From Chopra’s column in the execrable Huffington Post*:
I realized that I would much rather expound woo woo than the kind of bad science Shermer** stands behind. He has made skepticism his personal brand, more or less, sitting by the side of the road to denigrate “those people who believe in spirituality, ghosts, and so on,” as he says on a YouTube video. No matter that this broad brush would tar not just the Pope, Mahatma Gandhi, St. Teresa of Avila, Buddha, and countless scientists who happen to recognize a reality that transcends space and time. All are deemed irrational by the skeptical crowd. You would think that skeptics as a class have made significant contributions to science or the quality of life in their own right. Uh oh. No, they haven’t. Their principal job is to reinforce the great ideas of yesterday while suppressing the great ideas of tomorrow.
Chopra is a quack, a hack, and a giant turd floating in the punchbowl of human knowledge. Nearly every improvement in the human condition over the last few millenia has been due to the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the natural world. Supernatural thinking has given us nothing of value, and in many cases causes outright harm– it is at best useless, at worst dangerously insane.
We have reached the state where Shermer’s tired, out-of-date, utterly mediocre science is far in arrears of the best, most open scientific thinkers — actually, we reached that point 60 years ago when eminent physicists like Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger applied quantum theory to deep spiritual questions. The arrogance of skeptics is both high-handed and rusty. It is high-handed because they lump brilliant speculative thinkers into one black box known as woo woo.
In classic style, after shitting all over the science which has given us a world in which Chopra gets to live far longer than his ancestors and preach his shtick electronically to every corner of the globe, he then goes on to misrepresent the ideas of some of the greatest scientists of the last 100 years with a gall that would cause them to spit-take were they still around to hear it.
Speculative thinking is not believing whatever you want to believe. It has to start somewhere, and ultimately to be of value it has to lead somewhere. Speculating on something without having the slightest interest in discovering your idea might be a stupid one is a trap that everyone falls into at some point, but most people don’t label this character flaw as “brilliance”. Chopra wants to turn his intellectual laziness into a virtue; he doesn’t know the first thing about relativity or quantum theory but he will happily throw the words about if it makes his rather woolly and unoriginal ideas sound more cutting edge.
He just can’t accept that sometimes it’s better to just accept you don’t know something (eg “what is consciousness”) than to pointlessly hypothesize a transcendental quantum cosmic mind that makes a flower beautiful so that it might be appreciated by Deepak Chopra. What’s really sad is that he’s not just shit at science, he’s shit at speculation too.
Update: Speaking at the Indian Astrology Conference, Chopra said:
“Western science is still frozen in an obsolete, Newtonian worldview that is based literally on superstition – and we can call it the superstition of materialism – which says you and I are physical entities of the physical universe.”
Ah yes, tough crowd those Astrologers. And now, a quiz from way back:
1) Which of the following was most responsible for dragging western civilization out of the dark ages?
a) Astrology
b) Religion
c) Politics
d) Science
2) Which of the following is the most self-critical/self-correcting?
a) Astrology
b) Religion
c) Politics
d) Science
2a) Which of the following eagerly anticipates revolutionary reform?
a) Astrology
b) Religion
c) Politics
d) Science
3) Which of the following exploits people′s fears and insecurities the least?
a) Astrology
b) Religion
c) Politics
d) Science
__________
* The Huffington Post is a bothersome place that reinforces the rather frustrating link between liberalism and new-ageism. It stands as a great exemplar of the old aphorism: “Be open minded, but not so much so that your brain falls out”
** I personally find Michael Shermer to be a bit of a dick, but not because of his skepticism, rather his free-market libertarian politics. Skeptics and scientists alike would be well advised to try to keep their politics out of it when advocating critical thinking.