by Terrence J. Sandbek, Ph.D.

A link to Part II follows this article

Reprinted from the January-March, 2006 BASIS

Many Americans consider alternative medicine as a reasonable option for taking care of sickness, aches, pains and general discomfort. Reasons for its appeal are legion. Researching the best medical treatment for disease such as prostate cancer is time consuming and effortful. If discovered, what stage is it? What is the Gleason Score? Which treatment should I pursue? Should I choose surgery, radiation, brachytherapy or a combination of these?

Look how much easier it is to ingest saw palmetto. No agonizing decisions, no professional disagreements, no questions. Just take the natural medicine and all will be well. If it works, you can be a walking testimonial for the alternative medicine. If it does not work . . . oh, well. The traditional medicine probably would have gotten the same result.

Skeptics make noise about alternative medicine as pseudo-science. We assume that once it has been so named that will be the end of the story. Then alternative medicine supporters will fold up and go home. We even have powerful arguments to support our position that alternative medicine is merely a pseudo-

science. One of our assertions is based on the reasons that alternative medicine is supposed to work. The putative explanations by the supporters of alternative medicine violate and contradict all our knowledge from chemistry, physics, or biology. Though alternative medicine attempts to use scientific language and concepts, it has never put forth any legitimate scientific explanation for how these alternative approaches are supposed to work. As more research in alternative medicine is based on double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled outcome protocols, the failures are beginning to accumulate.

Some of the first research findings looked at the efficacy (or lack of it) of herbal supplements. In 2005, the New England Journal of Medicine published a test funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative medicine to see if echinacea could prevent or cure colds. The herb failed miserably. ConsumerLab.com recently tested five different echinacea products to see if they contained the expected amount and type of echinacea claimed. They also screened the products for microbial and lead contamination. All five products failed their tests.

St. John’s Wort has faired no better. Promoters of this herb insist that it is just effective as Prozac and other SSRIs in treating depression. According to findings published in an April 2002 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), St. John’s Wort proved no more effective in treating major depression of a moderate severity than a placebo. They also found that use of St. Johns Wart had serious side effects. A follow-up study in the September 17, 2002 issue of the same journal showed that St. John’s Wort affects the liver enzyme cytochrome P450 3A4 that is essential to metabolizing at least half of all prescription drugs. This event can speed up the breakdown process and short changing patients of their lifesaving medications such as those for treating cancer, pain, high cholesterol, blood pressure, cardiac arrhythmia, and even depression.

Ginkgo biloba is one of the top selling herbs with more than $150 million in sales each year. As with most alternative medicine treatments, its main claim to fame is its use for long history. When describing this plant, purveyors often mention that is it one of the world’s oldest living tree species. How this relates to medical efficacy is an illogical conclusion. Since Chinese have been using herbal medicine for more than four thousand years proves, it must work. The proof for even a mild benefit is weak. People base its efficacy more on folklore than solid scientific studies. The Mayo Clinic declares that no one has proven the safety and effectiveness of this herb. It may also have serious side effects. In August 2002, The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study that found that Ginkgo biloba does not enhance memory or improve cognitive function.

More than two million men in the United States use saw palmetto to treat benign prostatic hyperplasia. A recent double-blind study (Feb 2006) in the New England Journal of Medicine found that saw palmetto did not improve symptoms or objective measures of benign prostatic hyperplasia (ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00037154).

Advocates of alternative medicine become adamant in their defense of acupuncture as the shining star of alternative medicine. Poorly designed studies consistently show how great this procedure is. Nevertheless, The Journal of American Medical Association (May 4, 2005) reported a clever experiment. This randomized, controlled trial compared the effectiveness of acupuncture with something called sham acupuncture for treating migraine. The test included twelve sessions over an 8-week period. Everything about the sham acupuncture was the same as regular acupuncture except that researchers inserted the needles randomly. Since the needles were not used at the specified meridian points, sham acupuncture should have been less successful than the standard acupuncture. However, the two procedures showed no difference in outcomes. As one wag said, “This should greatly simplify the training of acupuncture specialists – just stick the damn needles anywhere.”

One cure touted by acupuncture devotees is that for subacute stroke rehabilitation. An article in the Archives of Internal Medicine [165:2026-2031, 2005] used a double-blind clinical trail of stroke patients and found that acupuncture was ineffective for stroke rehabilitation.

Less is more. At least what homeopathy specialists believe. Recent research put this myth to rest. The researchers compared 110 controlled clinical trials of homeopathic treatment with 110 “matched” trials of standard medical treatment. They found that any reported benefits of homeopathic treatment were likely to be placebo effects (rather than real treatment effects), whereas the reported benefits of standard treatment were likely to be due to the treatment.

In 1993 one of our great scientific institutions, CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes,” showed a report laced with gullibility about claims that people in Cuba had experienced cancer remission after shark cartilage treatment.

The National Cancer Institute later concluded the Cuban study’s results were “incomplete and unimpressive.” Soon, more responsible studies began to appear. The website, Canadian Quack Watch, lists about a dozen studies which show no evidence that adding powdered shark cartilage (Benefin®) to standard therapy is beneficial for cancer patients.

The medical journal Cancer (104(1), July 1, 2005) evaluated shark cartilage treatment in patients with advanced cancer and concluded that no useful effect on humans was demonstrated.

Popularity of Alternative medicine

At least three reasons exist why alternative medicine is so attractive to the general population: psychological unawareness, scientific illiteracy, and medical ignorance. Each of these strongly creates openings for advocates of alternative medicine to peddle their goods.

Ignorance of psychological research about the working of the mind keeps people from examining their perceptions and motives regarding their physical and emotional health. Many people deride psychological research if the conclusions violate their beliefs. This cognitive dissonance inhibits the ability to understand how tenuous our perceptions of the world are.

Polls continue to show that our society is scientifically illiterate: thirty-six percent of the public believes astrology is scientific; half the public thinks that early humans lived at the time of the dinosaurs; less than half of all Americans know that it takes a year for the Earth to orbit the sun; only one-third of all the people who use the Internet know what it actually is.

Related to scientific illiteracy is medical ignorance. Most people do not understand the difference between feeling better and being cured. Medical science is so complex and stratified that the layperson cannot hope to understand the complexities of the biology and its many offshoots. Yet, everyone wants answers and everyone wants to understand their predicament at some level. Since medicine is complicated and the general population easily understands alternative medicine, “let’s use alternative medicine since it works for me. After all, what’s the harm?”

Psychological Unawareness

Psychologist Steven Pinker calls this human defect “mental negligence.” This term describes people who can only maintain belief in ideas by using a variety of cognitive distortions. For example, some people believe in alternative medical practices because no one has proven that they are not effective. This appeal to ignorance (also called the Logical Fallacy of Irrelevance) occurs when people claim that alternative medicine is true because nobody has proven it false. Alternately, some people believe that using fluoride to prevent tooth decay is unacceptable because no good evidence exists that this is true. In other words, if someone cannot disprove a claim, then it must be true.

Biased thinking is another cognitive distortion used to support alternative medicine. Die-hard believers in alternative medicine refuse seriously to consider any information that runs contrary to their belief. They make a commitment to being more critical of opposing data than to supportive data. Using biased thinking is much easier than being open-minded. Open-mindedness is difficult and time-consuming. Rejecting appositional information is so much easier.

Psychologists continually find more cognitive distortions. Following is a sampling of other cognitive distortions used inadvertently by many believers in alternative medicine. If you are interested in more information about any of these, Professor Bob Carroll explains many of them in his book The Skeptic’s Dictionary and on his website, http://www.skepdic.com/.

• Behavioral Confirmation Illusion
• Belief Perseverance
• Begging the Question
• Confirmation Bias
• False Dilemma
• Forer Effect
• Fundamental Attribution Error
• Illusory Correlation
• Magical Thinking
• “Man Who” Statistic
• Personal Validation
• Pragmatic Fallacy
• Regressive Fallacy
• Selection Bias
• Straw Man Fallacy
• Transparency Illusion
• Wishful Thinking

Scientific Illiteracy

From the beginning of time, humans have had many ways to understand the world around them. We have relied on a variety of methods to understand our world and our lives. Human authority feels like a safe and credible way of understanding life’s mysteries. Divine revelation and sacred texts have the power to offer us knowledge beyond the limits of human reasoning. Personal experience has always seemed a reliable and trustworthy method for knowing the truth. This truth channel can rely on either emotional experience or rational thought or both. The experience of other people when related to us as testimonials can have high credibility if the source seems believable and authentic. Majority rule potentially gives human beings more certainty through the strength of numbers.

Human Authority

Human authority has, historically, been one of the most prominent ways of understanding. Wise men, priests, and scholars have always helped the average person to access the truths of life. We still use this method of knowing today in our use of books, talk radio, television, and the Internet. People who use these methods for propagating alternative medicine readily tout their advanced degrees or charm their recipients through personal charisma.

Supernatural Revelation

With the advent of writing, tribal elders compiled ancient wisdom and knowledge in their sacred texts. The leaders allowed only a specific tribe or culture to use these texts. These writings contained divine revelation from the gods belonging to a specific tribe. Since the gods were superhuman, they were to be feared and honored. Human understanding was no match for their superior knowledge and wisdom.

Personal Experience

Personal experience has always been a powerful motivator for belief. When an experience contradicts an authority or a sacred writing, individuals often rely on their personal experience. This choice can have strong repercussions from the community of believers. Developmental history, environmental conditioning, and emotional temperament strongly contribute to the sense of “self.” Out of this self comes a set of personal beliefs that are highly resistant to change. Alternative medicine thrives on the personal experiences of its clientele. “I never got any help for my back pain from traditional doctors. Since seeing my acupuncturist, I have been pain free for more than five years.”

Testimonials

Personal experience creates a ripple effect for spreading the word about alternative medicine. Anecdotes and testimonials often feel trustworthy, especially when they come from friends and acquaintances. Many success stories in the halls of alternative medicine are nothing more than urban legends passed on uncritically by a friend of a friend: “All my friends have gotten better because of their chiropractor.”

Majority Opinion

Democracy brought with it the belief that the majority made better decisions than individual kings, priests, and divine beings. In spite of known flaws (tyranny of the majority, thinking inside the box, etc.), recent research shows that groups of individuals can often make better decisions than the smartest person in the group.

Unfortunately, human error permeates these historical methods for understanding the world and ourselves. No sacred text or god can be the ultimate authority because they all disagree. Wise and intelligent people are also emotional people and get stuck in their own perceptions. This is why younger people advance human knowledge against the advice of their wiser elders. It is why ancient wisdom is so hard to refute. Personal experience always violates someone else’s personal experience. Postmodernists have thrown in the towel by saying that all personal experience is equally valid. Given enough time, majority opinion will often be wrong. Testimonials and anecdotes perpetuate flaws and distortions in our perceptions and beliefs.

More than four hundred years ago, humans devised a new method for understanding the universe. It is now called the scientific method. The scientific method is the human discovery that is the best at minimizing—not eliminating—human error. It cuts through the frailties of authority, revelation, personal experience, and majority opinion. It produces fewer errors in understanding than any other human endeavor.

Yet, despite its power and effectiveness, prejudice and fear slow the full acceptance of science by the human race. At one level, most people appreciate what science has given them: better health, a knowledge explosion, more efficient transportation, global communication. The list of scientific advances would continue for countless pages. In many ways humans misunderstand what science does.

Importance of the scientific protocol

We know that observers change what they are observing. The act of studying any event can change the event. For example, anthropologists know that when they study the members of a tribe, the members change their behavior. Subjects behind a one-way mirror change their behavior if they think they are being watched. Subjects in psychology studies alter their behavior based on what they think they know about what the experiment is trying to study. All researchers can unwittingly alter their observations of the experimental data. This is the reason for double-blind controls. As simple as this seems, many people think that talk about double-blind studies is a smoke screen for rejecting the obvious, that alternative medicine helps people. Alternative medicine proponents tend to make many procedural mistakes in their ambivalence toward science.

Scientific language does not make a science

Dressing up a belief system in the trappings of science by using scientistic language and jargon means nothing without evidence, experimental testing, and corroboration. Because science has such a powerful mystique in our society, those who wish to gain respectability but do not have evidence try to do an end run around the missing evidence by looking and sounding “scientific.” Much of science deals with many forms of energy, e.g., kinetic energy, gravitational energy, sound and heat energy, mass energy, and electromagnetic energy. Yet, alternative medicine, while decrying science as a legitimate source of knowledge, is always touting its ability to modify a person’s energy. Alternative medicine energy is always ill-defined and unmeasurable.

Bold statements don’t make claims true

Alternative medicine thrives on making powerful statements on its efficaciousness. Look at any alternative medicine website or read its literature and you will notice that no illness is beyond the curative powers of the alternative medicine method being offered. Concurrent with these bold statements is a dearth of supportive evidence.

Heresy does not equal correctness. Being laughed at and ridiculed does nothing to reinforce the claims for alternative medicine. People in the alternative medicine movement often quote Schopenhauer, “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self evident.” This quotation has become hackneyed. Though Schopenhauer was brilliant, his three stages of truth are merely speculation. Nevertheless, it is a haven of comfort for those who are ridiculed for supporting alternative medicine to say, “See, I must be right.”

Our society maintains the myth of the lone scientist working on discoveries that violate the doctrines of his own field of study. The fact is that many lone scientists have attempted breakthroughs and most of them have turned out to be wrong. Today, we do not remember who they were. For every Galileo opposed by the authorities (who, in his case, were not scientists) there are thousands of unknowns whose “truths” turn to intellectual dust. We still hear the trite

phrase, “They laughed at Galileo . . .” History tells us no one laughed at Galileo. His peers accepted his findings. Only those ruled by fear of new knowledge opposed him.

Burden of proof

Who has to prove what to whom? The rules of the game state that the person making the claim has the responsibility of proving his claim. Advocates of alternative medicine do not like this rule. They want the doubters and skeptics to prove them wrong. As Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine, points out, anyone outside science who has an alternative viewpoint must lobby for her opinion to be heard. She has to convince experts to support her findings so they eventually will convince the majority to support her claim over the one that they have always supported. Then when the outsider is an insider, the burden of proof then switches to another outsider who wants to challenge her newly accepted claim.

Many claims of current medical practice were unusual at the time of their discovery, i.e., circulation of the blood, the germ theory of disease. The medical community now supports these. Today, alternative medicine must prove why medicine is wrong about specific theories and why they are right. It is not up to the scientific medical community to defend medicine. This is a fait accompli.

Rumors do not equal reality

You can recognize a rumor with the opening sentences, “I read somewhere . . .” or “I heard from someone that . . . .” Eventually, rumor can metamorphose into an urban legend that then becomes someone’s reality. Although some rumors are true, most are not. The alternative medicine community is saturated with rumors. The Internet has made alternative medicine rumors exponentially available.

Unexplained is not inexplicable

It appears that many people enamored of alternative medicine thrive on the inexplicable. By not being able to explain how certain treatments work, the mechanism can become a true mystery. Solving or explaining the mystery is then acceptably speculative. Medicine has many unexplained mysteries, but its supporters do not explain the mysteries by invoking inscrutable forms of energy and ambiguous toxins. By offering an explanation for every medical mystery, alternative medicine practitioners, offer certitude to a world that is uncomfortable with ambiguity.

Failures are rationalized

Medicine values negative findings. Though these findings are desired and often not even published, these failures help medical science get closer to the truth. Honest scientists always admit their errors. The community of scientists keeps their colleagues in line. As we have seen recently, scientists may cheat but other scientists eventually catch them. Alternative medicine ignores or rationalizes failures. When a failure occurs—a treatment does not work—they have many ready and creative explanations for the failure. Medical clinicians will instantly drop a treatment when a new study shows that it is ineffective. None of the studies cited above regarding the failure of alternative medicine treatments has had any impact on the continued use on the treatment in question.

After-the-fact Reasoning

This type of thinking is rampant in the alternative medicine community. At its most basic level, it is a form of superstition. It relies on the assumption that correlation means causation. Medical science has always been wary of correlation studies and tends to view them as preliminary studies to those that are double-blind and randomized. Not so in alternative medicine. The statements, “Chiropractic treatments always make me feel better” and “I always feel better when I take my Ginkgo biloba” are accepted at face value. No alternative medicine practitioner questions whether something else might be contributing to the change in the patient.

Medical Ignorance

Fallible human storytellers tell anecdotes. Stories about how watching Marx brothers movies cured Aunt Mary’s cancer or by swallowing a liver extract from castrated chickens are meaningless. It never occurs to the alternative medicine community that the cancer might have gone into remission or might have been misdiagnosed.

It makes me feel better

People naturally assume that feeling better is the gold standard for a medical cure. This misperception is why physicians must emphasize to people that they must take all the antibiotics because the patient will always feel better before the drugs can eliminate the bacterial infection. Unfortunately, the alternative medicine community accepts the self report of “feeling better” as evidence that the alternative medicine procedure worked and is valid for everyone else. In the general population, alleviating pain and discomfort is confused with a cure.

Ignorance of disease

Many diseases run their course. They are also often cyclical in nature. Every oncologist understands the mystery of spontaneous remission. Sometimes physicians misdiagnose diseases which makes their disappearances seem unusual and strange.

The Placebo Effect

We are still trying to understand how the Placebo Effect works and why it works as well as it does. “Mind over matter” is too simple an explanation. The interaction of the brain with the rest of the body is vastly complex. We know that worry can generate stress and emotional distress. These in turn can make us susceptible to various ailments. This is why the control group is so important for evaluating treatment outcomes.

An individual whom acupuncture cures may be a person who has a misdiagnosed (or self diagnosed) ailment brought on by worry and stress. The sympathetic nervous system might be on overdrive. When the person lays down comfortably in a setting with candles, incense, soft music and a practitioner with a soothing voice, the parasympathetic system is bound to be activated. This switch in the central nervous system can have powerful restorative effects on many ailments. Unfortunately, the needles get the credit.

Human Connectivity and Hope

The most powerful force for accepting alternative medicine is the messages of its practitioners to speak directly to the emotional needs of the public. These practitioners advertise themselves as giving more than “medical” expertise. Not only do they claim a cure for every conceivable human ailment, they also speak to real human need. People with serious illnesses constantly try to cope with fear, uncertainty, and loss of hope. Hope, whether misplaced or fabricated, is still hope. Desperate people will cling to any type of hope rather than no hope. No wonder alternative medicine appeals to people when they use these types of marketing phrases:

• “Passion for excellence, compassion for people”
• “Compassion in Action”
• “Spirituality in Healthcare”
• “Suffering and compassion”

Although their medical procedures are controversial, the alternative medicine community reaches people at their deepest levels of need. They portray themselves as friendly, warm, courteous, compassionate, honest, and having integrity.

My point is that if scientific medicine is to win back patients, they, too, must become practitioners who make their patients feel good. This change does not require lowering standards of care. The difficulty is that the doctor-patient relationship can be extremely demanding. Many physicians find themselves overworked because our society does not have enough physicians to help all those who need medical attention. Consequently, too many people view physicians as human vending machines. These patients feel as if they are merely numbers in an appointment book; as interchangeable entities with all the other patients that need help.

Additionally, people are questioning the aura of medicine and the authority of the physician in contemporary society. Several generations ago, no one questioned the pronouncements of a physician. Now we have web sites and open medical libraries for people to find information often overlooked by their attending physician. Medicine has become so complex and specialized that it continually exposes the public to medical controversies, contradictions, and reversals. The popular media often proclaims new treatments and cures before they are ready for prime time. The drug companies go directly to the public with ads for medication for common medical conditions.

These conditions have helped patients develop strong expectations about the medical community. People often expect to be active participants in the decision-making process of their treatment. They expect the physician will listen to them and address their concerns. They expect not only competence, but friendliness, warmth, courtesy, compassion, honesty, and integrity.

Psychologists know that everyone who is suffering needs to tell their story to someone who is a good listener. Studies have shown that the largest percentage of the variance for effective psychotherapy is the relationship between therapist and client. This is also true with patients in a medical environment. People want to “like” the medical practitioner. This relationship is based on the personal connection established during the office visit. Interpersonal skills are vital for physicians who want to help people. A 1983 study found that patients usually leave a physician because of inadequate interpersonal treatment, not for technical incompetence.

This is why alternative medicine is an estimated $15 billion a year business. People will pay to be in a relationship that validates them. They want themselves to be the focus of attention, not their disease. This is why the term “holistic” is so appealing. For most people it means that the practitioner will interact with them as a person and not as another medical case.

Though alternative medicine has a miserable track record in curing disease, why haven’t people noticed this? It is because the message of hope and connection is so strong that they easily forgive the mistakes and failures. Traditional medicine offers high-tech, expensive medical cures; alternative medicine offers connection and healing. Traditional medicine offers uncertainty and probability; alternative medicine offers certainty and hope.

Scientific medicine has extended life expectancy, eliminated many health scourges, and generally advanced human health far beyond anyone’s imagination just one hundred years ago. It is now time for medicine to learn how to enhance their skills by learning to relate more skillfully with their patients. Without meaning to, many physicians inadvertently create emotional distance between themselves and their patients. Physicians can alienate patients by showing a lack of concern and interest in them. They exacerbate the problem by being unapproachable and impersonable.

The most important component of effective connection is effective communication. Meichenbaum and Turk have identified many behaviors that interfere with effective patient communication:

• Appearing busy, i.e., watching the clock
• Reading case notes while interviewing patients
• One-way communication — Never ask if patient understands
• Asking patients specific closed-ended questions
• Cutting off or interrupting patients’ talk
• Ignoring questions or saying you will get back to them but don’t
• Not allowing patients to tell their story in their own words
• Failure to take into account patient’s concerns and fears
• Treating the disease instead of the patient
• Omitting clear-cut explanations of diagnoses and causes of illness
• Ignoring opportunities to give feedback
• Failing to solicit feedback from patients
• Abruptly terminating sessions
• Providing little support

Obviously, the solution is for physicians to learn how to reframe their message of concern and caring. Physicians are not less committed to the well-being of their patients than practitioners of alternative medicine. Somehow, the message has gotten lost in the quest to provide the best medical care.

by Yves Barbero

Reprinted from the January-March, 2006 BASIS

Ideology is the corruption of reason and is morally akin to lying.
John L. Allen, Jr., author of Opus Dei (2005)

Many, many years ago, before the popular use of personal computers, I had occasion to hear Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) on one of the local public radio stations ranting on why we are continuously being deceived by government.

I remember that he said that in the Federalist Papers, it said that “government is the shadow of business.” That phrase stuck with me, and like many projects one puts in the back of his mind, I meant to look it up.

Comes my first PC, and the Internet, and I downloaded the Federalist Papers from Project Gutenberg. I used the old (DOS) Xtree Program to search the plain text and could find no reference to that phrase. I left it alone for a few years, figuring that maybe I didn’t have the whole text. When I returned to it, and looked for it on the substantial search engines of on-line university sites, I did not find that phrase or anything like it, despite attempting several boolean arguments. I was sufficiently convinced that it had to be an error to write Professor Chomsky a letter. He sent me an e-mail saying that I had mistaken the source he quoted. But I’m sure that wasn’t the case. True, I was driving and didn’t jot down the info at the time, but still, rather than own up to a mistake, he prefers to make people question their recollections.

I follow America’s political life and so I’m aware that ideology often obscures facts, and happily point this out when it comes to such right-wing icons as Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who, it has been pointed out, didn’t have students so much as disciples. Strauss is dead so it is up in the air what he meant to have his followers do. I am not all that sure that he would approve of all that has gone on in his name. But then, in my democratic naiveness, I like to think moral teachers have our best interests at heart even when they are dead wrong. Most of what I read about Strauss has been from third parties, and highly processed to fit nicely into a political (pro or con) point of view. I did attempt to read some of his original text but found it unfathomable. My only reason to read him today would be to understand his disciples. Maybe someday I’ll try again.

Comparing Chomsky to Strauss is not all that hard. Both write in an academic prose that eludes me despite my better than average intelligence. I am suspicious of such authors. The science popularizers, Jane Goodall (b. 1934) and Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) also wrote with academic terseness, in a style that didn’t much resemble their popular writing. With sufficient focus, unlike Chomsky or Strauss, I find myself able to understand it. The two Gs write with clarity.

But then, Gould and Goodall weren’t attempting a grand vision of society.

Chomsky, like Strauss, could also be said to have disciples. Here I am defining a disciple in the worst light imaginable, a person willing to subjugate his own personality to that of the leader, much like Rush Limbaugh’s (b. 1951) dittoheads, but with a better vocabulary. A cursory look at various websites oriented toward Chomsky’s world view shows that they are highly selective and like to frame their arguments in a certain way to fit their scheme of the moral universe.

I don’t know how Strauss presented himself to the world. Was he a good talker? Hard for me to say, but he must have had some success in front of an audience. I know Chomsky has great stage presence. His one true gift is the ability to present a spoken argument, any argument, in a light that is impossible to disagree with, except maybe on reflection. I’m being sarcastic about a guy who has a lot of political views I agree with. To be sure, I’m uncomfortable with his conspiratorial tone. It makes me suspicious. But a guy can have the right views for all the wrong reasons. Look at all those Christian conservatives who want to end sex trafficking in the Middle East. Whatever their motives, they are right.

It’s easy to compare the two messiahs on the level of style and approach. There are, of course, differences. Strauss was looking to build a leadership class, philosopher-kings, and willing to structure society artificially to preserve good order (in his light anyway). Chomsky appears to be an anarchist, trusting to keep things peaceful by moral suasion. Strauss’s vision leads to dictatorship. He may wish that his philosopher-kings sell sausage in pretty packaging thus hiding the truth of how they are made. This can only lead to contempt for the lowly folks who buy the nicely packaged meats. Chomsky seems to be modeling his sense of humanity on his followers. He will, of course, never convert anywhere near the numbers he needs to run things. This means he needs policemen with guns.

I’m not sure which world I dread more. I admit to a bias. I admire Martin Luther, who helped free us from the priestly intervention in our sense of self. It was the Reformation, of which he was a key leader, that began the roll away from authority. Even the Catholic Church had to clean up its act in the Counter-Reformation. Ultimately, it wasn’t suasion, but a series of wars that completed the Reformation’s reforms.

Then there is the enlightenment, which further formed the individual. The founders of the United States put this all into a practical form. Leo Strauss correctly surmises that the Founders never intended a political democracy that potentially includes all citizens. He thought that they had missed an opportunity by not having an official state religion, even if they themselves did not believe in it. Having seen the wars in Europe over religion, the Founders knew better, and took government out of the religion business.