Natural Foods vs. The Synthetic A Priori
North, Gary
"Natural Foods vs. The Synthetic A Priori" "liberalism" a man can spend three decades voting against practically every social domestic reform, beginning with civil rights and remain an...
...George Washington succumbed under such treatment in 1799...
...Cops In Your Goo Natural Foods vs...
...We need intellectual and professional guilds...
...They banded together to artificially restrict production, thus keeping up prices of the objects produced...
...They have sunk their lives into this interpretation of reality...
...Such remarks as these do not jive with the thinking of the author of this book who criticizes others for being coldhearted...
...What is really involved is something analogous to religious faith...
...They protect their own...
...They protected their own...
...What men should regard, as scientists, as merely an intellectual framework, they begin to accept as reality...
...If Agnew was such a louse during those years while County Executive and Governor, and it was obvious that he was an incompetent all along, why did Marsh spend years contributing to his political stardom...
...but no advance will be regarded as an advance if it is made outside channels or outside the prevailing framework of the guild's reigning hypotheses...
...While McGovern, McCarthy, Lindsay et al build castles in the sky, Jackson is building the kind of operation with the kind of forces around him that could very well bring him to the White House in 1972...
...Recently the ranks of the "'undecided" or "'independent" voters has greatly increased, not out of political conviction but more out of utter confusion...
...Anyone even remotely connected with diet therapy is grist for the Establishment's intellectual mill...
...No, the real reason is far deeper, and far more difficult_ to deal with...
...They required enormous courage, enormous dedication and enormous patience by the geniuses who accomplished the various feats...
...U, 150 E. 3...
...Halpern's bill is backed by 25 women's organize - tions representing [itty million women, and seventeen married governors...
...Marsh's no more serve the cause of thoughtful, objective scholarship than those books written by campaign aides to ballyhoo the assets of their candidates...
...grant a monopoly to any one, and the arrogance of power will combine with the inescapable narrowness of scientific vision -- a narrowness that is the concomitant of specialization -- to create a kind of thought control...
...16 The Alternative January, 1972 munications, and members of the favored guiM will be tempted to impose some form of enforced orthodoxy that will stifle the broad advance in all fronts that is necessary for the flourishing of a free society...
...Rushdoony's The Mythology of Science (Craig Press, 1967...
...More than this: in the 1940s be found that this same diet could produce significant results in terminal cancer patients -- the only kind he ever got to see, as it turned out...
...doctors can relieve pain, even when the root causes remain...
...We pay a price for the assurance that our doctor is not a quack...
...But no guild has all the answers...
...He distinguishes revolutionary science from what he calls "'normal science...
...Therefore, there is much peevish criticism of Agnew here that looks too much like what would be expected from a disgruntled political opportunist whose own star fell when Agnew's was rising...
...Much more must be done to understand the Agnew phenomenon in American politics, and it must be done by authors less prejudiced by their personal experiences and failures...
...During the election, Marsh assured me, and others as well I suppose, that he was "more conservative" than Beall...
...A gnew The Unexamined Man: A Political Profile by Robert Marsh M. Evans and Company, Inc., $5.95 T here can be no doubt but that this book was intended for a specific constituency...
...Marsh's study of Agnew's rise to power cannot be considered in any way a convincing examination of Agnew the man...
...From smallpox inoculation to Pasteur, medical experts dragged their feet and used every possible way to ridicule the opposition...
...Second, doctors possess one of the most important weapons available to any guild in the country: the AMA is granted the right to license doctors, a right granted to the AMA by state legislatures...
...There is also hope in some aspects of the "'ecological revolution...
...Medical scientists will welcome advances that are made in terms of the prevailing presuppositions of established medical science...
...They policed their ranks, keeping trade honest...
...In 1962 Thomas Kuhn, a professional physicist and historian of science, produced one of the most important books of the decade, "'The Structure of SCientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press...
...The case of Dr...
...Each has hi~ weaknesses...
...The story of his persecution-is described by the journalist, S.J...
...It has hit the academic world like a bombshell, or better yet, like a ticking time bomb that is about to go off at any moment...
...And all inquiring outsiders were warned that he was suspended and that he never bothered to publish his findings...
...it was more profitable to look for a cure than to find one...
...Ivy's ease is better known: his publicity was better and his position in the academic world of medicine impeccable...
...Also, there are fraudulent ideas aplenty in the health food field...
...Whether you know it or not, you are a part of this field of investigation, for there are few other areas of life that are so thoroughly organized for resistance to new ideas as the medical profession...
...The more scientific a man is, the more narrow his outlook, at least in so far as his work is concerned...
...But men should be aware of this when they begin to study and when they make their pronouncements on what is or is not possible...
...Men build their lives in terms of some outlook toward the world...
...grant one monopolistic power over schools and public com"CONG...
...research based on one's faith in an intuition is the very foundation of an advancing science...
...In history we have them all the time...
...Why did it take so long for Marsh to see the obvious evidence of Agnew's faults...
...Normal science is that conducted by the overwhelming majority of scientists and social thinkers: the careful, painstaking research done along established lines and making only minor contributions to an already accepted body of opinion...
...And if the time is ripe, either can produce a scientific or intellectual revolution...
...One is a maverick...
...Long John features six-hour marathon talks with intelligent, fascinating mavericks, some of whom may well be cranks, all of whom are interesting...
...Gerson only discussed some of his most phenomenal cases...
...It is the hypocrisy of those who claim to speak for "'respectable" medical research that is so galling - - the hypocrisy, the arrogance and the sheer monopolistic power...
...I somehow doubt it...
...Any premature announcement that might call attention to their The A l t e r n a t i v e J a n u a r y , 1972 15 inefficiency in explorh~g some medical avenue will be met with unrelenting hostility, a hostility that grows as the defender adds more convincing proof of his case...
...Doctors stopped bleeding as a cure less than two centuries ago...
...You can expect trouble...
...It is fitting that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring appeared in that same year...
...Without it, there is neither scientific breakthrough nor 'normal" science...
...It is a true monopoly of supply and groups like the Kaiser clinics have fought long and hard against it...
...Haught tried to explain the opposition to Dr...
...Any number of things, but most important is the fact that the questions being asked by the "'guild," the procedures used to investigate the narrow questions and the results produced by the techniques of investigation no longer conform "to the reality of the world...
...The story can be found in a book by the distinguished social scientists, Dr...
...Schools, institutes, professional associations and other well financed and staffed structures generally conduct normal science...
...Chances are it will pass, unless it is, For a free copy of headed off by a I NATIONAL RE$3 bill, proposed ~ VIEW, write: Dept...
...Analogously, we don't want quack architects building our bridges...
...The same argument could be used against policemen: they need criminals to keep their jobs...
...Marsh's showing on election day in September 1968 was microscopic...
...Marsh's own political career, it is important to point out, was at one time tied closely to that of Agnew's...
...Consider the record of Senator Fulbright...
...What is necessary for continual innovation is a commitment on the part of the various levels of government to avoid the outright subsidies that are presently being provided to certain self-appointed experts who claim to represent all those qualified to speak on a particular subject...
...Kuhn did in his book was to trace the history of major scientific breakthroughs in the last 350 years, and he described them as just that, breakthroughs...
...Those people who thrive on Nixon Agonistes will gobble up this addition to the anti-Administration literature...
...While Jackson will probably not be able to boast the kind of "kiddie-crops" that Eugene McCarthy had the last time around, a number of very sober and articulate young people are gathering around his effort...
...Many Democrats who have sat out politics during the past few years are backlashing with a progressive alternative to anti-anti-Communist "'liberalism", pro segregationist • 'liberalism", anti-labor "liberalism", anti-semitic "'liberalism" and a 'liberalism" which has developed an identification with the deterioratic...
...The crisis in health care, which in large part is due to the government's own policies, is bringing the AMA monopoly into disrepute...
...Guilds are necessary, but they must be kept competitive...
...Review The Legacy Of A Superfluous Man Wick Allison o n ; afternoon not long o I was sitting in the living room of a spacious old apartment near the Ala Wai Canal in the Waikiki section of Honolulu...
...They create a framework of reference that makes scientific communication possible...
...He attributed this lack of resistance to the failure of the liver to produce the means of defense...
...NALPERN has introduced legislation to resurrect the $2 bill...
...the other is an invader...
...His primary opponent in that contest was J. Glenn Beall, Jr., now the junior Senator from Maryland...
...There is no guild.which can boast that it has had no Galileo...
...He came in last in a long list of candidates who were vying for the Congressional seat...
...Anyone who doubts it ought to read Ralph Lapp's The New Priesthood: The Scientific Elite and the Uses of Power ~Harper & Row, 1965), or R.J...
...As for Marsh's observation that Agnew is an insensitive man incapable of empathy for others, especially the poor and disadvantaged, Marsh once remarked solemnly to me that voters were "cattle to be herded" by the successful candidate...
...Young men, some of whom may become doctors, will see and are seeing the effects of pesticides on our food and bodies...
...and that dietary cures are the products of the diseased imaginations of health faddists and medical quacks...
...In short, we are not all geniuses, even those of us (I am tempted to say especially those of us) with a string of academic degrees after our names...
...No one enjoys being labeled a quack - - not even quacks...
...Even a man well inside the guild must go about his business quietly, giving his fellow doctors the opportunity to accept or reject his findings at their own speed...
...He had to be content with the undying affection of his patients, one of whom was Mrs...
...One thing is the fear of today's men of pain...
...He blamed his methods, his choice of substances...
...Max Gerson and Dr..~mdrew C. Ivy...
...r Amerma as a world power...
...Paradigm" is simply another word for "climate of opinion" or operating methodology of normal science...
...No man can know everything...
...Then who makes the big breakthrough...
...They need confidence in their theories, even in the face of recalcitrant facts that do not seem to fit those theories at first...
...As we reflect further on the fact that as an aide Marsh helped lift Agnew to power, we become more skeptical of Marsh's seriousness in this book...
...Anyone who believes he has discovered some truth that might benefit his fellow men runs the risk of experiencing the traditional role of the prophet: he is unrecognized in his own land...
...Max Gerson a True Cancer Cure...
...Kuhn thinks that generally two types of researchers do: the man on the fringe 6f an academic "guild" and the man outside it altogether...
...That he knew, with the intuition of a great scientist, was correct...
...Kuhn then offers a hypothesis concerning the progress of science...
...Indeed, his opposition to gun control legislation (which ~vould have been popular in rural western Maryland), his support of Nixon's candidacy and positions on foreign and domestic issues were all designed to gain support from conservative voters in western Maryland...
...Ultimately, men need faith to function...
...London Books, 1962...
...It had large windows, turn-ofthe-century-style, which filled the room with light and admitted the breeze of island trade winds...
...They were, universally, met with hysterical resistance from the organized intellectual guilds...
...I hope things are better today...
...Why the outcry...
...What, then, makes the time 'ripe...
...He never got his recognition from the guild...
...it is loosely named "'the sociology of knowledge...
...Perhaps in the 1980s men will abandon their hopes in chemical salvation, whether establishment (DDT) or revolutionary (LSD...
...It meant that some potential producers were kept out of the market...
...Schweitzer referred to him as ' a medical genius who has walked among us...
...Haught, in Has Dr...
...For those with a strong stomach, I recommend his article, • "Price Discrimination in Medicine," in The Journal of Law and Edonomics (October 1958...
...Durovic and Ivy had concluded...
...He was hounded into recanting his belief, but the revolution - - both intellectual and astronomical - - was accomplished...
...by Gay Lib...
...And then one bright soul produces a new paradigm...
...Gerson had comn~'itted another sin...
...Is Marsh a slow learner or has he some special reason for fault-finding now...
...Change, however, is in the wind...
...Both are "'unrespeetable...
...Gerson made the mistake of appearing on Long John Nebel's all night radio show in New York...
...And that, whether we like it or not, is what lawyers do today, and labor union members do, and professors with academic degrees do, and civil service people do, and above all what the American Medical Association does...
...The production of food on exhausted soils through the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, coupled with overprocessing of the food so produced: here was an answer to earn him the wrath of organized medicine...
...That has been the weakness of organized medicine for the whole of its history...
...Street, J N. Y. 10016...
...There are charlatans in . . . . / medmlne, or pseudo-medmme...
...Marsh's tergiversations in a period of only two years cannot be understood unless Marsh is a "'political eunuch," or a man without enduring political convictions - - his accusations against Agnew...
...There were some beneficial aspects of the guilds, however: they tried to keep the quality of their production at a reasonably high level !not too high, since that might give one member of the guild a sales advantage...
...He argued until the day he died (at age 77) that the chief cause of cancer is a defect in the body's ability to resist cancer growth, precisely what Drs...
...Now every where in the ,South the talk is of money, how to get it and how to make it grow...
...It deserves a full-length study...
...But to do this a true revolution will be necessary - - a scientific revolution in agriculture coupled with a spiritual revolution among the young...
...What the capsule vita neglects to mention is the fact that Marsh became a Republican candidate in the primary for the Maryland Sixth District Congressional seat...
...The Synthetic A Priori Gary North A nyone who has devoted even a few years of his life to an investigation of the improvements in personal well-being that are possible through a conscientious program of nutrition inevitably confronts a stone wall of opposition to his findings...
...This must be one of the most frustrating of life's experiences to professional investigators in the field, but it is more than a little annoying for those of us who have profited personally as laymen from dietary supplements and selective purchasing of food...
...For such an answer is in open violation of one of the most cherished foundations of contemporary medicine, namely, that "'a carrot is a carrot, no matter what soil it's grown in...
...In short, that diet is only a small part of treatment...
...Such books as Mr...
...However, Marsh the author takes a different position...
...Most of all, they protected their own...
...Gerson is less well known...
...Albert Schweitzer, whose incurable lung tuberculosis was cured...
...In the 1920s, this young German doctor discovered that the incurable disease of skin tuberculosis -- lupus - - could be cured rapidly through the use of a saltless, high potassium diet that emphasized the consumption of larger quantities of fresh, raw juices (if the juices were pressed rather than produced through a centrifugal juicer...
...But the medical profession can lay claim to having had more unsuccessful attempts, at intellectual suppression than any other guild...
...A whole field is organized around this very problem...
...The astronomers' latest candid'ate is Immanuel Velikovsky, whose books were suppressed by the guild (yes, I'm afraid some of the leaders taught at Harvard...
...Willie Morris, the...
...that treatment should be aimed at removing specific symptoms...
...The perplexing problem of "'liberal' or "conservative" as accurate political labels in this period of political topsy-turvy, is reflected in recent-polls...
...It is just that the AMA has more than a finger to point: it has power...
...Possibly, but this misses the point...
...And the cause of this failure...
...As Baily writes of Durovic's early experiments: "'Most of the time he failed to extract anything...
...he blamed everything except his theory...
...The dust jacket tells us that Marsh left Agnew's state administration in 1968 to become a public affairs consultant...
...Because even then (in 1928, when he announced his cure for lupus...
...If it does not occur, we will see our future polluted...
...we ~grant his guild a monopoly...
...That is what non-guild mavericks are forced to resort to...
...The South is my home and I love it, but I left il with an uneasy feeling...
...What Dr...
...Inevitably, tins demands the formations of guilds of likeo minded thinkers...
...The treatment is described in his book, A Cancer Therapy (Dura Books, 1958), a small publisher which was well off the beaten path as far as prestige publishing firms are concerned...
...He asks new questions, he looks at the universe in a new way -- equally narrow, equally limited, you understand, for that is the way of all science -- and the entire frame of reference shifts...
...They do serve useful purposes...
...If the government decides to ,solve the crisis by breakin~ the AMA's licensing monopoly instead of building a newer, socialist medical guild, there is hope...
...What is true for medicine is true for all branches of science...
...Some licensing is necessary, but care must be taken to avoid giving monopolistic grants to any one branch of a discipline...
...What gives the AMA such overwhelming power...
...What I intend to explore here is the phenomenon of resistance from established intellectual or professional organizations (to new ideas...
...Shortly thereafter he was suspended by his medical association...
...In this biographical study of Agnew's political career, Marsh portrays the Vice President as a convictionless politician, an authoritarian personality, a thin-skinned man with a "hyper-reactive ego defense mechanism which was and is always maintained in hair trigger readiness," and if not unintelligent a t least a political incompetent who rose to power in spite of his faults (his upward mobility, writes Marsh, was the ' P e t e r Principle in reverse...
...No man can point the finger solely at his enemy...
...The apartment had been built in a time when the demand for rental space had not transformed every inch of ground into stacks of cubicles designed to be inhabited only by moles and modern men...
...The author of this book takes the stance of an extreme civil libertarian and finds reason to side with New Left students and black militants...
...Keep your eye on Scoop Jackson...
...If they fail to grasp the nature of the commitment based on faith that is necessarily involved in all scientific endeavor, they will fall into a very unscientific hypocrisy...
...consequently, we need an intellectual divisio_n of labor...
...The economists had a man named Gossen back in the 1850s whose views broke though a few decades later...
...Why should we refer to an academic establishmeat as a guild...
...It will be the first Federal Reserve Note to be graced with the portrait o t a woman: Susan B. Anthony...
...14 The Alternative January, 1972 tion of "liberalism" a man can spend three decades voting against practically every social domestic reform, beginning with civil rights and remain an impeccable "liberal...
...If only economics were involved, a few pay-offs would do the trick...
...W. Wesley McDonald W. Wesley McDo~mld is a graduate student at the State University ol New York and Editor-in-Chief oJ rh~ ~Aii(l(~rher...
...But Gerson went beyond this...
...Furthermore, he chides Agnew for not being more "progressive" while he was County Executive of Baltimore County and Governor of Maryland...
...His articles defending his position were rejected by the medical journals (which had previously published his material...
...At the close of this book, the reader still feels that Agnew is an unexamined man...
...After that, Marsh ceased to be in his public consultant's office for callers - - especially if those callers where calling to collect his campaign debts...
...Well, you can't find his articles in reputable journals any more...
...Not so the American Medical Association...
...Without this kind of faith, life is impossible...
...Nevertheless, certain facts must be borne in mind...
...For decades it lay dormanl, a neglected and still genteel cousin to the barbarian North, harboring its own customs and conventions and dark, whispered secrets...
...The economic effects of this unique monopoly were described over a decade ago by Prof...
...Challenge the paradigm of an intellectual guild, and you challenge the life work of all those involved...
...In the last analysis, the answer is not to abandon guilds altogether, as some of our more enthusiastic nihilists are demanding...
...They are unlikely to change, especially if they have made measurable gains -financial, professional, intellectual and people sent out of the hospital-- in terms of it...
...they are usually called revisionists, since they want to revise some accepted historical explanation...
...her ideas exploded in the environmental revolution of 1969...
...Gerson in terms of the economic benefits to those involved in cancer research...
...Reuben Kessel of the University of Chicago's department of economics...
...This kind of architecturally planned expansiveness has largely disappeared, and 1 was not only pleased that the structure had defied the promoters and lheir bulldozers for so long, but struck by an uncertain nostalgia for the world il represented...
...He died in 1959...
...Krebiozen, the promising drug used in the treatment of cancer, proved his downfall...
...Precisely...
...I had felt the same nostalgia before, for I had recently arrived in the Islands afler spending several dreary months in Texas, Lousiana and Georgia, courtesy of Ihe United States Army...
...Anyone who wants a look at how the medical establishment can turn on one of its own members should look at Herbert Baily's book, A Matter of Life and Death (McFadden, 1964...
...While it is the etablishment doctor's weakness to ignore fruitful avenues of treatment in nutrition, it is the weakness of the layman nuiritionist to become a faddist...
...They can kill through false cures...
...When I see what has happened to Krebiozen and the Gerson diet, I doubt it...
...The medieval guild was an organization of craftsmen or scholars, teachers or preachers, but generally men connected with the sale of some service or product...
...Two of the most prominent recent victims of the medical guild are the late Dr...
...Guilds must impose some sort of discipline on their members...
...Marsh's point of view, his assertions, his conclusions are all too jaundiced to be taken without great skepticism...
...To understand why this book and its point of view must be approached skeptically, it is necessary to look at the unexamined Marsh...
...Durovic needed such a personal commitment in his search for a cancer treatment, even as his AMA counterparts need theirs to deny Krebiozen's effectiveness...
...The classic example, of course, is Galileo's hypothesis that the earth revolves about the sun, and not vice versa...
...Alfred de Grazia, The Velikovsky Affair (Universily Books, 1966...
...The proot...
...Some new problem, regarded by the younger men especially as tl~e crucial issue, does not lend itself to the prevailing 'paradigm" o f science, as Kuhn calls it...
Vol. 5 • January 1972 • No. 4
