On Monday evening I didn’t have much to and sat down to watch Grey’s Anatomy with my wife. I had watched it occasionally and didn’t think it was too bad apart from the miserable Meredith Grey that the film revolved around (Not sure whether she is like that or it’s just the role she plays?).
It was Episode 4.11 called “Lay Your Hands on Me”. Besides bits and pieces about god, this episode features a faith healing patient that can heal by aligning chakras. She was found standing near a patient in tachycardia with her hand above his heart. The doctors tell her to move away, they need to get in there and try and fix him. She tells them to wait and suddenly presto - his heart rate goes back to normal! She then cures a patient with a staph infection. Later in the show, I can’t remember exactly who the patient was, I think it was Bailey’s son who had been in surgery. Everyone is all sad etc. and to get all the help they can, they wheel in the healer and her band of loonies!
Anyway, what pisses me off about this is that a long running successful show endorses that kind of magical thinking! At least they got one doctor, Alex, that said that he thought it was crap. Maybe they should get House to spend some time in their hospital telling them how it is and maybe a dosage of 10cc of atheism!
I won’t even start on the bits of Desperate Housewives that I got glimpses of last week.
I wholeheartedly agree. Yes, music, film and TV often does perpetuate a lot of woo, but to me it’s just entertainment. If anyone ever told me that they believed in miracle healers because of an episode of Grey’s I’d feel sorry for them that their only source of education is a fantasy world.
When I listen to a song and I hear the word “soul” (which comes-up very frequently in music) I don’t immediately turn it off and mutter about the hogwash. It’s the same as listening to a song about Santa and his flying reindeer, we all know it’s fantasy and we don’t complain about it because we suspend our belief - or lack thereof.
Actually one of my favourite songs “Learning to Fly” by the Foo Fighters (“Foo Fighters” being a WWII term for UFOs seen while in battle) is a song about The Rapture. I still like the song, it is still on my playlist and I don’t think about the junk they spout in that song like “hook me up a new evolution, 'cause this one is a lie”, I choose to enjoy the song for the reason that I first started enjoying it. So I extend this acceptance of woo in music to all other forms of entertainment.
Wandapec, I know why it irks you to see this on Grey’s Anatomy. It’s because the characters have an air of authority and, at best, believing what they say is argument from authority, at worst it’s argument from the-inane-ramblings-of-a-team-of-script-writers-who-have-little-medical-knowledge-and-usually-defer-to-subject-experts-for-the-“tricky-bits”-when-they-want-to.
The trouble is, though, that few people are sufficiently savvy in the vagaries of science to maintain a proper distinction between entertainment and fact because entertainment has collectively contrived to blur the borders between the two. Sadly, this has happened with science’s tacit consent, specifically by it remaining largely silent. To illustrate: a constant diet of movies that explore plots in which, say, aliens mean nefariously to take over the world, if it is not offset in some degree by a rational appraisal, will, I think, sustain the woo-woo bugs of many credulous people, or perhaps infect others with same. In the given example, perhaps not so much the notion that aliens are uniformly evil, as that their existence and visits to Earth are facts. In other words, the viewer will acknowledge that the fiction is about fighting off an evil horde of nasty aliens, but the attending baggage and subtext of aliens’ existence and proximity might remain entirely unexamined, if not actually accepted as a factually-based backdrop to the main story.
What is also extremely damaging is that some famous names in the entertainment game vocally reject science wholesale as a valid way of knowing the world or addressing its troubles. Others publicly support all manner of nonsense that they also cart around in their entertainment vehicles. Tom Cruise, Madonna and Steven Spielberg spring readily to mind here. Such extreme (and usually self-styled) humanists are, of course, guilty of at least some hypocrisy, considering that they make extensive use of technology, the chief product of science, in the preparation of their particular mode of entertainment.