De Novo

In case you haven’t seen, irony is apparently not dead:

“They have quickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them. They have made for themselves a molten calf, and have worshiped it and have sacrificed to it and said, ‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!’”

The LORD said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, they are an obstinate people.

…
It came about, as soon as Moses came near the camp, that he saw the calf and the dancing; and Moses’ anger burned, and he threw the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain.

He took the calf which they had made and burned it with fire, and ground it to powder, and scattered it over the surface of the water and made the sons of Israel drink it.

Then Moses said to Aaron, “What did this people do to you, that you have brought such great sin upon them?”

Aaron said, “Do not let the anger of my lord burn; you know the people yourself, that they are prone to evil.

– Exodus 32:8-9, 19-22

via Wonkette

While digging around the NYTimes website for their glowing obituary of the recently deceased Albert Hoffmann, I uncovered this little gem from 2001. Let’s see if we can spot the manufactured controversy here:

Users of LSD and many psychiatrists who have used the drug in therapy sessions say that [psychedelic] effects provide a window into the human unconscious. When people let go of the past in an altered state, they can dredge material from the deep within themselves.

Or can they? To Dr. Jack Cowan, a mathematician at the University of Chicago and a number of other scientists who study the architecture of the brain’s visual areas, the dancing geometical patterns observed by Dr. Hoffman are not in the least mysterious…. People may find the results helpful or insightful, he said, but they flow not from some mysterious netherworld world [sic] but from the architecture of their own brains.

Sigh. That’s right, the architecture of our brains could not possibly harbor some mysterious netherworld. The statement is not logically false, but neither does it actually contradict the possibilities of mysteries being hidden in the human brain. It’s precisely because of LSD’s interaction with our brains’ complexities that psychiatrists believe it might be useful to us at all.

Comments like this one that betray an utter illiteracy of psychology and anthropology on the part of the speaker, but can also, sadly, aid in perpetuating public misconceptions about a drug that might well offer a valuable gateway into the workings of the human mind.

When you study natural science and the miracles of creation, if you don’t turn into a mystic you are not a natural scientist.

– Albert Hoffmann

RIP, Dr. Hoffmann.