Crux: Comment made by Doctor Huffenbinder that homeopathy is common sense.
Background: An increasing awareness that I find it difficult to be in a room with a lot of people, and that sat in such an environment I become increasingly twitchy and eventually, after sitting silently for a period of time, explode in a rant.
An awareness too, that despite the variety of people at work, ranging from craftspeople and bikers (who would consider themselves to think in something like a common sense way), to ‘anthroposophists,’ an overwhelming number who may hold divergent beliefs on many of Rudolf Steiner’s writings, believe in homeopathy. This awareness being in some ways a recent development with e-mails circulating from one tutor who is some kind of pagan who has for years been writing a novel about a tree and has taken time off in the past to do so, but who otherwise dissents from many of the ideas and practices of the college which I cannot agree with myself, and who recently sent round an e-mail asking us to sign a petition about homepathy to the effect that it is a cheap and effective form of medicine. Another tough-talking guy who works down the woods and mocks everything from Dr Huffenbinder’s sermons (adopting his accent and sending up his alchemical-like statements) to Rudolf Steiner’s beliefs also one time seemed to nonetheless sign up to the simplistic argument that because orthodox medicine is corrupt, alternative medicine which has some form of traditional authority must therefore be superior.
Master Kidderminster [hair disshevelled from having long been pushing his hands through it and due to months of not having had it cut, staring into various corners of the room or to the floor ahead of him rather than looking anyone in the eye, and with emphatic gestures like an orchestral conductor]:
Common Sense!
Where are the bastions of common sense anyway? I mean, is it in the pubs? The hairdressers? In the bookies with a stake on the 8:45 in Pontefract? Maybe it resides among the grannies on their motability scooters chatting away with their superkings in the indoor market. I’ve never quite understood but I’ve always kind of got the sense that common sense has it that ‘no one had ADHD when I was a lad’ and that we should all pay less tax but have more and better public services. Common sense is what the tories use to justify locking up more of those kids who don’t have ADHD, or dyslexia, Asperger’s or other such neurodevelopmental disorders whilst pursuing policies which ensures that the money we do spend on tax goes to prisons rather than the kind of welfare that might help some of these lads. Common sense is not in short the ideal arbiter of all things and bears no relation whatever to dependable logic.
And anyway, even if it were based on sound logic, your assertion that homeopathy is therefore common sense is absurd. Here is a system which states not only that water has a memory but that it has a memory which is discerning, forgetting some things and remembering others. Homeopathy came about as a reaction to he orthodox medicine of the time and, specifically, to practices such as blood letting…