Oh, shit. Pete Evans has a new movie out; one that makes the claim that “food is medicine” and that tragic and common disorders like Alzheimer’s can be undone by the power of leafy greens. I could do as I have hitherto done and spend the day on the phone to biochemistry departments in the effort to understand how Evans’ foundational assumptions about the human liver, those based on the “research” of a “wellness expert” whose single enumerated qualification seems to be that she was “raised in a prominent medical family”, are demonstrably bunkum.
Or, we could all just give up on pursuit of this truth thing. In the present era, doubt has given way to absolute denialism and expertise is reviled to the extent that its opposites, like Pete or Donald Trump, are able to claim a peculiar new legitimacy, based entirely on their assurances that there are Things They Don’t Want You To Know.
At no time in human history have so many been so cultish in their devotion to so many bad ideas. While it is absolutely true that I have no sound basis for making this claim, it is also true that the pursuit of “truth” has become an unprofitable and unpopular exercise. So, truth. Why bother? Truth is nothing more than a tool of those elites in white coats and fine suits; it is the cruel device of a ruling class eager to keep us from “alternative facts” that would guarantee our freedom. The true truth could be that sugar is worse than heroin, that fluoride is a chemical means of diffusing communist theory, and that climate change is a supernatural moment ordained by our creator who wants us all to enjoy a century or three of relaxing warm weather.
Refuting these newly true truths with recourse to a truth derived in old-fashioned reason no longer ends well. You explain to an anti-vaxxer that the link between the life-saving measles, mumps and rubella shot and autism is based in one fraudulent study performed by a discredited doctor. You show those who support Pauline Hanson that her claims about the evil of Islam are nothing more than the foulest policy-based evidence. You explain that the Earth is round. You recount the old, established truth to the point where you appear like a madman.
In his very good essay on the present nature of truth and its defenders, UK writer Sam Kriss recounts a tale told by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. A chap escapes from a psychiatric facility. In the effort to appear sane, the man takes note of the things that others hold true and resolves to only repeat these. “He decided to prepare himself fully to convince everyone, by the objective truth of what he said, that all was in order with his sanity.”
The man notes that most believe that the world is round, and so, he begins to repeat this incessantly. At every turn and in every interaction, he strives to “prove” Newton’s laws and his constant repetition of them has him sent right back to the asylum, still shrieking that the world is round.
There is a certain madness that inheres in restating the truth. You can say for all that you are worth that, no, cheap migrant labour has nothing to do with the decline in US wages and that Trump is a liar. You can say that Pete Evans, a man always shy of citation, has a paucity of evidence for his claims about the power of soup. You can say that anthropogenic climate change is observable fact, fluoride has improved dental health and not spread the decay of communism, that Islam dictates violence no more than any other faith. You keep saying it and you keep saying it and you begin to appear inauthentic.
Those who strive to reveal the danger of delusion, whether scientific or political, are to be admired. Those who write pop-Popper essays on the stable nature of truth, somewhat less so. Still, even here the impulse is noble and an attempt to re-establish Enlightenment order in which we, the mass inexpert population, agree that there are people who know better than we do.
Still. Trump is in the White House. Pete Evans has a “documentary” in cinemas and just last night in Melbourne, Crown Casino screened a film directed by the discredited anti-vax doctor Andrew Wakefield. My neighbour Polly activated her Tesla plate, unasked, to help me with my cynical vibrations. Down the road, 50 people will pay thirty dollars each for a “hot yoga” class that promises to eliminate unspecified toxins and my pharmacist tried to sell me olive leaf extract when all I wanted was a triptan script for my migraines filled. Perversely, all of these persons will rely on the language of reason to justify their malarkey — a “peer reviewed” study here, a decontextualised statistic there. They are as desperate for truth in this era as are we, their cynical opponents.
To claim that there is a “crisis of truth” is hardly a new one to make. Philosophers, the fathers of science, have been fretting about this for centuries. But, this calamity was one addressed at the individual level; the eternal question of a child who looks up at the sky and asks, “how do I know that this true blue is the same blue seen by other people?”
Our questions about objectivity are now more fractured and social. Joined together since the Enlightenment by so much scientific truth, we have come to resist its force. We now live in a world where we don’t even ask if we know if this blue is the same blue seen by others. We know now for certain, with the emergence of people like Pete Evans, that it’s not.
Our greatest and most ambitious Western traditions, philosophy and science, are falling apart. To simply reassert their reliability, it seems, does nothing but convince those already suspicious that these institutions are evil. I’m not sure how in this age where instant individual confidence trumps centuries of collective doubt we re-establish these things. I just know it’s not by barking, “Look. The Earth is round.”
In an increasingly populist world, the increasing anger of the wounded climate will be increasingly taken as evidence of an angry God. We are not so intelligent ourselves; we think that by mounting prayer wheels on our skylines we will be forgiven for their fossil backup that wounds the climate all the more.
I agree, that has long been my main concern as well. The End of Days will be taken as proof not rebuttal.
Whereas the hardened containment vessel domes that you would like to see strewn across the land are … what, the Eye of God?
The legacy of the enlightenment was only sustained by a hierarchical structure of information distribution (which was imperfect but generally worked pretty well).
The internet has destroyed this hierarchy, so the internet, for all its benefits, has also destroyed the concept of “truth”. We’re now seeing the legacy of the libertarian wet-dream of freedom from any centrally imposed “ideal” (other than the ones they want to centrally impose of course).
Welcome to the era of the Dunning-Kruger effect overlord.
Historically, people have believed all sorts of things, and for the most part it doesn’t matter. For most people it doesn’t even matter if they think the earth flat or round, because the GPS in their mobile phone knows precisely how non-round it is, and so did (some of the) people who built it. It just shows the way. Could be magic.
I don’t know any more about Paleo Pete than you’ve written in previous columns, but it seems to me that he’s a cook, who publishes recipes of various sorts. Why does it matter what he thinks when he devises them? The people who eat his food will, presumably, still be fed.
The public insistence that “food is medicine” and can be used in the place of actual medicine or therapies for a range of disorders, including heart disease and autism, is generally thought of as dangerous.
How dangerous, though? You can’t make people go to the doctor, at least until they get wheeled into emergency, where they might have ended up anyway. A feed of fresh food, with lots of green leafies (if I’ve understood the cuisine) is unlikely to do much actual damage. Some conditions, like autism don’t have any known “cures” anyway. The usual prescription for many other modern afflictions is “diet and exercise”. Or there’s probably a pill. My doctors recommend the former, with the latter as a threat.
Regarding the general degeneration of discourse, the post-enlightenment: I first noticed what I catalogued as a “rise of occult thinking” in the eighties, when PCs were new, and non-technical acquaintences had their own preferred incantations and terminology, to make the beasts do their bidding. A sufficient level of arbitrary complexity to deny actual understanding, but useful none the less. How can anyone without ten years of postgraduate engineering hope to apply rationality to the world we now inhabit?
I may be missing the point, but this seems like a dramatic over-simplification. There is quite a lot of good quality, consistent and valid research evidence for the benefits of certain foods and diets for the prevention of disease, including heart disease and Alzheimer’s/dementia (e.g. flavanols, polyphenols, omega-3s, the Mediterranean diet, the DASH diet). Yes, be critical of everything presented to you as ‘evidence’, but by the same token don’t make blanket claims that everything is bullshit, and therefore has no value.
I agree. It’s worth remembering that pharmaceuticals are produced by the pharmaceutical INDUSTRY, focussed not on health for health’s sake, but on how it can turn a profit. Not to say that modern medicine is bunkum, but I don’t see the harm in promoting the benefits of a balanced diet and enjoying regular exercise. However I haven’t seen the film in question & am no fan of Paleo Pete.
Evans explicitly endorses avoidance of pharmaceuticals and therapies, declaring that “food is medicine”. His recommendations, seen by millions of people, include eschewing sunscreen in favour of a “healthy tan” and feeding your ASD child a diet he has developed, sans medical knowledge, in favour of early intervention therapies.
Yes, the pharmaceutical industry can hardly be characterised as free from vested interests. Yes, eating a diet rich in plants and low in processes is good. But, come on. Criticism of big business (and let’s not pretend “wellness” is not a big business, with chain store chemists making up to 70% of their profits from the sale of herbs and vitamins) and advocacy for fresh food need not end in Pete Evans. He disseminates poor information to a large sector and he does NOT simply say “eat a better diet” but he encourages people, as did the infamous statins episode on Catalyst and as have the anti-vax, to distrust medicine. He is not just a humble advocate for leafy greens but an anti-civilisation extremist.
” Pete Evans, a man always shy of citation”
ROTFLMAO Bless you Helen. Line of the day. 🙂
I first posited, some time in the late 90’s I think, at the beginning of what I saw as rampant climate change denialism, that there are signs that we are entering another dark ages. Nutrition punditry, anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, the rise of the connectedness and influence of conspiracy theorists, fake news etc, that we are very possibly entering a new ‘dark ages’.
I’m not so educated to know that philosophy and science are our greatest western traditions, or whether they just happened to occur at the same time, but I very much believe that this is the beginning of the fight, not the end.
On the other hand, perhaps all these suspicious old buggers can die off and the generations following won’t buy into that crap so much, and restore philosophy and science to their rightful place.
But that is not likely to happen while the world is spewing out so many MBA’s.
Thinking, it does not teach.
Damn, please excuse repetition there, lack of editing makes a goose of me again! Oops