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BAD SCIENCE

Ben Goldacre’s book continues a trend that has emerged in my reading over the past couple of years: non-fiction aimed at debunking the imbecilic, the deluded and the irrational.

It started with Francis Wheen’s “How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World” – a polemic about flying saucers, New Age spirituality, financial fraud (oh how we should have listened), cults, quakery and moral confusion.

Last year, I found Michael Bywater’s “Big Babies: Or, Why Can’t We Just Grow Up“, a rant against the infantilization of the modern world; how we are treated like children who can’t make their own decisions in a big big bad world. “Peanuts: make contain nuts”; “Hot Coffee: contents may be hot.”

Both books are very funny; both books are thought-provoking, and tap in to the Grumpy Old Man zeitgeist. But on reflection, they’re little more than accumulated anecdotes used to illustrate a series of prejudices. Very entertaining cultural criticism, but hardly analyses based on scientific principles.

‘Bad Science’ takes the debunking genre to a different level altogether.

Dr Ben Goldacre (a medical doctor, with a medical degree, from a recognised university – unlike many of the ‘experts’ he investigates) writes a column for The Guardian and runs a website collecting stories of manipulated drug trials, selective evidence, misrepresented statistics and fallacious solutions to ill-defined problems.

In doing so, Goldacre has upset many people and created a lot of enemies – many of whom are in the media itself. His biggest complaint is that most journalists and editors come from the Humanities background and don’t understand the scientific method generally, or evidence-based medicine specifically.

As he puts it, most science stories in the press aren’t covered by scientists.

Hence, we are fed an endless stream of nonsense, presented as ‘proven’ treatments: detox patches; Hopi ear candles; colonic irrigation; fish oil supplements that improve GCSE results – Goldacre’s book is full of analyses of the pseudoscience behind this quakery, and why intelligent people find themselves believing stupid things.

In his sights are Dr Gillian McKeith(PhD), Professor Patrick Holford, Durham Education Services, Big Pharma, MRSA and the MMR Hoax. As he demolishes each one, the reader is given a primer on the scientific method and the use and abuse of statistics. If nothing else, the book is the answer to those people who complain that “I don’t know why we do half the stuff we do in maths at school. It’s no use.”

There’s no doubt that Goldacre is a highly intelligent man; sometimes his tone – both in his writing and on-screen – is slightly smug. But we should forgive him that – because he’s right.

I cannot recommend ‘Bad Science’ too highly. It’s fair, well researched and presents complexity with great clarity. At the risk of sounding like the blurb on a cheap self-help book, it will change the way you see the world: For the better.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Just behind me, on the floor in front of the chair that my great-grandfather made, is a pile of books.

To be more accurate, three piles of books, about 9 per stack. It’s my fiction hoard that won’t fit on the shelves in the hallway, where we keep our fiction.

Over my left shoulder are two more stacks, standing guard in front of the shelf that’s home to oversize art books. They, in turn, are beneath my photography books, poetry books, sociology and political books, history and current affairs books.

If I raise my eyes from the keyboard for a moment (I’ve never been able to master touch typing) there is a shelf of reference books:
two regular dictionaries;
two crossword dictionaries;
a synonym finder;
a Roget’s Thesaurus;
Schott’s Almanac 2009;
two volumes of ‘Passing Time in the Loo’;
a couple of David Wallechinsky’s massive compendia of trivia;
a dictionary of Latin phrases;
a dictionary of human thought;
a compact version of ‘The Times Atlas of the World’;
a rhyming dictionary;
a couple of books of quotations.

Valhalla

Walk out of the study, across the hall and into the family room, and you’ll find music books, travel books, film books, card game books, puzzle books and the Children’s Britannica.

In the loft, four shelving units house most of our hardback fiction, biography, Eastern philosophy, psychology, science and craft books.

Even the kitchen has a three-shelf unit, stacked with cookbooks and gardening books.

I shudder to think how much I have spent over the past forty years amassing this collection. Actually, I don’t – because I no longer think about it. I tried that a few years ago, in the hope of worrying myself into a stop, but it didn’t work. I continued to buy more than I read.

And yet the list of things I discover I am supposed to have read grows ever-longer. Today I found a ‘1001 Books to Read Before You Die’ website, which categorised the selection into centuries. Of the seventy-or-so from the 2000s I own six and have read one.

Which set me thinking about earlier masterpieces that have escaped my purview: huge swathes of C19th classics shouting for my attention; warehouses of postmodernism demanding my time; giants of the Great American Novel standing defiantly, looking for a literary fight.

A fight that I will never win.

Each time I turn up a list of the books I should have read, I discover titles of which I have no knowledge. By writers I do not know.

Here’s an example; Time Magazine’s All Time 100 Novels (although it only goes back to 1923, the year Time was first published). This list includes Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather), Their Eyes Were Watching for God (Zora Neale Hurston) and Dog Soldiers (Robert Stone). All US novels, but that’s not the point. Taking the editors’ choices at face value, they are among the greatest ever written – and I’ve never heard of them.

I used to find this thrilling; now it just induces guilt.

Guilt that I consume my fair share of pop fiction (even highly respected crime writers like George Pelecanos and Richard Price are, let’s face it, hardboiled entertainers). But also guilt when  I am reading books that are suppose to be good for me – like Mark Thomas’ very funny polemic about Coca Cola, and Ben Goldacre’s attack on the media’s treatement of science and health.

While I’m trying to get to stay ahead in my understanding of the modern world, a little voice (which is getting ever louder) keeps saying:

“What about Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? What about Dickens or Hardy? Or Austen or Bronte? Even Bellow or Updike?”

My elder son is putting me to shame. Like many young men in their late teens, he’s a fan of horror, and so is returning to original sources – he’s halfway through Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with Shelley’s Frankenstein next on the bedside table.

I’ve read neither.

And I’ve reached a stage where I notice that there are more unticked boxes on the list than there are ticks. More gaps than fill-ins. More ignorance than bliss.

Nirvana

And so I have a request of the book trade.

Please stop.

Given that publishers don’t make any money, that only James Patterson and Jacqueline Wilson earn anything from public lending rights, and that we’re all going to spend another fortune moving our paperback collections onto Sony Readers or Amazon Kinders (like we did with VHS-to-DVD, and we’re expected to again with Blu-Ray), can we just press the pause button for a little while?

The sum total of human wisdom, love and folly has already been well documented. There is no need for yet another variation on any of the well-worked themes. We’re done.

If there are, indeed 1001 masterpieces to read before I die, then I don’t need any more. That’s enough, already. Do the maths: 300 pages per book, 500 words a page; that’s 150 million words I have to get through.

Well, I’ve checked my diary, and I’m busy for the next 30 years. So please stop.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I went to Eden on Sunday – and lost my soul.

Before you entertain images of giant bubble-wrap pods, I’m not talking about the C21st Kew in Cornwall. While I haven’t visited  that one, my family tell me that it’s great; inspiring and nourishing.

No. This Eden is the antithesis of a life-affirming botanical experiment. This Eden is a shopping centre in High Wycombe. Or rather, it’s a “desirable new shopping and leisure experience…set within a contemporary space with an enviable selection of fashion and lifestyle brands.”

(Can you feel your life force being sucked from you already?)

Eden opened in March, and still shines like a newly-installed kitchen. Surfaces have been buffed, glass has been wiped, chrome has been polished. It’s as if it has just been taken out of its box.

The layout is two interlinked circles, like crumpled Olympic rings that, once entered, can have even the keenest mind wandering for hours, lost in a retail maze. As I had forgotten my reading glasses, I couldn’t follow the map given to me by the happy, smiley people at Customer Services (yes; there is a map) so I tried to follow my innate sense of direction – a sense of direction that, over the years, has got me across Europe and much of the US.

Only after passing the Sony Centre for a third time did I wake up to the fact that I had surrendered my critical faculties, and was ambling round and round the circuit like a forgotten suitcase on an airport carousel.

The overwhelming feeling the place engenders is two-dimensionality. It’s the first time I have ever been to a (quasi) public space that looks exactly as the rendering in the artist’s impressions. Clean lines, perfect surfaces, interrupted  by carbon-based consumption units. Shaped by the environment, visitors become citizens of flatland,  not really participating in a shared experience.

It’s as if we’re only there to demonstrating scale.

As it’s Christmas, Eden has been decked with designer bling to encourage festive cheer – from  fashionable rust and purple baubles to transparent trees with ice-white lights. And at the crossroads of two walkways, a 7-metre chandelier hangs from the roof, swaying gently like an electric jelly-fish that’s been hauled from the darkness of the ocean.

But even that wasn’t the most disturbing aspect of the place. Nor the name. Nor the antiseptic quality. Nor the seats that look like fondant ice cakes – dark chocolate sponge cubes topped with wooden caramel icing.

It’s the fact that among the “jaw-dropping array” (sic) of over 100 shops, there only one bookstore.

In the midst of the accessories shops, the childrenswear shops, the confectionary, electrical, fashion and footwear shops; the gift and card emporia, the health and beauty outlets, the jewellers, the opticians, the restaurants and cafes, there’s  a single, solitary branch of Waterstone’s (what else?).

And it’s not even a good bookshop. It isn’t selling good books, stimulating books, challenging and thought-provoking books. It’s shifting units of brand (and their booky wooks).

I know it’s Christmas, and I know that the vast majority of book sales happen in December. But oh, how my heart broke to see such vacuity being passed-off as reading. Shelf upon shelf of reminiscence from people who have spent their lives in a parallel universe called ‘Meeja’.

Parky and Julie; Jeremy and Dawn. Gordon and Delia; Jamie and Nigella. You don’t have to read the product to get the message – that they are the chosen ones, members of a golden circle that refer to one another, while we, the great unwashed, look in – and buy.

Standing in the shop yesterday afternoon, I happened to catch the reflection of the book covers in the window.  Faces of secular saints, like stained glass in a retail cathedral.

And in that moment of realising why the developers had called the place Eden, a tiny piece of me died.

Merry Christmas

Popularity: 88% [?]