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Chapter 8/9
Boarding the Astral Plane © Brian Allan 2003 There are many interpretations of what and where the Astral Plain really is, it is my contention that it is identical to the region accessed by psychic, mediums and shamans, the only differences are in name and context. In this short article I will set out my reasons for making this assertion, it is entirely up to the reader whether they accept it or not. (Brian Allan May29th 2003.) According to standard psychic dogma, there are discrete levels of existence alongside our own collectively called the ‘Astral Plane’, (AP) a term given to a multi-layered, nebulous region inhabited by spirits; it is, say the psychics, the ultimate destination at which on death all of us will eventually arrive. While access to this region is often accomplished involuntarily through either ‘Near Death Experience’ (NDE) or ‘Out of Body Experience’ (OBE) it is normally implied that mediumship is the sole vehicle by which we may obtain ‘controlled’ access this particular level of consciousness, although this is demonstrably not the case. We are likewise told that there are several distinct layers, sometimes reckoned as seven, hence ‘seventh heaven’ occasionally less and indeed more in this ultimate spiritual terminus. These levels range from the unpleasant to the sublime and according to popular belief, the worse we have been in life, the lower down the levels we will find ourselves. Those from the lower levels cannot visit the levels above, but the occupants of the upper levels may, for whatever reason, visit those dwelling further down the scale. However, one thing that the all inhabitants of the AP can do irrespective of their position is arrive here in our realm as they see fit to either amicably visit or wreak havoc upon us. Setting the Boundaries Spiritually, the concepts here are not new and find close parallels within mainstream religious beliefs of good and bad expressed as Heaven and Hell. Roman Catholicism adds another level, purgatory, designed as a halfway house to expunge the sins garnered during life preparatory to attaining sufficient grace and purity to enter heaven. There is nothing wrong with any of these ideas and concepts; they are designed to bring a measure of hope to humanity that its existence here on Earth is not the only reality; there is another, greater and presumably better, existence yet to come. However they also serve another more pragmatic purpose, that of control and indoctrination; depending on how you behave yourself in life, either eternal punishment or glorious reward awaits beyond death. The more law abiding and subservient you are, the greater chance you have of a glorious, carefree afterlife. This is apparently another example of the civil authorities using and modifying whatever device is at hand to ensure compliance among the population. Early Mediumship The concept of an astral or ethereal level of existence invites closer examination of other concepts involved in the natural order of human consciousness, especially those dealing with concepts like ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’. The gift of mediumship, which we are told can be taught like any other skill, in all its forms has been around for as long as humanity. It began with the spiritual quests of shamans, normally carried out as an information gathering adjunct to their unique positions within the tribal groups to which they belonged. Just how these spirit odysseys originated into what is the AP by any other name, is still a puzzle, but since the ingestion of natural hallucinogens was and still is often involved, then presumably there must have been a measure of chance and trial and error. While this conclusion appears logical, is also known that other methods are traditionally used to attain the necessary altered state of consciousness. These include rhythmic chanting, drumming and movement, sleep deprivation and fasting, when combined all of these methods will eventually produce the required mental state. However, while shamans effectively use these techniques in their rituals, it is not true mediumship except in a general sense. Although not a spontaneous action, genuine mediums appear to be able to disengage or attenuate their consciousness more of less at will to attain access to the AP. There is however one question that appears to remain unanswered; is the medium acting purely for a channel for entities already around us, or is the medium actually accessing alternate planes of existence and entering them? The Golden Years Traditionally, mediumship as it practised now first appeared on the world stage in the 19th century via the teenage Fox sisters, of Hydesville in New York State. According to accounts from the time, the house where the Fox sisters lived had previously been the scene of poltergeist activity causing the previous occupants to depart, which leaves one wondering if, in some way, the sisters had somehow become psychically ‘sensitised’. They claimed that they could communicate with the dead through a code based on audible taps and knocks. Although the Fox sisters helped launch the craze for spiritualism world-wide, it had been promoted and practised in the 18th century by the talented Swedish scholar and mystic, Emmanuel Swedenborg (1699 – 1782). Swedenborg also revealed that rather than the current acceptance of seven levels of spiritual existence, there were six, comprising three heavens and three hells. During the Victorian era two of the most prominent mediums were the Scots American, Daniel Dunglass Home, usually referred to as ‘DD’ Home, and the English medium, Florence Cook. Curiously, some of the abilities attributed to Home were levitation, bodily elongation, resistance to pain, clairvoyance and, strangely, self-luminescence; all these bizarre attributes are also credited to Christian saints and mystics. Does this mean that Christian saints were mediums or that Home was a saint? Certainly, the Christian versions appeared to converse directly with invisible entities including God and his angels, which is in effect what Home did, or does sainthood depend on the person, the era and context? Florence Cook on the other hand attained fame through her alleged ability to materialise apparently totally lifelike organic forms again presumably drawn from the AP, most notably one ‘Katie King’, supposedly the daughter of a long dead pirate. Claims made on behalf of Florence Cook suggested that her alleged ability to incarnate the dead provided proof of the resurrection of Jesus Christ; Cook did not refute this remarkable and probably blasphemous, claim. One dubious aspect of the materialisations was the uncanny facial and physical resemblance of the incarnated Katie King to the medium. This similarity, it has been argued, is due to the fact that since mediums require to give of their essence to produce the manifestations, perhaps ‘Katie King’ was superimposed, rather like a projection, upon an energy framework provided by Florence Cook. While the similarity in appearance does not diminish the phenomenon, it does tend to raise suspicions, as did her insistence in secluding herself in a curtained booth during the seances. According to contemporary accounts this was lest any light fell upon her and affected her trance. The concealment of physical mediums behind screens during seances was, and in some cases still is, standard practise, as indeed is placing bowls of water in the séance room. Depending on the nature of the phenomenon and providing it does function at the sub atomic level, the use of water does have some possible relevance here; not only is water a form of liquid crystal, but it also contains viable energy in the form of ‘micro vortices’. Despite this, it is also arguable that in earlier times Cook, especially in view of the ‘Christ connection’, Home and indeed many other mediums would have been burned as witches. Modern Developments With the advent of modern thinking on the subject came a different view of what was possible in psychic terms and in the 1970’s during the paranoia of the cold war the Russian and American security services entered into a race to gain the psychic high ground. Based on fears that the USSR were developing a system of spying based on the abilities of psychics to remotely ‘see’ targets, the American CIA in conjunction with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) founded ‘Operation Sun Streak’, which later became incorporated into the ‘Stargate Project’. This black ops initiative was located in a secluded group of wooden buildings located at the home of the NSA, (National Security Agency), in Fort Meade in Maryland. Probably not by accident, Fort Meade is also the home of the US Army Intelligence service. One of the leading members of this series of experiments was former US Ranger, and Special Forces officer, Major David Morehouse. During his experiences while part of the clandestine ‘Stargate Project’ he allegedly learned to project part of his consciousness to any given location on the surface of the planet and incredibly, beyond, aided by a photograph and finally solely using map co-ordinates. While in the process of projecting his consciousness he described sights, sounds and sensations including visions of beings he describes as ‘angels’. Other plans under consideration and mentioned by Morehouse and others suggest that once in a suitable mental state, they could not only travel in space, but also in time to both past and future. This development is perhaps the most exciting and fantastic part of the entire project, where possibly effect proceeds cause, and in a typical example of time paradox the result could be observed before the action was taken. Perhaps fortunately, the entire project was shelved then abandoned because the results were too hit or miss could not be properly quantified and guaranteed. Are these impressions real, or are they part of the brains internal mapping system designed to act as reference points for the mind and therefore consciousness? All these factors are identical to those described by mediums travelling in the AP; it is therefore reasonable to assume that Morehouse and his colleagues also achieved access to this nebulous realm. One aspect of this attempt at transcending conventional reality is the prospect of time travel, this apparent impossibility is now becoming theoretically credible as quantum physicists theorise the possibility of manipulating gravity and therefor space/time thereby creating localised time shifts. So far this only appears to exist in one direction, but indications are that once a body, or indeed non material consciousness, is projected outwith the constraints of Newtonian physics then literally anything is possible. The Outer Limits The most recent attempts to explain the nature of the Astral Plain have finally attempted to draw together strands of quasi-religious trappings with an extraterrestrial/interdimensional, hybrid existence that roughly equates with a spiritual dimension that is above human. This begs comparison with the beliefs of certain modern millennial cults, Marshall Applewhite’s ‘Heavens Gate’ is a good particularly example, who decided to leave their ‘husks’ or bodily constraints and attain a higher level of existence, perhaps a variation on the Astral Plain. According to Applewhite and his followers, their destiny lay in a spaceship hidden within the tail of the spectacular ‘Hale-Bop’ comet as it passed the solar system a few years ago. They did this by consuming a lethal cocktail of powdered sleeping pills mixed with applesauce washed down with vodka. To make certain of their departure, as they sank into drug induced slumber, another member of the cult placed plastic bags over their heads so that they suffocated. They were uniformly dressed in black and wore light coloured running shoes, whoever placed the plastic bags over their heads also placed squares of purple material in a diamond fashion covering their faces and chests. Bizarrely, they also had passports and driving licenses in their breast pockets, perhaps to aid with posthumous identification. Although initially they were all assumed to be highly motivated and intelligent people, later investigation indicated that they were, instead, largely gullible misfits who fell for the allure of Applewhite’s utopian vision. Strangely, unlike other grotesque, mass suicides like the infamous ‘Jonestown massacre’ in Guyana, all the dead Heavens Gate members conveyed a sense of peace, dignity and ordered tranquillity. Applewhite (who had at one point in his life castrated himself) joined his flock in their final journey and was dressed and covered in an identical manner. Those of the cult who are left alive because they did not feel ready to embark on this, very much, one way trip, (evidently there was no compunction to join the others) appear to fully approve of their comrades decision and Applewhite’s teachings. In one sense, Applewhite and his UFO based, oddly pacifist and altruistic asexual ethos, mimics earlier religious groups like the ‘Perfecti’ of the Cathars and the earlier group, the Bogomils. These religious splinter groups rejected the physical world and maintained that celibacy (including the use of castration) brought them closer to spiritual perfection. Significantly, like these other groups he and his followers also died unnatural deaths. Did they reach their hidden spacecraft or did they reach the AP? It is possible to argue that they did both; claims made over millennia have all in the end come down to the same root doctrine; belief in an afterlife. It matters not whether this is heaven, paradise, Allah’s garden, a realm above the physical, the AP or indeed, a spacecraft. It all ties into an inbuilt survival mechanism and very human need to understand what lies beyond the veil of death. Psychics, mediums and shamans regularly voluntarily travel to this region of spirits using barely understood mechanisms to do so, although perhaps only now is science coming accept the possibility that it is not down to sheer imagination. Evidence is slowly emerging that consciousness is not purely a function of the human brain that exists only as a set of chemical and electrical processes, but rather, it is a detectable entity in its own right. While the use of the term ‘spirit’ tends to cloud the concepts we are dealing with a quasi-mystical and unnecessary religious tone, it is difficult to use other, less evocative descriptions. Perhaps using expressions like ‘external energy matrices’ is more accurate but it also tends to dehumanise the experience. If we can assume that we are indeed no more than collections of swirling molecules bound together by an electrical charge the is becomes easier to understand why we interact with other energy fields. As full understudying of the energy of consciousness is understood, it also makes it easier to appreciate the true nature of ‘spirit’. The ET Connection It is possible that the AP is accessible at will in a non-physical from via an altered state of consciousness, then this level of existence acts almost like a ‘superhighway’ outwith normal constraints of time and space. Once the quasi-religious trappings and traditional, non-mechanistic ritual is stripped away, then the AP emerges as one the possible extra dimension at the sub-atomic level theorised by proponents of quantum physics. If the evidence of research groups like the ‘Scole Group’ is credible, then there are entities, including what we refer to as ‘spirits of the dead’, exist in perpetuity and in real time outwith our continuum. This existence is also known about and recognised by beings residing beyond even this bewildering reality, perhaps they are able to traverse it and arrive here for their own purposes. Certainly, the residents of the AP are aware of them and are as powerless as we are to prevent their arrival here. We are told that through the use of technology they come here because, like them, we exist in physical terms. Fortunately, they are not necessarily inimical to humanity although evidently some are. It is when we contemplate entities such as these that we come face to face with what humanity has for millennia deemed demons and devils and perhaps even Satan himself. It also becomes credible that what we assume is the consummate evil embodied by these beings is no more than how they function naturally without any artificial early constraints of compassion, conscience or responsibility imposed upon them. If this is indeed the case, it is fortunate we have relatively little contact with them. In Conclusion Whether or not we ever achieve controlled and intentional access via some form of purely artificial and technological means to the dimension we call the Astral Plain, is, as yet, pure speculation. However, as advances in the field of quantum science reduce the world and universe we live in to its ultimate and indivisible component particles, would this be the ultimate physicist’s goal, the ‘Theory of Everything’? Perhaps, if and when we achieve the breakthrough, this we could use this alternate reality as a form of interdimensional, stellar transport unfettered by the stifling restrictions of time and space. Using this technology, do we in effect become like the Gods we once worshiped and stride across the boundless infinities of space and time, manipulating and interfering with the realities of lesser beings? The temptations to do this will always be there, and until humanity has learned sufficient humility to use its gifts and abilities wisely, perhaps it is better that our aspirations continue to be greater than our ability to achieve them. References: Psychic Warrior, Auth. David Morehouse and published in 2000 by Clearview. Chapter 9
Fort’s Fat Monks Part 2: Oerstedt and Objectivity “Objectivity” is a comparatively modern term; De Quincey notes that it was hardly used before 1820. Before this time, Nature is “appealed to,” asked for an “answer,” as if addressing some ancient goddess; for the physicist Oersted,1 science had to be pursued with “holy seriousness.” In a lecture to his students, he addressed them as a crusading army:
“The conviction that when you diffuse knowledge you are instrumental in the consolidation of God’s kingdom on earth can alone give you a true and unalloyed desire to lead those around you towards a higher light and higher knowledge.”
And here is Louis Agassiz,2 whose fundamentalist cry reminds us the protests of our very own Dawkins, Crick, and Hawking:
“The study of Nature is an intercourse with the highest mind. You should never trifle with Nature. At the lowest her works are the works of the highest powers. A laboratory of Natural History is a sanctuary where nothing profane should be tolerated. I feel less agony at improprieties in churches than in a scientific laboratory.”
But it is left to Sir Richard Gregory to put the 19th century scientist in a framework which dispenses once and for all with T. H. Huxley’s idea of science as common sense:
“To qualify for admission into the temple of science it is necessary to offer sacrifices at the altar of knowledge; and only those with sincere regard for truth will find their gifts acceptable. Nature must be loved for herself and not for her dowry. The reward which the world can give may come; but the discoveries which may bring them can only be secured in the pure quest for the advancement of knowledge. To one alone of King Arthur’s knights, Sir Galahad, was a complete vision of the Holy Grail vouchsafed; and he was the simple knight that could say: ‘My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure.’ Tennyson The secrets of Nature are likewise reserved for those who seek them purely for the love of truth and desire for understanding. The ‘just and faithful knight’ can see Nature unveiled and pass into the spiritial city of science, where purer joys than all earthly fame can give will be his prize.”3
But by the time of the publication of Fort’s Book Of The Damned in 1919, the gallant knights were in trouble. That culture which dealt with things “outside our cognition” was becoming expensive, the national stakes were getting higher, and the exploitation of world resources demanded by scientific exploitation was beginning to have its effect on the environment, destabilising economies, changing patterns of trade, raw-material and precious-metal acquisition, and also giving birth to the first of those national and international corporate conspiracies which we are only too familiar in our own time. Whilst parts certainly of its eugenic theorizing were moving towards the construction of Auschwitz, other parts were moving towards the nuclear weapon. The danger with science in this sense has always been that its developing theoretical base becomes almost instantaneously semi-realized and applied within a street-fighting political framework, whose moral over-simplifications lead towards tragic enormities beyond all moral conception. In this sense, it is the only “philosophy” which does not see the need to avoid tragedy, simply because it does not recognize tragic forces in the first place. Being absorbed by science as much as he was, Fort was in the unique position to see scientists change, almost within a mere historical blink, from the well-heeled men in clubs (most of whom gave their discipline the same minimal amount of time as an Oxbridge Classics Don gave to his), such as the astronomers, to the collective ranks of worker-bees of the lower-middle-classes, who were to make mass social-scientific applications to an extent the 19th century did not dream of. He made good note of course of the profile of “factual truths” changing to fit the new faces of fast-progressing capitalism and communism, each in its own way as “dialectical” as each another. This last idea bridges in a vital sense, the three-quarters of a century between Freud’s early work and Marcuse.4 They too, thought that dialectics of any kind (that is in the sense of conscious solutions, formula, objective factual predictabilities), more often than not preceded enlightenment as false as any to be found in the intense subjectivities of specifically religious assumptions.
Unlike Carlyle’s traditional heroes again, such powerful people as scientists, have, in Europe and America, never been elected to leadership.5 That they have created the power to destroy all life is almost mentioned in passing; they have played only a passive part in government, giving advice (more often than not absolutely disastrous,6 and playing almost no part at all in operational decisions at Cabinet level,7 even during times of the most dire peril. During the Second World War, the stylish, but ineffective, blustering, and (by that time), completely out-of-date Lord Cherwell8 (who was the influence on Air Marshall Harris’s largely ineffective policy of area-bombing, and who vehemently denied the German rocket threat in the face of Duncan Sandys’ evidence), was preferred to the much more capable Henry Tizard, Watson-Watt, and also the brilliant R. V. Jones, who was dealt with by Churchill’s War Cabinet rather as a lance-corporal making a report.9 The same treatment was also meted out to many of Alan Turing’s senior code-cracking staff using the first digital computer for the vital Ultra operation.10 This almost forced invisibility is quite a unique aspect of science as a culture. As a character, the scientist does not appear in plays, and apart from science fiction, even the mass-market novel largely ignores the scientist. As distinct from the spy, film star, media personality, soldier, ship’s captain, SAS soldier, or the successful tycoon, the scientist appears to be of almost no psychological interest, to have no worth-while relationships, adventures, or conflicts. Sadly, the vast science-fiction industry still shows the scientist as the electric-haired madman of early films, and few such works contain deep psychological interest. Between wars, the scientist had a toehold in radio, dispensing very stuffy, wooden-scripted “talks,” and sounding like a cross between a Dalek and an old fairground fruit-machine trying to talk to the great mass of the partly-washed. Not a good image-platform, to say the least. A confidential report compiled during the Second World War by John Harrisson, and quoted by Waddington in The Scientific Attitude, sums up the public’s view of scientists as it emerged mid-century: “Usually the scientist is a brilliant, infallible, but subsidiary hero; the virile millionaire-explorer is boss.” Harisson then speaks of an unnamed best-selling novel:
“Throughout the story the magnetic eyes and master-mind of the scientist operate, but, as is always the case in such stories, the scientists never emerges with any definite character, normal activities, hobbies, political views or love of life.”11
It seems that the basic problem with the scientist, as distinct from traditional heroes and heroines, is that he or she rarely has that great Darwinian asset of style. Of course style, if it means anything all, means non-conformity. But because they cannot possibly make a move without fabulously expensive hardware, scientists are essentially corporate animals, relying almost entirely on powerful financial interests over whose whims they have no control at all, and whose attitude to non-conventional behavior need hardly be stated. Therefore powerful as science may be, in our own burgeoning Entertainment State, this conformist facelessness is an almost fatal disadvantage, and no amount of quite brilliant Public Relations work on the selling of the New Cosmology,12 for example, appears to make much difference. In addition to the effect of this extremely low profile is that in our own time, science and technology are hardly yet taken really seriously by the British education system. In a recent international mathematics survey,13 thousands of people aged 16-60, were asked to do 12 very simple sums, such as working out 15 per cent of 700, and multiplying 6 by 21. Only one Briton in five obtained correct answers, and this put British schools at the very bottom of the world league table. With science, the situation is far worse. The vast majority of British schools turn out students who cannot give the simplest account of how a computer works, electro-magnetic induction, or how a broadcast wave passes through walls to reach their room. Since such machines and such waves carry much of our information and entertainment, and thus control our society, this is a state of affairs which is anything but mentally healthy; science yeah or nay, it is not good for anyone not to know (or care) what is happening to them.14 Hari Kunzru, associate editor of Wired magazine, said recently that the collapse of his publication marked “a critical point in Britain’s difficult relationship with all things technological.”15 If the educational establishment has a rather cavalier view of scientists, the new and powerful estate of electronic media is hardly conscious of them at all. What little science there is in the media exists in the form of tiny-minded rather boy-scout views of “gadget science”: a bicycle which could reach a speed of 200 mph, the latest penny-dance of technology with a view to producing a myriad more entertaining consumables. As manic cerebrals, scientists ill fit the generally low mental level of television, and are often anything but telegenic. A few comic eccentrics and blustering amateurs are allowed, such as Dr. Magnus Pike, Patrick Moore, and in the deep media past we had the wonderful tongue-twisting Professor Stanley Unwin, a most rare example of the satirizing of the scientist. But specialist channels generally house the scientist, where a hand pointing to a blackboard quickly replaces what is usually a nervous, wan, and drained face, together with a equally nervous and wan diction and delivery. Barthes would probably see this face as the face of passé social-democratic dedication, perhaps the last communist-industrial face of serious directed purpose, just before the Entertainment Era. What the viewing figures are for these Balkanised regions and dialectic-disciplined faces is anybody’s guess. A Radio Four discussion at the time of writing (August, 1998), tells of plans for a soap about scientists. One suspects that this idea may go the way of soaps about the middle class, or soaps based on the idea that the British love sea, sun, and sangria. The scientist is also quite invisible as far as central government is concerned. In a well-informed book published in 1986, The Politics of British Science, Martin Ince shows how scientists of the past such as Ashby, Crowther, Waddington, and Julian Huxley, would have been disappointed in their visions of a scientifically-informed administration conducting an open “democratic” debate with the voting populace. Ince says that “the UK does not have a unitary science policy,” adding that the British government’s research choices emerge in an ad hoc way from a web of committees and advisory groups which constitute: “an insider’s world in which a relatively small group of senior civil servants, élite scientists, and influential industrialists move from room to room to room in Whitehall and from committee to committee, trading in confidential minutes, endless acronyms and ultimately pounds and pence.”16 It is also of note that in Yes Minister, one of the best and most intelligent TV comedy series of recent years about top government officials, not a single scientist is considered worthy of being given even a comic treatment. Scriptwriters are sharp-witted, talented people, and science is full of the most outrageous comic folly, and yet such writers and artistically minded people in general run from science as if it were the very devil. Perhaps this is the reason why there has not been a Carry On Scientist. Surprisingly again, such a superb target is rarely dumped-on in Private Eye, or other satirical journals, yet without the scientist as target, these publications remain firmly embedded in the age of Addison and Steele, as indeed does Yes Minister, with very few changes of diction, content, and props. As for present-day British “literary fiction,” it is as if the scientist had never been created in the first place. There, Eden is neo-Edwardian Hampstead in full eternal bloom, and not even the Temptation or the Fall have yet occurred within its pastel-shades, still less Science.
Whilst prophets, saints, and poets are tortured, burnt alive, crucified, imprisoned, and stoned to death, or (worse) go unpublished, the scientist as Hero has therefore had it pretty easy, so far. Despite Thalidomide, Chernobyl, and mass-pollution, the scientist is never put on trial, and unlike the rest of the suffering working nation, is never blamed, dismissed, named, or sued. Hapless Ministers (very few of whom have any kind of technological knowledge, still less scientific qualifications) are asked to take the blame for those disasters that have been caused by those same ministers taking “scientific” advice in the first place, as has been the case with BSE. It is to be assumed that the level of naked scientific criminality is so vast, it can hardly be conceived of. The scientist, it appears, is free to pollute oceans, space, skies; he or she is quite free to change water, air, and land by radiation and pesticides; breast-milk can be affected, the European sperm-count lowered, and even the general intelligence lowered by pollution.17 Yet no scientist or scientific organization is named when such techno-scientific catastrophes occur, ranging from the casualties of hormone-therapy (many victims are now sueing), or the Channel Tunnel disaster.18 No-one knows the names of the scientific “advisors” who told the Ministry of Agriculture that feeding live cattle on the corpses of slaughtered cattle was “safe;” just as no-one knows who advised the Channel Tunnel Authority to use draft-creating open-sided trucks. The economic damage of the first is unaccountable, just as are the “experts” who advised the government to build tower-block estates, most of which now have to be taken down at tremendous cost. Given a long list of other social-scientific disasters, there could be put forward a case for excluding scientific advice from human considerations where risks are unacceptable, or where failure would be catastrophic or horrendous. But as many recent court cases point out, it appears that there is absolutely no section of British Criminal Law which applies to officially sponsored and nationally-applied scientific policies which go wrong in practice, witness the countless modern victims of socially-applied “medical” practices. But there are more sinister levels to scientific operations than mere mistakes. If we now know that Charles Fort’s fears about animal experimentation were fully justified, it might be born in mind that in recent years mass litigation has commenced in the United States concerning countless government-sanctioned experiments on non-voluntary and frequently unaware military personnel, civilians, prison-inmates, and mental patients from the 1950s through to the 1980s.19 Should anyone think that this is emotional bluster, let them take note that during the last Tory government, Michael Portillo (then Defence Minister) confirmed in a letter to Ken Livingston MP, that germ-warfare experiments were carried out on the population of London between 1964 and 1977.20 Admittedly, the bacteria was probably the “harmless” Serratia Marcescens developed at Porton Down for just such a purpose, but this writer cannot recall this being discussed in any party manifestos of that period. He also supposes that the names of the scientists, the financing, the paperwork, the bio-technology involved, and documents regarding any the ministerial sanction, will somehow not be available. According to The X Factor,21 similar biological warfare tests were conducted throughout the 1950s and 1960s in Britain, Canada, and America. In New York, in 1966, bacteria was sprayed into subway stations via gratings at peak commuter periods to estimate rates and levels of contamination. The same magazine reports that between 1960 and 1966, 33 patients at St Thomas’s Hospital - all diagnosed as terminal cancer cases - were infected with deadly viruses. All 33 patients died.22 Charles Fort’s ideas are valuable in that he pointed out a breakdown of such trust between scientists and the general public very early on. Trust in a community must necessarily always be based upon the idea of open discussion based on freely disseminated information. Even in Fort’s fairly young scientifically oriented society, such a situation proved to be well nigh impossible to realize, and as for our own, the blatant supplying of Iraqi alone with weaponry of all kinds, demonstrates a complete breakdown of socio-political trust in that area where technology, finance, industry, and Intelligence meet. The resulting loss of faith not only in the Intelligence Services, but also in major instruments of national policy and their institutional base is not good for the health of any culture.
Socially almost invisible then, largely despised, and the object of fear rather than veneration, hardly even laughed at, and never in office, Carlyle might have asked what kind of hero is this “scientist”? Moreover, the scientist in the 20th Century (called by some his century), with the possible exception of cuddly Albert Einstein,23 has never really had a good press. With exceptions of rather nice folk, such as Rutherford, Eddington, or Jeans (names the young can now hardly recall), the scientist has aroused suspicion rather than affection, being inevitably the bad-guy in those tell-tale marks of the psyche, the B-Feature films. There is hardly a single example in the cinema of the scientist being regarded as the object of respect or veneration, still less as any kind of moral force; the white coats, harsh lights, sinister glassware, and the instrumentation of probes, wires, and needles, certainly inspire no love. Indeed, they are not infrequently seen as the instruments of nightmare, and the reports of continuous scientific “advance” are beginning to sound as hollow as did reports of “advances” on the Western Front, or the equally steady “advance” of any communist Five Year Plan. This situation is not helped by the extremely low standard of science reporting in the quality press, which to continues to fall. In an influential book published as long ago as 1942,24 three members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science pointed out that science was being “badly reported.” They complained about media folk in particular who were not acquainted with modern scientific facts and perspectives, or if they were, they put the situation in such a “popularised” form that it was rendered quite meaningless. This situation has changed hardly at all. Recently, a well-known science writer, talking recently of “Magnus,” a neural-programmed computer, constructed by Professor Igor Aleksander,25 offers us the following definition of what he calls “intelligent free-will”:
“Magnus even appears capable of exerting free will, by being aware of the many possible actions it can take, and then choosing the one that best suits its purpose.”26
Does the writer think that when a computer operating system decides of its own accord to close some redundant file-windows, and borrow their allotted Random Access Memory for a rather more active application, it is “intelligent” in any human sense? He says that the machine “selects the best course” and this is most “impressive,” but has he ever heard of automatic-selector gears? Does he think that when a transistor changes its collector voltage because it “senses” a change in the voltage of its input bias-chain, it is “thinking”? What he describes is exactly the opposite to thinking in that these things and devices have almost no choice at all. But then even the good professor Aleksander himself admits blushingly to “guesses” and simplifications:
“...real brains are too complicated to use and you can’t easily see what is going on inside them. With a machine you can.”
Thus we get the answers that are required.27 In the same edition of the same newspaper, there are yet more Fortean delights. This same writer, when referring to quasars, says that they “sprang a surprise on astronomers” when “objects were seen zipping around inside them at speeds faster than light itself.” The italics are this present writers, the astonishment the astronomers, the profits belong to the Telegraph, and the laughter belongs to everyone. But the Fortean point here is that we are not dealing with idiots. We are dealing with people of the highest intelligence, whose concentration lapses frequently, and they fall into that condition which Fort generally recognizes as a common disease of the intelligentsia, particularly with regard to science, whose-fast-food cultural influence shows in such snap-crackle-and-pop paragraphs
Even in our own time, along with such “reporting,” there is no national public debate on science policy in the sense that there is debate on crime, drugs, housing, or pensions, or party policy. The general public have absolutely no say at all in major scientific decisions,28 and no election manifesto would ever be so silly as to mention the science policy of a particular party, as if such policy is of absolutely no concern to anyone at all. Still less would there be proposed a referendum on scientific directions. As any glance at the Internet will show, of higher operational scientific planning, social consequences, and possible effects, technological/government aims and interface, there is hardly any information at all given out by the bland web pages of the appropriate departments. The wartime and early welfare-state hopes of a scientifically planned society, with scientists playing a leading part in social, political, and technological planning, have all vanished as if they had never been. Therefore science appears to roam as it will, quite free from all open-minded and radical discussion of its aims, quite ignorant even of its own identity, direction, and purpose.
Part 3 coming in next month’s issue of the Combat Diaries: How much Metaphor is too Much?
[1] - Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) was the Danish physicist who first measured the strength and direction of the magnetic field of the Earth. He was a Director of the Polytechnic Institute in Copenhagen for most of his life. 2 - Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807- 1873) was the Swiss palaeontologist who developed the idea of an ice age. He spent most of his life as a professor at Harvard. This quotation is from the introduction to his monumental Contributions to the Natural History of the United States, written between the years 1857-62. He was an ardent supporter of Nazi racial historiography. 3 - Discovery: The Spirit and Service of Science p.55 4 - In particular, Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (published in 1949), and Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation (1955) are relevant here. 5 - That is, with the single exception of Margaret Thatcher, who has a degree in Chemistry. She was, however, anything but the scientist-leader to fit Carlyle’s formula. She made little use of opportunities to synthesise her scientific training with her political views. In Carlyle’s terms, the only modern scientist cum visionary-prophet cum national leader was perhaps the Zionist, Chaim Weitzmann, whose chemical discoveries resolved the dangerous British munitions crisis during the Great War. Lord Vansittart remarked in his autobiography, The Mist Procession “Without Weitzmann (making acetone from conkers), we’d have gone under.” 6 - Scientific “advice” for example, in the matter of the liberal use of organo-phosphates, almost disabled the entire British Army in the Gulf War before it had a chance to fire a shot at the enemy. As far the similar scientific advice which resulted in the standard SA 80 rifle, the only thing that can be said about that weapon is that the SAS use them as door-stops, shelf-supports, and as a substitute for banned dwarf-throwing competitions. At Hereford, the American M16 (designed by experience) reigns supreme. As for the present countless food and health scandals, possibly every single one of them was caused by the application of “scientific” advice. 7 - The disasters caused by the first Churchill/Lindemann axis (which recommenced when Churchill was re-elected in 1951), certainly rival the near-revolutionary near-disaster of the Solly Zuckerman/Mountbatten relationship in the early 1970s. To these things must be added the comic terrors of the Thatcher/Alan Walters axis, when wonderfully colourful computer-profiles of poll-tax policy so convinced ex-scientist Thatcher, she implemented the “scientific” predictions, and cause the worst riots in London since the 18th century, and thus ensuring her downfall. 7 - See Tizzard by Ronald W. Clerk (Methuen, 1965) 8 - “Despite the fact that I was rather a vital cog in the defence machine, I had no special privileges...I had no official transport, either at this time or throughout the war. Indeed, I had no help, apart from what Daisy Mowat was able to give me as secretary when she was not occupied with Fred Winterbottom’s work.” Most Secret War by R.V. Jones p. 144 (Hamish Hamilton, 1978) 9 - See Ultra Goes to War , by Ronald Lewin (Hutchinson, 1978), Top Secret Ultra by Peter Calvocoressi (Cassell, 1980), The Ultra Secret by the said Fred Winterbottom himself, and also The Enigma of Intelligence, a brilliantly interpretative book by Andrew Hodges. 10 - The Scientific Attitude (Pelican, 1941) p. 116 11 - For a rather blushing view of Professor Stephen Hawking as a near-deity, see The Fire in the Equations by Kitty Ferguson (Bantam, 1996) 12 - Article by David Wooding, Education Correspondent of The Sun, January 17th, 1997, p. 8. 13 - The original works of Faraday, Rutherford, Kelvin, and Maxwell are difficult to find, and they often take the form of extremely expensive editions. In any case, the work of such illustrious men plays practically no part, unfortunately, in British pre-university education. When this writer was a lecturer at Middlesex University some years ago, conducting a seminar of twenty-five students, only three had “heard” of all four names. 14 - Connected Magazine February 11th, 1997 p. 7 15 - The Politics of British Science p. 12 (Wheatsheaf, 1986) 16 - BBC Radio Four News (Sat morning 0900, 23rd May, 1998) announces that scientists from the University of London have recorded a 10% drop in general intelligence amongst children due to lead-laden pollution. In some African countries, it is apparently 90%. 17 - For an early (that is late 1950s) view of mass scientific folly, see Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Hamish Hamilton, 1963) 18 - See The Mind Manipulators by Alan W. Scheflin and Edward M. Opton, Jr. (Paddington Press Ltd. 1978) 19 - Such terrible experiments have been going on for some centuries in the interest of “scientific truth”. J.B.S. Haldane in his 1938 Pelican, Science and Everyday Life quotes the diary of Samuel Pepys for 1667 describing what must have been one of the first attempts at a blood transfusion. Pepys tries to justify this horror by that saying that the receiver of these intellectual attentions sponsored by the Royal Society was a “poor and debauched man.” A similar Nazi-like excuse is now used for covert medical activity. In the same volume, Haldane quotes a Professor MacBride of the Eugenic Society who as late as 1936, was recommending that the unemployed be compulsorily sterilised. 20 - The X Factor No. 6 p. 161 21 - For further information on continuing “eugenic” policies and experimentation in the West, see The Unopened Files Issue 7, Summer, 1998, for article An Abuse of Human Rights, page 30 22 - His brutal, savage and criminally sadistic treatment of his wife has only just been revealed in a new biography by ??? 23 - Crowther. Howarth, and Riley: Science and World Order (Penguin Special, 1942). 24 - He is the author (with Piers Burnett) of the influential book, Thinking Machines (OUP 1987) 25 - The Sunday Telegraph, December 15th, 1996. 26 - In Martin Amis’s novel Times Arrow (Jonathan Cape, 1991), such scientific simplifications are seen as being implicitly criminal. When such cut-down formulas leap out of their culture dish to the moral and intellectual worlds, as Amis points out, they become railway lines which all lead to the mouth of Hell. The contra-Socratic method of Aleksander here seems to be eliminate all boundary-layer conditions until a formula begins to work, as surely it will if this procedure is followed for long enough. Amis’s novel well demonstrates how Auschwitz as such an expanded metaphor was (and still is), stitched throughout the social and cultural fabric of the Western World. Since the Law cannot comprehend such a thing, we tried the Nazis as we would try horse-thieves, which was a neat way of getting the European intelligentsia off the hook. As the ultimate expression of the non-eugenic citizen on the boundary-layer, Charles Fort would certainly have been on transport number 1, steaming into nacht und nebel. It should be borne in mind that the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex was a registered joint-stock company staffed by doctors and scientists, and run by the SS as a thriving business. As has been recently disovered, this was managed with the full co-operation of the Swiss, and not a few senior members of the Vatican, who took good care of the profits. The only things missing from the Russian “political hospital” and the gulag were the business men, the priests, the gas-chambers, and the profits. Otherwise, death was identical. As Amis might have said, some metaphors have a longer shelf-life than others. 27 - In the recent “scientifically based” and “computer-managed” Maastrict referendum, Denmark narrowly voted no. They were then asked to vote again. This time the answer was yes. One is left to wonder if, therefore, Denmark had voted yes in the first place, whether the populace would have been asked to vote again until they recorded a no. Lewis Caroll, thou shouldst be living at this hour!
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