by the school secretary, and then capitalised on by some pressure group. As Shami Chakrabarti has pointed out, there’s no such thing as a spontaneous demonstration.

So, in summary, I’m calling by teddy bear Jesus. I’m taking him to church on Sunday; I hope no-one minds.

(note: the author has strong views on religion. How much does your interpretation of the above opinions depend on whether you think I am atheist, Christian, Muslim, or even Buddhist?)

December 3, 2007 | Filed Under Philosophy, Posts | Leave a Comment 

Decoding Donnie Darko

I watched Donnie Darko again last night - it’s a very interesting movie, which uses a teen-movie basis to explore many interesting themes, including those of destiny and death. However, it has been somewhat of a victim of its own cult success, and many people have written pieces interpreting the story in various ways. More than a few of these interpretations have tried to reconcile the theme of time travel with real scientific theory, whilst others try to explain the surface plot elements themselves - in other words, ‘who does what’ in the movie. I thought it would be interesting in this post to describe some of the symbolic references that abound in the film, and show how their use link the movie to general symbolic themes in Western culture; it is these links that capture the imagination of many viewers, sometimes unconsciously, and are part of what makes the film so compelling for many people.

Links to cultural themes in our society is a well-trodden path in literature and film. One of the most well-known examples is J.R.R. Tolkein’s ‘Lord of the Rings’, which makes use of numerous folk culture themes such as dwarves, elves, wizards and more, and whose narrative is based on medieval and pre-medieval tales from Europe. Tolkein was of course a Professor of Old English, and had at his disposal a large corpus of work from which to derive his stories. More simply, he used what the really rather simple formula tale of good versus evil, whereby a young acolyte is guided by a wise elder, and uses his knowledge to battle and conquer evil. Any student of literature or film will immediately recognise the parallels between this story and any number of modern derivatives. Obvious examples are The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, and Harry Potter. Whilst the individual characters may take on one or more Jungian archetypes, the same archetypes are present in all these stories. These parallels have been pointed out in countless pieces, so I will just summarise the two obvious ones - the apprentice and the teacher:

The point here is not to point out that such parallels exist, or even that one story may be simply derived from another. What’s important to note is that they all call on pre-existing archetypes that are evocative in our culture, and which therefore produce a lure which catches the reader or viewer’s attention.

It is not only characters and archetypes which are used in these stories, which are basically sorts of folk tales. Many elements are also inserted into these stories which have symbolic meaning. Donnie Darko uses many such symbols. First and foremost is the obvious motif of the Rabbit - the ‘Frank’ character - that guides Donnie through his story. The rabbit is a nocturnal creature, and of course in the film Donnie only meets the rabbit at night. In mythology the rabbit is very often associated with the moon, and is why the shapes on the moon’s surface have often been interpreted as a rabbit. The association with the moon links the symbol of the rabbit with the phases of the moon, and the rabbit’s reputation for fertility (like the hare’s) adds to this so that the rabbit comes to symbolise death and rebirth. Easter is based around the ‘death’ during the new moon, and its subsequent rebirth after three days (hence the Christian idea of raising the temple in 3 days) is basically why we have an Easter bunny. Also, the moon dies each morning to be born again in the evening, like the rabbit was once thought to. The rabbit motif clearly then links to the idea in Donnie Darko of death (and hence rebirth?). It is curious that the time that Donnie has to live - or really to learn - during the film is about the length of a lunar cycle, 28 days. It is also worth noting that at the end of the film, Donnie’s youngest sister sits on the aeroplane holding a toy rabbit - this is the same aeroplane that is the operative cause for Donnie’s death.

A secondary rabbit motif is the ‘path to knowledge’, a theme that occurs across many folk stories. Animals are often helpers in folk tales, and in more modern stories the rabbit is often a guide to knowledge. One need only think of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, who guides Alice down the hole and thence into a wider world; in Donnie Darko the rabbit also leads Donnie to a golf course with its own holes. The Alice in Wonderland rabbit motif is basically copied wholesale in the recent film The Matrix, and we can therefore strongly suspect that the same is true in Donnie Darko (whether it is also true in ‘Harvey’ is more tenuous!).

The journey into knowledge parallels the theme of death and rebirth, and the links to Christian practice is clear: physical death and rebirth are linked with spiritual rebirth (this is why converted Christians are often called ‘twice-born’). The first thing that the rabbit says to Donnie is ‘wake up’, linking it to spiritual awakening. By the way, the rabbit also appears in the form of a car (a Volkswagen Rabbit) to guide Gretchen.

Another symbol in the film is that of water. Water, or being underwater, is a symbol of the unconscious, and rising out of the water is related to coming into consciousness in some way. The first act in Genesis (the book, not the band!) is moving over the face of the waters, and the first act that Donnie makes is the releasing of water in the school, symbolising a release from the unconscious. Water is also the sustainer of life, so the release of water may also symbolise the giving of life (physical or spiritual). And of course, water symbolises cleansing and regeneration, hence baptism being both cleansing and a symbolic rising from the unconscious. The rabbit is also often seen next to water in the film, by the way.

At the same time as Donnie releases the water, he embeds an axe into the head of a bronze dog in the school grounds. The dog has an ambiguous role in symbology, often referring to fidelity, but also to ignorance in the sense that the dog follows blindly. The symbolic defeating of the dog can therefore refer to the overcoming of ignorance in the journey into knowledge. This is a symbol that has been used in medieval illustrations, where a knight defeats the dog.

With regard to guidance and knowledge, Donnie Darko makes use of the almost universal motif of the bird spirit guide. Where, you may ask? Roberta Sparrow, of course! Birds are often symbols of higher guidance: we only have to think of the Spirit descending onto Christ in the form of a dove, or the animistic shaman associated with his eagle guide. Roberta Sparrow acts as Donnie’s spirit guide, through her first words (’all living things die alone’) and through her book.

There are plenty of other references in the film, and they are described in many other websites. I will finish with a few of them.

Just one more thought: 24 hours in a day, 24 cans in a crate of beer. Coincidence? You decide…

October 17, 2007 | Filed Under Philosophy, Posts | 10 Comments 

Country music makes you want to kill yourself

This is the abstract from an article published in 1992 in Social Forces, for a study showing that listening to Country music increases your chances of suicide. But then you knew that….

The Effect of Country Music on Suicide
STEVEN STACK, Wayne State University JIM GUNDLACH, Auburn University

Abstract
This article assesses the link between country music and metropolitan suicide rates. Country music is hypothesized to nurture a suicidal mood through its concerns with problems common in the suicidal population, such as marital discord, alcohol abuse, and alienation from work. The results of a multiple regression analysis of 49 metropolitan areas show that the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate. The effect is independent of divorce, southernness, poverty, and gun availability. The existence of a country music subculture is thought to reinforce the link between country music and suicide. Our model explains 51% of the variance in urban white suicide rates.

Sociological work on the relationship between art and society has been largely restricted to speculative, sociohistorical theories that are often mutually opposed. Some theorists see art as creating social structure ( Adorno 1973), while Sorokin ( 1937 ) suggests that society and art are manifested in cyclical autonomous spheres; and still others contend that art is a reflection of social structure ( Albrecht 1954). Little empirical work has been done on the impact of music on social problems. While some research has linked music to criminal behavior ( Singer, Levine & Jou 1990), the relationship between music and suicide remains largely unexplored. Music is not mentioned in reviews of the literature on suicide ( Lester 1983; Stack 1982, 1990b); instead, the impact of art on suicide has been largely restricted to analyses of television movies and soap operas (for a review, see Stack 1990b).

In this article, we explore the link between a particular form of popular music (country music) and metropolitan suicide rates. We contend that the themes found in country music foster a suicidal mood among people already at risk of suicide and that it is thereby associated with a high suicide rate. The effect is buttressed by the country subculture and a link between this subculture and a racial status related to an increased suicide risk.

October 3, 2007 | Filed Under Philosophy, Posts | Leave a Comment 

The case of the missing minister

Jamie and the magic retouchMany of us know the story of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man fingered by the US government as the guy who assassinated John F. Kennedy, and the theory that a photo of him holding Marxist newspapers and a rifle were faked. More recently, another suspected left-winger, James Purnell, has been inserted into an image to make people think he is interested in the NHS. It seems pretty well established that the photo is a fake - even a cursory close-up shows the tell-tale Photoshop jagged edge from an inexperienced cut-and-paste. The exposure is all wrong too, and the composition is good without him and bad with him, but the latter could just be bad photographer (I’m really laying into them today, aren’t I?). The question now seems to be: did he arrange for his post-event inclusion into the photo, or was it just a public-sector publicity section who thought it would do no harm? Whilst it could easily have been the second, it seems that Mr. Purnell has been doing a bit of Orwell. And well he might, since those of a Socialist persuasion have been doctoring history since Socialism was itself invented; something that comes out of the ‘we know best’ ideology that marks out much left-wing thinking (by the way, I am sometimes a left-winger myself).

The sad thing about this event is that it was expected that Purnell would be getting up to this sort of thing. Spin is de rigeur nowadays, and the media are fond of being outraged about it. But hang on a second: how do we know that spin is being perpetrated in the first place? After all, we only learn about these events from the media in the first place. Everything we learn that is not from our own senses must come from someone else, and therefore is subject to their agenda rather than our own: an obvious statement, maybe, but one that bears repeating. When judging such material, therefore, we must use some of our critical faculties. What is the purpose of the story? Why does it matter to the presenter (the journalist or newspaper in this instance) and to the reader (you or I)?

Incentives are a good way to look at this. Generally, there is an incentive for each of the players in this game. Firstly, the NHS want to associate themselves with a rising ministerial star (perhaps something like money or influence will rub off - good luck with that…), so they want to have the photo doctored but not seen to be so. James Purnell clearly wants to be seen as a ‘man of the people’ supporting health care, so he’s in with the NHS - no surprise there if he knew about the doctoring beforehand. But what about the whistleblowing journo? He’s probably just in it for the money, but the guy paying for it (ultimately the newspaper owner) is looking for an angle with which to sell newspapers, but also to bias public opinion to his own personal benefit. It’s well-known that newspapers are generally right-wing since right-wing policies benefit newspaper owners (who therefore influence newspaper content).

But what about you, dear (newspaper) reader? Why did you want to read about it? Perhaps because of the vicarious pleasure gained from seeing someone ‘caught out’. That’s a powerful incentive for buying things: witness those womens’ magazine sections showing picture after picture of celebrities not looking their best (sweat patches, bad hair days, no make-up). People like reading that sort of thing because they feel they have scored points off people they thing are doing better than them in the game. But are they? Think about this game, the one about Purnell and the picture. Who was the winner of that game?

The Purnell story made me think about how hard it is to ascertain any truth about anything you read; so much editing occurs in the media anyway, that it is to be expected that manipulation is to take place. ‘There is no such thing as unbiased history’, as I was told by my history teacher (or did he really say that to me? I might be just saying that). An example of this is rather trivial maybe, but also maybe illustrates some important things, one of which is that you can only really be sure if you are there yourself.

Last Christmas, Daresbury Church was the one featured on the ITV Xmas service, as it had been the previous year. ITV has a commitment to religious programming, it needs a church, Daresbury is well-known because of Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland, is fairly photogenic (with good lighting) and has a similarly photogenic vicar. So far so good. Also, not so surprisingly, with the prospect of being on the telly, quite a few rarely (if ever) seen locals turn up to be the bums on seats in the front rows, plus there are a few actors and singers from ITV to give it a bit of glamour. Katherine Jenkins and Alfie Boe for example turned up and did a turn, and then jetted of just as quickly - fair enough, they’re just in it for the money. Wendi Peters was great, by the way: she really went up in my estimation.

But what were all the politicians doing there? I sat through the service (a bum on a seat!), and then saw it a few days later (’look Mum, there I am!’). And there are the politicos again: David Blunkett, Ann Widdicombe, and Hazel Blears? Hang on a second: Hazel Blears? She wasn’t there at the service, I am sure of that, ‘cos I was there myself (see above). But yet there she is, edited into the footage as if she had been there. It clicked straight away, of course: she had been there earlier in the day, and had done some readings. Presumably, like Purnell, she had another ‘important’ appointment to be at. Now I dislike David Blunkett intensely (a more obvious ‘man on the make’ I can’t think of right now), and Ann Widdicombe is not my cup of tea (although she obviously has convictions) - but at least they turned up. Even the rather starry Jenkins was actually there in the room with us. And the Duchess of Kent sat through all the takes you need to get sufficient footage for what is apparently a continuous service on the telly. If Royalty can turn up and stick it out, why can’t Ms. Blears? A very Stalinist attitude, if you ask me…

Local coverage of this televisual feast was bizarre, and missed the good story above. Instead, our local rag complained about how the event was pre-recorded and edited before transmission. Really? You don’t say! You mean, East Enders isn’t broadcast live from the set? Local journos were ‘outraged’ - a common emotion in newspapers these days, along with ‘fury’ - implying that the reader ought to be outraged too. A little secret - the service was recorded in November… as was the Easter service, recorded a day later and done without all the bums on seats and politicos, probably because it wasn’t on prime time. It’s amazing what you can do just by changing the lighting and taking out the Xmas tree in the corner of the church.

Does all this matter? Does it matter that James Purnell wasn’t really in the photograph? Some might say that it’s all just performance, just presenting a picture designed to satisfy the viewer in some way. But people have a desire for ‘reality’ rather than scripting, because they don’t wish to be manipulated, or at least to think they are not being manipulated. Hence we have the desire for soap operas rather than drama, because it appears ‘more real’, and then to have ‘reality TV’ shows like Big Brother, because they appear unscripted. Wait a minute: you thought they were spontaneous? The recent TV competition voting scandal should teach you otherwise. The only way round this is not to believe anything that’s presented to you as ‘fact’.  It probably isn’t.

Postscript: photo manipulation is getting more sophisticated that just cut-and-paste. Seam carving is entering the mainstream. Now you won’t be able to believe any image you see in the paper.

October 1, 2007 | Filed Under Philosophy, Posts | Leave a Comment 

The nature of fact

The other day at work during an afternoon coffee break, the conversation moved round to the question of how many people you could fit onto the Isle of Wight. There was much heated opinion, with opponents maintaining firmly on one side that you could easily fit the entire population of the world onto that small-but-perfectly-formed island off the South Coast, whilst others just as stridently claiming that you couldn’t; there was no consensus. The topic then shifted onto how many people had ever lived: the oft-quoted statement was made that half the people who had ever lived were alive today, and supported by most people in the room. I wasn’t sure about this, having heard somewhere before that the dead outnumber the living by six to one. I decided to find out something about both of these asserted ‘facts’.

Like any proper scientist should, I did my own calculations about the Isle of Wight. First, an assumption: when trying to fit onto the Isle of Wight, people can’t just stand on each other’s shoulders or anything like that; after all, if you could stand on the shoulders of someone below you, could fit the entire world’s population onto an area the size of a paving stone. That would be a pointless calculation: so there’s only one layer of people. But how much surface area does one person need? I assumed something like 50cm x 30cm: some people are smaller, some bigger, but it’s probably about right (use a tape-measure on yourself to try it out!). Next, what is the surface area of the Isle of Wight? Obviously, I got the information from Wikipedia (answer: 380 sq.km) like I did for the world’s population (6.6 billion). It’s then trivial to work out that you can fit about 2.5 billion people onto the island. We could assume everyone is thin (unlikely these days with our obesity epidemic), and say they need 40cm x 20cm instead. Nope, still not enough space on the island though: only 4.75 billion can fit if you assume they’re this smaller size.

So it isn’t true that the world’s population can fit onto the Isle of Wight. However, you could have fitted everyone who was alive in 1950: the population was only 2.5 billion back then - maybe that’s when this statement was originally made…. But, you can now still easily fit the population of the UK into the 380 sq.km on this island; but I don’t think they could all get onto the pier at Ryde.

What about the next statement, that half of all the people who have ever lived are alive today? Unfortunately, this is also not true: according to an article by the Population Research Bureau, it’s a hard estimate to make (I was a bit lazy so I didn’t do that one myself!), but the total number who have ever lived is way over 25 billion, maybe much more (the PRB suggest 120 billion, which is a lot of people - but see below). So, maybe interestingly, the dead do greatly outnumber the living.

The above two examples are maybe not that interesting in themselves, but they illustrate something often seen, both today and presumably much in the past: that there are plenty of commonly-believed things that just aren’t true. Arguing about people fitting onto the Isle of Wight or how many people have ever lived sounds inconsequential in itself, but there are plenty of so-called facts that have important repercussions in the way people go about their lives.

An important example of damaging misunderstanding is a statement I often hear whenever religion is talked about - particularly about Christianity, and I guess more and more it’s said in when Islam is mentioned. I have lost count of the number of people who, almost as a knee-jerk reaction to hearing the word ‘religion’, state baldly that ‘wars about religion have killed more people than anything else’, or words to that effect. Now, regardless of whether you practice some sort of religion or whether you are an atheist, one should at least try to see whether this statement is true before subscribing to it.

So we ask the question: ‘Is it true?’ Is it true that wars, or other conflicts that are religiously-based, have caused more deaths than any other conflict? I wondered about this question, and I wonder still - but I offer the following information at least which may dent the above assertion. We have reasonable grounds to think that the major wars of the 20th Century, with their ‘advantages’ of mechanisation and modern mass-killing weaponry, have allowed enormous numbers of people to be killed, both on the field and in strategic offensives. It is also generally accepted that more deaths were caused in those 20th-century conflicts than in any previous period in history, in part simply due to there being larger populations of people available to take part in that conflict. For example, The First World War is said to be responsible for the deaths of nine million people, the Second for the deaths of 60 million.

We should also consider the Russian Revolution. Whilst not a ‘war’ between two nations, the Russian Revolution was responsible for the deaths of perhaps more than 2 million people, either killed or from starvation. After that, the Great Purge instigated by Stalin’s regime against its own citizens resulted in at least 1.2 million deaths, and surely many more that have not been documented. Some historians estimate that overall, Stalin was responsible for over 20 million deaths (for example, Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Re-Assessment).

On to Mao and China: the Revolution/Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution - jointly, another testament to the 20th Century. We have death tolls of maybe 2.5 million during the civil war, over 25 million due to the famine brought about partly by the Great Leap Forward, and perhaps more than two million during the Cultural Revolution (although some people dispute these numbers vigorously).

That’s probably enough numbers. But there are some things to note about what’s presented above. Firstly, none of these conflicts have anything whatsoever to do with religion. They were all motivated by strong belief systems of course, but one thing they have in common with each other is that they were all secular movements. World War One was primarily a struggle about imperial power, WW2 a misguided notion about the ethnic superiority of a so-called nation, and the Soviet and Chinese movements were self-consciously anti-religious. Of course, cynics could say that these latter movements were manipulated by the power-seeking aspirations of a few lucky (and obviously able) people - Hitler, Stalin and Mao - but it would be a stretch, to say the least, to suggest for example that Hitler had a Christian frame of mind when he was persecuting and ultimately attempting to eliminate the Jews. So when people say that most deaths from conflict are caused by religion, they are wrong. It isn’t true.

So why are statements of this sort believed uncritically, often without any sort of thought at all? One can think of many such ‘facts’: received wisdom which turns out to be nothing of the sort. Joel Best has written about this phenomenon, which he has termed the ‘mutant statistic’. Simply put, a statement is believed without bothering to think about what it means, if two things about that statement are true:

  1. It requires a bit of consideration to find out if it is true or not.
  2. It reinforces a pre-existing prejudice in the mind of the hearer.

The original statement - above about religious wars being the cause of most deaths - is a perfect example of this. Firstly, it’s quite hard to work out how many people were killed in historical wars, sometimes in part due to the storytellers who documented those battles embellishing those stories to make them sound better; perversely, it sounds better to say some knight ‘killed ten thousand Moors’ than that he only did in a couple. Secondly, we are apt to see the past as being necessarily more primitive, and therefore more superstitious, than us ‘modern folk’. A past filled with pixies and magic must mean that all wars then were motivated by such considerations; the fact that most religions today were born in that ‘primitive’ past just adds weight to the prejudice.

If this is not convincing, Joel Best presents another example which shows how false (and with study, idiotic) statements are accepted at face value by both the media and the public. An article by Sautter in 1995 in a well-known journal made the statement ‘Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled’. Sounds scary, doesn’t it? After all, everyone knows that gun crime is an increasing problem not just in America but over the Western and wider world. The media report lots of scary stories about how guns are used in crime: I saw one myself just last night. And this sort of statement is so scary it’s used by campaigners to bolster their efforts to curb gun ownership, for example here and here. But, it isn’t true. As Best illustrates, imagine if only 1 child was shot dead in 1950. Then double it each year, 2,4,8,16,32,64…. By 1994 you would have 17.6 trillion children shot dead each year - just in America! That’s a lot, about 150 times more people than have ever lived, in fact. As we started out, a little thought (and maths) shows that the statement is actually not just false, but complete rubbish.

So, when you hear or see statements of ‘fact’, ask yourselves three questions. First, is it true? Second, how do they know? But, most importantly, what are they actually saying? You’ll find that under this simple method of cross-examination, many of the things you read in the paper, or hear people say, dissolve and are either patently false or - worse - meaningless. I’ll leave you with an exercise to illustrate this:

‘Eskimos have thirty different words for snow.‘

If you got this far, thanks for reading: I hope you found it interesting.

August 19, 2007 | Filed Under Philosophy, Posts | 3 Comments