An end to hope (Griffith REVIEW Selections)
Visiting at least annually, I observed how shops closed, shopping centres became increasingly shabby and houses and then entire blocks of Housing Trust houses fell derelict and were then demolished. The local newspaper, the Whyalla News, begun in as a weekly, went to twice weekly in the s and thrice weekly in the s. It then declined, losing pages, advertisers and readers.
It now appears once a week again, like many country newspapers permanently on the brink of closure. In the early s, nonconformist congregations supported half-a-dozen clergymen and several other social and community development officers. Now the Uniting Church has one minister in the entire city, though arguably the need for the social and spiritual support that churches represent could not be greater. The study also revealed shockingly high levels of domestic abuse, as suggested by the numbers of women seeking shelter.
In the face of these grim realities, Whyalla had its boosters. The council remained resolutely positive, even though most initiatives failed to deliver the benefits promised. Her book catalogued a relentless succession of development, urban amenities and civic progress. Of the migrants of the s who remained, the environment in which they lived now actively harmed their health. The report of a planning weekend among city council elected officials and employed officers in came up with extravagant ideas, such as developing a resort for Asian honeymooners and redeveloping the local racecourse and golf course to attract international punters and players.
The workshop considered several scenarios for Whyalla in The ecocity push reflected Whyalla at its most optimistic. In Whyalla Why Not? Its population would have doubled but its jobless rate would be the lowest in Australia. It failed, killed by lack of investment. In , the council was promoting the city hopefully:. Long a steel and ship-building hub, Whyalla is now experiencing a tourism renaissance based around its proud industrial history and natural phenomena. In truth, tours of the steelworks attracted few visitors. The tourist promotion office was now putting its eggs in the baskets of the Whyalla Maritime Museum, itself based on the preserved second world war corvette HMAS Whyalla the first ship built in the shipyard, launched in and in hauled ashore.
Even more, they hoped for a boon from fishing tourism, from the annual angling festival, and from the exploitation of the giant cuttlefish, which swarm in the waters of nearby False Bay. Alongside the pub-club-bingo and poker-machine culture that seemingly characterises the city, it is also, paradoxically, a place with greater access to culture than comparable communities. Partly because of its isolation and perceived disadvantages, the state government and other agencies have long made special efforts to bring culture to Whyalla.
The opening of what is now the Middleback Arts Centre in has given Whyalla residents an impressive program of theatre, music, ballet and other performances. Nor is the culture all imported. The Whyalla Players have performed musicals annually since , and not just the traditional Rogers and Hammerstein or Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire, but also complex and recent works such as Phantom of the Opera or Cats. Ironically, the Middleback Arts Centre is located in the same precinct that houses government and church employment and welfare offices.
Jan Vrtelka, a Czech migrant, wrote dozens of letters to the Whyalla News in the mid-noughties. He later published a selection of over 60 of them under the telling title of All for Whyalla. He too advocated developing coastal resorts and remaking the railway to Port Augusta — which had carried passengers for only two years before closing in — to ship cattle to Darwin for export to Asia.
He urged the introduction of dog-sledding on sand and land yachts on mudflats near the city. Whyalla, he thought, should plan for a city five times its present size: Ore mining in the Middleback Ranges brings modest benefits; as did the Santos natural gas development at Port Bonython on nearby Point Lowly in the s. BHP divested itself of the steelworks in to OneSteel, later taken over by Arrium Steel, with each transfer costing jobs.
Over the decade the total workforce in the steelworks — once 6,strong — fell to around 1, In April , Arrium called in administrators and offered the plant for sale. Today, the future of the steelworks remains uncertain. Fundamentally, the question is whether an industrial community can survive in the harsh environment of the upper Eyre Peninsula. But amid the predictions of economic collapse and the social dislocation that would inevitably follow, optimistic voices are also heard.
Amid forebodings of doom, quixotic headlines characterise the Whyalla News: Forty years later Ronald Searle wrote in his war memoir, 'If the men who died building it were laid end to end, they would roughly cover the miles of track they built that year. Searle was one of these tortured labourers and the pictures he drew in the jungle slave camps and back in Singapore's Changi goal are a rare and valuable record of a particularly cruel episode in a cruel war.
Three hundred of Searle's war drawings are held in London's Imperial War Museum and a selection published in his account of that time, To the Kwai — and Back: War Drawings Collins, Ten other Searle war drawings have never been published. Instead they were hidden for decades in a shoebox kept in the pantry of a family home in Coppin Street, East Malvern, in Melbourne's comfortable eastern suburbs. It was too hard, too sad. He spent most of the last twenty years of his life in Bundoora psychiatric hospital, in a ward for veterans with war-related mental illness. He died there in , demented and alone.
It was three days before his estranged wife Peg, Jill Parkes' aunt, was told of his passing. Postwar, Lofty Cannon shrunk while Ronald Searle grew to become one of the most famous illustrators of the century. Between and the early , Searle published fifty books. He is most famous for his subversive St Trinian's pictures about monstrous British private school girls, but these stockinged, hockey-stick-wielding horrors are just a small part of an extraordinary career that includes animation, sculpture, painting, magazine and newspaper illustration.
Searle's output has been so great that many people have a private exhibition space of his work in their heads. Mine is the spidery, gothic illustrations he did for a hard-cover edition of Dickens' A Christmas Carol. My parents owned the book and every December I would get it out and make myself cry.
Searle is still alive, aged eighty-seven and living in a village in the south of France. He is a private person but I was given his address and fax number. No email, no phone number. When I began this research, I wrote a letter asking for an interview. Then, panicked about my poor handwriting, I sent a typed fax.
As the machine beeped transmission success, I noticed that the word 'Searle' appeared on the screen. Ronald Searle is famous, Lofty Cannon is a nobody, yet without Lofty's care, the artist would not have survived the war. The drawings kept in the shoebox for so many years are now in the State Library of Victoria, along side the men's correspondence and background material compiled by Jill Parkes and her husband John. The library considers 'The Lofty Cannon Collection' one of its archival treasures. This essay is about both stories, and the chance encounters that gave these illustrations a new life.
Stories arrive from the most unexpected places. Old Tom is a diabolical, self-centred young child disguised as a cat who lives with his neat freak mother Angela Throgmorton. Searle is famous for his drawings of cats. One wonderful image shows a fat black cat sitting on a wooden chair in front of a table laden with a sumptuous spread of jellies, cakes, profiteroles and fruit.
A thought bubble above the cat's head is filled with fish: Hobbs loves Searle and each time he has spoken publicly about his influence something significant has happened. First, in a profile in The Age Hobbs explained how, as a child, he had pored over Searle's works: The Rake's Progress , the Changi drawings and, of course, the St Trinian's books, drawings that critics have described as being concerned with three themes: After the article appeared a reader contacted Hobbs.
She wanted to give him her collection of Searle first editions and a book he autographed in , the year Hobbs was born. In , Hobbs wrote a personal piece for The Age explaining why Searle was so special to him. This time, John and Jill Parkes got in touch. Jill's mother Fay had died two years before and when they cleaned her house, Jill discovered the shoebox of Searle drawings. The Parkes had no idea what to do with them and called Hobbs and asked if he would like to see them. I went grudgingly to meet them. At their house the couple started piling things on his lap: One on pink cardboard with a black and white sketch of a St Trinian's girl — a single black garter flashing — stealing presents from Santa's sack.
Another big yellow card with a couple dancing in an empty ballroom to a song played by a beggar on a violin. Disguised in the swirls of the rococo roof are voluptuous naked dancing girls. Then there were the pictures: Six sketches featured Lofty. As Australian nicknames go, Lofty was either very short or very tall. He was six foot six. The most affecting image 'Ronald Searle the Beauty of Ward 5' shows the artist naked and startled, his skin pocked with purple sores, 'a foul, creeping skin disease,' his knees drawn up to his chest and sitting on a bamboo platform. In front of him are two soldiers, a short man with a moustache and Lofty, so tall that his chest, shoulders and head are missing.
The perspective is like that of a child who draws adults with fantastically long legs and pinheads. A similar and much warmer image is simply captioned 'Thanks Lofty! Lofty as solid and mountainous as his name suggests, Searle a tiny child. In To Kwai — and Back Searle wrote: High, endlessly long and crammed with skeletal-looking bodies sprawled on raised bamboo platforms, it was a luxury hotel compared with what we had just left in the jungle. Like all the other prisoners, he lived on boiled rice supplemented by whatever they could catch and kill, everything from snakes to kittens.
Lack of vitamin B12 meant most men had 'happy feet' and 'rice balls'. Happy feet caused stabbing, burning pain in the soles. Rice balls described an affliction by which the skin of the genitals split and peeled. Searle also had dysentery, malaria, fever and his legs were puffed up with beri-beri. Apart from this, my three-weekly bouts of malaria had left what was still visible of my skin between scabies and ringworm, a pleasing bright yellow.
Russell Braddon was also at Kanchanaburi. We thought he was dying and we — some of his remaining friends — used to put him out on a groundsheet in the sun. I don't know why but we felt that the sun would do something. He kept on drawing. Searle drifted in and out of a coma; his left, drawing hand was 'holed with ulcers' so these delicate, grateful pictures were all done with his right. A dying man doesn't waste his strength recording the mundane or meaningless. He records what is important and monumental.
Half-dead, he chose to draw Lofty at his bedside, Lofty conversing with a Dutch patient, 'Oh ja, ja, ja — oh ja, ja, ja', his long, spotty legs and arms folded around themselves as he smokes a cigarette, listens and chats. In every picture, Lofty is distinguished by his height and by the Red Cross bandage on his arm.
There is Lofty bandaging a soldier's leg in the hut they called Ward 5, Lofty 'at his sheep dip', the place where patients bathed and, finally, a gigantic, weeping Lofty waving off a Changi-bound train. Hobbs looked at the pictures then he read a letter from Searle to Lofty, dated August 30, The current measuring stick for the success of an idea is its popularity, everything and everyone is now ultra democratic, the mob decides.
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But, given that Kim Kardashian has 20 million followers on Twitter, it seems obvious that the popularity test still has some kinks to iron out when it comes to finding real substance and meaning. The End Of The Human Condition rises above all the narcissistic, neurotic, celebrity-crazed, mindless buzz-feed that currently dominates our world, it redefines meaning and substance.
It defies opinion, popularity and the feel-good superficiality that we are all drowning in and, as with any great truth, the information contained in FREEDOM , just is. This wonderful book deals with ALL those truths, it confronts them in the most head-on, revealing and profound way. In fact, this book provides the whole human race with a much needed lesson in truth, beauty and what is really important on this planet. It deals with what really makes us human; the most advanced and powerful tool ever known, our fully conscious brains and the real underlying issue in all human affairs, the human condition.
Unlike Wilson, who claims that the human condition is the conflict within us between selfish and cooperative genes, a situation over which we have no control and therefore no moral dilemma to resolve, Griffith claims that the human condition is a psychological problem, a psychosis, that can be completely cured by a truthful explanation and understanding of its origins. Essentially, Griffith explains that our fully conscious brain, which is unique to humans, is a super computer that was developed without an instruction manual, and over the last two million years the human race collectively has been going about life, slowly but steadily putting together the manual that can finally explain ourselves, and FREEDOM is that manual.
Once he has resurrected and explained exactly what the human condition is he goes on to tackle the meaning of human existence, the origins of our moral instincts, the true nature and origin of our conscious mind and the importance of nurturing in our historical and future development, to name but a few. Helpfully and incredibly insightfully, Griffith also draws heavily on all kinds of thinkers, both contemporary and ancient, and has an incredible ability to summarise complex theories and thought patterns into short easily understandable sentences.
He explains and dissolves the battle of the sexes, the dichotomy of left and right wing politics and removes all the dogma from religion. This book seriously takes the reader on a journey of enlightenment from the depressing uneasiness of the human condition to a wonderfully optimistic and exciting future for humans. Honestly, doing justice to the depth of insight and subject matter covered is simply not possible.
Any preconceived psychological ideas I had about myself, humans in general and the world we live in, were completely demolished and a whole new framework of understanding built in its place by this awesome book. Personally, I think he could use it a whole lot more because the truths he unlocks about our human situation, and there are countless , definitely shake all the seemingly solid mechanistic foundations on which we currently live and ultimately, will fundamentally change them forever. Packaged within his relieving and compassionate explanations that deeply resonate, these truths, although terrifying, are at last able to be faced by all.
Most reassuring of all is that there is a big, bold, enveloping sunrise at the end of this seemingly daunting book—an explanation of how we can live now that we can understand ourselves, which essentially is in a state of freedom from the oppression of our human condition.
Ed Wright: An end to hope
As he enthusiastically, sometimes ecstatically describes all that is possible for our species and our planet now, an inspiring and transporting conclusion to the book unfolds—a happier ending there never was! This book is an intriguing, sometimes very difficult, continuously demystifying, exposing, moving, logical and accountable journey through the story of humankind with an explosively positive final chapter that blasts each and every one of us into a completely new, human-condition-understood, wildly exciting, ecstatic-feeling-inducing future, that has only existed in our wildest dreams.
View all 7 comments. May 21, Will Once rated it did not like it. This has to be the worst book I have read in a very long time. I'd give it zero stars if GR allowed me to. Let's start at the beginning. The basic premise of the book is that mankind is in the last chance saloon because we don't understand the duality of our nature - that we are capable of both good and evil deeds.
Apparently, this is in stark contrast to the animal kingdom which doesn't kill, rape or torture for pleasure. And we "learned" to be evil when we "became conscious" This has to be the worst book I have read in a very long time. And we "learned" to be evil when we "became conscious" - around about the time that we stopped being hunter gatherers and started to become farmers.
Ever watched a cat play with a mouse? Which they are not.
The reluctant memoirist - Griffith Review
The dodgy pseudoscience wouldn't be so bad if the book was reasonably well written. It is a dense and almost unreadable rant which stuffs far too many polysyllabic words into every sentence to make up for its lack of content. This book is more than pages long. Frankly, it feels longer. Then we have a hectoring tone which criticises anyone who dares to disagree with the book as being afraid of the truth, or having failed to understand what the book is saying.
Bizarrely, the book uses quotes from popular songs and cartoons I wish I was making this up in order to "prove" its points. The worst sin of all has to be the underlying arrogance. This is the only book to save the world. The messianic author is the only person to have worked all this out. The sycophancy and arrogance is nauseating.
The one good point is that the book is free on the web google "human condition". View all 34 comments. The Dawn of our Emancipation: Something disrupts our veneer and strikes a deep chord in our psyche, transcending our day to day lives, leaving a lasting imprint. It captivated and stirred me, awakening my senses from a world in turmoil and a world drowning in superfic The Dawn of our Emancipation: It captivated and stirred me, awakening my senses from a world in turmoil and a world drowning in superficiality.
It also unsettled me—the subject matter and implications for me as an individual and for us as a species ensured this. Even the title unnervingly confronts us with the stark reality of a planet seemingly on the brink of self-destruction. It is a case of having got all the truth up in one go! We are asleep, but think we are awake.
We are dreaming, but take our dreams to be reality. We are the halt, lame, blind, deaf, the sick. But we are doubly unconscious. We are so ill that we no longer feel ill, as in many terminal illnesses. Grounded in biology, his writing is bold, upfront and honest, cutting a swathe through the world we live in. D Laing and others and he deals head on with explaining men and women, politics and religion. He takes the reader on a journey of enlightenment from explaining the development of order of matter on Earth and the meaning of life to leading the reader through the psychological maturation of humanity from the origins of our conscience, the development of consciousness and the emergence of the human condition.
He confronts us with narrative on the contradictory nature of our behavior, describing both our capacity to be loving, selfless and compassionate and paradoxically to be selfish, aggressive and brutal.
Griffith then raises the fundamental questions that he suggests we face as a species: Why are we the way we are? Where does our contradictory nature and this dark side to our behavior come from? With these all-encompassing questions posed, Griffith then fearlessly, logically and compassionately, through first degree biology goes about answering them. Griffith then goes on to explain that the human condition, this paradox of good and evil that we have in our make-up only appeared with the development of consciousness.
Griffith identifies this key moment as happening some two million years ago: However, and the simplicity of this can seem beguiling, Griffith explains that it is through being able to understand why our human condition emerged and the very good reason for all of our behaviour, or put another way through now having the biological explanation of our fundamental worth, that this burden of guilt can lift from our psyche enabling the behavior to subside and the cycle of destruction plaguing our planet to end, bringing about real and transformative change to the world.
Everyone can now come back to life—can wake up from their human-condition-afflicted torpor and look outwards and see each other and the world for the first time, and move across and help each other, and do anything and everything that needs to be done to end the suffering and pain that plagues this planet. We humans have, in truth, all been asleep, owned by so much pain and suffering. From the festering, stalled state it has been in for far too long, waiting for these liberating understandings of the human condition, the human race is finally on its way!
In a world consumed by suffering, anger, desperation, corruption, violence and despair, and with society disintegrating and rotting in dogma and meaninglessness FREEDOM is timely and seismic. Timely in the desperately needed answers, meaning and understanding it brings to our world, and seismic in the truth and hope that this knowledge brings to our future. Every human needs a copy of this book. Jun 27, Gary Clark added it. This is a book that warrants serious thought.
How are we to decide if these claims are legitimate or if they are emotive hyperbole? Griffith claims his theory is scientific — therefore it should be empirically verifiable and open to proof or refutation. In fact many of his claims are based on emotive assertion. He offers no empirical data to support many of his claims — therefore the reader is unable to reproduce his analysis and confirm or reject his findings.
In circular fashion he claims people who reject his theory are being evasive and in denial. This tactic - of claiming the opponents of your theory are in denial while offering no data as to why you are correct - is one adopted by circular or pseudoscientific theories such as Marxism or Freudianism. Griffith seems to be on track here — although it is incorrect to say science has not acknowledged this fact.
The most widely accepted theory in human evolutionary studies at the moment assumes that an intensification of parental care relative to other primates is central to the human emergence. He rightly argues that nurturing is important in human evolution — but he then makes the leap that nurturing in early infancy is what creates our adult personality.
And why is science in denial about the role of nurturing in human evolution? Simple — scientists have damaged souls because they received inadequate nurturing and therefore they have institutionalised the denial of the role of nurturing into science itself. There are two problems here. The first is the assumption that infancy determines variation in adulthood personality.
The second is that lack of nurturing in the background of scientists has produced the systematic denial of nurturing in studies of human evolution — which as I have suggested does not exist, with the role of intensified parenting being at the heart of contemporary human evolutionary studies.
Griffith believes the lack of nurturing in our background is the core problem at the heart of the human condition. He also argues that our personality is indelibly grafted into us during the first few years of life and that this is something that is determined and which we have little hope of changing or overcoming — that is by the time we reach childhood and adolescence the die is cast so to speak by the degree of early nurturing we receive.
And it is the degree of nurturing that we receive that determines our ability to think clearly about the human condition. The major studies in human behavioural genetics undertaken by people such as Robert Plomin and Judith Rich Harris indicate that early nurturing explains very little of the differences in adult personality.
Most of that variation — that is why my personality might be different to yours — is explained by heritable variation in addition to environmental influences outside the home that occur after infancy — that is amongst peers within the broader culture during childhood and adolescence. And what is his strategy in making his case — claiming in circular fashion that people who reject his thesis are in denial.
This is not how science works.
Griffith offers no data sets which can be used to replicate his findings. Upon this flawed foundation, for which not robust scientific data exists, Griffith constructs an entire system — in fact an entire model of how we are to construct a future civilisation.
Because he believes that our character is indelibly grafted into us during infancy and early childhood he makes the further point that our ability to think clearly and honestly is determined by the degree of nurturing we received in our infancy. He also claims that our world should be ordered according to the quality of nurturing we have received in infancy for it is our degree of nurturing that determines the nature of our adult character and therefore our ability to think soundly.
Consequently, it will only be those of us whose have a sound character as a result of early nurturing who will be free of insecurity and consequently able to develop a more truthful and honest understating of human nature and therefore help develop a new more psychologically healthy society. When you actually begin to seriously investigate what Griffith is arguing the unscientific nature of his thinking becomes apparent and consequently the entire edifice of his theory begins to crumble.
The most significant issue here is that there is very little evidence that differences between our individual characters are the result of nurturing in early infancy. Abuse and neglect outside the range of what is considered normal parenting can result in life long psychological problems that require significant therapeutic interventions.
However, most of the variation that we see in human character is not the result of the degree of early nurturing we have received. Differences between individuals, based on the data of behavioural genetics, seem to be attributable to environmental effects outside the home that is the broader culture and peer group combined with hereditary influences. The most robust evidence in support of this view has come from twin studies. These studies have shown that identical twins separated at birth and raised in different homes have quite similar characters.
Most significantly they are more similar to one another than they are to their respective siblings in the adoptive home. This should not occur if parenting style and nurturing in the home determine adult character. This research is based upon a whole battery of psychological measures such as susceptibility to depression, schizophrenia and psychoses, as well as character traits such as degrees of happiness, timidity, confidence, introversion and extraversion. The only way to explain this phenomenon is that similarity in character evident in identical twins is due to hereditary factors.
If nurturing did determine character, as Griffith claims, then identical twins separated at birth would show greater affinities to their siblings in their adoptive homes. The fact that they do not, and that they resemble one another more than their adoptive siblings, means that something else is involved in the formation of human character in addition to the influence of early nurturing.
Given that identical twins share the same DNA, the only way to explain their similar characters is by invoking hereditary factors. Once we realise that foundation stone is without any empirical support major aspects of his apparently liberating intellectual edifice begin to crumble. The essential point here is that no matter how you alter the early parental environmental important aspects of character will not be affected.
Given that much of the variation in human biology — which includes height, body shape and hair colour — are based on genetic differences, it stands to reason that aspects of brain function underpinning human character vary in human populations. If this were not so then humans would be an evolutionary anomaly — that is a species with a nervous system that lacks genetic diversity.
To assert such a position is anti-evolutionary. This is because for evolution or natural selection to operate there must be genetic diversity within the population. It is unlikely that the human brain is the sole exception to this universal fact of organic life on earth. Griffith takes no account of these studies but merely makes emotive assertions that his view is correct — with the caveat that anyone who does not accept his theory is being evasive of the truth.
This is kind of circular reasoning, presented in the absence of robust longitudinal data sets, is not how science works. Therefore until he can produce a longitudinal data set indicating correlations between parenting styles, the degree of nurturing we receive in early infancy and variation in adult character, his work can only be described as pseudo-science. If Griffith is incorrect on this issue then it seems he is misleading and deceiving his readers and those individuals who believe he has discovered the indubitable truth about human nature. It should be added that I do not believe Griffith is deceiving people intentionally — in fact I believe he is a decent man with honourable intentions.
However, honourable intentions do not necessarily produce robust, experimentally verifiable science. The main reason I believe his ideas are deceptive, misleading and potentially harmful is that people may actually attribute various character dispositions they have to the degree and quality of nurturing they received in early infancy. Not only is this a scientifically untenable view but it may also lead individuals to make inaccurate interpretations of their own character and the character of other individuals, that far from being therapeutically beneficial, may actually cause more problems than they solve.
If we wish to solve our psychological problems we need to know what their causes are. And attributing them to the wrong cause may result in years of pointless navel gazing and hashing over ones infancy and childhood — without any positive therapeutic outcome. Griffith claims that Left wing political analysis is oppressive, hindering liberty and the search for knowledge - and that the political Right is at the van guard of intellectual freedom and exploration, fulfilling our two million year search for knowledge.
He extolls the virtues of leaders such as John Howard and Margaret Thatcher and her belief in liberty and other forms of neo-conservative ideology that developed during the 80s and 90s. This is legitimate as an ideological preference and there is — or was prior to the Global Financial Crisis in — evidence that neoliberal free market ideology did deliver economic and social benefits as a result of opening up markets and reducing the power of unions.
Thatcher was a big fan of F. What this means is that neoliberalism is not about any concept of abstract freedom — it is explicitly a model of how societies should be organised economically in order to create healthy and stable populations.
In other words it was based on a moral assertion that neoliberalism is the best means of creating societies that are prosperous and that benefit all. This was based on the notion that increased profits will trickle down the social and economic hierarchy, raising the living standards of all and lifting people out of poverty. Since the crash this has been shown to be a fallacy — the waves of boom and bust resulting from the financialisation of markets eventually becoming a tsunami that has produced a global economic crisis, with the banks being bailed out, absolved of any responsibility and their mistakes foisted onto the general populace who are suffering under unjust and economically disastrous austerity measures.
In other words neoliberalism failed to deliver on its promises and is now considered a failed economic model that is responsible for the current state of social disintegration in Europe and America. At the moment those who are in denial of reality and who are supressing freedom and the search for knowledge are recalcitrant neoliberals who refuse to register the fact that their ideological preferences and economic models have failed to deliver on their promises. Real knowledge and insight is coming from people who are willing to abandon neoliberal dogma — which is currently eating away at the social fabric of our civilisation and the intellectual and political freedoms that should be at the heart of our democratic institutions.
Recent history has basically shown his thinking to be redundant. Who are the strong and resilient — and hence well nurtured — members of our community? Griffiths claims it is conservatives who have the strength of character to take up the fight against idealism and fulfil our destiny to find knowledge. And who are the poorly nurtured and psychologically exhausted in our community? Given Griffith seems to value Laing's thought so highly, and is someone who is constantly quoted as providing support for Griffith's thesis, the question then arises as to why they differ so dramatically in their assessment of Foucault?
It may be that Laing actually read Foucault and understood him whereas Griffith seems more intent on making him a scapegoat for society's ills and its unwillingness to confront the ideas articulated in his own work. Intellectually rigorous or death by dogma? I know who I would tend to side with. The final irony here is that Foucault actually provides a powerful argument in support of Griffith's main thesis - that is the cause of the current epidemic of mental illness and depression amongst human populations is not to be found in genetic factors but in the cultural, social and economic atmosphere within which humans have to struggle.
Foucault would argue that civilisation, not genetic factors, makes people ill. This work is actually one of the major advances in our understanding of the history of psychiatry and of Western cultural attitudes to the mentally ill. I do not see how it could be conceived of as a dogma leading to collective spiritual death as Griffith claims.
My concern is by promulgating such opinions Griffith seems to promote in his readers the sense that they understand these ideas and their supposed inherently malevolent nature. The problem is this kind of view is based on ignorance and misunderstanding of the very ideas Griffith dogmatically rejects. So what are we left with? A writer with conservative ideological sympathies and with a deep antipathy to postmodern thought and any critical analysis of the conservative world view.
And somehow conservatives have been all along at the vanguard of human knowledge, fulfilling the two million year struggle to find knowledge. This is not really a serious scientific hypothesis but an ideological preference dressed up as objective biology. Griffith is entitled to his preference — but it definitely does not make for good science. It warrants thoughtful — yet critical analysis. Given the current vexed state of humankind any contribution as to how we are to get out of the mess we are in as a species is welcome.
However, I do not believe he is offering robust and verifiable science. In this sense his work — and the grandiose claims of being the final word on the human condition — can be quite misleading particularly to those without a background in science. Hopefully this and my other reviews which deal with his anthropological writings which I have writen on Amazon will help readers develop a critical and informed attiude to his work.
This book will literally change the world. You must read this. I feel inspired to write something about this truly amazing book, but where to start!