Academia Doesn’t Change

Every era has its blindspots. Even professors who are supposed to be critical end up falling for stupid ideas and the quacks peddling them, simply because everyone around them believes in them. Around the year 1970 I first heard about Carlos Castaneda from a friend. I tried to be open-minded about his claims, but at that time I was going out with a woman who was extremely skeptical of the whole business, so I never bothered reading his books. I just assumed it was all likely to be false.

Imagine my surprise in reading this link to find that his first book was published by the University of California Press. In other words, a press that would never stoop to publishing anything by me nevertheless published Castaneda’s drivel. And they published it solely on the basis of the recommendation of its own department of anthropology, where he was a grad student.

Anyway, a few years after hearing about Castaneda, he was basically shown to be a fraud, though this hasn’t stopped people from reading his books. Here, though, is one of the interesting paragraphs from this article about one of Castaneda’s critics:

No one contributed more to Castaneda’s debunking than Richard de Mille. De Mille, who held a Ph.D. in psychology from USC, was something of a freelance intellectual. In a recent interview, he remarked that because he wasn’t associated with a university, he could tell the story straight. “People in the academy wouldn’t do it,” he remarked. “They’d be embarrassing the establishment.” Specifically the UCLA professors who, according to de Mille, knew it was a hoax from the start. But a hoax that, he said, supported their theories, which de Mille summed up succinctly: “Reality doesn’t exist. It’s all what people say to each other.”

And then there is this:

Among anthropologists, there’s no longer a debate. Professor William W. Kelly, chairman of Yale’s anthropology department, told me, “I doubt you’ll find an anthropologist of my generation who regards Castaneda as anything but a clever con man. It was a hoax.... Perhaps to many it is an amusing footnote to the gullibility of naive scholars, although to me it remains a disturbing and unforgivable breach of ethics.”

All of this relates to our own day and to global warming. We are told that the research is peer-reviewed, that it couldn’t possibly be the case that all those scientists are wrong or deceiving us. No, but some of them may be deceiving us, and others who don’t believe in it are forced to go along, as has been suggested somewhere by the leftist Alexander Cockburn. (I’d give a link, but they don’t seem to work very well.) He has suggested that if a junior researcher, for example, has results that are inconsistent with global warming, his institution will come down on him or her saying that they don’t want their reputation to be sullied by these contrary results.

Incidentally, as part of the debunking of Castaneda, one critic pointed out that he lied in saying he was from Brazil because he was really from Peru. Why would someone lie about this? It’s not as though either place means a lot to Americans one way or the other. Why damage your reputation by telling a useless and pointless lie?

Anyway, like I said at the top, every era has its blind spots, and in addition, the dominant voices in any era will be wrong about some things.

Hat tip for the link to reader James Drake

Comments

[Mark Spahn]

Thank you, James Drake, for finding the article
http://www.salon.com/2007/04/12/castaneda/ .
I have heard the name Carlos Castaneda, but never read anything by him, assuming he was some kind of literary writer.
That linked-to article mentions "Tensegrity", which is described vaguely as "a movement technique he claimed had been passed down by 25 generations of Toltec shamans." I have never run across the this word except in connection with Buckminster Fuller, who coined it as short for "tensional integrity", says
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity .
And I once had a tensegrity structure that looked like this:
http://www1.ttcn.ne.jp/a-nishi/tensegrity/tensegrity6_2.jpg
It is a thought-provoking structure consisting of two types of structural members, some under compression (dowels) and some under tension (strings).
I wonder what, if any, the relationship is between "tensegrity" as used by Fuller and by Castaneda; did one borrow from the other?

[Quizikle]

I enjoyed reading Castaneda in the early 70s. I just never considered his works factual. I also enjoyed Lord of the Rings and Alice in Wonderland. Didn't think they were documentaries either.
Q

[Peg]

As you may know, for two years, I attended a week long seminar at the top journalism center in the U.S. Out of about 25 participants, I was the only non-liberal.

Let that sink in for a bit...

I actually liked most of the people that I met there. Many were friendly; almost all were clearly very bright. But I was utterly amazed at how much they thought was gospel - like denying gravity - that I either did not believe to be the case, or felt that skepticism was surely at least a viable viewpoint.

Obviously, global warming was part of the gospel.

Just a few days ago, one of the nicest women in the entire group who is a professor, posted something on her Facebook page. She said that she was talking with a global warming denier... and was pleasant with him and although gave him her opinions, was not "in your face" with him.

I applauded her action, and said that there actually were experts who shared this students viewpoint.

Well; you can only imagine the other comments my comments engendered!

Many lefties mock religion. But I will tell you; I have seen few of any religion who cleave to their faith like leftists do.

[John Pepple]

Quizikle: That sounds like a pretty healthy attitude to me.

And Peg, it's hard to believe there are still lots of people out there who believe in global warming.

[Andrea Harris]

Why Castaneda would tell a pointless lie about where he was born... well, it could be he thought he had a good reason (Peru has all those mystical mountain ruins while Brazil has beaches full of nearly naked women, and he was selling himself as some sort of mystic wasn't he?) but it is probably more like he was a typical liar, in that he lied about everything, compulsively, even stupid stuff no one really cared about.

[John Pepple]

Andrea, that would make sense if he were from Brazil and had lied and said he was from Peru, but it was the other way around. I agree, though, about compulsive liars who lie about things no one even cares about.