Heretics: A Short Pass

From that quasi-heresy of social epistemology, Wikipedia, 19th century doctor and "savior of mothers," Ignaz Semmelweis:

>Despite various publications of results where hand-washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings. Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory. In 1865, Semmelweis was committed to an asylum, where he ironically died of septicemia, at age 47.<


Heretic! Wash our hands? This is not what we were taught! 


"I know, I know, you want your 'geniuses' and you're ready to honor them. But you want nice geniuses, well-behaved, moderate geniuses with no nonsense about them, and not the untamed variety who break through all barriers and limitations. You want a limited, cropped and clipped genius you can parade through the streets of your cities without embarrassment."
-Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!


Reich died in an American prison, persecuted and prosecuted by the US government, egged on by the AMA, his books burned only 10 years after Unistat fought a war against people who, among other affronts to basic ideas of human dignity...burned books.


Robert Anton Wilson, who saw value in the ideas of such heretics as Wilhelm Reich and Timothy Leary, told Lewis Shiner in a 1988 interview, "As long as one heretic is locked up, part of my brain is locked up, and I'm not getting the nourishment I need."


And Kevorkian has died, much to the joy of many. No joy for me.


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"Between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, as many as one million European women, most of them poor and many of them widowed, were executed for witchcraft, taking the blame for bad weather that killed crops." - Superfreakonomics, p.20


There is a long debate about why these women were killed, and the one I grew up with - the narrative I grew up with that I found most compelling - was that the all-male disastrous "doctors" (bleeders, leech-appliers, etc) were jealous of the success old crones living in the woods or on the outskirts of town had in healing...with no formal training at all! They were a threat to male power over the body. Knowledge - empirical! - passed down through the ages, much of it orally transmitted, about plants, water, use of herbs, symptoms, loving care, hand-holding: dangerous! Levitt and Dunbar in the book cited above mention weather and the crops. There's probably something to that. But they're all dead anyway. 


For being heretics, for not belonging to orthodoxy, as established by Authority. 


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U. of Washington zoologist, biologist and evolutionary psychologist and public intellectual David Barash urges in one of his essays in Natural Selections that, from a sociological and existentialist view, far more damage has been done by preaching obedience to authority; we must teach disobedience to the authority of political authorities, social authorities, and to "genetic inclinations." That is: we are probably genetically hardwired to do some nasty things to each other: let us disobey these "natural" urges!


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"Heresy is charisma's boisterous child, its role being to challenge the deadening effects of orthodoxy." - from Prophets, Cults and Madness, p.63 


Same book, p.175: "The essential difference between the messiah and the charismatic prophet is that the messiah advocates renewed submission to the Almighty whereas the charismatic advocates heresy." The authors of this book, John Price and Anthony Stevens, bring a sort of evolutionary psychology-psychiatry with a Jungian bent to the age-old phenomenon of origins of religions and "cults" and prophets, holy-men, Mansonoids, etc. What a fascinating book that was, and now that I'm quoting from it I feel like reading it again...


My cardinal sin: prolixity. One last word: At what point does a religion lose its authority for you? Take any religion. (I'm not conventionally religious in any sense of the idea, but am fascinated by religion, if only for the simple fact that it seems I MUST be fascinated by it; it plays such a large role in this mad world!) At what point in its history did it "blow it"? 


I like Ezra Pound's poetic answer:


"A religion is damned, it confesses its own ultimate impotence, the day it burns its first heretic." - Selected Prose, 1909-1965