Owen Jones and John Harris - where are your replies?

I think five days is long enough to respond to a direct challenge, if you’re going to.  I know that it’s too short for some people, but in the case of John Harris of the Guardian, and Owen Jones of the Independent, both experienced warriors of debate,  I think I’m entitled to tap my watch and ask when they plan to respond to my posting here (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/11/on-doing-your-homework-a-riposte-to-a-bog-standard-attack-on-grammar-schools.html) last week on the subject of grammar schools and social mobility. I’ve told both of them that they are welcome to respond here at length.  I shall, as always, take indefinite silence as a white flag. But I would much prefer a response.

 

I might add that a certain writer on the Daily Telegraph is still mulling over an invitation I offered him to discuss the MMR issue here, many months ago. And yet I seem to be having some influence over him in other matters. I welcome this. The other day he voiced an opinion on Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ (‘Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which the population is blissed-out by a “delicious” drug called soma, looks far more prophetic than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100246226/hangovers-and-the-abolition-of-suffering/ )

which is remarkably similar to my own thoughts on soma here ( ‘Aldous Huxley, a far more accurate prophet than George Orwell….”http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8666301/high-society-3/) and elsewhere.  

 

And he will shortly be speaking in a debate supporting the motion that ‘Addiction is not a disease’ (http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/11/the-next-spectator-debate-addiction-is-not-a-disease/),  alongside the excellent Theodore Dalrymple, whose writings on the subject first alerted me to the problems of the concept of ‘addiction’. To be fair, the motion follows Mr Thompson’s own rather odd line that addiction is ‘not a disease’. But this is not, in fact,  quite as radical a statement as it appears. At least it isn't in the form espoused by Mr Thompson. In my view it’s certainly not as radical as what Dr Dalyrmple has written in ‘Romancing Opiates’.

 

Mr Thompson maintains that ‘addiction is behaviour, not disease’.

 

Yet he believes this ‘behaviour’ is still, somehow,  involuntary. As he put it when dismissing my view on the subject: ‘But Hitchens believes that addiction does not exist at all – that it’s an excuse for the illegal behaviour of “selfish” people. This is scientifically illiterate – people can become involuntarily addicted and their brain chemistry changes.’

 

Is it 'scientifically illiterate" What if their brain chemistry does change?  All kinds of activities, including studying for the famous ‘knowledge’ test required for London taxi drivers, can alter the brain in observable ways. But the brain alteration is a *result* of the activity, not the *reason* for it, and it does not *compel*  the altered  person to continue to pursue the activity which has brought about the change, nor make any future actions of this kind *involuntary*.

 

So,  if addiction’s not an objectively diagnosable disease that you can catch or develop (and I agree with Mr Thompson that it isn’t), what precisely is the involuntary process by which this alleged ‘addiction’ seats itself in the body of the alleged  ‘addict’? How do we detect it? And why, in some cases, is the 'addict' able to overcome his or her supposed 'addiction', thus calling the concept into doubt? Is there an objectively measurable difference between those who do, and those who don't? What is it?

 

For those interested in the details of my position on this, I recommend reading this discussion (http://bit.ly/GzI61T ) which I had over several days with a  person who had until then accepted the conventional wisdom on the matter, and who believed that my refusal to believe in the existence of addiction was outrageous. The power of conventional wisdom to stifle thought is great, but it is not irresistible.