According to Viking mythology, eclipses occur when two wolves, Skoll and Hati, catch the sun or moon. At the onset of an eclipse people would make lots of noise, hoping to scare the wolves away. After some time, people must have noticed that the eclipses ended regardless of whether they ran around banging on pots.Some of us, of course, want to appropriate the authority of 'modern science' for a mysticism that features claims that we can communicate with the dead via valve radios, deal with bodily ills through 'remote healing', have precognition (aka fortune telling) and prove the reality of reincarnation through reports from people who have been administered LSD.
Ignorance of nature's ways led people in ancient times to postulate many myths in an effort to make sense of their world. But eventually, people turned to philosophy, that is, to the use of reason — with a good dose of intuition — to decipher their universe. Today we use reason, mathematics and experimental test — in other words, modern science.
Those claims would be derided if made by a practitioner of Scientology or Theosophy and aren't different to past nonsense about witches or hobgoblins but gain credibility when packaged with terms such as mesodomain, supervening and interstitiality. Very sad, very sad.
As noted earlier this year, it is difficult to see an Australian barrister getting very far in the High Court with claims that people actually do get messages from the dead via valve radios (irrespective of whether they're wearing an alfoil beanie or a bone through the nose), that mass meditation changes the weather, that the adept can levitate (particularly when the gurus continue to fly first class in a conventional aircraft rather than floating into the aether while seated on a tea towel or prayer mat or pile of hundred dollar bills from their acolytes), or that the brains of true believers have indeed become "quantum wave transceivers" attuned to the Akashic Field. (The requisite "health warning" regarding that scepticism is here.)
I'm reminded of the virtue of occasionally questioning whether emperors have new clothes, Akashic or otherwise, in reading Jane Smiley's tribute to Jessica Mitford's Poison Penmanship, which notes that Mitford's -
weapons of choice were factual accuracy and a tone of amazement.As the great and underappreciated Julien Benda noted in La Trahison des clercs, who would have thought clever people could believe such silly things. It is amazing and more than a little downheartening in world where, as one reader pointed out, nonsense kills and where scholars or journalists have spent a century debunking nonsense from gurus such as Cayce and Blavatsky.
Smiley rightly describes Mitford as -
a toiler in the muck who cared about facts and believed in the idea that her fellow citizens were generally honest and expected the same of business and government.Would that we held each other to Mitford's standard.
Jonathan Mirsky, in a LR review of Frank Dikötter's Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (London: Bloomsbury 2010) highlights why truth may be more useful for law reform and for the advancement of human rights than fantasies regarding communication with Cleopatra (reincarnated or otherwise).
Mirsky notes that Edgar Snow's The Other Side of the River featured the statement that "I saw no starving people in China ... Considerable malnutrition undoubtedly existed. Mass starvation? No. ... Whatever he was eating, the average Chinese maintained himself in good health, as far as anyone could see." Perhaps people chose not to see very far.
In brutal fact, between 1959 and 1962, at least forty-three million Chinese died during the famine Snow didn't bother to see. Most died of hunger, over two million were executed or were beaten or tortured to death, the birth rate halved in some places, parents sold their children, and people dug up the dead and ate them.
The cause of this disaster, the worst ever to befall China and one of the worst anywhere at any time, was Mao, who, cheered on by his sycophantic and frightened colleagues, decreed that before long China's economy must overtake that of the Soviet Union, Britain and even the US. Mao suggested that 'When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill,' and declared that anyone who questioned his policies was a 'Rightist', a toxic term eventually applied to thirteen million Party members.
