Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (31 page)

It might appear to the discerning that Principles V and VI cannot both be true: yet that is the nature of true religion, which cannot be imagined without paradox and contradiction! Read, for example, Rudolph Otto's "The Idea of the Holy."

VII. That the lifelong gratification of idle curiosity must produce all the raptures experienced by the mystics of the Middle Ages.

What indeed is this much jubilated "Scientific Method," if not the promise of some delectation of infinite and perpetual bliss in the discovery, for example, that (Catalan's Conjecture) the Diophantine Equation, xy - uv = 1, has only one non-trivial solution in integers, namely x = 3, y = 2, u = 3; or that the uncovering of counter-examples, if there are any, would require more computer capacity than that presently available over the entire planet!

Alas, that Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Heinrich Suso, Thomas a Kempis, St. John of the Cross, and so many others were not born in our glorious age of scientific faith, so that they might achieve union with the Ultimate Reality through computing 20 million roots of the Reinmann Zeta on the line s = 1 + iy, or through bashing in the brains of a thousand monkeys to learn about head injuries, or through counseling the world for more than half a century that it must find some way of copulating with its mothers to achieve psychological health, or through using the inhabitants of Bikini Atoll as guinea pigs for the study of radiation sickenss, or through elaborating very complex and involuted theories with no experimental basis, no predictive power, and hardly any theoretical purpose, such as string theory in particle physics.

Twenty years of wasted effort in the elaborate gymnastics of string theory must be worth, in the free market, at least a dozen visions of the Virgin Mary in tenth century gold crowns.

VIII. That Science is value-free.

Most of these abominations are justified, sooner or later, by arguments to the effect that Science is unable to determine values. There is, in other words, a limit even to the great powers of the Scientific Method. A book of matches is also value-free; this hardly give us the right to use it for the purposes of burning down someone's house.

The "ultimate benefit" argument, and the "value-free" argument are frequently employed by the same official personages, usually in the same paragraph.
IX. That Science is the highest value.

The metaprinciple that there is no contradiction in contradictory principles, is invoked with a high frequency in all organized religions; and, as a religion, Science is nothing if not organized, perhaps the most highly organized in the history of organized religion. One can well imagine, for example, that the author of this essay, sick unto dying from the gangrene of functional employment, would derive quite a lot of satisfaction and a good income by joining the ranks of Walter Sullivan, James Gleick, Gina Kolata, Isaac Asimov and so on, by writing a science column for some magazine or daily newspaper.

This is indeed true, the trouble being that he is unable to pay homage to the drivel demanded by the Religion of Science, a spiritually emaciated cult worship of such universal acceptance that "science writing," "science proselytizing," and "science worship," are inseparable in the public consciousness.

The Article of Faith which requires us to believe that "Science," as a metaphysic and mass opiate, is the highest and most enduring value, has prevailed over the past two centuries so that it has turned almost all of our schools and colleges, and certainly all of our big universities, into either technical schools or research institutes. Things have changed very little since twelfth-century Sorbonne, when Theology was lord of all, and all other intellectual endeavors had to go begging. It is only the name of the game which is different.

In today's schools, Philosophy has been reduced to an inane obsession with sententious doubt. Letters apologizes for its very existence. There's no money in an English degree, and the teaching of Languages for any profession outside the diplomatic corps has fallen to such a low level that even the pampered scientists of our day are in danger of losing their grasp on the scientific treasures of the past five hundred years, almost all of which were written in Latin and Greek—indeed, scientists in today's America can't even speak a good French, German or Russian, something unimaginable seventy years ago.

Culture is ridiculed with a sorry yawn; mathematicians, physicists,

biologists, or even chemists who imagine themselves on the slashing edge of knowledge will make comments about modern art, music or poetry that a poor lonesome cowboy, far from the centers of learning and art, would be ashamed to utter.

Such is the power of faith.

X. That non-scientific thought is ignorant, superstitious or crazy and merits ridicule and even persecution.

Read Stephen Hawking's Brie] History of Time. His account of the history of Science is factually threadbare - yet quite valuable in presenting the "Standard Model" of European Science: every advance was halted by obscurantist monks and popes who burned Giordano Bruno, silenced Galileo, taught the unlettered that the Earth was flat, and so on.

While not disputing the validity of these charges, it it very clear that the things which Hawking, or Star Trek, or Nova, or The Shape of the World, or Asimov, or Sagan (Carl, not Francoise), or Hofstader, or hosts of others really don't like about the Medieval Church, is the presence of a strong and well-organized competition. This myopic view of history also fails to understand that the kind of world that Science has created for us, and the kind of spiritual desert it wishes all of us to live in, is driving hundreds of thousands, millions of the "ignorant" into the arms of these simplistic, foolish, backward yet in so many ways more spiritually enriching faiths, such as Creationism, which people like Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould waste their time in hating and fearing.

As long as there is a well-entrenched, powerful intellectual Establishment trying to teach all of us that the pointless and sterile accumulations of silly facts has more spiritual merit than the compassion of a Mother Teresa or the courage of a Mahatma Ghandi, the legions of the "ignorant" and, presumably, the "damned," are going to swell.

XI. That anything but the latest theory ("the paradigm") is ignorant, superstitious or crazy and should be ridiculed or even persecuted.

(I am indebted for this example to Dr. Andreas Ehrenfeucht, at the University of Colorado.) We know that the father of the theory of Drifting Continents, Hans Wegner, was ridiculed and ignored throughout most of his scientific career for his belief in this theory.

Imagine today, however, that there is a geologist who for lots of good reasons believes that this theory is false.
He would probably be given much the same treatment that Galileo received, less brutal in its methods, perhaps, but with exactly the same results: a black-listing and a silencing.

XII. That social involvement interferes with pure thought.

Why should the priesthood, the social elite who are carried on the backs of the society like Hindu Brahmans of old in the hoodhahs of elephants, worry themselves about the cow dung that the elephants have to step in? Go to half a dozen science conferences and you will see that the academic scientific world lives in a kind of permanent merry-go-round from lectures to banquets to receptions to luxury hotels to jetliners to grants to awards to citations to publishing contracts to . ..

XIII. That Science is pure thought.

Few words in our vocabulary are quite so impure as the word "pure." The Burmese Buddhist tradition maintains that any person who is so advanced as to have no more than one sexually unclean thought each month is already a very high holy man and should be accorded deep veneration.

How much less can we expect of our modern day Western scientist? How often, even in a single day, does he (most of them being men, but this applies also to women), think of the path of the electron, or the structure of DNA, or the classification of all finite groups, or the hibernation of grizzly bears, without at least one reflection on how much money it can make him, or how many conferences he can travel to with it, or how much flattery his colleagues will give him, or how big his pension is going to be, or how handsome he will look in that photograph in the Encyclopedia Brittanica of the year 2024, or how much closer he is to the Nobel Prize, or how much better his theory is than that of the x, y, z group over in Illinois, or how his children will look up to him, or how bored his wife will be when he explains it to her, or how, even though it has little about it that appears useful in any way, somebody might just, in two hundred years, discover a practical application that will eventually earn him posthumous praise as a benefactor of Mankind.

Of such does the purity of Science consist. It has about the same rating as the purity of the monks in the medieval monasteries, of which we have read so many accounts. We see indeed that the "Credo of Science" is nothing but a long list of delusions on a par with the parting of the Red Sea, the immortal snakes of the Polynesian islands, the bodily ascension of Elijah, the material Ascension of the Virgin, the rebirth of Quetzacoatl, the immortality of the Pharoahs [sic], and the like. It is therefore hardly surprising that the scientific community (apart from the many individual exceptions), has contributed nothing to the advance of civilization beyond its barbarian precursors.

Sigmund Freud
and the
Cover-Up of
"The Aetiology
of Hysteria"

Jonathan Eisen

In 1896, the young psychiatrist Sigmund Freud presented the first major paper he had ever written to his colleagues at Vienna's Society for Psychiatry and Neurology. Freud considered that his paper, entitled "The Aetiology of Hysteria," was of the utmost importance, since it proposed what he believed to be an irrefutable cause for the neuroses suffered by many of his patients. Quite simply, when listening sympathetically to his women patients, Freud had heard that as children they had suffered sexual assaults, and he believed that it was these acts of violence which had led to the victims' mental illness later in life.

The point of the paper was that sexually abused children, many of whom had come from "respectable" middle class homes, displayed significant "hysterias" later on in life—an observation that today would pass as obvious to the point of banality, but something that in 1896 provoked a backlash among Freud's older colleagues.

All the strange conditions under which the incongruous pair continue their love relations—on the one hand the adult, who cannot escape his share in the mutual dependence necessarily entailed by a sexual relationship, and who is at the same time armed with complete authority and the right to punish, and can exchange the one role for the other to the uninhibited satisfaction of his whims, and on the other hand the child, who in his helplessness is at the mercy of this arbitrary use of power, who is prematurely aroused to every kind of sensibility and exposed to every sort of disappointment, and whose exercise of the sexual performances assigned to him is often interrupted by his imperfect control of his natural needs—all these grotesque and yet tragic disparities distinctly mark the later development of the individual and of his neurosis, with countless permanent effects which deserve to be traced in the greatest detail.

In fact, as author and former Freud Archives Director Jeffrey Masson discussed at some length in his controversial bestseller The Assault On Truth: Freud's Suppression Of The Seduction Theory (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1984), the pressure that was brought to bear on Freud was strong enough to make him change his mind completely about the validity of the sexual assault theory. In a dramatic about-face, he formulated his "seduction theory," in which children themselves became the seducers rather than the victims.

Freud's inaugural paper, "The Aetiology of Hysteria" was singled out from all the other papers presented in Vienna in 1896 as the one paper that was not published in the "Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift," the peer journal for the newly forming school of psychoanalysis. Unlike all the other papers delivered, there was no summary and no discussion of Freud's work.

According to Masson, Freud wrote a letter to his close friend Wilhelm Fliess that "A lecture on the aetiology of hysteria at the Psychiatric Society met with an icy reception . . . and from Krafft-Ebing the strange comment: It sounds like a scientific fairy tale. And this after one has demonstrated to them a solution to a more than thousand year old problem, a 'source of the Nile.'"

According to Masson, "The prospect of being ostracized by medical society was negligible in the face of his knowledge that he had discovered an important truth." At this point Freud believed what his patients were telling them, namely that they had been sexually assaulted, usually by their fathers, but sometimes by their mothers, and were living in shame and pain and self-loathing.

... The behaviour of patients while they are reproducing these infantile experiences is in every respect incompatible with the assumption that the scenes are anything less than a reality which is being felt with distress and reproduced with the greatest reluctance.

Masson states that Freud went to some pains to assert his own objectivity and admitted that "he too had to overcome resistances before accepting the unpalatable truth," and was therefore somewhat prepared for his colleagues' negative reaction to his paper.

When the reaction did come it was swift and severe, and conveyed the impression that unless Freud recanted, his future as a psychotherapist would be in jeopardy.

"I am as isolated as you could wish me to be: the word has been given out to abandon me, and a void is forming around me," Freud wrote to Fleiss. And slowly began the transformation that would result in his repudiation of the earlier theory of sexual trauma, to be replaced by the convoluted theory of the infants' fantasy of sexually seducing the parent.

Freud's recantation reads like something out of Stalin's trials of the 1930s when Freud writes of his patients .. .