Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 284

A Visit from the Thought Police

I have received another visit  from the Thought Police, who have claimed my remarks about police advertisements, making us by implication responsible for being robbed, are inconsistent with my views about rape. As is clear below, my views are entirely consistent. But it is an interesting example of how 'liberals' hunt and worry at the writings of dissenters, looking for opportunities of this kind.

 

A Mr or Ms R Godfrey originally wrote ‘Your views on mugging differ to those you previously expressed on rape. You were blaming women for wearing scanty clothes previously comparing it with leaving valuables in a car, but when it comes to mugging..it's the police’s fault suddenly?’’

 

I replied : ‘Perhaps this person could cite the supposed statements on rape allegedly made by me, to which he alludes’.

 

Mr or Ms Godfrey replied: ’Certainly: You said, on the 16th of August 2008, in this column entitled ‘How The Left Censored the Blindingly Obvious Truth About Rape: ' Women who get drunk are more likely to be raped than women who do not get drunk. No, this does not excuse rape. Men who take advantage of women by raping them, drunk or sober, should be severely punished for this wicked, treacherous action, however stupid the victim may have been. But it does mean that a rape victim who was drunk deserves less sympathy. Simple, isn’t it? You can hate rape and want it punished, while still recognising that a woman who, say, goes back to a man’s home after several Bacardi Breezers was being a bit dim.' On the 13th of November 2007 you said: It is a breach of trust and honour and it ought to be punished. I do not think that the fact that a woman has drunk too much excuses a man who then has intercourse with her. But is this always rape, for instance where the two are well-known to each other and have been in a sustained sexual relationship for some time?’

 

‘In both cases you claim that the Victim’s previous behaviour makes them more culpable for the violence perpetrated against them, yet you take the opposite view on being mugged. Waving an expensive phone about, late at night while drunk, get mugged? Police’s fault. Get raped late at night while drunk: you question whether that is even rape. So which is it? Maintain consistency does conspicuous display of wealth or attractiveness make you more culpable or not? You cannot claim that being attractive and drunk makes you less deserving of sympathy if attacked sexually than being rich and drunk does if robbed, It also begs another question: Do you or do you not believe that rapes is possible within a marriage.’

 

Try as I may, I am condemned to be misrepresented on this subject by people who don’t read what I say, which is why I have sworn to avoid this topic in future. It is futile to use reason on this subject, especially against the ultra-feminist Thought Police who will invariably misconstrue any dissent from their view , which is basically that all men are rapists, all accused persons charged with rape are guilty, and the normal safeguards and presumptions protecting defendants against wrongful conviction should be dispensed with in trials of those accused of rape.  Only the dwindling minority in this country, who can recognise this attitude as oppressive and dangerous, will be interested in what I have to say.  I am only commenting on this for the purpose of self-defence, and in case silence is misconstrued as consent.

 

However, for any genuinely interested readers, here is my reply to Mr or Ms Godfrey.

 

Mr or Ms Godfrey blusters to cover up for the fact that he or she has failed to substantiate his or her  allegation that I was ‘blaming women for wearing scanty clothes previously comparing it with leaving valuables in a car’ .  Before I go any further, I would say that I frequently mock the police for their defeatist campaigns telling people not to become ‘victims’ of crime, instead of preventing those crimes, and mistakenly equating crime prevention with living our lives in fortresses of fear, alarms and locks.  And the Metropolitan Police advertisements which I have seen in central London do not as Mr Godfrey suggests, target people who are ‘Waving an expensive phone about, late at night while drunk’, but target sober people going about their normal business.

 

He or she also, rather significantly, does not reproduce this passage from the 2008 article, , which *directly contradicts* his/ her claim that I was ‘blaming women for wearing scanty clothes.

 

How can he or she square that claim with the words which follow, some of which (’thanks a lot to those who do’) got me into trouble with quite a lot of my more conservative readers who were shocked that this was my view : ‘If women want to dress provocatively, then they should be free to do so, and I say thanks a lot to those who do. Our society is based on self-restraint. We can be provoked and still behave ourselves. We do not need to compel women to dress like bats, as many Muslim countries do, so as to curb the unchained passions of hot-blooded menfolk.

 

‘All the above is a statement of the blindingly obvious. Yet, in the main forums of public opinion, such views are becoming harder and harder to express because of the unreasoning storm of fury that will follow.’

 

 

 

What he or she does find, and even quotes because it is impossible to give any sort of honest account of what I said without doing so,  is a series of unequivocal statements in which I make it plain that the rapist is entirely to blame for his crime.

 

Here they are:

 

. This *does not excuse rape*. Men who rape women, *drunk or sober* should be *severely punished for this wicked, treacherous action* *however stupid the victim may have been*. *I do not think that the fact that a woman has drunk too much excuses a man who then has intercourse with her*.

*It is a breach of trust and honour and it ought to be punished. I do not think that the fact that a woman has drunk too much excuses a man who then has intercourse with her*.

 

 

And then *But it does mean that a rape victim who was drunk deserves less sympathy. Simple, isn’t it? You can hate rape and want it punished, while still recognising that a woman who, say, goes back to a man’s home after several Bacardi Breezers was being a bit dim.'*

 

Which of these statements does Mr or Ms Godfrey disagree with, and why? How can he or she possibly claim, in the light of these unequivocal words,  that I suggest women should be *blamed* for being raped? I have never suggested it, and the claim is false.

 

For any remaining doubters on this matter, you may go to the index under ‘Rape’ and find several articles, the most sustained, comprehensive and detailed of which is here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/rape/

 

 

Here is a central quotation from it:

 

‘Now to the question of what difference it makes if they are drunk. Now, here's what I never said. I never said that it was their fault if they were then raped.  Rape, as I made clear, is entirely the responsibility of the rapist. I am not one of those who blames the victim for being attacked, robbed, or otherwise harmed by crime. On the other hand,  I would guess that  many of my ultra-feminist critics, being conventional leftists, would tend to blame the victim and sympathise with the attacker in the case of crimes other than rape.  Their militant punitive views are reserved for crimes against ultra-feminism, crimes they regard as political offences against the New Order they want ( more of this later).

 

‘Unlike them, I am consistent. I think criminals are wholly responsible for their misdeeds and should be punished for them. That very much includes rapists. The fact that a victim was drunk shouldn't reduce the sentence by a single second. In fact, on reflection,  I rather think it should increase it, since the treachery involved was greater.

 

‘But the issue here was never whether rape should be punished, or by how much. That wasn't in doubt.  I made my position on this completely clear in the original article - so clear that a large number of correspondents simply ignored what I said, so here it is again: "Men who take advantage of women by raping them, drunk or sober, should be severely punished for this wicked, treacherous action, however stupid the victim may have been." As the ultra-feminists themselves like to ask "What part of this don't you understand?"

 

‘The issue was whether the state should pay the same compensation to a sober rape victim as it should pay to a drunk one. In this, the question of 'culpability', that is to say not responsibility for the crime against them, but responsibility for needlessly putting themselves in a position of danger, arises. "Culpability", the thing which Bridget Prentice maintains does not apply to drunk women who get raped,  refers to a responsibility in civil law for taking care of yourself. It is not the same as "guilt' which refers to criminal responsibility for a criminal action. Try it another way. The rapist is not culpable for the rape. He is guilty of it. The victim may or may not be partly culpable for creating the conditions in which the rapist could strike.

 

‘Tax-funded compensation for being a victim of crime is a new concept in Britain, and I do not know if it exists anywhere else. As I said in my original article it is probably a side-effect of the failure of the British system to catch and punish criminals. I can't think of any other way in which it could be justified, except as a tacit admission that the state has failed in its duty to protect the victim.  Instead of justice, I said, the state offers a cheque. It strikes me that a cheque for £11,000 (who worked that figure out?) would be scant compensation for having been raped, and that what has been lost in the rape could not be restored by any amount of money. I should have thought that a serious feminist might actually have made this point. Call me old-fashioned.

 

I will make one confession of fault.  I must admit to having been too vague when I sought to come up with a non-gender-specific parallel to being raped while drunk.  My road-accident comparisons weren't good enough. The alternative comparison, of being mugged, put forward by "Rachael" was far better.

She asked: "Would you have been any less deserving of sympathy if [you had been drunk and] someone had mugged or injured you?".

 

Well, the answer to that is that yes, absolutely, I would have been much less deserving of sympathy if I had been drunk and someone had mugged or injured me. I would have contributed to my undoing by being needlessly and obviously vulnerable, ie partly culpable in civil law for the consequences for which I was claiming compensation.  Would that make the crime against me less heinous? No. Would it mean that my assailant deserved a lesser punishment? No. But, if there were any compensation involved, I would be entitled to less than someone who had been identically attacked while sober.

 

I can't see anything surprising or inconsistent in this,. I  fact, I cannot imagine what other answer I could give. Yet for some reason 'Rachael' seems to assume that my motives for taking this view are selfish, pro-rapist and anti-woman.  She insisted "Whatever language you choose to use, it is blatantly obvious that you are placing a degree of responsibility with the victim of rape who is drunk."

 

In other words, "Even though you say quite clearly and unequivocally that rapists are entirely responsible for their actions, whether their victims are drunk or sober, I will nonetheless conclude that you mean the opposite of what you say, and too bad". Well, how can civilised people argue if one side assumes that the other side is lying,  presumably because it has already dismissed the other side as wrong and evil? No free society can last long if disagreement is based on this level of contempt for opponents. This is how opponents become enemies, and argument is replaced by force.’

 

 

Oh, Mr/Ms Godfrey asks if rape can take place inside marriage. It most certainly can . It would be ( amongst other things) a serious breach of the first part of the Marriage Oath in the Prayer book, in which the husband promises to ‘honour’ his wife.

 

 

Don't Take Your Nanny up the North Face of the Eiger, or , "Fun with Mr 'X' "

Mr ‘X’ is becoming obtuse, something which I don’t think would happen if we were allowed to know who he is. 

He writes :

‘Mr Hitchens, thank you for a further reply and your explanation. I note the use of the word 'sudden' in the first quotation. I was in fact already aware of its presence.’ 

** Really? In that case, why did he write his comment as if he was not aware of this , or, alternatively, as if the distinction was unimportant?

He then says  ’ I also note its absence from the second quotation, as you suggest.’

 

**I don’t ‘suggest’. I state. It is there in the one, and absent in the other. This is a fact, not a suggestion.

 

He continues: ‘ Actually, that seems to be the cause of the problem to me. That quote was: “Your body may be habituated to it, and so produce hangover-like symptoms of varying strengths when you cease using it. But you won’t die of ceasing to use it, whereas you may well die of carrying on.” It seems to unequivocally suggest that if you cease drinking alcohol, suddenly or not, it will not lead to your death.

 

** Unequivocally is a big word, not be used lightly. A sentence will easily collapse under its weight, if that sentence doesn’t justify its use. I think this sentence has collapsed.

 

Had he written ‘This unequivocally says that if you cease drinking alcohol, suddenly or not, it will not lead to your death’ , it would be clear (from reading what I said)  that his claim was ill-founded, not to say mistaken, not to say…. Well, I’ll stop there out of politeness.

 

I did not, unequivocally, say any such thing. I made a far more general statement which did not exclude from my mind, or from the meaning of the sentence,  the possibility of sudden death *triggered by* abrupt cessation, which I have never denied. Why should I? Sudden death in very ill people (and heavy drinkers are usually pretty ill) can be triggered by all sorts of things. It would be an odd world, if this were not so. Mr ‘X’ would like it if I had said what he wants me to have said, but he can’t make it so. I wish he would give up trying, and I only persist with this conversation in case some person inexperienced in logic is taken in by the sophistries of Mr ‘X’.

 

In fact it is obvious from his diffident, even shy use of language that Mr ‘X’ does not really believe his own claim. If it is *unequivocal* then it must *be* so, not *seem* so. But Mr ‘X’ significantly does not make himself the subject of the sentence implicitly by making his statement a simple unadorned sentence, clearly attributable to him and his view. Nor does he do so explicitly, by beginning it ‘I think…’ .. Instead, he introduces a shadowy un-named audience (of weasels, perhaps?) to whom this thing ‘seems’ to be so. Well, it may ‘seem’ so to them, whoever they are, But that doesn’t mean it is. This audience may be prejudiced, or ignorant, or anxious to believe that it is so.

 

The word ‘seems’  really doesn’t work in the elevated and precise realms delineated by the word ‘unequivocally’.  The sight of them together is as incongruous as, say, a mountain-climber accompanied up the North Face of the Eiger by his nanny. Unequivocal things don’t seem. They are.

 

Nor, in the same vein,  is ‘suggest’ a word you can use in company with ‘unequivocally’ . 'Suggest', by its nature, is less precise and definitive than that nice short word ‘says’, which is why Mr ‘X’ uses it.  'Suggests' is to 'says' as doggypaddling across the municipal pool in waterwings is to swimming in the deep sea.  It lacks confidence. Deep down, he knows I didn’t say what he is trying to attribute to me.  Either I said it, or I didn’t say it.  If abrupt cessation is risky (and this is not uncommon in the case of mind-altering chemicals with potent physical side-effects, ‘antidepressants’ being another instance) then the risk (as I seem to have said quite a lot of times without it making any impact on Mr ‘X’) is from the abruptness, not from the cessation.

 

Let’s try a parallel, to show how essentially pettifogging and silly this effort is.

 

He writes : ’There is no qualifier that mentions abruptness. Perhaps it should have read something more like, "But you won’t die of ceasing to use it (unless this happens suddenly), whereas ..." or maybe "But you won’t die of ceasing to use it in a controlled and careful manner, whereas ..."

 

**Groan.  If I say ‘People don’t die of getting out of their cars and stretching their legs during long journeys’, someone might write in (obtusely) and point out that in such a such a year , a certain number of people had indeed died by doing so , because they got out of their cars to stretch their legs , but , as part of this action,  strolled into the path of a passing car, or toppled over a precipice. It would be misleadingly true but fundamentally false.  They would have died in the course of getting out of their cars. But actually they would have died because they failed to take sensible precautions while doing so.

 

I would have avoided such a letter had I said  ‘people don’t die from getting out of their cars to stretch their legs, unless they step into traffic, or over precipices’ . But would any serious point have been made?   No. I can’t write every word on the basis that some opponent will deliberately misunderstand what I am saying, and attribute meanings to my words that they don’t have.

 

The discussion, in the general context of ‘addiction’, was about whether the action of ceasing to use alcohol would itself kill you. The word ‘cease’ means just that.  Mr ‘X’ chooses to believe that it includes the meaning  ‘cease abruptly’ because that is what he wants to believe.  He wants to believe it because he wants to believe in the enslaving concept of ‘addiction’ and is anxious to introduce an element of real compulsion into that concept, namely the threat of death if you give up the thing to which you are ‘addicted’. He is uninterested in the following points: 1. People volunteer to take up heavy drinking. 2. They can also die from the effects of it, without ever trying to give up.  Quite possibly, this is more common than dying having abruptly ceased to drink. 3. The bodily weakness which creates the risk of death after abrupt cessation stems from the habit of habitual heavy drinking itself, and would not exist if the person had not voluntarily become a heavy drinker.

 

That is why he is now becoming obtuse. He knows I didn’t actually say what he wants me to have said, and what he wants readers of his contributions to believe I said.

 

 He also knows for certain I didn’t mean it, because I have told him so. (He could know anyway if he chose, because it’s clear from everything I have said that this is what I mean,  but he chooses not to).  He can carry this on if he wants to, (he threatens me with further discussions upon ‘addiction’) but I can’t promise not to get bored with this sort of sniping.  I believe he knows perfectly well what I meant, and understands it too. He just doesn’t like it.  

 

Oh, one last thing though I really cannot see why he needs to ask it, the answer again being perfectly obvious from everything I’ve written .

 

He writes : ’You took issue with my saying, "If the drugs are quickly removed, seizures, hallucinations and even death can result (contrary to what Mr Hitchens says)." For absolute clarity please, are you saying you do in fact agree with this statement?’

 

** I can’t possibly disagree with it. Nobody can. It's a sattement of fact, not of opinion.  I feel no reason to provide any more ‘clarity’ than I have already done. If there is a lack of clarity, then it is in the beholder’s eye, not in my argument.  . As I have said since the beginning of my disagreement with Dr Lovell (and as my critics have repeatedly failed to grasp), it is Dr Lovell who denies that Delirium Tremens can occur in heavy drinkers other than during abrupt withdrawal. I have never disputed his correct and experience-based statement that it *does* occur during withdrawal.  I *have* disputed his assertion (which contradicts decades of skilled observation, and offers no researched reason to do so)  that it does not occur under any other circumstances. I do hope that is clear now.

 

 

 

Can Bears Turn Into Whales? (Part Two) - Charles Darwin Revisited

Mr Platt says I have been ‘put right’ about evolution.  I imagine he says this to provoke another posting on the subject. Well, it’s been a while, so here goes anyway, useless though it is to reason on the fanatical faith which has the mighty Selfist Church in its thrall (I don't mean you, Will) .

 

I’ll come to  the matter of being ‘put right’ in a moment. First, he resurrects a silly comparison. He tries to equate encylopaedia references (and medical journal references)  to an observed fact (Delirium Tremens) witnessed by doctors and classified since 1813, and encyclopaedia references to the theory of evolution by natural selection. The latter is opinionated, differing and rapidly changing speculation about supposed events in the remote past, long before we were there to witness them (and far too slow to be detected in our own time).

 

Why does he do this obviously misleading thing, and not notice he is doing it?  As I said, and now repeat, the theory of evolution, *whatever its merits and problems*, is – and has to be by its nature - a theory about the distant past, witnessed by nobody,  based upon speculation, not upon observation.

 

Mr Platt says : ‘If he had bothered to look it up in the encyclopaedia he relied upon for information about DT, and by implication trusted as a reliable source, he would have seen how badly mistaken his ideas on the subject are. Realising the implications of his theory, Darwin spent several years making observations and collecting data after his return from the Galapagos Islands before publishing his great work. To suggest that the theory is “based upon speculation, not upon observation” is an insult to Darwin, and to the many biologists who have studied and refined the theory over the years. But why take my word for it? Consult one or more reliable texts and see for yourself! Mr. Hitchens has just taken on a medical professional and (in my view) won, simply by quoting from various textbooks. Steadfastly refusing to believe what those textbooks tell him about other subjects – presumably because it would mean having to transform his entire view of the world – seems at best stubborn and at worst hypocritical.’

 

Let me say it again. These are different kinds of information, treated differently by works of reference. The fact that they both appear in the same work of reference does not make them necessarily comparable,  let alone identical.  Newspapers contain weather forecasts, sports reports and obituaries, as well as news of differing kinds. Because all these things are in the same place, do we read them all in the same way? Not if we have any sense.  

 

Mr McStraun, whom Mr Platt applauds, had said : ‘Your [my] statement that the Theory of Evolution only concerns the distant past cannot pass uncontested. It is also used to explain present day phenomena such as the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria and the rapid (within a decade) changes in common beak shapes in the Galapagos finches as a result of vegetation changes.’

 

First, what do these two gentlemen think my position is on the theory of evolution by natural selection? I will re-state it, yet again. It is that I am quite prepared to accept that it may be true, though I should personally be sorry if it turned out to be so as, it its implication is plainly atheistical, and if its truth could be proved, then the truth of atheism could be proved. I believe that is its purpose, and that it is silly to pretend otherwise.

 

It is an elegant and clever explanation for the current state of the realm of nature.  But it is a theory . Personally, I have no idea how the realm of nature took its present shape, or how life began, and I don’t think anyone else does either. There are several strands of belief among supporters of the theory (much as there are several sorts of belief in God), with Stephen Jay Gould disagreeing with Richard Dawkins, among others. The theory of evolution by natural selection has altered substantially since it was first set out, stumbles over the fossil record, which provides some unwelcome evidence of large-scale sudden change, especially in the Cambrian Explosion,  and has a general circularity problem (as do most all-explanatory theories),  which has troubled at least one notable philosopher, Sir Karl Popper. Don’t tell me he ‘recanted’ (even that is in dispute, by the way). So did Galileo, and in both cases the recantation said more about those who desired and pressed for it than it did about those who made it. In both cases a rather ossified faith come up against an enquiring mind, and the enquiring mind was compelled to conform,  by ossified faith. Which side are you on in such conflicts?  I am always on the same one.

 

Mr McStraun’s citation of ‘the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria and the rapid (within a decade) changes in common beak shapes in the Galapagos finches as a result of vegetation changes,’ simply moves the problem along a few feet, much as a motorway shifts a traffic jam from one place to another. It also suggests he may not fully understand the immense ambitions of the theory he embraces. It seems to me that these problems are so obvious to a thinking mind that nothing short of fervent faith protects them from sceptical examination.

 

These undoubted phenomena, which he mentions in the apparent belief that I haven’t heard of them,  are evidence of *adaptation*, which could easily exist in a non-evolutionary system (as could extinction)  and fall well short of the far more ambitious changes required for the evolutionary theory to work. The point at which adaptation becomes evolutionary change is one of the most interesting in science, and not easily answered, particularly by measurable evidence.  This is where the circularity tends to come in.

 

The theory’s confidence has often led its proponents into error (E.g. : Darwin’s own wondrous speculation that ’I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale,’ and the willingness of so many to be fooled by the blatant fake which was Piltdown man) . Why shouldn’t it be doing the same now? And what exactly *is* punctuated equilibrium? It makes theology look straightforward.

 

Mr Platt’s assertion that ‘to suggest that the theory is “based upon speculation, not upon observation” is an insult to Darwin, and to the many biologists who have studied and refined the theory over the years.’ , with its interesting use of the word ‘insult’, is a mild but important warning of the inquisition-style rage which quickly enters arguments on this subject, and which is in fact the biggest single argument against the theory. Why are its supporters so furiously intolerant of doubt and dissent, if they are so confident?

 

By the way, I must request Mr ‘Crosland’ not to contribute to this debate until he has answered the ‘childishly simple questions’ on this subject I put to him some years ago, but to which he has mysteriously failed to respond despite numerous promptings, and now says he has lost.  Of course, I cannot stop him contributing, but I will not respond to him unless he answers the questions.

 

I’ll end as I did the last time I wasted my time trying to approach this matter in a reasoned, sceptical way, three years ago. This can be found here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/02/can-bears-turn-into-whales.html

 ‘What I enjoy about this debate is the way in which my cautious modesty about the unknowable is made out to be a fault - often by the same people who belabour me about my passionate certainty about knowable things. You just can't please some folks.’

 

Lincoln, Blair, Drugs, Drink and the Future - my responses to your comments

A few responses to comments, more or less at random. Brooks Davids criticises what I wrote about wage-slavery : ‘ (first quoting me) ‘ “And some would say that the ultimate fate of the freed slaves (and indeed of the already-free white migrant inhabitants of post-Lincoln America, sucked into ‘The Jungle’ (see Upton Sinclair’s tremendous novel of that name) of ruthless capitalism, was as bad as slavery.”

 

‘And some would be wrong to say it. Wage slaves, unlike actual slaves, could hope to work for something better for their children. Some of the children of my slave ancestors in North Carolina became teachers, doctors and pastors before desegregation in the 1960s.’

 

Well, that is an interesting distinction, but I am not sure it answers the question, since many of those sucked into the great roaring furnace of American industrialisation had no such hope, not least because the rapaciousness of their ‘employers’ ( an interesting word, suggesting that the main aim of businessmen is to employ people, which it obviously isn’t)  made it more or less impossible for these workers to have anything resembling a family life, or even to have descendants.

 

 I wonder if Mr Davis has read ‘The Jungle’, or the industrial passages in Dickens’s ‘Old Curiosity Shop’.  He should. (Both these books became popular for other reasons –  to Sinclair’s bafflement, ‘The Jungle’ led to a campaign for better meat hygiene, while most people think the ‘Old Curiosity Shop’ is all about the Death of Little Nell) . A.N.Wilson, in his ever-interesting history of  ‘The Victorians’ distinguishes between Britain, where aristocratic conservative Christians ameliorated working conditions in later stages of the industrial revolution, and the USA, where there were no such restraints, and the big businessmen were robber barons pretty much to a man, though they had attacks of conscience and philanthropy later in many cases.  Who has not benefited from Andrew Carnegie’s many endowments (the lovely park in Dunfermline, which I much enjoyed as a child, was, I think,  due to his generosity, not to mention hundreds of libraries)? But how did he get the money in the first place?

 

Anyway ‘as bad as’ does not mean ‘the same as’. The two might be equally bad, but in different ways. Having been brought up in the belief that the Industrial Revolution was a pretty unequivocal Good Thing, I have been forced by later knowledge to accept that the cost of it was sometimes so high as to make its benefits at least questionable. No doubt I will be asked sarcastically if I would prefer to live in a backward feudal system. No, I wouldn’t, but I cannot help wondering if the route we took to our present precarious prosperity was the best one, or whether its long-term  consequences will necessarily be good. Isn’t the point of free thought that we should be free to wonder about such things, the better to penetrate the disguises in which history advances itself?

 

I hope there is a sort of answer, in the above,  to the question about the difference between ‘ruthless’ and normal capitalism, put by Mr ‘R’ . there are many different faces of capitalism. If he had seen the spoil heaps near the worked-out copper mines of Katanga, and the wretched people picking through them for gleanings, he might know what I was driving at.

 

I’m grateful for Mr Bancroft’s thought about Flashman. Yes, it’s true that some of those who tricked (or in one case drugged)  Flashman into undertaking missions for them knew what he was made of. But they also had no interest in spoiling his reputation.

 

 I was thinking of the soldiers who found themselves alongside him in a tight spot, in Afghanistan in the original ‘Flashman’ and also the Irish soldier who sees him kowtow in ‘Flashman and the Dragon’. Flashman contrives a particularly awful fate for him, so brilliantly described that I actually trembled with fear when I first read it and imagined how it would be to be the victim of such a betrayal.

 

My thanks for the many recommendations for further reading and watching about Lincoln and other American political giants. I hope to find the time to follow them all.

 

Mr Platt’s remarks on Britannica and evolution miss an important point.  The theory of evolution, whatever its merits and problems, is a theory about the distant past, witnessed by nobody,  based upon speculation, not upon observation.

 

The reference books I quote on delirium tremens are descriptions of observed behaviour, actually seen and recorded by our contemporaries and near0-contempoararies. They show, at the absolute least, that the definition of Delirium Tremens has not changed, but that the view of its cause has changed, and significantly narrowed, in recent years. Readers here will know well what a jungle causation turns out to be, so I remain highly interested in this change.

 

Like all anomalies, it seems to me to suggest further inquiry. I have asked for, and not so far received, any explanation as to why the *cause* of DT has been narrowed to ‘withdrawal’ in recent years. Remember, my point was and remains that Dr Lovell insisted that there was no other cause of DTs, and wrote here to tell me I was wrong to suggest that there was . I have never challenged the belief that withdrawal *can* bring about DTs. I have challenged a) the idea that it is  the sole cause and b) the idea that it can truly be described as a *cause* rather than as a trigger.

 

In the absence of any other explanation for this change of view, I shall continue to suspect that it has something to do with the pharmaceutical industry’s growing power over the medical profession. By the way, where *are* the Lovells these days?

 

Mr Whittington states : ‘It does seem that, no matter what evidence is discussed Peter will say that there is no evidence and it's all a matter of opinion. No matter what happens, Peter will not ever ever ever change his mind on this one. Not based on something someone else says, at any rate. Rather than evidence, his mind is made up by a philoosophical point about free will which, in his mind, is unimpeachable.’

 

I reject this completely.  If there is objective evidence, I accept it. The point is that in these cases ( ‘addiction’, ‘ADHD’. ‘dyslexia’, there is no such evidence, just a cloudy shape-shifting definition that can never be pinned down,  opinion presented as fact , and a wave of intolerant rage directed at any dissent.

 

Nobody here has come up with any evidence of the objective, testable existence of ‘addiction’, as it is commonly understood and acted upon in medicine and justice, that is,  as an absolute excuse for a criminal act.

 

This is partly because it is such a misty, unclear term. Its advocates use it lightly in public debate, to suggest that heroin abusers or habitual drunkards are victims rather than criminals. This could only be so if their actions were involuntary. But when one then says ‘their actions are not involuntary’, the ‘addiction’ lobby retreats, saying ‘Oh, no, we didn’t mean that by addiction at all. We meant that these things are difficult to give up, and that those who use them suffer physical symptoms when they try to do so.’ Well, so what? Even if this were the same as the alleged ‘addiction’ , which it obviously isn’t, it evades the question of the voluntary nature of these problems. People take drugs, and drink too much *because they like it*. And because they choose to do so. And because they choose not to stop.

 

Mr ‘X’, offers  a largely meaningless disquisition on receptors, which at most could be said to mean that the more of a habitual heavy drinker you are, the harder you will find it to give it up, which, while true, is of no great use in this argument, since it does not overcome or even engage the problem of free will.

 

 

He then says : ‘The presence of alcohol (or other depressant drugs like benzodiazepines) will help dampen down excitatory activity to below the seizure level. If the drugs are quickly removed, seizures, hallucinations and even death can result (contrary to what Mr Hitchens says).’

 

Is it contrary to what I say? Really?  Where? When? I don’t believe I have denied that sudden withdrawal from alcohol or other drugs *can* trigger seizures or death. It is not me doing the denying in this argument, but Dr Lovell, who (if I understand him rightly) denies that the DTs can happen under any other circumstances. Amazing what people see when they want to.

 

Mr ‘reason’ comments  ‘ One word that rarely if ever crops up in PH's posts is 'compassion'. In his world there's success and there's failure and those who fall into the latter category, lacking as they do the necessary ego strength or will power to drag themselves out of it, must be condemned and then forgotten.

Only these are real human beings, as much deserving of love and forgiveness as any of us. There but for the grace of god and all that...’

 

That is  because I think the use of the word ‘compassion’ is an almost invariable sign of humbug fore and aft. People who aren’t asked to use their willpower, won’t use it. Is it ‘compassionate’ to indulge them I their weakness and ( say) supply them with methadone or other heroin replacements? I think not. Genuine compassion would compel them to give up the drug .

 

Why is it always considered ‘compassionate’ to be indulgent? Whereas it is in some way cruel to ask people to function as free human beings, and overcome their problem through an exercise of will. Which of these courses is more likely to be a) successful and b) to produce at the end of it a self-respecting human being?

‘Iain’ asks : ‘surely we can also all agree that the appeal of alcohol is qualitatively different from the appeal of, say, pudding, and is something slightly more akin to lust or hunger, or an itch which needs to be scratched. The appeal of alcohol does not only take the form of 'that drink made me dizzy, which was fun, in a way, so, let's have fun again'.  

 

No, I don’t think we can. I actually have much more of a weakness for sweet things, and for food in general,  than I do for alcohol, which has a very limited appeal for me. I know that several fairly horrible fates await me if I don’t keep this under some sort of control.     I don’t think I’m alone in this.  In fact, whenever I consider the failings of others, I try (as we all should) to observe and acknowledge the comparable, if different,  failings in myself, and coldly observe my efforts to control them. There is no good to be done in ‘committing sins we are inclined to, while damning those we have no mind to’.

 

One thing I’m sure of. It would never have helped me to have a had a social worker telling me that my bad features were irresistible forces, which had to be treated, rather than unpleasant appetites, which it was my duty to curb. While I’m glad to hear that Janie Behr is a fellow-admirer of ‘east of Eden’. I really cannot see why ‘withdrawal symptoms’ experienced by heavy drinkers  should be anything other than an additional reason to stop drinking. ‘All the literature on the subject’ is written by people with an interest in promoting the fiction of addiction. It should therefore be read as all interested propaganda should be read.

 

In reply to ‘Bob, son of Bob’, I’d ask who, in a self-serving way, would ever need to claim that marital break-up does less harm to the children than divorce’ ? Under modern divorce law, under which a mutual pact can be unilaterally dissolved against the wishes of one party, such a plea would be irrelevant in law, as the marriage would be dissolved anyway, whatever  such a person claimed. A person might say such a thing, but it wouldn’t serve him or her. I do wish people would read my ’The Abolition of Britain’, and its chapter on marriage, 'Difficulties with Girls'.

 

An ‘R Godfrey’ writes : ‘Your views on mugging differ to those you previously expressed on rape. You where blaming women for wearing scanty clothes previously comparing it with leaving valuables in a car, but when it comes to mugging..it's the police’s fault suddenly?’.

 

Perhaps this person could cite the supposed statements on rape allegedly made by me, to which he alludes.

 

I am grateful for Nick Agnew’s sensible point about the mysterious unpopularity of Gordon brown, compared with the strange continued adulation for the man who made Gordon brown’s economic policies possible and was in the same government most of the time, the Blair creature. The only significant difference between them is that Blair would have taken us into the Euro, had Gordon Brown (and Ed Balls ) not stopped him.  You would have thought, in that case, that conservative patriots would *prefer* Brown to Blair.  Yet it is the other way round. It is wholly illogical.

 

‘Iain’ jeers at me in a  know-all way for suggesting that Hitchcock’s film ‘Psycho’ damaged the morals of the western world. I suspect he has not seen the film ( I was lucky enough to go to a preview) , which makes this feature of ‘Psycho’, and Hitchcock’s battles with the then Hollywood censorship system,  quite specific and important  - though the makers of the film clearly assume that Psycho’s breach of then then codes on both sex and violence was a good thing. Hitchcock is shown as being under pressure to prove himself against new avant-garde rivals,  and to show he is not washed up.

 

Anyway, how can he be serious|? The impact of this film on the imaginations of western adults is huge.  I remember it, and the discussions of it,  even though I was not allowed to see the film by my wise parents, for many years after its release.(I was ten when it came out). Who, who has seen it , does not retain several powerful images for the rest of his life? How many were introduced, through it, to various theories of human behaviour and types of sexual perversion which were more or less undiscussed before 1960? Whether you like or not (and ,as I say, I don’t) Psycho was a trailblazer for a whole new type of film, which ahs got more adventurous , violent and explicit evr since,  Why else was the Rebello book,  on which the film is based,  even written?

 

‘Stan’, first quoting me, contributes :’ "Eventually, wholly deprived of a voice in Parliament, excluded from the BBC, they will be browbeaten into silence and total defeat." If "they" includes you and your endless bellyaching, why would this be a bad thing?’

 

I think the answer to that must depend on who you are.

 

‘David ‘ writes : ‘But two parents who stick together for no other reason than legality and/or spiritual obligation is a far less safe environment for a child than single parenthood.’

 

Can he explain why, and how he knows?

 

He adds :’ At best, the former would be more 'stable', but at what cost? (prolonged emotional abuse, domestic violence, depressives as parents)’. Here we have it again, the fatalist assumption that humans cannot control their baser instincts. Unbelievably now, the Church of England’s response to calls for easier divorce in the 1940s was to ask  : ‘Whoever succeeded in raising the moral tone of any society without causing the frustration of some natural desires, and the hardship of having to forego them’.

 

Or, in short, if you have children, you will have to grow up and become adults yourselves.

 

The ready availability of divorce opens avenues of irresponsible and babyish behaviour which are closed to those who know that they need to make compromises in life, just as easy times stimulate selfish, rackety behaviour, and  hardship and adversity create a higher proportion of grown-ups in any society.

 

Mr Richard Wilfred, plainly bursting with self-admiration, posts the following in the belief that it is witty and devastating:

 

‘ First quoting me as asking "or how could Anthony Blair have become, and remained, Prime Minister?"

He replied ‘erm - He was popular with voters? (just a guess)’

Now, the full quotation from me, which he didn’t use, ran : ‘if you repeat rubbish often enough and loud enough, most people will come to believe it, or how could Anthony Blair have become, and remained, Prime Minister?’

 

Now, as Mr Wilfred might be able to work out, ‘popularity’ is quite often not a product of intelligence or reason. Hitler and Mussolini were popular.  So were the Perons.  Marshal Petain was mobbed by Parisians in 1940.   Liberace, and a number of other remarkable showbusiness figures whose adulation now seems very odd indeed, were also popular in their times.  Popularity is, as it happens, quite often engineered by propaganda and advertising, much of which involves the endless repetition of, er, rubbish.

 

All Mr Wilfred has shown is that he didn’t think much before he posted. Better luck next time. It is my sorrow that I simply can’t answer everybody. I have responded, with comments of my own, to several of the comments on the Same-Sex marriage column,  and elsewhere, so I’ll repeat them here for those who may have missed them.

 

 

Mr 'Pop' comments : ' You appear to accept that people use harmful substances compulsively and it is evident from your words above that you accept that adverse withdrawal symptons are indeed suffered by persons that stop ingesting something that is bad for them.' ***Is it so? I rather thought that I had taken issue with the expression 'compulsive' as it implicitly denies free will, the whole core of this argument. So if I 'appear ' to do so, then I either I haven't been clear enough, or Mr 'Pop' hasn't understood what I was saying. He then says 'When a person compulsively uses a harmful substance and suffers withdrawal symptoms when not using the substance, they fit the definition of someone that has an addiction so why is it that you accept the premise but not the word?' **Because I don't accept the premise, and therefore don't accept the concept of 'withdrawal symptoms' . People who stop taking harmful substances after a long period of using them may suffer in various ways, and it is not always wise to abandon their use abruptly (the same is true of prescribed 'antidepressants'). But this is not because they are 'dependent' on them (the reverse is true, they would invariably be better off without the substance), it is merely because the substance is harmful and has caused harmful body changes which make themselves felt on cessation. The whole language in which this thing 'addiction' is discussed is crammed with prejudicial presuppositions, especially the verbs. This is obvious when you think about it. But it is not obvious when you don't. I advise thinking, myself.

 

**

 

'Old Jim' asks :'Would it be too great a concession, then, to accept that in many cases DT results from absolute alcohol withdrawal, where it might have been temporarily avoided by continued use? The addict is short-sighted for taking this course, but it does have the merit of explaining the course taken. I do not see that this would involve any concession from you that the addict is not ultimately responsible for his behaviour.' Like others, 'Old Jim' has failed to notice that Dr Lovell insists that Delirium Tremens is *not* a symptom of the ingestion of alcohol. My case, which Dr Lovell has emphatically dismissed, is that 'Medical opinion, easily found and consistently described in more than one place, attributes DTs to ingestion of alcohol, *as well as* to ‘withdrawal’ . It is he who is denying my contention, not I denying his. The argument between us not, therefore, whether sudden cessation of drinking *might* trigger DTs. I am sure that all kinds of things, including that, might trigger it. But whether the actual cause of DTs is this 'withdrawal' or the underlying problem of habitual heavy drinking. There are only three small problems with his formula 'in many cases DT results from absolute alcohol withdrawal, where it might have been temporarily avoided by continued use? ' One, Dr Lovell , s I understand, absolutely rejects the idea that DTs are caused by alcohol use itself, or by anything other than 'withdrawal' . I think he is simply factually mistaken and have shown that medical and learned opinion on this is at the very least divided. I have also sought to explain why this should be so. Why then is 'Old Jim' not chiding Dr Lovell for his unwillingness to move his position in the light of evidence? The second is the use of the word 'results', as in 'in many cases DT results from absolute alcohol withdrawal,' Nobody is at risk from Delirium Tremens at all unless he or she is already a long-term habitual heavy drinker of alcohol. The risk of DT *results* solely and exclusively from this voluntary action. Sudden cessation may in some way bring about a bout of Delirium Tremens, but if the patient were not a heavy drinker, there would be nothing *to* cease, and if the patient were not a heavy drinker, the trigger would not work . Thus, I don't think there is any case of someone suffering DTs who is not a long-term heavy drinker. Thus, the unqualified use of the word 'results' is not really acceptable. 'Results in part' might just do at a stretch. But 'is possibly triggered by' is about as far as I am prepared to go. 'Old Jim' ends with the qualifier 'where it might have been temporarily avoided by continued use?' '. This I find quite interesting. The word 'temporarily' is properly cautious, and implies (rightly in my view) that a permanent avoidance is only available through some other means (permanent cessation of drinking) . By the way, what I think is in dispute is now becoming clear. The habitual drinker might avoid DTs by continuing to drink . But I think the modern medical profession prefers to administer pills, kindly provided by the pharmaceutical industry, than to let the sufferer head back to the bottle. hence the whole quarrel.

 

**

 

 

I knew when I posted this that some wiseacre would post roughly what follows from Mr 'b' : 'Amazing Peter - to refute what appears to be a polite reply from Dr Lovell you resort to referencing a 1911 edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica and articles from the Journal of the American Medical Association written in 1965 - thus your understanding of medical matters concerned with Mr Lovell's assertions are based on medical evidence firstly, 102 years ago and secondly 48 years ago.' Mr 'b' is not really paying attention. I am not sure what politeness has to do with this. Dr Lovell has been quite aggressive and assertive in his interventions here, and someone sharing his surname has been more than aggressive. I have remained entirely polite, and my fault in the eyes of Mr 'b' is presumably that I have not subserviently knuckled under at the mere mention of a medical qualification. Well, since the memorable day I narrowly escaped a wholly unnecessary operation thanks to misprescription of antibiotics at the hands of an incompetent locum, I have not given automatic respect to medical qualifications as such, and I advise others to take the same attitude when in doubt. I am glad he thinks that I have in fact refuted Dr Lovell's claim that DTs only result from sudden cessation of alcohol consumption. I rather agree with him that this claim is now a sad heap of smoking wreckage. As for the age of the references I used, he has wonderfully missed my point, which is that the medical view has changed, not thanks to any alteration in the complaint, Delirium Tremens, which remains the same as it was in 1911 (why should it have changed? ) and whose symptoms are not significantly easier to observe now than they were then, but because the pharmaceutical industry has become involved and has spread the idea that DTs can be 'treated' with its products. Plainly, if the DTs are seen as the consequence of 'withdrawal' rather than of the long-term abuse of alcohol, the opportunity for using these drugs as 'treatment' for 'withdrawal' greatly increases. I'd be interested to know what has happened to the premature death rate among heavy drinkers since this change. He should note that I have also referenced more recent material in earlier posts but As I pointed out - the only source of knowledge on this must be observation. There is no other way in which these facts could be measured. DTs were a recognised complaint 100 years ago, and had been for many years. In 1911, the most learned and authoritative general reference work ever published noted that DTs followed long-term alcohol abuse, and specifically rejected the claim that they only followed a sudden cessation of drinking. In 1965, well into the modern era, a doctor notes that DTs do not only follow sudden cessation. I am sure I could find many others who say the same more recently. Does Mr 'b' really doubt it? Mr 'b', so passionately engaged that he hides his passion behind anonymity, continues :' 'I can not be the only one on this blog who would have considered it a more decent and courteous act on your behalf to have accepted his invitation to an alcoholic withdrawal ward and discuss your views with him and report your discussion here at a later date. But no ..you have to have the last word..your pomposity and arrogance know no bounds.' I cannot see what such a visit would establish. I don't dispute that heavy drinkers can bring on episodes of DTs through sudden stoppage of drinking. It is even possible that benzodiazepine drugs may help in such circumstances. I imagine it is also possible that doses of alcohol would help, but it is easy to see why both doctor and patient would be repelled by that course. As I understand ti, Dr Lovell is maintaining that DTs do not happen under any other circumstance. How would such a visit prove this point? The fact that DTs can happen after sudden cessation of heavy drinking does not alter the fact that DTs (whatever may trigger them under certain circumstances) are in fact *caused* by habitual excessive drinking, and that if people never started heavy drinking or were persuaded to stop doing so, they would not suffer from DTs at any time. I really do not see why it is discourteous for me to stand my ground in argument with facts and logic. And if Mr 'b' wishes to dish out rebukes for bad manners, wouldn't he be more justified in offering one to Rhiann Lovell? As it is, his whole post demonstrates his partisanship.

 

**

Mr Cavender asks [This was on the problem of the unconservative Tories] :' My question is simple - what can I and others like me DO about it NOW (today and in the months ahead)? Your thoughts on that would be much appreciated. Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa' My answer is simple, too. It is this. Search me. I see no way out now. The great opportunity was in 2010, when, as I repeatedly said, the Tory Party could not win anyway, and if people had deserted it as it deserved, it could not have survived four decisive defeats in a row. The pathetic, dim acceptance, by Tory loyalists, of tribal calls to 'get Gordon Brown out', to make themselves feel good, rather than acting unselfishly to save the country, actually saved the Tory Party from the much-deserved split and collapse that would otherwise have happened. I will be dead before such a wonderful opportunity presents itself again. After five years of Labour or Lib-Lab government, (2015-2020) we'll just swing back to five years of Lib-Con (2020-2025) and so on until the country goes down the gurgler for good.

 

**

I am asked on what I base the figure of 0.2%. This , as far as I know, is the proportion of the population which has taken advantage of the law allowing civil partnerships since it passed in 2004. As for the lack of enthusiasm among homosexuals for same-sex marriage, I have not noticed any such enthusiasm. I am open to persuasion by evidence.

 

**

 

A reader comments :'While I usually agree with your accurate, if pessimistic, view of the future of this country, I disagree that the present problems were caused by the British public voting Tory. Not enough did. Labour should have been wiped out after its 13 year disaster of Blair and Brown, so that Cameron had not only a working majority, free of the ever weaker Lib Dems, but possibly more true Tory MPs to keep Cameron on the straight and narrow. It is the British public who are largely apathetic and/or stupid. ' I am baffled at this level of illusion. The Tories never had the slightest chance of *winning* the 2010 election. Please look up my posting the 'Tories are still useless' which explains that they simply could not, mathematically, have done so. Had they done so, the resulting government would have been indistinguishable from the one we have now, as there is no serious, organised or coherent strand in parliamentary Toryism which is patriotic or socially and morally conservative. And what about this desire for 'True' Tory MPs? What and who are these people? There are none. How could future ones be selected under current centralised Tory Party rules, with their equality and diversity aim? Even those Tory MPs whose political views appear patriotic have never organised as a coherent body, and have no understanding of the nature of the problem. They are, in effect , imaginary . I am also told that Ed Miliband is comparable to Neil Kinnock. Well, perhaps, but the Grim Reaper had not carried away a large part of the heritage Tory vote back in 1992 (he has now) , and the comprehensive schools, the BBC and the alternative 'comedians' had not fully done their work in creating the modern leftist consensus. Anyone who thinks that Mr Miliband faces the same difficulties as Mr Kinnock did is in for a surprise. I might add that many former Conservative supporters (this writer included) have abandoned the Tories since 1992. I don't know if the next government will be a majority Labour one or a Lib-Lab coalition of some kind. I am sure it won't be a Tory one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bishop of Rome Retires

I thought I had better say something about the retirement of the Bishop of Rome.

 

Regular readers here will now of my fondness for the 37th of the Church of England’s 39 Articles, which begins ‘The Queen’s Majesty hath the chief Power in this Realm of England and other her dominions, unto whom the chief government of all Estates of this Realm, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Civil, in all causes doth appertain and is not, nor ought to be subject to any foreign jurisdiction…’ and continues by declaring ‘the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England’.

 

I know of no statement of national independence which is as robust and uncompromising as this. The Queen mentioned is of course the First Elizabeth , she of the ‘heart and stomach of a king – and of a king of England, too!’ , and the whole point of this article is at the heart of the English religious settlement – Papal power is foreign power. An independent country cannot tolerate it.

 

Of course this got mixed up with the Reformation, and the 39 articles are broadly Calvinist in their meaning. But the actual church which resulted was never fully Calvinist or Lutheran, but something entirely of its own, which (thanks to the power of the monarch) preserved far more of the heritage of the old faith than any other Protestant church known to me.

 

I have never been able to find a copy of ‘Campion’s Brag’, the document in which the Roman Catholic Martyr Edmund Campion, having left the English church and gone over to Rome, is said by Evelyn Waugh (in his biography of Campion) to have counselled loyal Roman Catholics that Church of England services were not fit for them.

 

In my view this act exposed ordinary loyal Englishmen, who also remained Roman Catholic in their hearts, to a needless ripping of their consciences. What a pity this was, nearly as bad as stupid Papal calls for the death of Elizabeth, which following Mary’s idiotic persecutions, pretty much ensured that for centuries afterwards, Roman Catholicism would be associated in the minds of the English people with foreign power, disloyalty and tyranny.  It was , in my view, Rome which more or less created the Church of England as a real living thing, rather than as a cold state institution.

 

So I do not know what arguments Campion offered. I can only say that, try as I may, I can find nothing in the service of Morning Prayer or Evensong, which a member of the congregation is required to say,  which a Roman Catholic could not assent to (and these were the services which Elizabethans were required to attend) .  There are certainly things  missing which a Roman Catholic would wish to say, but that is quite a different thing.  Even the Communion Service, the Lord’s Supper, could,  with a little flexibility,  be construed in a Roman Catholic fashion.

 

I am not saying here that services were Roman Catholic, only that they did not (and in my view were designed not to)  place too much of a strain on those who secretly earned for the old way. Given where we have ended up all these years later, with many of Luther’s positions conceded by the Vatican, not to mention communion in both kinds and (dreadful) vernacular masses,  the Church of England seems to have been well ahead of the Vatican.

 

And in the High Victorian era, quite a lot of Englishmen were sure that the English Church was a better repository of the true faith than Rome. When you look at the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and of papal infallibility, you can see why they ( and some Roman Catholics)  might have thought this.

 

So it is really quite strange to see, in this officially Protestant country, all this media fuss about the retirement of the Bishop of Rome, though he seems to me to be a distinguished thinker, a transparently good man and an admirable Christian gentleman, thrust at the end of his life into a public role which very few humans, even in the peak of health,  could have handled.

 

I was really quite nauseated to see how many journalists dredged up, yet again, the child abuse scandal.  Haven’t they noticed, (look up ‘Jimmy Savile’) , that abuse can happen and be covered up in secular liberal institutions, with no Popes, priests, cardinals , altar boys or rules of celibacy? This rather strengthens the argument that the problem, though horrible and undoubted,  is a human one, probably made worse by the growing openness of the Church to the secular world, rather than something endemic in the priesthood which can be used specifically to attack the church. In which case, how can it possibly justify the importance given to it in the discussion of Joseph Ratzinger’s brief tenure of his throne?

 

For years and years, the BBC’s coverage of religion (for example) has swung between exposes of RC child abuse,  or examinations of the C of E’s problems with homosexuality. If you ever listen to BBC Radio 4’s ‘Sunday’ programme, you might get the impression that nothing else, apart from child abuse in one, and homosexual clergy in the other, were exercising Christian minds.  

 

The real problem with the Roman church seems to me to be something else entirely. It is dying in the lands of its conception and birth. In the Arab world, Christianity is oppressed by the Saudi-inspired Islamic revival,  and those Christians who can are leaving while they can. In its European strongholds, its power and authority have diminished hugely in the past ten years, despite the personal adulation of the previous Bishop of Rome by so many, not least the media, who need simplicity and exaggeration very badly.

 

But while John Paul II was a global superstar , the Church he led was still losing its long battle with the modern world (which it rightly saw as a menace to faith, more than a century ago)  And there are many, who now deride it who will miss it when it is gone.

 

There’ll be a Sistine Chapel and a St Peter’s Cathedral, but there won’t be the belief that stands behind them, that ultimate, hard uncompromising authority,  able to rally great crowds of supporters in Ireland, Spain, Italy and Germany. In all these countries, the Roman church has shrivelled and shows no signs of rebirth. In France, an indifferent secularism has reached near-Soviet levels.  Behind the giant figure of John Paul II there was a ruin, emptying of people. This is not a good thing, either for Christianity or for those societies which (though they don’t acknowledge it) rely on Christianity for the underpinning of their laws, morals and culture.

 

I am alarmed by this, Anglican as I am in my bones and blood.  Even my church, for all its wars with Rome, has always sought to be the heir of Rome in the Realm of England, and draws its authority from the same source as does Rome. The departure of Benedict, and the lonely, diminished prospect it reveals, leaves us all a little lonelier. And the ‘foreign jurisdiction’ which chiefly menaces this Realm of England is not the Vatican, but a great secular authority seated in a European city very different from Rome.  

 

 

 

Delirium Tremens - a Summing Up

Dr Lovell is of course free to post at any length in response to what follows, but for the moment I’d like to sum up the debate about ‘addiction’, ‘alcoholism’, free will and delirium tremens.

 

 

Mr ‘X’ has rightly accepted that one’s moral opinions on this subject may influence one’s judgement. He seems to think that I apply this only to him. I also apply it to myself.  The belief that the human being has the power to choose (interestingly explored in John Steinbeck’s masterpiece, ‘East of Eden’ which I am currently reading for what I think is the fifth time) is central to my view of the universe. What I express here is my opinion. I can choose that. But neither I nor my opponents can choose facts. They just are, or are not. We must all be careful not to mistake opinions for facts, and I believe that, by asserting the existence of ‘addiction’ my opponents make this mistake, based on their strong desire that it should be so.

 

 

 

It is my view that a belief in addiction must of necessity exclude the view that we are free to choose our actions.  When I say that ‘addiction doesn’t exist’, I am saying that there is no objective evidence for its existence. But it is certainly a common opinion.  It would be foolish of me to deny that it exists *in the minds* of many people, as an excuse for their actions or the actions of others, or as a pretext for intervention by states and governments into the private affairs of others.

 

There is an amusing paradox here. Belief without proof (i.e. faith) in the concept of human enslavement to various pleasures, or the medicalised explanation of human failings,  is particularly strong among materialists who deny the existence of God and reject the idea of a purposeful universe.  You might say, as the materialists say of Theists, that they have ’invented’ the concept of ‘addiction’ to make their universe explicable. They have done the same with various other concepts which suck responsibility out of the human experience – ‘dyslexia’, which exonerates bad teaching methods, ‘ADHD’, which exonerates bad parenting and bad teaching, ‘clinical depression’ , which allows us to seek a chemical explanation for moral and societal ills, not to mention all the mighty ‘genes’ which supposedly make us fat, greedy,  lazy,  angry, sexually incontinent or whatever it happens to be.

 

 

Ultimately, like so many of these arguments - especially the ones over drugs - this is all about morality. That’s why people get so cross about it.

 

But it is also, increasingly, about the way in which the big drug manufacturers have (aided by the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM) provided alleged chemical solutions for these various griefs, pains and failures.

 

At what seems to be the end of my exchanges with Dr Lovell (and with his forthright ally, Rhiann Lovell, whose connection with him is not so far clear) I am left dissatisfied on a few grounds. One, I don’t feel Dr Lovell has ever really answered or acknowledged my clear point about why the pharmaceutical industry, plus the doctors it so generously co-opts, might have an interest in promoting two ideas : one that ‘alcoholism’ is a treatable disease rather than a failure of will ;  and two, that ‘DTs’ are solely a ‘symptom’ of ‘withdrawal’ from ‘alcoholism’ which can also be treated, lo and behold, by a pill. This would be a much more interesting and important argument than the largely irrelevant one about the use of barbiturates, which undoubtedly did take place. Miracle drugs go in and out of fashion, as we know. Will the ones we use now be in fashion 20 years hence – or viewed with disapproval, as barbiturates are now? And what will that actually mean?

 

The few people who have followed this argument may have missed the following rather simple point. I know at least one who has. My disagreement with Dr Lovell dates from his  posting three days ago (his second on this subject) in which he aggressively stated as follows,  in reply to my statement that ‘I think you can achieve these symptoms [Delirium Tremens] without any attempt at ‘withdrawal':

 

 

He wrote (my emphasis) : ‘I'm afraid on this one you are just plain wrong. The DT's are a symptom of withdrawal, not ingestion of alcohol.’

 

I’ll repeat that.

 

He wrote (my emphasis) : ‘ I'm afraid on this one you are just plain wrong. The DT's are a symptom of withdrawal, not ingestion of alcohol.’

 

I hope this is clear.  He said I was ‘plain wrong’. And he said that DTs are *not* a symptom of alcohol ingestion.  I have never denied that withdrawal from alcohol can trigger DTs.  Why should I?  I know from discussions with victims of ‘antidepressants’ that sudden cessation of ingestion of mind-altering chemicals is often unwise,  so I have no reason to doubt that sudden cessation of heavy drinking can be unwise too. However,  I personally doubt that it is sensible to accompany gradual cessation with prescription drugs, which is what I suspect this argument is really about. To give up alcohol, and then to become a habitual user of benzodiazepines, seems to me to be a questionable procedure.

 

 All I have ever said is that the DTs can result from excessive alcohol consumption. Dr Lovell has assertively told me that I am wrong. I believe that he was mistaken to do so, and cannot prove his assertion. The fundamental cause of DTs is heavy drinking, and , while they can be triggered by sudden cessation, they can take place in other circumstances.

 

For those who are still interested in this controversy (and I have to say that I was unaware of it till now, and have found the investigation of it extremely interesting, in the light of the growth of pharmaceutical solutions to human difficulties) here are a few points and quotations.

 

If there is any literature establishing by experiment and observation that Delirium Tremens is definitely *not* ever caused by heavy habitual drinking, but *only* by abrupt withdrawal from the same, I haven’t found it. But if any can be produced, I will happily admit to my error.

 

From the Journal of the American medical Association (JAMA) .

 

‘Delirium tremens was first described by Sutton in 1813. Since that time many treatment approaches have been used, but the cause is still obscure. The frequency with which the condition is seen in hospitalized alcoholics varies in different series from 6.2% to 32%.1 It is not unusual to find a chronic alcoholic, however, who has had delirium tremens with transitory visual and auditory hallucinations on several occasions but has been hospitalized only once or twice. Therefore it would seem safe to presume that the individual patient may have incipient delirium tremens without seeking hospitalization, and that the frequency is higher than the records of alcoholics admitted to hospitals would indicate. (JAMA May 30th 1953, Jackson A. Smith M.D).

**

 

‘It is our purpose in this paper to present certain data on the history, etiology and pathology of delirium tremens and to call attention to a method of treatment which in our hands has given good results. In any discussion of delirium tremens it would hardly be possible to disregard entirely the larger problem of chronic alcoholism, of which delirium tremens is only a special phase or, one might say, a dramatic incident. However, if we refer at times to the problem of chronic alcoholism, it will not be in the attempt to contribute to its understanding but only better to clarify the various aspects of delirium tremens.’(William B. Cline and Jules V. Coleman (both MD)  8th August 1936).

 

They add (quoting R.R.Peabody) an entertaining if unsatisfactory definition of the difference between an ‘alcoholic; and a normal drinker ‘Chronic alcoholics are those to whom a night’s sleep is only an unusually long period of abstinence’ .

 

And they say ‘It is only among the group of habitually severe and consistent users of alcohol, then, that delirium tremens develops’

**

In another contribution the argument about its cause is described as an ‘old controversy’ . It certainly is.  In the 1990s edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, (Micropaedia, p.975 of the relevant volume)  we find the following definition, as a sub-set of delirium in general : ‘ Alcoholic delirium – called delirium tremens because of the characteristic tremor – is a result not merely of the excessive consumption of alcohol but of a complicating exhaustion. Lack of food and dehydration; prior to the outbreak of delirium, the patient has usually been deteriorating physically because of vomiting and restlessness’.

 

Ordinary delirium, in the same entry is said to   ‘often result[s] from an overdose of sedatives, especially bromide, and can be provoked by the too abrupt discontinuance of barbiturates in addicts’.

 

This is the only mention I can find in this reference to anything resembling Dr Lovell’s unequivocal assertion that DT is caused solely by withdrawal.

 

In an older encyclopaedia (not the Britannica) , retained by the Associated Newspapers library for historical purposes and apparently dating from the 1940s, I found : that ‘acute noisy delirium’ was said to be most frequently caused by poisoning,  ‘the most frequent form of which is long-continued alcoholism leading to delirium tremens’.

 

It adds,  ‘Delirium being a symptom and not a special disease in itself, treatment must be directed towards the condition which gives rise to it. (my emphasis). During an acute attack sedative drugs such as chloral and barbiturates may be given. In delirium tremens, the vitamin B complex must be given’ (NB, these suggestions date from many decades ago and I include them for historical interest)

I’d note that the current treatment with benzodiazepines may, in future years,  be supplanted by something else.

 

In my lifetime, several medical certainties, including the cause and treatment of stomach ulcers,  the medical recommendation of smoking for the treatment of asthma, and indeed the willing recommendation of certain brands of  cigarettes in advertisements by qualified doctors, the first-aid treatment of burns and the medical use of pre-frontal lobotomies, have been revolutionised or abandoned or are now regarded as actually shocking. The interesting thing about this is not the growth of knowledge, which is constant though not regular or smooth, but the absolute certainty with which doctors used to do the wrong thing, and the length of time for which they persisted in doing it without realising anything was wrong.

 

You will have to make your own minds up as to what significance that has for doctors and patients of the present day.

 

By contrast with these mentions of DTs, I note that a contributor with a tediously long name adduces several modern reference books which attribute DTs solely to ‘withdrawal’. ? Is there a watershed discovery which separates these? If so, what is it, when was it, who made it and where can I read about it? I have to admit, medical studies stating that x is *not* the cause of y, as previously thought, , though not unknown, are rare.

 

 If not, has opinion actually been influenced by the availability and promotion of certain drugs?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can conservatives like Abraham Lincoln?

The reverent new film from Steven Spielberg provokes a worrying question, especially for conservative-minded people.  What should we think about Abraham Lincoln?  As it happens, I have always admired him and will probably never stop doing so, because he seems to me to have been an admirable person, whom I would very much like to have met.

 

I have several times, by day and by night,  visited the great monument to him in Washington DC, and never fail to get pleasure and enlightenment from reading his greatest speeches, which are carved into the walls of that remarkable structure. I especially like the second inaugural address.

 

His language grows straight out of the Authorised Version of the Bible, and so speaks to my heart,  whether I want to agree with him or not.  Modern orators and writers, who have never wandered in its high passes, deep forests and shadowed valleys, are so inferior that it is often hard to take their banal, pedestrian lectures seriously at all. I have still not recovered from the mass admiration ludicrously bestowed on the pitiful orations of the Blair creature in his day.

 

But then of course their listeners have not read or heard the Authorised Version either, so they have no idea what they are missing. How would you explain a thunderstorm or a stormy sea to someone who had never seen or heard either? They are stunted descendants of a greater, taller people, scuttling about in the ruins of a civilisation and not understanding the meaning and purpose of the broken pillars, shattered towers and crumbling archways among which they scrabble for a living, dwarfed by its grandeur and so pretending it was backward and stupid. 

 

I also found Gore Vidal’s historical novel ‘Lincoln’ captivating and powerful, a believable portrait of a very strange and unusual man. It is full of good things, especially its depictions of Washington DC as a half-finished, muddy, smelly slum and the White House as a rickety, draughty nightmare.

 

For some reason I am particularly fond of a scene in Vidal’s book in which Lincoln visits wounded Confederate soldiers, and of a moment in which Lincoln acknowledges angrily that the room in which he sits and issues orders  has ‘filled up with blood’ thanks to what he has done. I can think of some modern politicians who could benefit from having this sort of poetic understanding of the consequences of their decisions. The Lincolns’ unbearable grief over the loss of their son Willie – a grief portrayed in the film - is more powerfully explored in this book. The Lincolns’ family life was a series of tragedies, as politicians’ private lives often are.

 

I have also been influenced by another fictional reference to him. In George Macdonald Fraser’s ‘Flash for Freedom’. In a brief but memorable passage, the bottomlessly wicked and devious scoundrel Flashman is rescued from slave-catchers with Lincoln’s help.

 

Fraser often brought real historical characters into his superb books (one of the best ways of learning history I know) , but on this occasion he paid Lincoln a very great (if double –edged) compliment. He portrayed him as being able to see through Flashman, whose fraudulent bluster deceives almost everybody he ever meets (the few exceptions generally die soon afterwards, their ends conveniently arranged by the devious Flashman himself,  before they can blab).

 

Having detected Flashman’s lies, the future President quickly makes it clear he is not going to expose him. On the other hand, it is clear that Lincoln understands Flashman because he has quite a lot of the scoundrel in him, and recognises in Flashman what he knows very well is also to be found in his own heart. Flashman takes to him instantly, and fears him too.   From what we know of Lincoln’s immense shrewdness, considerable political deviousness  and very dry sense of humour, the scene is completely believable.

 

American conservative acquaintances, especially if they come from Dixieland,  shudder at the mention of his name, and mutter imprecations, frustrated to the point of apoplexy by my Limey soppiness about a man they regard as the cynical and unprincipled destroyer of the true America.

 

My difficulty with them is that, while it is sort of true that the Civil War was about the rights of the States to secede, or to run their own affairs, the issue which ignited the conflict was their desire to wring their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, that is to say, slavery.  Of course they had to lose. Whether they lost for the right reasons, or whether the right people won, is another matter.

 

For an unreliable and (by modern historical standards) misleading and prejudiced account of the other side’s view, I recommend Margaret Mitchell’s pro-South novel ‘Gone with the Wind’ (I’m not so keen on the film) . I think it falls into George Orwell’s interesting category of ‘Good Bad Books’. This is absolutely not because of its sentimental stuff about slavery, which we can discount because, even if it were true in some individual cases (and I suppose it may have been) it was not true about the institution in general.  Well-treated house slaves lived on estates where field slaves were horribly whipped and chained. I believe it is historically inaccurate in many other areas, too.

 

It is because it is a thrilling story ingeniously and irresistibly told, whether you like the characters and their society or not, and for its frequently very honest depictions of human self-delusion,  and of what civil wars are actually like, especially if you are on the losing side of one.

 

The character of Rhett Butler is particularly important, as (though he fights bravely for the Confederate side) he knows from very early on that the old South is doomed and must lose, and that its landed slave-owners are living in the past, a type of behaviour that invariably leads to destruction.

 

The section dealing with the remorseless siege of Atlanta, and the terrible, slow realisation of the city’s initially confident inhabitants that they are in fact powerless against the scientific, industrialised military techniques of the Union armies, is one of the grimmest things I have read.  It is a good metaphor for the whole war, in which industrial power slowly strangled and starved the romantic old-fashioned gallantry of Lee’s armies, and in which the First World War’s mechanised mass slaughter was prefigured in a series of appallingly bloody battles (though nobody noticed or took warning).

 

As for the after-effects of Sherman’s March to the Sea (about which we used to sing a then-famous song when I was at prep school) , they are pretty unsparingly portrayed, and area  useful corrective to any ideas we may have about war being painless.

 

But despite the undoubted wrongness of the Old South should  we be so reverent towards Lincoln? Professor Alan Sked of the LSE, that interesting and original historian (he once led UKIP) , is about to publish a critical biography of the great President, and recently wrote a pungent letter to the Daily Telegraph in which he said ; ‘Abraham Lincoln was a racist who deliberately started a war that killed more than 650,000 people.  He had no intention of freeing slaves, who freed themselves by fleeing to Unionist lines during a war that was going badly for the North and in which they became needed as recruits.’

 

He continued :’In September 1863, Lincoln's preliminary emancipation proclamation declared that the South could keep its slaves if it returned to the Union. Slave holders in the four slave states fighting for the Union were given until 1900 to consider emancipating their slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation itself did not free a single slave, since it was limited to territory controlled by the Confederacy.’

 

‘Until the day he died, Lincoln's ideal solution to the problem of blacks was to "colonise" them back to Africa or the tropics. This was what he told a delegation of free blacks he summoned to the White House in the summer of 1863, when he stressed that the mere presence of blacks caused pain to white Americans. He eventually agreed to the 13th amendment, which freed all slaves.

 

‘Americans ignore all this since otherwise the history of the civil war looks little better morally than America's treatment of blacks before and after. Steven Spielberg's film sustains the myth that Lincoln redeemed America's racist past. He did not.’

 

This fact-packed arraignment is itself a bit of a shocker for British people. There were slave states fighting *for* the Union? The Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves? Who knew?

 

As for who started the war, it seems incontrovertible to me that the Confederacy fired the first shot at Fort Sumter ( I have been to the spot, just by the beautiful city of Charleston) , an act which almost always places the person who does it in the wrong. No doubt they felt under pressure etc. But the South was spoiling for a fight.

My Dixieland acquaintances would no doubt smile mockingly at this point,  also perhaps pointing out that at one point the British government came very close to recognising the Confederacy, and that British shipyards built commerce raiders (the CSS Alabama was built in Birkenhead by Lairds, and the resultant furious demands for compensation from Washington DC blighted British relations with the USA for many,  many years, and at one point Senator Charles Sumner suggested we hand over the whole of Canada to resolve the dispute. We nearly gave them British Columbia, but ended up paying cash instead).

 

And some would say that the ultimate fate of the freed slaves (and indeed of the already-free white migrant inhabitants of post-Lincoln America, sucked into ‘The Jungle’ (see Upton Sinclair’s tremendous novel of that name) of ruthless capitalism, was as bad as slavery. Lincoln famously said that if slavery was not wrong, nothing was wrong. But what about the cruel exploitation of wage-slaves by rapacious industry and slum landlords? Surely that was wrong too? The fact that the bad side lost doesn’t mean that the good side won. And of course a peaceful, largely pastoral America turned, after the Civil War into the vast engine of growth, and the world power, which it has been ever since. Is this unequivocally a good thing?

 

What about the film? Well, influenced by Flashman and Gore Vidal, I thought it was far too sentimental about the cunning old Illinois lawyer. I also thought it veered round a proper discussion of Lincoln’s personal views about black-skinned people, which are highly shocking to us today (not least because of his saintly reputation), but which are a matter of historical record . There is a scene where he dodges the question, on the White House steps, in conversation with (I think) Elizabeth Keckley, a freed slave who was a friend of Mrs Lincoln.

 

I am not sure if there is any evidence that such a conversation took place.  I am sure that ,whether it did or not, the film version gives the watcher a sanitised idea of Lincoln’s view on the matter. This makes me suspect , because I am completely unfamiliar with the story of the passage of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, that the central episode of the film may be sentimentalised as well. It has that feeling about it.

 

The film is also far too long,  and rather short of incident , though it is beautifully filmed and lit, and a perfectly enjoyable way of spending an evening if you are interested in politics.  But all in all, I’d tend to the view that it was a bit of an animated waxwork. A pity, because it will now be rather difficult for anyone to make a film based on Vidal’s book, which would have been better.

 

 

 

Dr Lovell's Casebook, or the addiction argument revisited (Warning. It's long)

Since my rebuttal of Ben Lovell’s comment about alcoholics and withdrawal syndromes, I have received three contributions from persons with the surname ‘Lovell ‘. One of them has had to be slightly modified as it employed a word we don’t allow here.

 

Two of them (though the forenames are different)  make the point that Ben Lovell is a qualified doctor, and wishes to be referred to as ‘Dr Lovell’. Happy to oblige, though there are doctors, usually senior specialist consultants, who prefer to be referred to as ‘Mr’, a title which can surely never be insulting. 

 

But one has to ask in that case if these Lovells are perhaps connected?

 

The first, from (Dr) Ben Lovell, reads as follows:

 

‘Mr Hitchens, My title is Dr Lovell, rather than Mr Lovell. For someone very quick with sarcasm when you feel your missives have not been read clearly. You do not pay close attention to my own. I base my argument on medicine that I see in my everyday practice. The nervous system forms a dependency on certain substances. A graded reduction and withdrawal of said substances. A sudden withdrawal leads to withdrawal effects, such as delirium tremens, which is a medical emergency. It carries a 10% fatality. You form your arguments armed with an online medical encyclopaedia. I trust readers will make the appropriate inferences from that. You argue that DT is a manifestation of chronic alcohol abuse, rather than of its discontinuation. You are wrong.  Another visitor to this site asks you to comment on the babies of heroin addicted mothers who are born with opiate addiction and suffer withdrawal. I would also like to invite you to the A&E department, and witness alcohol withdrawal first hand. Maybe once you have seen a spindly homeless person being held down by four burly security guards, screaming at hallucinations and flipping in and out of full-blown seizures, then watch him rapidly return to normal after drinking alcohol. Then, fully informed, you could assert your opinion.’

 

The second, from Rhiann Lovell, reads, more pithily:

 

‘For the record it's Dr Lovell. And maybe lay off the thesaurus next time so you sound a little less like a tw*t. ‘

 

 

Then there’s a third, also from Ben Lovell, but regrettably not immediately posted by the moderator because of its length  (this has now been belatedly rectified, with apologies) . As a result of its late posting, I have only just seen it. It runs:

 

‘I fear you are crediting me with slightly more cunning than I deserve - I certainly don't mean to muddy the waters of the debate, and I thought I was responding clearly - apologies if I was not doing so. To respond to your claim "who does he represent", I am speaking as a medical registrar working in acute medicine in a London NHS hospital; perhaps I should have stated that at the outset. "How long after deprivation begins can they usually be observed? Would an immediate resumption of heavy drinking end the symptoms? Or would it worsen them? If not, in what way are they symptoms of ‘withdrawal’ Where is the work on this?" Ok, the DT's classically start at around 36 hours of withdrawal, and the seizures at around 72 hours. This is pretty predictable in most alcohol abusers, regardless of their alcohol intake. If you are interested in reading this for yourself, I find the GP notebook a useful resource, but you could find it in most medical textbooks. As I say to my medical student - I would be a bit wary of online medical resources. It really isn't relevant to the debate, but I must insist that I have never seen barbiturates used ever in the practice of medicine, and I would be very wary of resources that claim otherwise) "The heavy drinker has (as discussed elsewhere) a craving, a desire, even a greed, for his drink. If he stops drinking he will perhaps suffer in various ways, though he will benefit hugely as well. But far from ‘depending’ upon it, he is killing himself by his weakness, and he can stop when he chooses. The sooner he stops, the easier it will be, and the less damage he will have done." You'll have no argument with me on that one. It is very depressing to see the same faces in A&E over and over again, suffering from alcohol withdrawal after swearing they had given up for good. Please note the ONLY point I am trying to make is that withdrawal of alcohol and opiates from a chronic abuser must be done slowly and carefully. To do it quickly is dangerous and results in some pretty nasty complications. I just want to make a biological point, a medical one. Biological dependency exists,  unfortunately; I heartily wished it didn't but it does. Finally - you accuse me of being patronising. I apologise, that was not my intention. But after reading your comments: "Mr Lovell wags his finger again..." "What is more ‘strange’ is Mr Lovell’s apparent inability to cope with the fact that somebody disagrees with him..." "though the answer to this question is so blazingly obvious (and is given below) that I am amazed that Mr Lovell cannot seen it for himself.... I don't think you can be entirely absolved from blame on the patronising front. But let''s not disgrace ourselves with name-calling. I would like to echo your sentiment: "I urge readers to study carefully what I have written, and reach their own conclusions." '

 

I will now answer these.

 

The one from Rhiann Lovell, it seems to me, answers itself. And it fails to follow the other Lovell’s advice about name-calling.

 

The two from the doctor will take a little longer. Now, in one of his contributions yesterday, Dr Lovell chided me for not knowing  ( as he saw it) that Delirium Tremens  is a symptom of withdrawal, *not* (my emphasis) ingestion of alcohol’.  He said (wagging his finger) :’ A cursory Internet search would have saved you from embarrassment on this one’.

 

I then made a cursory Internet search, on his recommendation, which quite clearly showed that he is the one who needs to be embarrassed. Medical opinion, easily found and consistently described in more than one place, attributes DTs to ingestion of alcohol, *as well as* to ‘withdrawal’ .  Older medical opinion (superseded for reasons we can guess at) took more or less the opposite view. The view 100 years ago was that DTs were caused by ingestion itself, and not by withdrawal.

 

My reward for taking his advice and making a cursory Internet search (in the full knowledge that it was cursory, and enturely becayae he recommended this course)  is to be told off thus by Dr Lovell  ‘You form your arguments armed with an online medical encyclopaedia. I trust readers will make the appropriate inferences from that.’

 

They can if they want. But they should note that I was openly and consciously doing as he suggested.  I was simply showing that, even with a cursory Internet search, Dr Lovell’s assertions could be shown to be plain wrong. He said, remember,  that that DTs are (specifically) *not* a symptom of ingestion of alcohol. This is demonstrably mistaken.

 

If one goes a little deeper, say to the archives of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) going back into the last century, one can find many, many references to Delirium Tremens which make no reference whatever to ‘withdrawal.’

 

It does begin to creep in as a topic in the middle 20th century , I found in a letter to that journal, (published on 14th June 1965, (JAMA. June 14 1965, vol 192, No. 11, page 1014) a letter from a Buffalo, NY doctor (whose name is alas illegible on the PDF, but may be Marvin Buck) which discusses a claim that DTs can be prevented by *gradual* withdrawal of alcohol or the so-called tapering-off treatment. The change in emphasis, of course, accompanies the development of drugs supposedly able to ‘treat’  ‘symptoms’ of ‘withdrawal’ from ‘alcoholism’ . What is most interesting to me is the Buffalo doctor’s statement that ‘In many years of treating alcoholics I have seen delirium tremens occur in the acutely intoxicated stage as well as (my emphasis) a withdrawal phenomenon. I have also seen it occur where the daily amount of alcohol intake is diminished and not stopped.’

 

He adds :’Strangely enough, many severe alcoholics never go into delirium tremens, even with withdrawal.’

 

This letter answers some of my questions to Dr Lovell. It also seems to me to cast doubt on the assertion that DTs are exclusively or necessarily associated with ‘withdrawal’ from an addiction, or are a universal ‘symptom’ of that addiction. (Or that they ‘classically’ occur at certain intervals. Equally ‘classically’, they do not occur at those intervals, it would seem) .

 

It’s clear from the letter that as long ago as 1965 doctors were using drugs of various kinds (rather than alcohol itself, which I think was once used in this way )  to try to wean heavy drinkers off their drink. No doubt this process has greatly expanded and accelerated since then, alongside the arrival of drugs to ‘treat’ large numbers of other hard-to-define, questionable or subjectively diagnosable complaints. As to whether this is an advance for the patients I am  not sure. People are still dying of drink all the time, and the main variable in that is the state of public morality and the state of the laws restricting the sale of alcohol, plus the price of alcohol.   It is certainly an advance for the pharmaceutical companies.

 

I’d also note that the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica is rather interesting on this subject. I haven’t room to reproduce the whole article, which is fascinating and available easily on the Internet here http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Delirium

 

But I think this passage is of some interest (I have added some emphases)  : ‘Delirium tremens is one of a train of symptoms of what is termed in medical nomenclature acute alcoholism, or excessive indulgence in alcohol. It must, however, be observed that this disorder, although arising in this manner, rarely comes on as the result of a single debauch in a person unaccustomed to the abuse of stimulants, but generally occurs in cases where the nervous system has been already subjected for a length of time to the poisonous action of alcohol, so that the complaint might be more properly regarded as acute supervening on chronic alcoholism. It is equally to be borne in mind that many habitual drunkards never suffer from delirium tremens.

 

‘It was long supposed, and is indeed still believed by some, that delirium tremens only comes on when the supply of alcohol has been suddenly cut off; but this view is now generally rejected, and there is abundant evidence to show that the attack comes on while the patient is still continuing to drink. Even in those cases where several days have elapsed between the cessation from drinking and the seizure, it will be found that in the interval the premonitory symptoms of delirium tremens have shown themselves, one of which is aversion to drink as well as food - the attack being in most instances preceded by marked derangement of the digestive functions. Occasionally the attack is precipitated in persons predisposed to it by the occurrence of some acute disease, such as pneumonia, by accidents, such as burns, also by severe mental strain, and by the deprivation of food, even where the supply of alcohol is less than would have been likely to produce it otherwise. Where, on the other hand, the quantity of alcohol taken has been very large, the attack is sometimes ushered in by fits of an epileptiform character.’

 

Since the only evidence of the onset of DTs can be obtained by observation, I really do not see how this could be said to be superseded, even though it is a century old. What is clearly shown here is that this is an old controversy, and one in which it is quite respectable to believe that DTs are not restricted to those ‘withdrawing’ from alcohol.

 

Mr Lovell says :’ The nervous system forms a dependency on certain substances. A graded reduction and withdrawal of said substances. A sudden withdrawal leads to withdrawal effects, such as delirium tremens, which is a medical emergency. It carries a 10% fatality.’

 

This appears to me to be a series of questionable assertions of opinion, followed by some undisputable statements of fact.  What does the statement ‘the nervous system forms a dependency on certain substances’ actually *mean*. How can it be objectively shown? How can the human body become ‘dependent’ on a poisonous chemical which is doing it grave damage?

 

Then there is this interesting ‘post hoc,  ergo propter hoc’ assertion: ‘A sudden withdrawal leads to withdrawal effects ‘

 

A sudden withdrawal does not provably *lead* to these effects. We know it is not always followed by them. It can do so, and sometimes does. But it sometimes does not. We also know that these effects may take place in someone who has not ‘withdrawn’ from alcohol at all.  The furthest we can go to is to say that withdrawal *may* be followed by *effects*. Even to call them *withdrawal effects* is to prejudge the causation. 

 

It is impossible to assert in these circumstances, that the effects are *caused* by withdrawal. The evidence tends to suggest (given that DTs may appear in those who withdraw and those who don’t)  that the cause of the DTs is  the underlying damage done by long-term alcohol abuse. Other things may *trigger* the outbreak, but the cause is the long-term abuse of drink.  Causation is quite complicated, as the dope lobby are always telling me.

 

 

I have no doubt that DTs are an emergency, and that those who suffer from this are by definition already very ill from long-term alcohol abuse. But this does not establish that they are ‘addicted’ to drink, merely that they have done themselves grave damage by drinking too much.

 

Dr Lovell then plays the emotional card. This is often a sign that the debater is in a bit of difficulty. But this can’t be said of Dr Lovell because he doesn’t know he is in difficulty, and thinks (who knows how?) that he has won a point he hasn’t. For first, he writes :’ You argue that DT is a manifestation of chronic alcohol abuse, rather than its discontinuation. You are wrong.’

 

He has not, in fact,  shown me to be wrong, or offered any evidence that I am wrong

 

He then says :’ Another visitor to this site asks you to comment on the babies of heroin addicted mothers who are born with opiate addiction and suffer withdrawal.’

 

What has that to do with anything under discussion? Once again, these mothers can stop taking heroin if they want to. The damage they do to their innocent babies is real (as is the damage done to babies in the womb by several other drugs, not all illegal). But the babies , having no choice in the matter,  cannot be said to be ‘addicted’ to a substance they have never voluntarily ingested and from which they can be protected by careful outside intervention as soon as they are born, and crtainly long before they are conscious of the problem. No doubt it is unpleasant for them to be weaned off heroin, but that is not evidence of the existence of ‘addiction’.

 

He adds: ’I would also like to invite you to the A&E department, and witness alcohol withdrawal first hand. Maybe once you have seen a spindly homeless person being held down by four burly security guards, screaming at hallucinations and flipping in and out of full-blown seizures, then watch him rapidly return to normal after drinking alcohol. Then, fully informed, you could assert your opinion.’

 

Again, what is the argument here?  The picture is tragic, but proves nothing. We know nothing about this person. Does he also take illegal drugs?  Does he take them with alcohol? Has he been given prescribed drugs? How long has he been drinking heavily?  In how many ways is he ill or damaged?

 

Drunkenness takes many shapes, and the main lesson from all of them is that we are better off not enslaving ourselves to drink. It is very bad for us.  I have seen a normally-proportioned middle-aged journalist, screaming and visibly fouling himself, carried forcibly from a newspaper office by four burly colleagues, shortly after he had resumed drinking alcohol after a long abstention. I have also seen many talented and previously healthy men decline into illness, memory loss, uncontrollable rage and (in some cases) death because of their long-term alcohol abuse. And I have seen some of them abruptly cease drinking because they chose to do so.

 

I think this also answers the points in the second, longer contribution.  The 36-hour rule does not seem to me to be much use if people can get DTs without withdrawing, and can withdraw without getting DTs. I can’t argue about barbiturates, as I simply don’t know.  I know they are mentioned as suitable for use in public literature on the subject. It doesn’t seem to me to be very important in any case. I just sought to demonstrate that another of his assertions was , at least, doubtful.

What is important, and what he simply doesn’t address at all, so far is his curious inability to see that the drug companies might have an interest in selling their products, and that some doctors have undoubtedly been co-opted into helping them do so, through lavish perks and gifts. Nor does he seem to be able to see that this might have in any way influenced medical attitudes towards this subject, and created a strong financial interest in the medicalization of drunkenness, and the convenient narrowing of DTs from a general consequence of excessive drinking to a ‘symptom’ of ’withdrawal’, so that drugs can then be recommended as a ‘treatment’ for this ‘symptom’.

 

One further thing I would say.  The use of the expression ‘dependency’ is an implicit prejudgement of the subject under discussion. The fact that you get unpleasant symptoms when you stop ingesting something that is bad for you cannot, in my view, be taken to mean that you are ’dependent’ on it.  Your body may be habituated to it, and so produce hangover-like symptoms of varying strengths when you cease using it. But you won’t die of ceasing to use it, whereas you may well die of carrying on. 

But you will very quickly recover once you have stopped using it, unless you have done permanent damage to yourself by long term use, which may assert itself whether you give up or don’t give up. 

By the way,  even some prescription drugs (of course, he’ll know this) cannot be abandoned abruptly but must be stopped gradually, to avoid unpleasant effects.   

I quite agree that my comments in response to the doctor’s patronising remarks were themselves patronising. I would add that this is because they were meant to be. I am not sure his were the rule here is that if you can't take a joke, you shouldn't have joined.

I must get back to my thesaurus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This gay affair is just an excuse for a Tory divorce

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail On Sunday column

Why is David Cameron so keen to trample on his own party and its most loyal supporters?
It is a gripping mystery, but as usual the political experts of the BBC and the grand papers have not noticed it, because they are interested in gossip rather than in the future of the country.

So I will explain to you why the House of Commons was forced to pass a completely pointless Bill on Tuesday.
It was pointless because – as Jacqui Smith made clear back in 2004 when she pushed them through Parliament – civil partnerships are legally identical to same-sex marriage anyway.

Same-sex marriage was mysteriously absent from the manifestos of any main party. Even those it was aimed it – 0.2 per cent of the population – do not seem particularly bothered.

What you have to grasp is that Mr Slippery did this precisely because it would wind up the remaining conservatives in the Tory Party. He is measuring them for the drop.

He knows that, without a miracle, the Tories will lose the next General Election. He, and the liberal coterie who created him out of nothing, are planning ahead for the battle for control of that party which will then take place.

The MPs who voted against same-sex marriage will be scornfully told that the defeat was their fault. Mr Slippery and his media choir will say, again and again, that if only these pinstriped dinosaurs had ‘embraced the modern world’ and ‘got on the right side of history’, the Tories would have won.

This is rubbish, of course, but if you repeat rubbish often enough and loud enough, most people will come to believe it, or how could Anthony Blair have become, and remained, Prime Minister?

The rebels will either be cowed into conformity, or deselected and replaced by another wave of equality and diversity fanatics, indistinguishable from New Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

And so the process will be complete. All three parties will be exactly the same. It began with the putsch against Margaret Thatcher in the autumn of 1990 and continued with the putsch against Iain Duncan Smith in 2003 and the skilful destruction of David Davis in 2005.

Most significant changes in modern British politics do not happen at General Elections, which are more or less rigged in advance by pollsters and the media. They happen in internal party struggles over which we have no control at all. An alliance of liberal, pro-EU political and media figures has worked relentlessly to remove everything that was conservative from the Tory Party.

That party’s only function is to be a safety valve for the anger of the remaining voters who have not been reconciled to Left-wing rule. Every few years they can go through the motions of protesting. Eventually, wholly deprived of a voice in Parliament, excluded from the BBC, they will be browbeaten into silence and total defeat.

I am sorry. I wish it were not true. But those who ignored my warnings against Mr Cameron, and foolishly voted Tory in 2010, have only themselves to blame for what is now happening.

Hitchcock, a 'genius' who sold us poison

What a strange film they have made about Alfred Hitchcock. It manages to make the late Fifties look rather wonderful, by spending a lot of money on clothes, cars and furniture, and dolling up Scarlett Johansson as a siren from that era, which suits her.

But it also rejoices in Hitchcock’s determination to destroy the calm of that age by smashing taboos about sex and violence, in his creepy film Psycho, based on an extraordinarily nasty book about a nauseating criminal.

Audiences were scared, thrilled and shocked by it, which made Hitchcock rich and proud, but poison of this kind, once it gets into the public mind, is hard to get out again.

Flexibility... it's a liberal strong point

I’ve no doubt that, among friends, Vicky Pryce is polite and enlightened about lesbianism, bisexuals etc, etc. But that didn’t stop her referring to her husband’s sexually flexible companion, Carina Trimingham, as a ‘****ing man’.

This reminded me of a jolly song from the Sixties, called Love Me, I’m A Liberal. Its author, the American Phil Ochs, said of such liberals that they were ‘ten degrees to the left of centre in good times, ten degrees to the right of centre when it affects me personally’.

All those who like to claim (usually in a self-serving way) that marital break-up does no harm to the children, especially once they’re grown up, might like to study the texts Peter Huhne sent to his father. I suspect this hellish denunciation will be even worse for Chris Huhne than prison.

So it’s MY fault if I’m mugged?

When did the police become such defeatists in the face of crime? They walk into people’s houses to tell them off for not locking their doors. They advise us not to leave anything in cars. They make station announcements telling us ‘not to become victims of crime’. But they’re far more interested in investigating ancient claims of paedophilia (especially if celebrities are involved) than in patrolling the streets preventing crime.

Now, the supposedly mighty Metropolitan force has decked London with posters urging us to see the world from the point of view of a thief. ‘Thieves see your possessions differently, take care when they’re on show,’ they say.

Why should I? Why should we continue to pay a police force that spends our money telling us we’re on our own? If they can’t deter muggers, what are they for?

What I liked about The Troggs, whose lead ‘singer’ Reg Presley died last week, was that they were so obviously, shamelessly awful. Nobody, however pretentious, has ever dared suggest that they were comparable to Schubert and Bach. But, honestly, is there much difference between Wild Thing and I Want To Hold Your Hand? Personally, I prefer Wild Thing.

The Blair creature appears in a black shirt and a gold chain. What does he think he is? The bomber of Belgrade and Baghdad, and the man who let in the biggest wave of immigration in our history, never understood what was actually going on. If he did, he’d be in hiding. He wanted to be a rock star, but failed. He wanted to be a lawyer, and failed at that too. So he chose politics, the only trade where failure is rewarded with riches and praise.

All Tory promises of change for the better are fakes. I told you on June 24 that the return of O-levels was ‘as likely as the return of the sabre-toothed tiger’. Now see how long it takes for Chris Grayling’s promise of tougher prisons to disappear without trace.

If you want to comment on Peter
Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

The Mystery of 'Addiction' continued

And so the debate on ‘addiction’ continues. Would it do so, if ‘addiction’ were the objective certainty its proponents claim it is? .

 

Mr ‘W’ complains : ‘You say (about me): "[...] his world view, in which people are not free actors but pitiful subjects of outside influence, who cannot be held responsible for their own actions, appeals strongly to him."

This is entirely untrue. What evidence do you have for this assertion? If none, perhaps you should retract it?

In fact I more or less agree with you entirely on the subject of drugs. The reason I want you to stop asserting that "there's no such thing as addiction" is because it means you immediately lose all credibility and undermines the rest of your argument. I think Ben Lovell's post illustrates very well why you lose all credibility.

You say that the concept of 'addiction' and the concept of 'free-will' cannot co-exist.

I say that they can because the concept of 'addiction' does not imply that an addict cannot quit using their own will power.

Can Mr. Hitchens supply a single definition of 'addiction' from any source which states clearly that 'addiction' means that an addict cannot quit and that this is what 'addiction' necessarily implies?’

 

Well, first of all it seems to me that a person who hides his identity cannot really complain in this fashion. Nobody knows who he is, so any criticisms made about him or any summaries of his opinions given, affect him and nobody else. Secondly, his vigorous defence of the fantasy of ‘addiction’ can have no other purpose than to support this delusion. And since the delusion maintains(and is maintained by) the view that man lacks the will to control his own actions, I really cannot see that it is unreasonable to draw this conclusion.

 

The idea that he is in some way trying to save me from being seen as foolish is just an evasion. This is terribly kind of him , but why should he care? If I am right, then the act of looking foolish is unimportant.What's more, if I am right, the whole direction of criminal law and medicine, on this subject, is dangerously wrong.

 

So if I am right, and it seems to me to be demonstrable that I am, then I couldn’t care less if mistaken people think me foolish. The reason for this series of postings was an article in which Decca Aitkenhead, it seemed to me, quietly accepted that my arguments (previously dismissed by her and people like her) actually had some force. This is what can happen when someone persists with an attack upon conventional wisdom and received opinion. A seed is sown. Why, 12 or so years ago, when I first began campaigning for the return of grammar schools, my position was derided and dismissed . Now, many people are coming round to it, in many cases people who despise and dislike me. I like to think that this would not have happened had I not sown the seed, by defying the conventional wisdom.

 

He asks for a dictionary definition of ‘addiction’ which states that an addict cannot quit.  I don’t know about ‘cannot quit’ .  I suppose we would all accept that the alleged ‘addict’ can quit if he is on a desert island, or in a properly run prison, and cannot get supplies. The argument is about whether the addict is capable of quitting of his own free will.  In the definition he originally supplied, ‘addiction’ was described as the ‘ compulsive need for and use of a habit-forming substance’. Well, there’s the answer. The use of the word ‘compulsive’ *by definition* removes the possibility of the exercise of will. But dictionary definitions do not, as a rule, follow themselves to their logical conclusions.

 

It is true that, like many other scientific expressions in common use (including our old friend ‘evolution’, whose use in general conversation, lay journalism and debate is hilariously different from its precise meaning)  is  that the meaning shifts quite broadly and rapidly depending on the circumstance, and sometimes in ways that contradict or defy the original meaning. As soon as anyone is forced to define it, the definition dissolves in question-begging and qualification, as we have seen in this argument already. But they are seldom asked to do so, because the idea is not challenged.

 

I have no doubt that the common public understanding of this word is summed up by the scenes in the film  ‘French Connection 2’, in which a police officer, dedicated to the fight against drugs,  is turned into a helpless slave of heroin by being forcibly pumped full of it, and can only escape his enslavement through a terrible ordeal in which he is equally forcibly denied supplies and suffers terribly as a result. The idea that this officer might, of his own volition, simply refuse to take any more heroin, and undergo a few not very terrible sensations and intestinal upheavals as a result,  is not even considered.

 

It is on that basis that the public accepts ( and pays heavily for ) policies under which the ‘addict’ is indulged and offered ‘treatment’ (often more drugs) or ‘rehab’ rather than ( as would be more sensible)  being chucked into the slammer to deter other people from doing anything so stupid, and incidentally being deprived of his drug.

 

By the way, a correspondent writes to inform me : ‘ I looked up Delirium Tremens in my old copy (1970) of Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, a standard medical reference at least in the United States. Here's what it says: "A psychic disorder involving hallucinations both visual and auditory, found in habitual and excessive users of alcoholic beverages." No mention of "withdrawal." And yet, just as you said, every contemporary reference to delirium tremens attributes it to "withdrawal." It would be interesting to pinpoint exactly when this trend started.’  Indeed it would.

***

On a separate point, there have been one or two explosions of outrage because I explained  that Englishmen of my generation and upbringing view the Roman Catholic Church as (amongst other things)  ‘foreign’  and ‘effeminate’, and that it was therefore most unlikely that I would be crossing the Tiber any time soon. I also mentioned the RC church’s dreadful liturgy and Bible, and its fast-impending collapse into liberalism, restrained only by two conservative Popes.

I was stating a fact (though I have to say that I am also flummoxed by many RC doctrines, from transubstantiation to the immaculate conception and the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome, and these also influence me). Read Macaulay’s description (in his ‘History of England’ )of the reaction to Roman Catholic worship, when it was reintroduced into London during the reign of James II, and you will see there is nothing new in the description of ‘effeminacy’ as compared with Anglican worship.  I’d further note Eric Newby’s observation in his fine book ‘Love and War in the Apennines’ that in rural Italy as long ago as the 1940s men barely attended church at all, leaving it to the women. I’d also advise anyone interested to read A.N.Wilson’s excellent popular history ‘the Victorians’, in which it is once again stated as bald historical fact that English Protestants regarded Roman Catholic practice as foreign and effeminate. I was brought up in this view. It influences me. I acknowledge this. There’s no occasion for people to get upset, unless they want to. I endure incessant sectarian rubbish about my own Church being founded on Henry VIII's (non-existent) divorce.

 

What do I mean by effeminate? Well, the elaborate vestments, the tinkling little bells, the clouds of incense might have something to do with it.  I agree that some sections of the Anglican Church have adopted these things too. They tend to be the ‘Catholic’ wing, so-called.  I don’t like them, though I try to keep my dislike down out of an eirenic inclusivity.  As for ‘foreign’, well, the RC Church is a multinational organisation run from abroad, isn’t it?