'I am a Scientist! You Will Obey!' Part Two

I like this headline so much that I've decided to use it again. It so beautifully sums up the Dalek-like barking of the pro-Nutt faction.  Not one of them, so far as I have noticed, has properly absorbed the significance of the uncontested fact that their  hero  

•    Described as a 'criminal sanction' the so-called 'cannabis warnings' which involve neither punishment nor a criminal record.
•    Wrote about  a phantasmal BBC statement saying that the Corporation will not use me again.

Both these dollops of balderdash were uttered by him quite voluntarily in public places. I'm sorry but in these matters he is actually, plainly and incontrovertibly wrong.  Despite his fan club's efforts, there's no excuse for either of them. Does the fact that he is a scientist, and a professor, mean that these significant errors don't count?

Or do they rather make one worry about his rigour? I'd say myself that his description of our dispute on 'Comment is Free' is highly inadequate (I'm being polite), and that anyone who wanted a full account of it would be far better off reading what's been written here.

Here's another cause for joy. One of my critics is a Colin Walker, who three days ago posted the following:' Prof Nutt may not be quite as good a journalist as you, though that is debatable, however you Peter are no scientist. The argument you're having is a tabloid journalist and author on subjects of politics and religion against a professor with a PhD and years of research in the topic. I wonder who is going to have a better grasp of the facts in this one?'

I said I thought this was pretty unresponsive to what I'd written (which it obviously is).
Mr Walker now writes in again to complain about having the board-rubber thrown at him by teacher and while doing so makes some very important concessions, which some other contributors here might like to note as , though they are set about with various hostile and biting remarks, they pretty much accept my principal argument:

' Peter, sorry 'Mr' Hitchens (or 'He who shall not be named' given a previous rant I've received from you), I hadn't realised that one of the comments you were referring to was mine when you accused people of not reading the article. I think it's very clear I had read your article as I made reference to two points near the end of the article.'

I reply 'Really? What were they? I am unable to see any trace of this in his original posting.'
Mr Walker continues ' I apologise for not giving a piece by piece critique.'

To which I reply : 'No, no, Mr Walker, that is perfectly all right.'

He then explains,  enjoyably covering his retreat with bluster: ' I just had a few minutes to kill, wondered what reactionary drivel you were spouting lately and got mildly miffed enough with your points to make a comment. Some of the points you make in the article are valid and in some you are pedantically stretching a minor point e.g. 'criminal sanction'.'

I respond here:  'A *minor* point indeed? Does Mr Walker really think that there is no important difference between having a criminal record and not having one?  Or between suffering a material punishment and not suffering one?'

He continues ' My point was that Prof Nutt may very well not be as good a journalist as you, you are well placed to criticise him on it given your qualifications and experience.'
I respond ' Actually,  that is not what Mr Walker said at all. He said: "Prof Nutt may not be quite as good a journalist as you, though that is debatable.". Still, perhaps Mr Walker ,too, is a scientist, and his accounts of recent events do not need to be subjected to the same rigorous scrutiny as do the accounts provided by us poor unscientists. I do however welcome Mr Walker's important concession – actually the point of this whole argument – that I am well-placed to criticise Professor Nutt on matters where his expertise is not involved.

He adds: 'However you are no scientist and are not capable of criticising him on his scientific statements in a rational or a valid way. '

I reply 'I completely agree. I yield to the professor on all matters of neuropsychopharmacology.  I have always made this clear. What's more, I don't criticse his purely scientific statements. I criticise him on his statements about morals, politics and sociology, and his attempts to mix hard science with inexact social commentary .'

He then adds: 'Your grasp of the scientific method does on occasion appear to be OK and I don't doubt you understand the principles involved well.'

This too is a welcome change of tune.

So I really don't mind that Mr Walker then tosses these words over his shoulder as he departs: ' It's just a shame you so often abandon it and resort to self righteous anecdotes and vitriol when it doesn't help your argument. '

Self-righteous anecdotes, eh? I must curb those.

On  a few other points. I was born in 1951 and can just remember (as I recount in my 'The Rage Against God') the outer echoes of the Suez affair. But manners, customs, fashions, manners of speech,  etc. remained very much the same for some years after 1956  – it wasn't until 1963 or 1964 (see Philip Larkin) that the cultural revolution began to be visible, and then quite tentativel,  in established institutions.

So I'm working in part from memory, in part from conversations and correspondence with people who were older than me at this time, particularly veterans of newspaper offices in that era, and in part from such interesting and detailed fictional accounts of the age such as Margaret Drabble's novel 'the Millstone' , and P.D. James's 'Shroud for a Nightingale' which I cite in my 'The Abolition of Britain' . My basic point is that the drama completely fails to capture the spirit of the age, which is why I feel quite confident that its subsequent episodes will be as ghastly as the first.

I'm puzzled by the claim that period drama isn't about the period in which it is set. Why, then, the elaborate attention to detail in terms of clothes, cars, smoking, old newspapers, music etc? If 1970s music were played, or a 1968 car appeared in the background, or a skirt-length from another era, there'd be sharp letters of complaint,. But when the most crucial thing of all - *what people were actually like*- is so wrong as to be laughable, nothing happens.

Poor old Shakespeare is going to be dragged in here. Personally I'm sick of seeing the histories set in the Third Reich and Richard III in Nazi uniform. But since his plays are crammed with a great deal of beautifully-expressed historical, personal, moral and political truth, they could be performed in boiler suits and you'd still get something out of it, even if 'Julius Caesar' were set in modern Kinshasa (and why not?).

Nowhere in the article do I say that 1956 was better than today. To criticise the present, and to point out that some features of the past were creditable, is not to yearn to recreate the dead past. It is to make suggestions for the future. I do grow weary of this stupid jibe.

I lived in the 1950s. I know what they were like, damp, smelling of stale tobacco, greyish- brown in colour, poorly-heated, stuffy, punctuated with horrible food  and insipid drink, almost wholly devoid of foreign travel save the very rich. Many of the evils of the 1960s in terms of crime and immorality incubated in the de-Christianised and demoralised culture left over from the war. I have never said they were a 'Golden Age' because I don't believe it.

But there were good things too,  that we have lost, and it is false to deny it.

I thank Mr Demetriou for his suggestions but I am to some extent constrained by current events, I am simply unqualified to write about economics ( I am no longer sure who *is* qualified, but I am certainly not). Funny, isn't it, that I get complaints that I won't do that |( and even more complaints that I won't discuss theology.  Another subject on which I readily admit my lack of knowledge and understanding) , whereas if I dare to write (quite knowledgeably if without scientific qualifications) about drugs, I am told snottily not to do so.  I should have thought my ready recognition of my own limitations might be a sign that I was careful to stick to what I know. 

But I have written an enormous amount about education. I have pretty much said all I wish to say, especially in the chapter 'The Fall of the Meritocracy' in 'The Cameron Delusion'
Oh, and Tim Wilkinson, over at 'Surely Some Mistake' has completed his reply to me on the cannabis issue.  My thanks to him for taking so much time and trouble to make a proper, serious response. I hope he will forgive me if I now take some time to prepare my reply, which I hope will be in one part and as brief as I can make it.  I have many other commitments and don't want to rush.