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tcpipLying isn't a good policy anywhere, unless you're trying to protect yourself from violence. I have no problems whatsoever with that situational ethic being applied. But mass deception, especially when it presented with a degree of academic credibility _really_ annoys me. Such as the falsified data of Cyril Burt, driven by the ideology that intelligence was genetic, the crass nationalism of the French with their supposed "N-Rays" and, in a more contemporary light, the mass and academic lies of Carlos Castaneda.
In the early seventies, whilst those who still had their feet on the ground were concerned about the war in Indonchina, endemic problems in Keynesian economics and the military industrial complex, the new 'fashionable' side of hippiedom had transformed a subculture to a fashion. No longer a politically ineffectual aesthetic avante garde, the movement didn't require any politics at all. Most of the time it required was that you wore your hair long, dressed in bell-bottoms, floral blouses, listened to tapes of whales making love and were kind of vague about "stuff". But most importantly, you had to be spiritual, a cultural relativist, bright-eyed and very naive.
These people were sadly burdened with the knowledge of knowing where their next meal would come from. They weren't psychologically capable enough to actually going to Latin America or other parts of the developing world themselves. They had half-baked ideas about religious anthropology and half-studied ideas of mythology, the sort of thing that could get you through first-year humanities - but certainly no further, or not with any credibility anyway. But they desperately needed some ersatz spiritual outlook for their pitiful existence.
Enter a very clever man, one Carlos Castaneda. Certainly more clever than those who bought his books and amazingly, continued to buy his books even though they are tucked away in the upteenth edition and firmly placed under the section of the bookstore that says "CULT". No, that's not "CULT" as in a movie or popular culture icon that has a small but dedicated group of fans, like 'Star Trek'. A bookshop that labels something "CULT" is actually trying to warn their clients that here is a selection of books that purport to tell the truth when in actual fact they are telling lies.
Whilst it was unpopular to question the wisdom of the "mighty shamam" in the 1970s, in recent years, with a modicum of research, the degree of Castaneda's deception has finally become public. In particular the famous and best selling 'Teachings of Don Juan', supposedly a story of how the young Carlos was initiated into the ways of sorcery in the Yaqui psychedelic cult. Don Juan was followed by no less than nine sequels, including 'Journey to Ixtlan', which the tired anthropological supervisors in UCLA finally accepted as PhD thesis despite his constant failure to provide even the most rudimentary academic analysis, reference lists, archival deposits and even a referee's testimony that he had conducted _any_ fieldwork whatsoever.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with anthropological research in magic-using cultures per se - as long you actually do it. Levi-Strauss spent a good dozen years with the Ge and other magic-using tribes in the Amazon. Evans-Pritchard's famous works displayed the causal logic behind magic-using people. The well-meaning Margaret Mead was able to describe different gender roles in Pacific societies, even if she was a little gullible to stories of group masturbation and lesbian orgies told by the teenaged women. In my opinion, it just proves that they've a healthy imagination. I've even met real witches, genuine crocodile worshippers and had the honour of hand-feeding one of the little beasties. Or _brothers_, I should say.
When actually conducted as serious research, anthropologists have shown how societies with a mythic mode of consciousness, with a model of binary opposites, can interweave vast quantities of cultural knowledge through storytelling without the aid of written records. Not all of which are necessarily true or right of course (or subjectively beautiful for that matter), but compare their ability to remember to our modern mode of consciousness where even grocery shopping is ineffectual unless we have a written list.
Castaneda has probably sold more books than Levi-Strauss, Evans-Pritchard and Margaret Mead put together. There's no questions about the quality of the writing style, although one should draw the line at his own description that it is "immaculate". Self-deification is a common feature among new age pseudo-pagans and faux witches, and Castaneda is no exception. He left his readers with the feeling that they were really on some special path and that from library to the plains it was possible, like Castaneda claimed, to fly, to stop time and even to travel back in time and erase personal history.
Hey, never let the facts get in the way of a good story, OK?
Because here are the facts. All other specialist anthropologists who studied the Yaqui at the time found no evidence that the Yaquis are datura users, as claimed by Castaneda. That's interesting enough. Similarly, Castaneda's claimed experiences with Jimson weed and psilocybin mushrooms have been considered dubious by specialistis in psychedelics. And it gets better: There is absolutely no evidence that Don Juan ever existed, except in the fevered mind of Castaneda and the poor fools who followed his works, and he stories that reportedly came from him bare no resemblance to the Yaqui mythos. Yep, that's the truth of the matter. One best-seller, reprinted goodness knows how many times, nine sequels and a PhD later we discover that the centrepiece character and cultural reprsentation of what is supposed to be a factual account of indigenous magic-use by American Indians is actually a fraud, a hoax, a lie.
It is difficult to determine who Castaneda hates the the most. Did he really hate the new age pagans so much that he spun such an elaborate tale and comfortably retired on the finances? Did he despise the ivory tower world of academia and simply wrote a popular, if false, text to prove that the popular opinion is worthy of a doctorate? Did he even care about the fact that he was lying about an American Indian culture whilst at the same time claiming to be an advocate of their beliefs?
One thing is sure. Like all people who spin elaborate lies, he made a lot of money. Book sales in the millions, published in a seventeen languages, with publishing revenue in the scores of millions. The wages of sin are high indeed, and fools and their money are soon departed.
In his later life Castaneda made all sorts of claims about being brought up in Brazil and Argentina, despite the fact that Time magazine in 1973 did pin down his extact identity as being born and raised in Peru. They even interviewed former schoolfriends. In the 1990's he started working for a corporation called 'Cleargreen', a self-help group which offered (expensive) workshops on "tensegrity", supposedly a modern version of techniques used by ancient Mexican shaman.
He was supposed to have died in 1998. But one can be forgiven for thinking that too, is just another hoax.
In the early seventies, whilst those who still had their feet on the ground were concerned about the war in Indonchina, endemic problems in Keynesian economics and the military industrial complex, the new 'fashionable' side of hippiedom had transformed a subculture to a fashion. No longer a politically ineffectual aesthetic avante garde, the movement didn't require any politics at all. Most of the time it required was that you wore your hair long, dressed in bell-bottoms, floral blouses, listened to tapes of whales making love and were kind of vague about "stuff". But most importantly, you had to be spiritual, a cultural relativist, bright-eyed and very naive.
These people were sadly burdened with the knowledge of knowing where their next meal would come from. They weren't psychologically capable enough to actually going to Latin America or other parts of the developing world themselves. They had half-baked ideas about religious anthropology and half-studied ideas of mythology, the sort of thing that could get you through first-year humanities - but certainly no further, or not with any credibility anyway. But they desperately needed some ersatz spiritual outlook for their pitiful existence.
Enter a very clever man, one Carlos Castaneda. Certainly more clever than those who bought his books and amazingly, continued to buy his books even though they are tucked away in the upteenth edition and firmly placed under the section of the bookstore that says "CULT". No, that's not "CULT" as in a movie or popular culture icon that has a small but dedicated group of fans, like 'Star Trek'. A bookshop that labels something "CULT" is actually trying to warn their clients that here is a selection of books that purport to tell the truth when in actual fact they are telling lies.
Whilst it was unpopular to question the wisdom of the "mighty shamam" in the 1970s, in recent years, with a modicum of research, the degree of Castaneda's deception has finally become public. In particular the famous and best selling 'Teachings of Don Juan', supposedly a story of how the young Carlos was initiated into the ways of sorcery in the Yaqui psychedelic cult. Don Juan was followed by no less than nine sequels, including 'Journey to Ixtlan', which the tired anthropological supervisors in UCLA finally accepted as PhD thesis despite his constant failure to provide even the most rudimentary academic analysis, reference lists, archival deposits and even a referee's testimony that he had conducted _any_ fieldwork whatsoever.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with anthropological research in magic-using cultures per se - as long you actually do it. Levi-Strauss spent a good dozen years with the Ge and other magic-using tribes in the Amazon. Evans-Pritchard's famous works displayed the causal logic behind magic-using people. The well-meaning Margaret Mead was able to describe different gender roles in Pacific societies, even if she was a little gullible to stories of group masturbation and lesbian orgies told by the teenaged women. In my opinion, it just proves that they've a healthy imagination. I've even met real witches, genuine crocodile worshippers and had the honour of hand-feeding one of the little beasties. Or _brothers_, I should say.
When actually conducted as serious research, anthropologists have shown how societies with a mythic mode of consciousness, with a model of binary opposites, can interweave vast quantities of cultural knowledge through storytelling without the aid of written records. Not all of which are necessarily true or right of course (or subjectively beautiful for that matter), but compare their ability to remember to our modern mode of consciousness where even grocery shopping is ineffectual unless we have a written list.
Castaneda has probably sold more books than Levi-Strauss, Evans-Pritchard and Margaret Mead put together. There's no questions about the quality of the writing style, although one should draw the line at his own description that it is "immaculate". Self-deification is a common feature among new age pseudo-pagans and faux witches, and Castaneda is no exception. He left his readers with the feeling that they were really on some special path and that from library to the plains it was possible, like Castaneda claimed, to fly, to stop time and even to travel back in time and erase personal history.
Hey, never let the facts get in the way of a good story, OK?
Because here are the facts. All other specialist anthropologists who studied the Yaqui at the time found no evidence that the Yaquis are datura users, as claimed by Castaneda. That's interesting enough. Similarly, Castaneda's claimed experiences with Jimson weed and psilocybin mushrooms have been considered dubious by specialistis in psychedelics. And it gets better: There is absolutely no evidence that Don Juan ever existed, except in the fevered mind of Castaneda and the poor fools who followed his works, and he stories that reportedly came from him bare no resemblance to the Yaqui mythos. Yep, that's the truth of the matter. One best-seller, reprinted goodness knows how many times, nine sequels and a PhD later we discover that the centrepiece character and cultural reprsentation of what is supposed to be a factual account of indigenous magic-use by American Indians is actually a fraud, a hoax, a lie.
It is difficult to determine who Castaneda hates the the most. Did he really hate the new age pagans so much that he spun such an elaborate tale and comfortably retired on the finances? Did he despise the ivory tower world of academia and simply wrote a popular, if false, text to prove that the popular opinion is worthy of a doctorate? Did he even care about the fact that he was lying about an American Indian culture whilst at the same time claiming to be an advocate of their beliefs?
One thing is sure. Like all people who spin elaborate lies, he made a lot of money. Book sales in the millions, published in a seventeen languages, with publishing revenue in the scores of millions. The wages of sin are high indeed, and fools and their money are soon departed.
In his later life Castaneda made all sorts of claims about being brought up in Brazil and Argentina, despite the fact that Time magazine in 1973 did pin down his extact identity as being born and raised in Peru. They even interviewed former schoolfriends. In the 1990's he started working for a corporation called 'Cleargreen', a self-help group which offered (expensive) workshops on "tensegrity", supposedly a modern version of techniques used by ancient Mexican shaman.
He was supposed to have died in 1998. But one can be forgiven for thinking that too, is just another hoax.
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Re: Spot on
Date: 2003-04-11 12:43 am (UTC)I find it difficult to consider anyone terribly seriously who starts and essay with "I BELIEVE THAT the intellectual capacity of women is on the whole inferior to that of men" and then doesn't even engage in a definition of "intellectual capacity" let alone provide empirical evidence. Mind you, there was a nice excursis on trying to disprove the "Betrand Russel's turkey"* hypothesis...
How Mr. Stokes considers Popper and Lakatos to be "irrationalists" might be worth reading as well. I suspect I would derive about the same amount - but for entirely different reasons - of humour that I get from reading Plato.
* Bertrand Russel's turkey was a deductionist. After three hundred and sixty four days, regardless of weather, regardless of season, regardless of current and domestic affairs the turkey was always fed at 6am in the morning. The turkey boldly proclaimed "I have scientifically deduced that tomorrow I will be fed at 6am!"
The following day was Thanksgiving.
Re: Spot on
Date: 2003-04-11 01:08 am (UTC)I would have thought it was clear enough what he meant by intellectual capacity. And he had empirical evidence -- the lack of comparable levels of intellectual output. Now, you can claim all sorts of reasons why that might not be fair basis to draw the conclusion he did, but it is evidence.
The strongest basis to criticise the essay is that he doesn't consider properly the implications if one gender has a flatter bell curve than the other (the 'more male geniuses AND more male morons' hypothesis).
Re: Spot on
Date: 2003-04-12 05:09 pm (UTC)Ah, _that_ was his evidence. I just thought I dispute over conditional reasoning. I mean if it he had said "I believe that women produce less articles in the journals of higher education institutions", well that would have been (a) analytically precise and (b) empirically testable. As it was he didn't really describe what he meant by 'intellectual' and despite some attempt didn't really make the difference between intellectual capacity and intellectual output (which is a little like the difference between kinetic and potential energy).
Re: Spot on
Date: 2003-04-13 12:03 am (UTC)Historical endurance he would take as a roughly OK filter indicating quality.
And his response to the 'output =/= capacity' point would be of course it doesn't, but it is the best indicator we have. Hence also his point about the contrast between the output of monasteries and the output of convents.
You can, of course, claim that output is no indicator of capacity but then the question is what indicator of capacity do you have left?
I suspect one will be left with the claim that intellectual output is a particularly fragile thing, easily deterred. Which is no small claim in itself.