Urban Magic

This is from sci-ence.org:

I open with this, because it’s kinda cute, kinda fun, and I don’t want tempers to fray before I’ve even got a paragraph in.

So, this time last year, I took the train from Carcasson to Toulouse.  I say that… I took a long series of ever-increasingly-delayed trains to Toulouse, but never mind.  The route is fairly straight, through increasingly interesting landscapes, except at one point where the track makes a massive curve towards the Alps to go to Lourdes.

Lourdes, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a French town boasting a tiny population but over 5 million tourists every year.  And why?  It’s not the ravines (which are impressive) or the castle (which is okay if you like that sorta thing) – oh no.  It’s the shrine for Our Lady of Lourdes.

And that’s fine!  As readers will know, I’m atheist, but I like a good shrine as much as the next girl and have a lot of respect for a) nice architecture and b) any doctrine which says it’s good to be compassionate.  Groovy.  However, the shrine in Lourdes has a very specific function: it’s renowned for its ability to heal.

Again: fine.  If you believe, then I see no harm in going and praying at Lourdes.  Unless, that is, the belief settles over you that by praying, you don’t have to do chemotherapy as well.  That’s where it starts to go wrong for me.  And as ‘healing’ places go, I guess we should be grateful that the entry to the shrine itself isn’t obscenely expensive, isn’t tens of thousands of dollars, perhaps, but then again, Lourdes has the second highest number of hotels per kilometre in all of France.  After Paris.  Walk through the streets and you can buy Holy Mary plates, cups, medals, postcards, blessed water, sacred candles, Holy Mary cigarette lighters and flick knives.  Very ill people come to this place looking for hope, and an industry makes money off it.

Lourdes is, in many way, a low-key example of an industry which thrives by giving hope to the ill.  A fascinating one, in that an entire rural economy depends on religious furvour for its income, but still, low-key and at most inducing a bit of irritation from atheist skeptics like myself, rather than an actual rant.

No.  For me, by far the more offensive manifestation of this are ‘scientific’ institutions that hide themselves behind a white coat and meaningless brochures.  I’d been thinking about this for a while, but will admit right now that my urge to write this blog was in response to a BBC Documentary about a clinic in Texas that claims it has a radical new approach to treating cancer that can save lives.  If it does: amazing.  Absolutely amazing.

But doesn’t share its research.  Full data is not released to the scientific community.  The drugs are not reviewed.  Treatments are not shared.  For a very large amount of money, desperately ill people go to this clinic hoping for a cure, and who can blame them?  I’ve sat with a close family member in oncology outpatients and frankly, if I were told there was an easy fix for a deadly disease, I’d probably pack up and go to Texas.

But there’s no evidence.  Worse: there’s hostility to releasing evidence.  There is obstruction.  Data is obscured.  Watching the documentary, the thing that struck me more than anything was the key difference between the mainstream scientists who were interviewed, and the practitioners at the clinic.  The practitioners spoke in absolutes, and with defiance.  ‘Your questions are wrong,’ they’d say, or variations on a theme of ‘you’re biased, you’ve got an agenda, you don’t understand the documents before you’ and so on.  Whereas the external scientists bit their lips and said, ‘we haven’t seen data either way.  Show us data and then, only then, we will make an informed judgment.’

It sounds like a little thing, but it’s the most important thing in the world.  Scientific method, the process of study, investigation and research, is what divides technology from magic.  It is how we advance – not by hope, however alluring it is, not by wishing it so, but by a process which regulates itself to seek the absolute truth, no matter how hard that may be.

‘Lemongrass and asparagus juice,’ said a very well meaning friend to my cancer-treatment relative once.  ‘It works wonders on tumors.’  How angry I was when I heard those words.  Grateful, for sure, because it’s nice that people care, and hell, lemongrass and asparagus – these are both Good Things.  But how angry it made me, knowing how hard chemotherapy is and being witness to the hell that is cancer diagnosis and treatment, to have such a complicated disease reduced down to a miracle vegetable and no evidence.

It is an anger that extends to so many ‘alternative medicines’.  Sure, aromatherapy might be calming, and that’s a good thing.  Homeopathy, if you believe in it, might help you relax simply through an exercise of the placebo effect.  But if you dare to suggest, if you even whisper to me that these are proven, viable alternatives to medicine that has been peer reviewed, examined and refined, studied and explored by a whole world applying open and understandable experimental method to their investigations, if you suggest that slurping a bit of sugar water with a pinch of dandelion in it, for which I’ve paid £100, is the way to go, I might just throw my boot across the floor.

So I’ve never really got into the Star Trek thing.  But I saw the last re-vamped film and had to admire the way in which things blew up, people growled and tortured souls battled each other for internal reconciliation and galactic peace.  I mean, who wouldn’t…?

That said, I wasn’t in a huge hurry to see the sequel as sure, it looked loads of fun but you know, it’s been a busy time, it’s stressful, and cinemas in London are STUPIDLY expensive.  I figured… I can wait until it comes into Islington Library rotation stock, right?

Then a friend came to town and said ‘let’s go see!’ and you know, the day was warm and the evening was lazy, so off we trotted.

She’d never seen anything Star Trek ever, but had some quite firm ideas about what to expect.

‘Apparently,’ she explained, ‘it’s not just about things blowing up.  Apparently it’s about colonialism, and society, and what it means to be human, and is arguably a post-modernist take on exploration, evolution and cultural development.’  She thought about it a moment more.  ‘And jumping off things.  There’s a lot of jumping off things.’

‘What?  Simultaneously?’

‘I think so.  I hope so.  Sorta – he’s running he’s running he’s running off a cliff and he’s shouting, ‘I really don’t think we should have violated their social identity, captaaaaaaaiiinnnnn…..!’ type thing.’

‘Or he’s jumping out of a space ship with a cry of ‘let the Klingons construct their own history, rather than inflict our prejudiced viieeeewwwwsssss….’?’

‘Yeah!  Just like that!  It’s gonna be great!’

Bolstered by this thought, into the cinema we went, and as the ads rolled along my friend nudged me in the ribs.

‘Apparently you have to drink whenever there’s lens flare.’

‘Okay.  We don’t have any drinks.’

‘Just imagine you’ve got a drink.’

‘What about when people fall off stuff?’

‘Oh yes, definitely then.  And spaceships crashing – any extreme downward descent, really, that’s fine.’

‘Righto.  What about The Look?’

‘What Look?’

‘Well, in the posters, and in the trailers and that, the villain keeps on having this Look.’

‘What kind of Look?’

‘I dunno.  Sorta a cross between a mad megalomaniac cackle and a triste expression of ‘this will hurt me as much as it hurts you’ kinda look.  I think we’ll know it when we see it.’

Hushed silence as the film began.  We both lent forward expectantly.  How long, we wondered, until people jumped off something?  Not very long, it turned out.  How long, we mused, until lens flare as the camera luxuriously spun round a fraught-looking officer discussing the consequences of interfering with a society’s internal development and really big guns?

Again, not long.

But what about The Look?

We had to wait for a nuclear device to blow up before we got it, but when it came, blimey it was worth the wait.  Even the cameraman seemed riveted by The Look, lingering on it as the pounding music faded to the vacuum silence of space.  Indeed, between a combination of falling off things, lens flare and the Look, I was grateful we didn’t have anything to drink through the course of the movie, as I’m not sure our livers could have handled the toxicity.

‘I don’t see it as a post-colonial deconstruction,’ mused my friend, as we wandered home.  ‘More as an exploration of Nietzsche power politics.’

We both considered this a while.

‘Also,’ she added, ‘I liked the fact that they shot each other with guns while travelling really fast through space.  And the jumping off fast-moving stuff.  And the fighting.  And aliens.  And stuff.  That was awesome.’

So concluded, and having righteously done our critical duty, we went home, happy all the way…

Things I learnt at my Grade 4 Escrima Exam:
1.     If you wanted to unleash pathogenic mayhem on East London, my escrima club is the perfect place to do so.  When we meet for a class, there is a ritual shaking of hands.  Doesn’t matter who you are or how long you’ve been training, you must shake the hands of everyone you’ve meet, regardless of how many are stood in the circle.  This is something I appreciate hugely, since every decent martial system has some form of preliminary salute.  In jiu jitsu you draw an imaginary katana across your body while kowtowing to your sensei.  In taekwondo you recite an oath in Korean to use your skills only for good.  In escrima, we shake hands and greet our fellow comrades in arms with the sacredly enshrined words: ‘how you doing, mate?’

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This…

http://vimeo.com/41038445

… made me happy.  And slightly less ignorant.  I mean, still pretty ignorant.  But slightly less so.