Yo Luddites! Here is something for you to read.

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The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment Was Hijacked and How We Can Reclaim

It

By Dan Hind

Verso, 2007

Hardback, 224 pages, RRP GBP14.99, available from www.amazon.com/co.uk

Review by

Those who engage in environmental activism will be all too familiar

with being dismissed as 'Luddites', 'anti-science', and 'irrational'. One

of the shrillest promoters of such a view is the pro-GM British peer

Lord Dick Taverne. In his book, The March of Unreason, he claims that

'the Enlightenment' is in danger of unravelling under the onslaught of

'eco-fundamentalism'. Taverne is backed by a powerful lobby of media

commentators, politicians, and intellectuals all too ready to assert that

Western science and rationality are under threat from forces of darkness

as diverse as religious believers, postmodernists, organic farmers, New

Agers and the practitioners of any and every kind of alternative

medicine.

The gist of Dan Hind's book The Threat to Reason is that there's a

problem with such attempts to defend the truth: they aren't true. Hind

takes to task a group of prominent commentators who have exaggerated the

threat posed by the so-called forces of unreason. These commentators,

says Hind, distract us from much more serious threats to an open

democratic society.

The chief threats to reason, according to Hind, are not foreign

extremists or homeopaths: they reside in our state and corporate institutions.

They manipulate information to promote neoliberal market values and to

maintain a permanent War on Terror, which Hind terms a 'well-organized

fraud' and a 'piece of enchantment'. Their practices have operated

against the public interest and have provided security only to the richest

people, who have benefited from a massive transfer of wealth. The rest

of the public are fed a carefully prepared diet of lies that prevents

them from making informed decisions about the direction society should

take. Informed insiders who would prefer to tell the truth to the

public, and who therefore have a genuine claim on Enlightenment values, are

threatened into silence. Should that fail, they are ridiculed,

vilified, or deprived of their livelihood.

Hind cites the example of the painkiller Vioxx, which caused tens of

thousands of heart attacks before Merck voluntarily withdrew the drug in

2004. At a Senate hearing that year, it emerged that the US Food and

Drug Administration approved the drug in the knowledge that it carried an

increased risk of heart attack and stroke. Graham, an FDA

scientist, co-authored a 2004 report on Vioxx that estimated that between

88,000 and 139,000 Americans had heart attacks and strokes as a result of

taking Vioxx and that between 26,000 and 55,000 of them died. As Hind

points out, practitioners of alternative medicine, those supposed

enemies of reason, have a somewhat better safety record.

Far from welcoming Graham's findings, as we would expect from true

adherents of the Enlightenment, the FDA connived with industry to continue

to keep the risks from public scrutiny. Graham told the Senate, 'I was

pressured to change my conclusions and recommendations'. In the same

month that Graham's report was completed, the FDA announced it had

approved Vioxx for children with rheumatoid arthritis. A senior manager from

the Office of Drug Safety labeled Graham's Vioxx study a 'scientific

rumour'. Even after the drug was withdrawn, the FDA tried to discredit

Graham in the eyes of the media and the Senate. Graham does not buy the

conclusion that Vioxx was an unfortunate lapse in an otherwise adequate

system. He said, 'I would argue that the FDA, as currently configured,

is incapable of protecting America against another Vioxx. We are

virtually defenceless.'

Readers of GM Watch's bulletins will recognize the secrecy, lies, and

persecution of truth-tellers that characterize the institutions of those

who would claim a monopoly on Enlightenment values. In the light of

these commentators' regular assaults on 'irrational' religion and

spirituality, it is interesting to note that Graham has credited his Catholic

faith with playing a part in his decision to risk his career in going

public with his findings.

And as Hind points out, Graham is far from being the only scientist who

finds no contradiction between his scientific knowledge and his

religious convictions. This reviewer would add that scientists with religious

faith are probably as numerous as alternative practitioners and

organic farmers who follow scientific method. Scientific method, after all,

simply means collecting data through observation and experimentation,

and the formulation and testing of hypotheses. It is an expected part of

scientific method that results will be openly shared, so that other

researchers can challenge and build on each other's findings.

If one accepts this definition of scientific method, then government

agencies like the FDA and the corporations they protect are the opponents

of science. Their actions, however, as Hind notes, are not irrational;

they are utterly rational. They are calculated to maximize profits to

shareholders. This is the sole purpose of a corporation and one that it

is legally bound to pursue, by whatever means.

But then the real battle, Hind says, was never between the rational

(good) and the irrational (bad). Attempts to portray it as such are merely

'a branch of the entertainment business, a kind of 'Folk

Enlightenment'.' The real battle is between what he calls the Occult

Enlightenment

and the Open Enlightenment. The Occult Enlightenment is 'the state's

[presumably also the corporations'] secret quest for total knowledge under

conditions of perfect secrecy'. Its opponent, the Open Enlightenment,

is 'a more faltering, but wholly human, attempt to achieve a more

universal understanding and so to make another world possible'.

This brings us back to the role of science. Polemicists of the 'Folk

Enlightenment' - like Taverne - are, of course, not interested in

science in the sense of an open-minded public endeavour to understand and

explore diverse possibilities. They seek rather to employ it as a source

of unquestionable authority that they can use to rubber stamp a pre-set

agenda. This is why Hind writes, 'Science, not theology, has become the

arena in which we must fight for the victory of Enlightenment, since

it is through their claims to rationality and scientific understanding

that our guardians bind us in obedience to the established order.'

Hind concludes that we, the public, have to reclaim the idea of the

Enlightenment from those who have hijacked it for their own ends. This

will not be easy, as for the most part, they pay our salaries. He proposes

that we consciously make the distinction between our work on behalf of

institutions that require us to lie and deceive, and what the

eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant called 'the public use of

one's reason ... as a scholar before the reading public'. We must

become, for some part of our time, disinterested researchers into truth,

perhaps in the field of our individual expertise. Doctors, for example, can

research public health issues. A critical mass of such scholars,

connected by the internet, may be the best hope we have of enabling us to

distinguish truth from the fictions in which we have become enmeshed.

is an editor at GM Watch, www.gmwatch.org

There is no longer any serious doubt that health officials are covering up a

big story, trying to side step a growing swell of evidence that threatens the

very foundation of medical science and practice. It is obvious that the medical

profession cannot afford to have the public ever find out the truth about

vaccination for there is simply just too much at stake for them. - Dr Mark

Sircus, MD.

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