Craig vs. Hitchens

A few months ago I pointed to a site that has links to nearly all of William Lane Craig's debates, as well as upcoming debates. It looks like he's scheduled to debate Christopher Hitchens on 4 April in Los Angeles. I wish I could go.


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Before it's too late...

I am really worried. I am worried that Britain is failing – not economically (although that is a big problem right now) – but as a civilised polity.

Let me illustrate my concerns with three cases over just the last couple of days.

In the first case, a couple were wrongly accused of abusing one of their three children. The state took all their children away and they were adopted by strangers. However, when the mistake came to light, the children were not returned to their rightful parents. The Court of Appeal said adoptions are final and that was that. Any notions of justice or fairness can go to hell. No politician has picked up this appalling case and the press have gotten bored and moved on.

In the second case, a Dutch MP was barred from the country because a Muslim Labour peer threatened to kick up a fuss. Freedom of speech was trumped by, well, nothing very much. Worse, MPs of all parties acquiesced in this decision. Hardly anyone had the guts to stand up for a cherished and vital right.

In the third case, the Crown Prosecution Service has decided not to prosecute policemen whom a jury had already found lied about their involvement in the killing of Jean de Menezes. The jury, using a civil level of proof, decided after hearing weeks of evidence, that the police had systematically lied under oath to deflect the blame for de Menezes killing from themselves to their victim. The Crown Prosecution Service set aside that verdict rather than ensure that it was tested by a jury in a criminal trial. Again, no politician has ever attempted to support the efforts to hold de Menezes’ killers to account. No one has ever been disciplined or even blamed.

I could multiply cases of arrogant officials never admitting error, incompetent police assaulting the innocent and political correctness used to victimise.

Whose fault is this? Well, partly it’s mine. As a citizen I have failed to make enough fuss as our rights are eroded and justice denied to those who need it. And it’s your fault too.

The press must carry more blame than us peasants. They reported the above instances but then move on. The Daily Mail is often attacked (not least by me) but at least it features stories about ordinary people. The obsession with petty politics (did Gordon Brown order an Obama DVD? Who cares?) is demeaning when there are huge issues that should be given attention. Thank goodness for Camilla Cavendish who single-handedly forced open the family courts.

Judges have also been guilty of defending terrorists but ignoring the plight of ordinary people. They are rapidly bringing the law into disrepute.

Most of all, it is the fault of all our politicians, not just the odious opportunists like Chris Hulne or Keith Vaz, but also Conservatives too busy with their directorships to use the backbenches as a campaigning platform for justice.

I can’t see anything changing in a hurry, but we must stop imagining that simply electing a Conservative government can restore our liberties. On the evidence of this week, it won’t.



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The Anthropic Principle for Misanthropes, part 4

In this series I have left out a lot regarding the Anthropic Principle, because my focus is on its value as a teleological argument for the existence of God. So, for example, I have not gone over the several types of APs that have been proposed, i.e. the Weak (WAP), Strong (SAP), Participatory (PAP), and Final (FAP) -- the latter of which Martin Gardner cleverly called the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle (CRAP).

Some people think that any teleological argument is invalid in light of Darwin. Such arguments are automatically excluded from consideration, since they also apply to arguments against biological evolution. If some teleological arguments from a particular field are invalid, why doesn't that give us grounds for rejecting those from other fields? My answer is fairly simple: because the arguments against evolution don't work and the arguments from the AP do. It doesn't matter who is presenting the argument or what their motivation is: if it's valid, it's valid; and if it's invalid, it's invalid.

One thing that frustrated me about the AP when I first studied it, however, is that there seem to be examples of fine-tuning that don't serve any purpose. The example that particularly hit home with me was that our location with regards to the sun and the moon make it appear as if they just happen to be the same size in the sky. The AP shows that we have to have a moon a particular size and distance from us, and the earth has to be a particular distance from a particular kind of star during a particular burning phase; but it just seems weird to me that this results in the sun and moon appearing to be the same size in the sky. If someone rigged the game, it looks like they were rigging it to mislead us into thinking that they were the same size. Of course, the ancients were able to study the sun and the moon and determine that they're not even remotely close in terms of size. But it seems like a meaningless coincidence, and this made me suspicious that the examples of alleged fine-tuning that the AP demonstrates were similarly coincidental.

The resolution to this leads to a very interesting corollary to the AP. The surface of the earth is the only place in the solar system where an observer could see a total eclipse, in which one body blocks out the sun, but does so just barely, so that the sun's corona can be observed. For millennia, solar eclipses were one of the primary methods by which humankind could study the sun. Such study would only be possible if the sun and the moon appeared to be the same size in the sky. So the same characteristics that make life possible are also the characteristics that allow us to study and investigate the universe around us.

With the advent of the Mars Rovers, there has been a boon in the last several years on Mars studies. Below, on the left, is a series of pictures taken by one of the Rovers of Phobos, one of Mars' moons, crossing between Mars and the sun. The picture on the right is of Mars' other moon Deimos doing the same. Click here to see a very short video (a couple of seconds long) of it.



The point in showing these is that such "eclipses" (they're actually called transits or occultations) would not allow any observers to study the sun's corona.

Here's another example: the AP says that in order for life to be possible, the solar system must reside in a spiral galaxy, and lie in-between spiral arms. In the same way, we have to be between spiral arms in order to see anything beyond our own galaxy. In any other location in any other type of galaxy, the number of nearby stars and the light they produce would prevent us from seeing very far beyond them. So just as it looks like the universe and Earth have been arranged in order to support life, it looks like the universe and Earth have been arranged in order to allow for scientific discovery. Praise God.

(see also part 1, part 2, and part 3)

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


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Sex Selection

Last year I decided to pay a visit to Highgate cemetery in London and wandered around the ivy chocked gravestones in search of Karl Marx, Douglas Adams and Herbert Spencer. Karl Marx was easy to find. The poor chap chose a rather modest grave the first time around, but in the fullness of time, as his fame became ever greater, he was dug up by his admirers and given a rather grandiose monument adorned with an oversized bust. In 1970 some Vandals tried to blow it up with a fizzing cocktail of weed-killer and sugar, either as a form of protest or as an expression of artistic taste. Across from Marx’s arresting stare lies the grave of Herbert Spencer who developed Social Darwinism, an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies; he also coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’.

The novelist George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) is apparently buried a couple of rows behind Spencer. Unfortunately, cursed by a short attention span and frustrated after about ten minutes of scrabbling and tripping over weeds I was unable to find it. For Eliot, Herbert Spencer was one of a series of men on whom, well into her 30's, she was developing painful, messy crushes. She had a brief, intense emotional involvement with him, which ended in July of 1852 with his rejection of her affections

As their relationship had blossomed Herbert Spencer had described George Eliot as ‘ the most admirable woman, mentally, I have ever met’. He noted in his autobiography that the ‘greatness of her conjoined with her womanly qualities and manner, generally keep by her side most of the morning'. George Eliot for her part reciprocated in gushing terms, saying:

‘I suppose no woman ever before wrote such a letter as this –but I am not ashamed of it, for I am concious that in the light of reason and true refinement I am worthy of your respect and tenderness, whatever gross men or vulgar-minded women might think of me....If you become attracted to someone else, then I must die, but until then, I could gather courage to work and make life valuable, if only I had you near me. I do not ask you to sacrifice anything- I would be very good and cheerful and never annoy you. But I find it impossible to contemplate life under any other conditions’.

Some historians have argued that Darwinian evolution influenced Herbert Spencer to such a profound degree that it caused him to apply his own theories to his love life. He had rejected Eliot’s advances, reputedly because of his conviction that the natural function of a woman is to be beautiful, which Eliot was not. Spencer later wrote in reference to Eliot that ‘Physical beauty is a sine qua non with me as was once unhappily proved where the intellectual traints and the emotional traits were of the highest’. Rather Spencer believed that, ‘nature’s supreme aim is the welfare of prosperity’ and that ‘as far as prosperity is concerned, a cultivated intelligence based on a bad physique is of little worth, seeing that its descendants will die out in a generation or two’. In a subsequent essay, “Physical Training,” Spencer argued that “of the many elements uniting in various proportions to produce in a man’s breast that complex emotion which we call love, the strongest are those produced by the physical attractions; the weakest are those produced by intellectual attractions…". Having rigorously applied this principle till the end of his life he died a bachelor.

Of course if he had consulted Friedrich Nietzsche for advice he would have received some more sage guidance. The cynical German philosopher, not known for his relationship tips, once remarked that:

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.

George Eliot for her part went on to enter into a scandalous relationship with Spencer’s acquaintance, the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes. Perhaps with all that concentration on the ‘survival of the fittest’ Spencer had forgotten that evolution is about what is able to breed and pass its genes into the next generation. Take the wrong attitude and you may end up selecting yourself out of the gene-pool.


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Science and Islam on BBC4

Islamic science was the flavour of the month for January with a three part show on BBC4 called Science and Islam: A History presented by Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics at the University of Roehampton and an Iraqi émigré. In the same month, two new books have been released. The first, by Ehsan Masood, is based on the BBC series and the second is The House of Wisdom by Jonathan Lyons.

I have not had a chance to read either of the books but have caught up with the TV shows. Generally, I thought they were quite good. The production values were very high, as we expect from the BBC, and Jim Al-Khalili is an enthusiastic and engaging presenter. The factual content was fairly lowbrow but accurate as far as it went (apart from a few infelicities from Al-Khalili himself which I’ll mention below). Laypeople who don’t know much about Islamic science will learn plenty. I learnt something new myself – Arab scholars went a long way towards deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. They expected to discover the magical secrets of the Egyptians and abandoned the project when the writings in hieroglyphs turned out to quite mundane.

I would have liked to have seen a few more academic talking heads. The shows made plenty of use of Simon Schaffer from Cambridge, but we heard relatively little from George Saliba. Occasionally, Al-Khalili let his enthusiasm get the better of him. For instance, he kept telling us that Arabic philosophers were following the scientific method when it was obvious that they were doing nothing of the sort. And an expert on the show explained clearly that Avicenna’s canon of medicine ceased to have any influence in the nineteenth century when modern medicine took off. But, in his summary later, Al-Khalili said we had seen how Avicenna was still relevant today, contradicting his own expert. Finally, he seemed to blame the decline of Islamic science on western imperialism even though the decline happened centuries before Muslim countries were colonised in the nineteenth century.

There was also a very subtle mistake that few people will have noticed as it was never mentioned in the script. We see Al-Khalili playing around in an alchemist’s lab and some of the filler film shows a clearly-labelled bottle of nitric acid being used to dissolve gold. This is a neat party trick which caused a lot of excitement in the Middle Ages because Moses appears to dissolve the golden calf at Exodus 32:20 (except he doesn’t really. Alchemists were always looking for scriptural justification for what they were up to). The problem is that nitric acid was first isolated by Christian alchemists in the 13th century and not Muslim ones. For a long time, no one realised this because the Christians wrote up their discoveries under the name of Geber, a mythical Islamic alchemist of the eighth or ninth century. Quite a substantial Latin Geber Corpus survives but it records Christian alchemy. A separate body of Arabic alchemy is also attributed to the same mythical individual, but even that was written a couple of centuries after he supposedly lived. Thus the filler film showing nitric acid is not appropriate as part of a discussion of Islamic alchemy.

Overall, despite a few slips, I enjoyed Science and Islam. It is a good starting point for anyone interested in the subject.



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Boxed in

In the sixth century this theological reasoning was still further developed by Cosmas Indicopleustes. Finding a sanction for the old Egyptian theory of the universe in the ninth chapter of Hebrews, he insisted that the earth is a flat parallelogram and that from its outer edges rise immense walls supporting the firmament…This was accepted by the universal Church as a vast contribution to thought’

Andrew Dickinson White

Cosmas Indicopleustes was a self educated, widely travelled Greek merchant who lived during the 6th century A.D. Having converted to Christianity, he was persuaded by certain biblical passages - which he took a very strict literal interpretation of - that the earth was in fact a flat rectangle covered with a vault containing the stars and planets. His motivation for doing so was his hatred of the heresy of the "spherists" and the antipodists, and he evolved his theory of the universe from the design of the Tabernacle built by Moses in the wilderness. This, he pointed out, Moses himself had declared to be constructed upon the pattern of the visible world. He developed this theory in a book called 'Christian Topography' in which he employed a variety of arguments in support of his hypothesis. In his preface he writes:

'Let me next exhort my readers to examine the sketch of the universe and the stellar motions which we have prepared as a representation of the organic sphere of the pagans, and to study the account of it sent to the pious deacon Homologus, then they with God's help are quite competent, especially with this book and the volume mentioned, to overthrow from the foundation the error of the pagan theories. For if any Christian possesses these three works, and is by divine grace carefully exercised in the divine scriptures, he will easily confute the foolish views of the fable-mongers'

According to Cosmas, the base of the box is formed by the surface of the earth, around which flows the ocean; on the other side of the ocean lies another continent. From this rise walls that support the firmament above. This continent, according to Cosmas, is now altogether inaccessible to man, but used to be the seat of Paradise and the home of the human race up to the time of the great flood; at which point the Ark was swept with its few saved men across to the ‘other Earth’. The stars are then carried by the angels in a circle around the firmament, above which is a vault which separates the heaven from the world beneath.

'All the stars are created….to regulate the days and nights, the months and the years, and they move, not at all by the motion of the heaven itself, but by the action of certain divine Beings, or lampadophores. God made the angels for his service, and He has charged some of them with the motion of the air, others with that of the Sun, or the Moon, or the other stars, and others again with the collecting of clouds, and preparing the rain.'

To the north, the earth rises into a cone-shaped mountain behind which the sun hides during the night. The nights themselves get longer or shorter according to the position of the sun, either near the longer base of the mountain or its shorter summit.

Much of the books consists of a long rant against Cosmas’s critics and their insane belief in a spherical earth, despite their professions to be Christian believers. In book one Cosmas writes:

'Cease, O ye wiseacres! prating worthless nonsense, and learn at last though late to follow the divine oracles and not your own baseless fancies. For, tell us, how ye think that the fixed stars move in an opposite direction to the universe? Is such a motion theirs only or that of the sphere in which they are placed? Then, if it is theirs, how do they traverse unequal orbits in equal time? …But who can imagine a greater absurdity than this? Thus they do their best to prevent anyone surpassing them in their effrontery----or rather, let me say, in impiety, since they do not blush to affirm that there are people who live on the under surface of the earth. What then, should some one question them and say: Is the sun to no purpose carried under the earth? these absurd persons will, on the spur of the moment, without thinking, reply that the people of the Antipodes are there----men carrying their heads downwards, and rivers having a position opposite to the rivers here! thus taking in hand to turn every thing upside down rather than to follow the doctrines of the truth, in which there are no futile sophisms, but which are plain and easy and full of godliness, while they procure salvation for those who reverently consult them.’

In particular he points to the attractiveness, or divine simplicity of his new quadrangular theory because it involves a less complicated model for the earth and the kingdom of heaven. In contrast the spherical model involves a proliferation of heavens to deal with:

‘It is necessary for those who wish to be considered Christians to enquire into which of these eight or nine heavens Christ has ascended, and into which they themselves hope to ascend, and what is the use of the other seven or eight heavens. For having already delineated the world in accordance with the scriptural view, we assert that two places were created, one adapted to the present state of existence, and the other to that which is to come, since we have such a hope, one that is better than the life here. And you, if as Christians you hold such a hope, will of necessity be asked what is the use of the seven or eight other heavens….. But ye advance arguments altogether incredible, and will have it that there is a multitude of spheres, and that there is no final consummation of the world since ye are unable to tell what is the necessity of these things. And in like manner ye will have it that the waters above the spheres rotate----a most ridiculous idea and altogether idiotic, and ye advance arguments which are self-contradictory and opposed to the nature of things. How great is your knowledge! how great your wisdom! how great your intelligence! how great your inconsistency!’

At this point, having worked himself up into a rage Cosmas delivers what I consider to be one of the best retorts in the history of science:

Such then is our reply to your fictitious and false theories and to the conclusions of your reasonings which are capricious, self-contradictory, inconsistent, doomed to be utterly confounded, and to be whirled round and round even more than that unstable and revolving mythical sphere of yours.

Despite Cosmas’s passionate treatise he appears to have had no influence whatsoever; he does deserve an honourable mention however, because later polemicists used him to buttress the manifestly false claim that all (or most) medieval people believed in a flat earth. Cosmas is in fact, the only medieval European known to have defended a flat earth cosmology. It is safe to assume that all educated western Europeans (and all but one educated Byzantine), as well as sailors and travellers, believed in the earth's spherity. The myth of the pre-Columbian flat earth was invented by the essayist Washington Irving in the 1820s and propagated by the notoriously unreliable Dickinson White. Cosmas has proven to be an interesting and reliable guide to the state of the world at the time and his descriptions of his travels in particular have proved invaluable. He remains one of my great heroes, having had the courage to advance an unpopular and highly speculative theory in the teeth of his mocking detractors. He had the spirit of science, but not the education and learning to be able to pull it off. If he were alive today I’m sure he would graciously concede that his detractors were right; but only by accident.

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The Golden Grayling

I am pleased and honoured to announce that the winner of last month's 'Dawkinsia of the month' poll was contestant number two, Mr‘Lazy!’. In honour of this achievement I have decided to bestow the 'Golden Grayling' award for 'the most intellectually inept attack upon religion'. This elegant trophy features the wise sage, A.C Grayling, himself in a characteristic pose, awaiting in contemplation to sally forth once again in the 'war' against the irrational theists in the pages of the Manchester Guardian. Since this is awarded on a meritorious basis I shall not be distributing this monthly, it will only be awarded for outstandingly inane non-contributions to the debate.

Here again is the winner

Flagged up by Al, this member of the Dawkinsia deserves praise for his unyielding faith, both in his own staggering intelligence and the memetic ideas of Dawkins. Also worthy of mention are the use of short punchy sentences such as ‘Thats Sad’ to frame and emphasise the points being made. This goes together to create a devastating writing style which is reminiscent of the late A.J.P Taylor.

Charles Darwin gave us a truly brilliant theory of evolution. It explains beautifully how all the breathtaking life on Earth was developed from nothing. Before you criticise the theory of evolution be sure you really understand it! According to Richard Dawkins many don't understand. That's sad. The explanation of the whole universe and it's existence is perhaps not darwinistic. God is a very bad explanation, lazy. Religion tend to say it's ok not to try to understand things. That's why I hate religion so much. I am far too intelligent for that. I have NEVER believed in God, not even in my childhood. I have always understood how silly the idea of God is (in our age). We know too much to think God's existence makes sense. Yeah, I can't prove God doesn't exist. In my mind the probability of God's existence is a very small number, perhaps 0.00000000001 %. That is a damn good justification for being an atheist! Believing in God is silly. Intelligent people do it because 1) they were indoctrinated in childhood (outracious brainwashing!) and 2) Religion sadly has an insanely strong status in society. Religion is dangerous. Religion is a virus exploiting the malfunctions of brain. All people free of that virus should promote reason and hope for secular tomorrow.

Long live the secular utopia, its thousand year reign by Richard Dawkins, and the long awaited resurrection of tired rationalist arguments from the 18th and 19th centuries. Amen.


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The Sin of Onan

A commenter on my previous article has asked me whether masturbation was considered sinful in the Judeo-Christian tradition before the release of the 'Onania' tract in the 18th century and the mass public hysteria that followed. The answer is yes, but the issue received far less attention than is commonly thought. It was a peripheral issue in a wider moral dialogue about human sexuality and the rights and wrongs of non-procreative sex.

According to the seminal work on the subject, Thomas Laqueur’s’ Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation’, polemics against the practice are nearly impossible to find in the ancient Jewish tradition. This was because the sin of Onan, when read in its original context by the rabbis, was for his refusal to procreate in defiance of his creator. Some commentators, attempting to find a condemnation have pointed to the pronouncement by Rabbi Eliezer (Eliezer ben Hurcanus) that ‘anyone who holds his penis while he urinates is as though he brought the flood into the world’, which looks like a rebuke against the wastage of semen which might otherwise be used for purposes of procreation.

Once we move into medieval theology a clear concept of masturbation as a sin was identified, but it was not one of particularly intense interest. Theologians were more concerned with ‘perversions of sexuality as perversions of social life, not as withdrawal into asocial autarky’; these constituted sins such as incest, bestiality, fornication and adultery. The monastic focus was on sodomy rather than masturbation, although masturbation was sometimes condemned in some texts as a form of sodomy. When theologians commented on Onan, it was for what he refused to do. Thus Saint Augustine speaks of Onan as one who refuses to help those in need. This interpretation was necessary because Augustine was approaching the text from the viewpoint of the Christian tradition which rejected the strict rabbinic obligation to procreate and had adopted monastic chastity and an escape from the whole cycle of intercourse.

Masturbation was not permitted, but as part of a wider attempt to overcome sexuality, not just non-reproductive sexuality, so without any particular focus. There were exceptions such as the fifth century abbot John Cassian and Raymond of Penafort (pictured in the top right). Raymond warned married men against touching themselves but only because arousal would make them want to copulate more with their wives. A solitary early-fifteenth-century text of three pages entitled ‘On the Confession of Masturbation’, attributed to the chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean de Gerson, instructed priests on how to elicit confessions of this sin. This does not appear to have been circulated widely and it appears to assume the practice is widespread.

With the appearance of the Reformation the conception of masturbation did not change but it was used in different contexts. Protestants accused Catholics of creating monastic institutions which undermined and denigrated marriage and resulted in prolific masturbation. This was part of the broader argument that sexual pleasure in marriage, provided it was not conduced for sinful purposes, was an acceptable byproduct of the divine purpose of procreation. The masturbation resulting from enforced chastity was condemned for the wastage of seed and the refusal to procreate.

The most infamous example of ‘the unnatural practice’ from the 17th century is that of Samuel Pepys who jotted down in his diaries the times at which he engaged in it; usually documenting the act with the use of a special symbol. What is surprising to the modern eye is that these did not seem to him to be shameful or worthy of self-reproach; instead he seems to have felt triumphant. For example Peypes managed, while in a boat trip up the Thames to have ‘had it complete’ by the strength of his imagination alone. He goes on to descibe how just by thinking about a girl he had seen that day to pass a ‘trial of my strength of fancy.... So to my office and wrote letters’.At High Mass on Christmas Eve in 1666 the sight of the queen and her ladies led Peypes to masturbate in church. This does seem to have bothered him but only a little.

The release of Onania in the 18th century therefore marked a seismic shift in attitudes to masturbation; before this it was decried as sinful but received little attention. The change occurred because the practice was conceived in scientific terms as medically harmful; a thesis which was popular amongst both the intellectual elite and the general populace. Religiously based moral sanctions against non-procreative sex were thereby converted into a secular system that removed the divine and substituted "nature" as its justification. The formerly sinful Onanist was now re-conceptualised as the victim of a process of moral disease, one that created false pleasure and undermined reason. In many ways, it was a disease of the Enlightenment.

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The Unnatural Practice

‘But Onan, knowing that the seed would not count as his, let it go to waste whenever he joined with his brother's wife, so as not to provide offspring for his brother. What he did was displeasing to the Lord, and He took his life also.’

Genesis 38:6-10

‘When a boy injures his reproductive powers so that when a man his sexual secretion shall be of inferior quality, his offspring will show it in their physical, mental and moral natures, shaping the history and destiny of the nation.’

Dr. Sylvanus Stall

Before the early eighteenth century, neither the scientific community nor the church had paid very much attention to the private, yet presumably common practise of masturbation. This was to change dramatically in 1712 with the appearance of an anonymous tract entitled ‘Onania; or, the heinous sin of Self Polution, and all its frightful consequences, in both sexes considered, with spiritual and physical advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice’. The unnamed author was probably an English surgeon called John Martyn, who has been described by later historians as ‘a profit-seeking quack doctor cum pornographer’. Martyn, who had been prosecuted in 1708 for obscenity, linked the sin of ‘wilful self abuse’ to the sin of the biblical Onan who had decided, perhaps understandably, to spill his seed on the ground instead of impregnating his dead brother’s widow. Despite the dubious track record of the author, Onania was written with a strong tone of moral outrage. In the preface Martyn warns his reader that there are:

‘lascivious People of such corrupt Minds, that at no time excepted, they may be rais’d to impure Thoughts by bare Words without Coherence, and the Names of Parts, even when made use of in the Description of Calamitous Cases and Nauseous Diseases..therefore I say, I beg of the Reader to stop here, and not to proceed any further unless he has a Desire to be chast, or at least be apt to consider whether he ought to have it or no’

Having filtered the perverts out of his readership Martyn proceeds to denounce the practice of self defiling in these terms, even going so far as to give guidelines for its elimination in schools.

‘Self-Pollution is that unnatural Practice, by which Persons of either Sex may defile their own Bodies, without the Assistance of others, whilst yielding to filthy Imaginations, they endeavour to imitate and procure to themselves that Sensation, which God has ordered to attend the carnal Commerce of the two Sexes for the Continuance of our Species....Would all Masters of Schools have but a strict Eye over their Scholars, (amongst whom nothing is more common, than the Commission of this vile Sin, the Elder Boys teaching it the Younger) and give suitable Correction to the Offenders therein, and shame them before their School-fellows for it; I am perswaded it would deter them from the Practice, and by that means save them from Ruin’.

The tract then went on to outline the terrible medical consequences of Onanism; this aspect of the work was to have far reaching effects over the course of the next two centuries.

‘In some it has been the Cause of fainting Fits and Epilepsies; in others of Consumptions; and many young Men, who were strong and lusty before they gave themselves over to this Vice, have been worn out by it, and by its robbing the Body of its balmy and vital Moisture, without Cough or Spitting, dry and emaciated, sent to their Graves. In others again, whom it has not kill’d, it has produc’d nightly and excessive Seminal Emissions, a Weakness in the Penis, and Loss of Erection, as if they had been Castrated.’

Onania was to become tremendously successful and enjoy widespread popularity. In his one of his works on the history of sexuality Thomas Laqueur describes it as ‘one of the first books to be extensively advertised in the nascent country press’. The meteoric rise of masturbation ‘to prominence’ wrote Laqueur, ‘constitutes ones of the most spectacular episodes of intellectual upward mobility in literary annals’. In just fifty years, it rose up from an obscure provincial publication to become included in the Encyclopedie of the Philisophes; the enlightenments great compendium of learning.

One of the most important factors in this rise to fame was a book by the famous Swiss physician Samuel Auguste David Tissot, a man described in glowing terms as ‘the physician of the enlightenment’. This work was entitled ‘Onanism; or, a treatise upon the disorders produced by masturbation’, and it was to become a literary sensation throughout Europe. Tissot taught that one of the basic causes of illness and death was the wasting away of the body’s energy and that the most dangerous of the wastes was that brought on by masturbation. Having observed that the body became flushed during and after sexual intercourse, Tissot concluded that all sex was potentially dangerous because it caused the blood to rush to the head, starving the nerves and leaving the person vulnerable to the onset of insanity. Those that performed masturbation, and would therefore ejaculate excessively, would suffer a cloudiness of ideas, a decay of their bodily power, be afflicted with pains in their head and pimples on their face, eventually even losing the ‘power of generation’. Females who indulged would suffer hysterical fits, cramps, ulceration of the matrix and uterine tremors. One man, according to Tissot, was so addicted to self-abuse that his brain dried out and could be heard rattling in his head. Masturbation, he concluded, was more dangerous than smallpox.

Marten, Tissot, and the Encyclopaedists who embraced their ideas were to have a profound cultural impact. Their popularised writings were read and passed on by figures such as, Rousseau and Kant; they also filtered down into the populace and the professions. Over the years, the hysteria multiplied.

In the first American psychiatry textbook, Benjamin Rush claimed that masturbation would inflict upon its victim

“...impotence, ...dimness of sight, vertigo, epilepsy, ...loss of memory, ...fatuity and death.”

By the middle of the 1800s, it was standard to blame masturbation for a bewildering variety of symptoms. If masturbation were widespread in the population, disasters could occur. The brain would wilt, the sex organs would shrivel up and die. Insanity, syphilis, blindness, deafness, cancer, afflictions of the female reproductive organs, nosebleeds, heart murmurs, sterility, acne, undesirable odours of the skin, epilepsy, headaches, infantile paralysis, infantile rheumatism, pederasty, and homosexuality were only a few of the conditions thought to be the direct result of masturbation and the bodily traumas it produced. In publications and popular discourse, lack of cleanliness, nervousness, sitting cross-legged or for long periods, spanking, corsets, straining of the memory, erotic reading, play, pictures, perfumes, solitude, fondling, rocking chairs, pockets, feather beds, horseback riding, and bicycling were all considered to encourage the practice of ‘self pollution’. An illustration from The Silent Friend of 1853 showed a bleary-eyed, slack-jawed, imbecile with his tongue lolling and oozing with drool; this was the grim fate that met the persistent self polluter.

When this phenomenon was documented by later historians, some tended to stress the continuity with earlier patterns of thought in the classical, Jewish or Christian traditions. But this obscures the fact that what had emerged in the early 18th century was radically different and widely popular. The ‘Sin of Onan’s’ rise from obscure biblical passage to cultural phenomenon happened -perhaps could only have happened- because it was backed by the best minds of the age and the most fervent advocates of 'unshackling the chains of unreason'. They conceptualised masturbation in scientific and rational terms, as a vice of individuation, a threat to the enlightenment, a medically reckless pursuit which was in danger of ushering in a world of solipsism; a denial of moderation, real autonomy and reason. In doing so they created a monster which was to haunt the Victorian imagination.

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The Great American Moose

"In America, therefore, animated Nature is weaker, less active, and more circumscribed in the variety of her productions; for we perceive, from the enumeration of the American animals, that the numbers of species is not only fewer, but that, in general, all the animals are much smaller than those of the Old Continent. No American animal can be compared with the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the dromedary, the camelopard [giraffe], the buffalo, the lion, the tiger, &c."

George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

In the wake of the American Revolution the fledgling United States was eager to assert its national identity, and proclaim its capacity to create a new society which could be morally superior to those of Europe. Yet one man proved to be a fly in the ointment; Georges Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon (1707-88), the best selling scientific author of the eighteenth century. Work after work from Buffon’s pen claimed that the New World, upon which the new Republic was staking its territory, was fundamentally inferior; a land of weaklings, limp foliage and stunted animals. How could the American experiment in liberty flourish in such surroundings?. It was soon realised by Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson that Buffon would have to be refuted. If not the United States would fail to gain sorely needed financial assistance and credit in Europe. The very future of the young state was in jeopardy.

The thesis Buffon presented in the ‘Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière’ was that the New World, in which he had never set foot in his life, was an immature landscape. The continent had only recently been raised up from the depths and was substantially younger in geological terms than the Old World. Its flora and fauna, including its native peoples, were under-developed and greatly inferior. Its mountains were higher, its environments wilder and more inaccessible and its animals much smaller; including the European livestock which had been shipped over. According to Buffon only snakes and insects could survive in such a cursed land:

‘Even those which, from the kindly influence of another climate have acquired their complete form and expansion, shrink and diminish under a niggardly sky and an un-prolific land, thinly peopled with wandering savages, who, instead of using this territory as an master, had no property or empire; and having subjected neither the animals nor the elements, nor conquered the seas, nor directed the motions of the rivers, nor cultivated the earth, held only the first rank amongst animate beings and existed as creature of no consideration in nature, a kind of weak automatons, incapable of improving or fecunding her intentions.’

Later on, Buffon described the American Indians in these somewhat derogatory terms:

‘The American savage is feeble and has small organs of generation; he has neither hair nor beard, and no ardour whatsoever for his female.... he is also less sensitive, and yet more timid and cowardly; he has no vivacity, no activity of mind, the activity of his body is less an exercise, a voluntary motion, than a necessary action caused by want; relieve him of hunger and thirst and you deprive him of all the active principle of all his movements; he will rest stupidly upon his legs or lying down entire days.’

We might question Buffon’s objectivity when critiquing the genitalia of America’s native peoples. He was relying on purely anecdotal evidence and idle speculation. A principle motivation of the Comte was his vehement opposition to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's notion of the "noble savage" which argued that humans had lived in a state of primeval grace before becoming corrupted by the evils of civilisation. Another was undoubtedly his aristocratic snobbery towards the United States, a country with a somewhat too egalitarian outlook which irritated the French aristocracy. In time other writers such as the Abbe Raynal and Corneille de Pauw were to extend the ideas of Buffon, even going so far as to claim that Europeans emigrating to the United States were also becoming degenerate. Native American males, wrote de Pauw, were not only reproductively unimposing, but 'so lacking in virility that they had milk in their breasts'. In his Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes, the abbe Raynal wrote:

"One must be astonished that America has not yet produced one good poet, one able mathematician, on man of genius in a single art or a single science.

These European attitudes, and some of the more arrogant pronouncements of Buffon, incensed Thomas Jefferson who exclaimed that in two hundred years:

"in war we have produced a Washington . . . in physics we have produced a Franklin, than whom no one of the present age has made more important discoveries . . . [and] we have supposed Mr. Rittenhouse second to no astronomer living."

In 1781 Jefferson threw himself into writing his only book, ‘Notes on the State of Virginia’, in which he mounted a vigorous defence against Buffon’s accusations. As well as defending the American Indian by referring to eloquent speeches by native celebrities such as Chief Logan, he also addressed the claim that the animals of the Americas had been stunted. Here he pointed to the fact that the American black bear weighed in at an impressive 412 pounds compared to the European bear at 18. The American beaver, Jefferson wrote, trounced its European counterpart at 45 pounds to 18. He wasn’t above being a little economical with the truth, claiming a little unrealistically that the American cow weighed 2,500 pounds against the European version at 763.

Yet Jefferson lacked a decisive trump card. At one point he was excited to discover a fossil claw, which he incorrectly identified as belonging to an American lion that had been larger in size than any lion of the old world. Sadly, as it transpired, the claw had come from a sloth, a somewhat less inspiring creature. He also tried to use the Mastodon as an example to refute Buffon; not realising it was extinct.

In the end Jefferson was to build his argument around the moose, an animal, he claimed, that was so big a European reindeer could walk under it. When Jefferson moved to Paris he went so far as to write to his friend General John Sullivan, the governor of New Hampshire, asking for a large specimen to be sent over in order to add force to his arguments. Accordingly, in one of the most bizarre military operations in recorded history, 20 men were sent out into the northern woods to prove the strength of American quadrupeds. After two weeks of searching they were able to shoot a moose, but when inspected, it was found that the specimen lacked the imposing horns that Jefferson had asked for. General Sullivan therefore decided to attach a set of anthers from a stag which bestowed a greater sense of majesty to the corpse.

Having been decorated, the moose was shipped to France and delivered by Jefferson to Buffon’s associate "in hopes that Monsieur de Buffon will be able to have it stuffed, and placed on his legs in the King's Cabinet.". Sadly, Buffon was too sick at this point to view the by now rancid carcass, but by this time he had been sufficiently impressed to retract his thesis. Jefferson later told Daniel Webster that Buffon had "promised in his next volume, to set these things right . . . but he died directly afterwards."

The efforts of Benjamin Franklin had been no less important in persuading Buffon to change his mind, although the way he went about it was much different. At a dinner party in Paris when a great number of American guests and French dignitaries were assembled, Franklin asked his fellow countrymen to stand up. When the Frenchmen including the Abbe Raynal rose to their feet, it quickly became apparent that their American counterparts towered over them. Rather than revelling in this victory, Franklin graciously remarked that he wasn’t exactly the tallest of men.

Following a number of scientific discussions with Franklin, Buffon was to remark that:

"because we know from the celebrated Franklin, that in twenty-eight years the population of Philadelphia (without immigration) doubled . . . in a country where the Europeans multiply so promptly, where the life of the natives is longer than previously, it is not possible that humans degenerate."

Honour had been restored and the flora and fauna of the great American continent had been elevated to the high esteem it has remained in ever since; mainly thanks to the efforts of a few founding fathers and the far less appreciated moose.


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