Martin Gardner vs. Wilhelm Reich & Orgonomy (2)

There have been numerous attacks on Paul Kurtz's organizations, all now falling on the singular Center for Free Inquiry, from several directions. One is from advocates of parapsychology, who have expressed numerous complaints. I'm not to deal with them now. Wilhelm Reich's orgonomy does not belong to parapsychology, but it is fringe science nonetheless. Here is the second article I've found attacking Martin Gardner, and now Kurtz, Corliss Lamont, and the Amazing Randi along with him:

CSICOP, Time Magazine, and Wilhelm Reich by John Wilder, Pulse of the Planet #5, 2002, pp. 55-67.

Wilder links Time magazine and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in the scurrilous trashing of Reich's reputation. He reviews the attacks on Reich by the Freudians and the Stalinists.  Wilder accuses Einstein's secretary of sabotaging Reich's attempts to continue correspondence with Einstein. Historians of philosophy and ideas have not been kind to Reich, not Peter Gay, at least. Paul Edwards is claimed to have treated Reich favorably, except for his dismissing Reich's later orgonomy as crank pseudoscience. Edwards alleged Reich's American acolytes to be right-wingers:

Interestingly, Edwards now decries what he calls the ‘right-wing’ politics of [Elsworth] Baker and others of Reich’s students in America, as he believes they have missed the contributions of Reich’s ‘Marxist’ period. The reader should recall that Reich, himself, dismissed this part of his work as a ‘biological miscalculation,’ as immature, as being insufficiently aware of the of the extreme stubbornness of the Emotional Plague.

Wilder asserts that the Kurtz's skeptic organization is wedded to mind-body dualism:

Despite Edwards lukewarm admiration of Reich, CSICOP seems to be populated with men who adhere to modern civilization’s mind-body split, a split which underlies the mechanistic-mystical dichotomy that fuels CSICOP’s engines.

Wilder further complains:

The membership, organization, and style of CSICOP reveal its traditional patriarchal, ‘top-down’ authoritarian character. Its membership, according to Hansen, is 95% composed of ‘white’ males; and nearly 100% of its members are intellectuals, mostly drawn from the non-scientific disciplines, despite CSICOP claiming ‘science’ as its patron. Few active research scientists belong. The membership at large, the ‘Fellows,’ has little, if any, power to formulate or change policy.

Wilder likens Paul Kurtz to the Kurtz of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, who faces irrationalism with a psychological regression:

Facing these unexpected outbreaks of apparently irrational behavior in the masses [in the late 1960s], facing what Reich had faced in the early 1930s (due to what Reich termed the biological miscalculation), Kurtz struggles to reforge his Marxist-Humanism into a weapon of control and repression. While Reich had turned away from politics to supporting changes in child rearing, to advocating sexual reform, and to studying biophysics, Kurtz, still at his core a political man, seeks elitist political and social solutions to suppress these uncontrolled, ‘unscientifically’ emotional horrors emanating from the masses.

Kurtz is painted as a control freak—espousing one-world government, praising the behaviorist B. F. Skinner, engaging in scurrilous character assassination of scientific claims he disdains.

I need to point out a streak of anti-communist paranoia that runs through the article, not all instances of which I cite here. Corliss Lamont is excoriated for his pro-Stalinist position, for example.

Wilder moves on to attack Kurtz's skeptical colleagues, among them Wilder's arch-villain Martin Gardner. Gardner was apparently in his youth a fundamentalist and a radical socialist, later became a magician and eventually "the foremost advocate of atheistic scientific orthodoxy, of the science of his patriarchy." Wilder outlines Gardner's five symptomatic criteria for judging pseudoscience: according to those criteria, Reich and Einstein would be judged alike. Wilder finds these demarcation criteria (citing Popper for the term) unusable in practice.

Wilder also finds the presence of erstwhile and practicing magicians in the skeptical movement suspect. He deems magicians to be "cynical, nasty people" as someone else puts it. An illustration of this is the Amazing Randi's participation in Alice Cooper's sadistic spectacles.

I now skip to the author's Postscript of August 1, 2010. Here is the most telling statement of Wilder's position:

I want to clarify that I see Communism as a particularly vicious head of the Emotional Plague, a social pathology described by Reich. This Plague is a hydra that has many heads, like the Inquisition, the KKK, the NAZIs, and Al Qaeda. Cutting off these heads has not and will not permanently end the Emotional Plague, anymore than removing cancerous tumors, while necessary and important, ends an underlying cancer biopathy. There are right wing and left wing variants of the Emotional Plague. There are even middle-of-the-road and non-political variants. Read the studies of pathological mass action and inaction.

In judging all this I am not going to address any of Wilder's factual claims. Nor will I address his evaluation of magicians. I question his analogy of Reich and Einstein, but I have always had a problem with Gardner's demarcation criteria myself, so I will refrain from taking apart Wilder's ridiculous argument. I also don't think there is an infallible formal criteriology for labeling someone a paranoid, and in any case, sometimes real paranoia and real persecution overlap in the same suffering individuals. It is not the mere eccentricity of Wilder's argument that I criticize. It is his underlying metaphysical perspective, and the characteristically paranoiac way in which his systematizing reasoning proceeds. His copious historical references notwithstanding, historical reasoning is excised from his world view, recapitulating the late Reich's retreat to metaphysics. If everything is a result of the Emotional Plague, which is an ahistorical psychobiological category, then the real historical development of society and its ideologies is eclipsed by a metaphysics, and one which bears all the characteristics of a right-wing world view, and hence of right-wing paranoia, regardless of Wilder's actual apolitical politics. This bizarre indiscriminate linkage of communism with Kurtz, a Time editor, Einstein's secretary, Lamont, and Gardner is characteristic of a paranaoic world view, however one might rationally analyze possible deficiencies of any of these individuals.

Finally I must mention the Editor James DeMeo’s 2002 Postscript. DeMeo wrote the article I analyzed in my previous blog post on this subject. Here DeMeo attempts to link Prometheus Books with pornography and pedophilia. If this is not the paranoid mind in action, what is?

I imagine some readers will think I'm overly generous in even bothering to analyze a manifestly crackpot view as seriously as I do. But this is not a randomly generated piece of craziness: there is a conceptual structure underlying it which needs to be analyzed. The more astute and acute our analytical capability becomes, the better will be be able to distinguish the merely eccentric and marginal from the fundamentally distorted framework of a wrongheaded world view, whether or not there are partial truths in it.

Studies in a Dying Culture now on ThinkTwiceRadio

You are invited to listen to my Internet radio show newly named "Studies in a Dying Culture," on "Think Twice Radio", recorded in the awesome metropolis of Buffalo, New York. The latest program was recorded on 19 July: Episode 3: "A Dying Culture, Raggedy Poets, a Farewell to Martin Gardner, and the Historical Trajectory of Secular Humanism".

Episode description:

This episode begins with an introduction and explanation of the show's new title, "Studies in a Dying Culture," borrowed from the title of a book by Christopher Caudwell in the 1930s. Ralph next reads his poem "Raggedy Poet Society", a poem about the elder generation's attempt to express itself at a time when it has become culturally obsolete. Next comes a tribute to the recently deceased writer Martin Gardner, best known for his publications on mathematical recreations and on fringe "science" and extraordinary knowledge claims. The balance of this show is devoted to setting the historical stage for the evaluation of the ideologies of the atheist/humanist/skeptical movement(s) in the USA and current controversies dividing different factions of atheists and humanists.

The theme of this radio show, borrowed from my blog also titled Studies in a Dying Culture:

What is to become of critical culture in this dumbed-down millennium? We aim to provide historical, social, and philosophical perspective.

Read the Introduction to my blog for a somewhat fuller explanation. See my Christopher Caudwell bibliography for more information on the author of Studies in a Dying Culture (1938) and Further Studies in a Dying Culture (posthumous publication, 1949), wherefrom my upbeat title originates. Now is not a replay of the 1930s, but we too approach a civilizational crisis.

The bulk of Episode 3, setting the stage for an historical perspective on atheism, freethought, humanism, and skepticism, begins at 13:15.

The 26 minute mark is where discussion of the history of "humanism" and "atheism" in the USA in the 20th century begins.

At 40 minutes I ask: why these humanist manifestos, and I say a few words about the historical context probably relevant to each.

At the 44 minute mark, I question Paul Kurtz's Neo-Humanist Statement of Secular Principles and Values: Personal, Progressive, and Planetary and his Institute for Science and Human Values newly founded in the wake of the recent crisis within the Center for Free Inquiry. Fred Mohr adds some remarks on programs presented at CFI and the perspectives of Kurtz and other CFI members presented in these encounters.

Martin Gardner vs. Wilhelm Reich & Orgonomy

"Response to Martin Gardner's Attack on Reich and Orgone Research in the Skeptical Inquirer" (1989)
by James DeMeo, Ph.D.; Director, Orgone Biophysical Research Lab; Ashland, Oregon, USA.

Wilhelm Reich's orgonomy was an object of attack in Gardner's (Fads and Fallacies) in the Name of Science. This is one illustration of the demarcation problem, i.e. distinguishing criteria between science and pseudoscience, a problem about which Gardner attempted to generalize, though I don't think that this can be adequately accomplished as a formal matter. As I recall, Gardner speculated whether the early Reich--the Marxist psychoanalyst and author of such notable works as The Mass Psychology of Fascism--was as discreditable as the later Reich who initiated orgonomy as a research programme. This particular twist is symptomatic of the inadequate treatment of the demarcation problem, as the field of psychoanalysis was doubly politicized as a putative science--in its orthodox Freudian and various heterodox incarnations. The earlier Reich was emphatically not a crackpot, but the criteria for judging the validity of his theories at that time may not be so straightforward as what is taken to be scientific method in the physical sciences. What constitutes deviant professional behavior in the cases of psychoanalysis and orgonomy may not be the same sort of thing. There are two dimensions to such evaluation: (1) how seriously the theory in question can be taken, given our background of scientific knowledge at some historical moment; (2) whether the pursuit of research outside accepted channels is an indicator of a pseudoscientific enterprise. We can attempt to formulate some general criteria as to what constitutes crank science, but actually, we have to approach specific cases from the standpoint not of formal criteria but of specific real-world knowledge.

For my own take on Reich, see my essay:

The Late Vitalism of Wilhelm Reich: Commentary

We may also ask now whether James DeMeo has a valid complaint or whether he is a crackpot. The author claims he rigorously follows the scientific method, and that the body of research he cites has been marginalized by the scientific community in a politicized context. DeMeo writes more or less in the style of a rational person, but whether he exhibits paranoia or a persecution complex (another reasonable interpretation) demands that we have a prior sense of both legitimate science and the scientific community.

DeMeo has a bone to pick with both the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, later absorbed into the Center for Free Inquiry) and Martin Gardner. DeMeo complains about smear tactics and censorship for being denied a forum. He complains that CSICOP violates its own stated principles. He establishes that he has scientific credentials but emphasizes that Gardner has none. The immediate occasion for irritation with Gardner is Gardner's article:

"Reich the Rainmaker: the Orgone Obsession", Skeptical Inquirer, 13 (1): 26-30, Fall 1988.

There is a history that begins with Gardner's article:

"The Hermit Scientist", Antioch Review, Winter 1950-1951, pp. 447-457.

There is one charge that is more serious:

Gardner's first attack against Reich appeared in the Antioch Review of 1950, though he was then more restrained in his linguistic distortions and vituperation. In 1952 he attacked Reich, with similar clever wit and fervor, in a chapter in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. His articles helped fuel the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) pseudo-investigation, which has since been demonstrated, through at least three different Freedom-Of-Information-Act searches of FDA files, to have been conducted in a most shabby, antiscientific "get Reich" manner.

One would have to look over the FDA files to ascertain whether in fact Gardner effectively contributed to the persecution of Reich, which led not only to his imprisonment but to an unprecedent government-instigated book-burning.

Whether or not Gardner in any way distorted Reich's claims, there are additional issues raised here. In addition to the nutty alternative science, there are philosophical arguments. DeMeo denies that orgonomy is a religion and reiterates Reich's war on all "mysticism," in which natural science as we know it is also implicated. DeMeo purports to find the root of Gardner's hostility in his own dualistic world view, in which Gardner affirms, sans attempt to justify himself rationally, his own theism. Now while this is indeed a noteworthy point upon which to dwell, DeMeo, following Reich, claims to have surmounted the dualism that plagues the modern world.

Here's a fragment of the metaphysical justification for Reichian science:

[. . .] Reich's functional, bioenergetic works stand in clear opposition to both a dead, machine-like universe, and a dualistic, "spirit-versus-flesh" anthropomorphic deity. Indeed, Reich argued persuasively that the mechanistic-mystical world view was the result of a perceptive splitting-off of organic sense functions, caused by the chronic damming-up of emotional-sexual energy within the body of the observer. For these reasons, he argued, animistic peoples, who lived a more vibrant and uninhibited emotional and sexual life, and who consequently remained relatively free of neuroses, could feel, with their sense organs, the tangible energetic forces which shaped and created the universe.

It gets worse. See for yourself.

Now before I add my own generalizations, I must point out that others have accused the orgonomy advocates themselves of falsifying Reich's legacy by altering his earlier Marxist psychoanalytical writings in accord with his later orgonomy.

A few conclusions of my own, some of which are explicated in my essay noted above:

(1) Taken all together, this is a nutcase alternate "scientific" world-picture, false not only in theoretical or empirical particulars but false as a total package in light of accumulated scientific knowledge, not to mention the tacit background assumptions of methodological naturalism and experimental replicability.

(2) Part of DeMeo's essay reads like scientific experimental empiricism, but if you read some of Reich's own reflections on experimental research, there is indeed a regression to animism in violation of the canons of experimental procedure. (I.e. a certain kind of personal vibe skews results.)

(3) Furthermore, in spite of the eschewing of "mysticism" and affirmation of naturalism, all of Reich's late writings are imbued with a metaphysics which indeed reads like mysticism. Reich's quest to overcome the alienated, fragmented experience of life in the modern world is derailed by a pseudoscientific, illegitimate holism.

(4) While accusing Gardner of harboring an implicit dualism, DeMeo himself vacillates between empiricism and metaphysics in his characterization of his own scientific claims and of the scientific community allegedly engaged in a conspiracy of silence against him.

Gardner, whether wearing the hat of methodological naturalist or theist-in-hiding, was simply not up to the philosophical task of analyzing the tragic turn in Reich's intellectual preoccupations. He was as incapable of profound analysis of ideology as the rest of the secular humanist/skeptical movement, which of course never sees itself as ideological. These folks can spot what's obviously pseudoscientific (unless it concerns memes, evolutionary economics, human sociobiology or some other pet non-paranormal pseudoscience of their own) in fringe science, but to delve beneath the surface, that's not their forte.

From CFI crisis to 'Neo-Humanism'

I begin with an alarming note I received from Norm Allen, staffer at the Center for Inquiry and Director of African Americans for Humanism for over two decades. The occasion was Norm's being terminated from his job, and not merely the fact of it, but according to him, the callous way in which he was terminated. There were other layoffs, and other offices belonging to CFI are closing (notably the Washington DC office), all due to a severe budget shortfall. This was not the beginning of organizational strife within CFI and tension within the humanist community, but its culmination.

I don't want to recap this sad story in detail just now, but a number of acrimonious debates ensued. Not privy to the internal workings of CFI, and not invested in ongoing disputes within the secular humanist community, I had no particular reason to take sides, but I as well as others initially reacted with a great deal of suspicion, largely on the basis of Norm's report of his termination. My interest was mainly in the fate of Norm and African Americans for Humanism (now in the capable hands of Deborah Goddard).

Here are some relevant links to the debate regarding the Center for Inquiry's financial crisis, closing of offices, and layoffs.

http://www.atheistnexus.org/group/blackfreethought/forum/topics/nor...

http://friendlyatheist.com/2010/06/02/cfi-budget-cuts-lead-to-a-number-of-firings/

http://www.facebook.com/notes/olga-bourlin/norm-allens-untimely-dep...

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1240401762&v=wall&st...

http://www.thinkatheist.com/group/africanblackatheistsandbelievers/forum/topics/norm-allen-terminated-at-cfi?xg_source=activity

See also:

Secular Humanism  Online News, Vol.6, No.6, June, 2010.

The first item is a farewell to Norm Allen.

• A Message from the Executive Director
• AAH Breaks New Ground at Washington, D.C., Conference
• A View from the Inside
• Meet Debbie Goddard: New Director, African Americans for Humanism

All of this is fairly moot at this point, and I'll just make a few general remarks. For me intervening in these debates without a basis in solid first-hand knowledge was mighty awkward. I see three main lines of disagreement in this dispute.

(1) The management style and priorities of CFI's current leadership (which was initially put into place by Kurtz).
(2) The management style and priorities of CFI founder Paul Kurtz.
(3) The unavoidable necessity of these layoffs.
(4) Alleged philosophical differences between Kurtz and the new leadership (Ron Lindsay et al).

The new leadership was accused of being callous and corporate. Kurtz loyalists were accused of misrepresentation. The financial crisis was real, and there obviously was no alternative to cutbacks. Remaining in dispute however were labor practices and organizational priorities. There is also the issue of overextension and dependence on large donors under Kurtz's leadership. Overall, there is a question of the ethics of the various parties' behavior, but also the ethics of the public debate.

In any case, I did my duty by publicizing Norm's complaint, but I cannot intervene sagaciously or effectively in this matter, partly because I am not in a position to answer unanswered questions, and partly because the broader critical framework from which I view the atheist/humanist/skeptical movement cannot be practically applied, considering the inevitability with which this organizational trajectory moves. What is already happening is that African American atheist organizing is moving ahead, inside of CFI as well as without, so this welcome development supplements the usual trite concerns and prominent personalities of the atheist/humanist movement, under the banner of diversity. Humanism will remain as bourgeois a movement as ever, with a few dissident voices within it. It is possible that the management and program of CFI will improve once the monetary shortfall is compensated for and now that fiscal accountability has supplanted Kurtz's alleged profligacy, but my perspective will always remain an outsider's perspective, "diversity" notwithstanding.

So, of the four points enumerated above, I'll let others fight out (1) and (2) and will concede the choices made in (3) for lack of contrary evidence. As to point 4--the philosophical debate--I won't say anything particularly in defense of the new leadership, but I find Kurtz's complaints about the direction of the humanist movement, and about the "new atheism" generally, thoroughly bogus.

As for the ongoing debates, probably the most interesting and confrontational is the one on Friendly Atheist.

There's a new development. Lo, out of the ashes comes a brand new organization headed by Paul Kurtz:

Institute for Science and Human Values

Former employees of CFI are on board, including Norm Allen and Toni Van Pelt. Several well-known intellectuals are involved, e.g. Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker. The rationale is given in the news section.

On the home page you will find a new humanist manifesto, or rather, "Neo-Humanist":

Neo-Humanist Statement of Secular Principles and Values: Personal, Progressive, and Planetary

Note also this news article:

Kurtz launches venture to explore morality, values in secular society
By Jay Tokasz
Buffalo News, July 10, 2010

Here we learn of  "Science and Human Values, a magazine to be edited by Norm Allen."

If this means that Norm Allen has a paying job and can pursue his international projects, more power to him. This is the one aspect of this new venture that could prove worthwhile. However . . .

This new manifesto reminds me of Marx's famous quote on tragedy and farce. The intellectual dishonesty and delusional pretension of this document are remarkable. I can understand for practical reasons why former employees of CFI signed onto this, but I don’t know what to make of some of the famous names I recognize getting involved in it. This ridiculous label “Neo-Humanism” is like a magic wand erasing the real history of secular humanism (and its terminological siblings “atheism” and “freethought”). It unwittlingly bespeaks not only of its own ideological character but of the ideological functioning and intellectual boundaries of the entire history of the secular humanist movement since the McCarthy era.

Kurtz's assertions of his alleged ideological differences with the new leadership of his former organization are ridiculous. Furthermore, I don't see the need for an institute to promote "values" and "morality", nor do I think it could possibly have any influence on curbing the rampage of the religious Right, or for that matter, make what's left of liberalism more socially conscious. There have been social and political movements galore for a half century or more. What could Kurtz possibly have to add to these beyond what he and everyone else has been pursuing all this time? Middle class professionals and the would-be managerial elite have an obsession with putting on a facade of niceness, but it's a self-deluding protective gesture, and the more ineffective to the social good the more vicious society actually becomes.

Now there is a Facebook page for the Institute for Science and Human Values. Note the ongoing discussion, particularly the debate around the Neo-Humanist founding statement. What a mess! There is at least a 3-cornered tangle of issues: (1) humanism vs "new atheists" (pro-Kurtz), (2) refutation of charges against atheists & "new Atheists" (most notably Ophelia Benson), (3) libertarian socialism vs. affirmation of (welfare state) capitalism in the Neo-Humanist manifesto (Barry F. Seidman). It's especially a mess because Seidman belongs to categories both (1) & (3).

"Neo-Humanism" reminds me of the elephant house at the Buffalo Zoo. Ophelia Benson effectively refutes Kurtz's scapegoating of the artificial pundit-generated category of "new atheists". But she also refutes the community-building pretensions of Barry F. Seidman, who occupies a peculiar position in all of these discussions. He dislikes the new CFI leadership but criticizes Kurtz in a collegial manner. He propounds "humanism" vs. atheism along with his anarcho-syndicalism. We learn here, if Seidman reports correctly, of Kurtz's leftist past. Who knew? You sure couldn't tell by anything Kurtz has said in the past 40 years at least. It's about time someone called him on his admiration for Sidney Hook, who was an arch-McCarthyite terrorizing philosophy departments. Barry Seidman strikes me as rather childish, though. I'm not impressed with the distinction between atheism and humanism. And in practice the demarcation is not as these ideologues would have it. "Humanism" no more guarantees community, commonality, progressive politics or human decency than "atheism". It is ideology, sometimes on point, sometimes platitudinous, sometimes duplicitous.

Seidman is on point, however, in criticizing the Neo-Humanist statement for its advocacy of the market economy. Granted, Kurtz maintains the social-democratic thrust of American liberalism which was killed off 35 years ago, but what qualifies Kurtz to uphold a moribund capitalism which long ago ceased to sustain the welfare state, in a statement otherwise upholding abstract democratic values; and in so doing, does Kurtz legitimately sustain a principled difference with neoliberalism? Does his eschewing of right-wing libertarianism, welcome as it is, really mark a departure from the humanist movement of either recent vintage or of the eclipsed era of Cold War liberalism? What right does Kurtz have to proclaim novelty, in light of other, long-standing liberally oriented organizations, notably the American Humanist Association? What good is his manifesto-mongering going to do now, and what's the point of studying values and preaching ethics as an organizational project in the world we live in now, and in addition to other social movements that actually concern themselves with human welfare? What can Kurtz and his liberal friends possibly say about the deadly, perhaps terminal, stage that global capitalism has reached?

All of this bears out the essentially ideological nature of both the intellectual and institutional history of "humanism" and the historical amnesia which imbues all these debates.