The rather artfully framed picture of a man with “inside” knowledge being smeared as an “outsider” by homeopaths contains so many exact parallels with how “top” skeptics have behaved in other areas of enquiry, that Andy Lewis’ promotional tweet actually describes exactly what he has done himself. Delicious irony:
For all the endless homeopathic gibes about truth working better if it’s more diluted, skeptics just don’t seem to see how unfussy corruption can be, or the titanium irony of standing on a “grown-up” platform of being evidence-based, and then behaving like a bunch of cliquey toddlers.
Ernst's piece carefully describes how his critical position on homeopathy is unique because he started out as one of them, and we had exactly the same experience with Steiner “skeptics”, as they initially fell over themselves to welcome us into the “fold”. I was a “genius” for making comedy videos to lobby Parliament with, especially after what we’d been through, how on earth were we still standing? Our blog posts were promoted as “important”, and we were assured by all that what we had uncovered was systematic and had to be exposed.
It wasn’t even our criticism of them that flipped that situation, but our continued polite engagement with their “criticisms” which were basically that we failed to observe the command to “bend over”. The avalanche of mobbing which resulted from that refusal has now largely been quietly removed from the site where it originally happened although you can see it here. This is how we discovered the authoritarian and victimising reality of Steiner skepticism.
It was impossible not to relate to Ernst's account of how his “insider” position made his criticism difficult to deflect or dismiss, as he describes how, denied the possibility of claiming that he didn't know enough about homeopathy to criticise it, due to the unavoidable fact that he did, some homeopaths resorted to personal smearing - that old skeptic chestnut.
"The homeopathic idyll was under threat, and a solution to the problem had to be found with some urgency.” says Ernst, “And soon enough, it was found. Homeopaths from across the world started claiming that I had been telling porkies about my training/qualifications in homeopathy"
Using the completely false excuse that we had been "rude to some of their best friends" (i.e. stood up to a mobbing), skeptics whose “idyll was under threat”, saw no problem in undermining their own evidence-based position by trashing the initiative we had built which led to Human Rights enquiry into the subject of unchecked bullying within Steiner Education, (a subject which features on critical blogs on the subject across the world).
This does render any claim to an “evidence-base” pure fiction, and due to the necessity of hiding the facts about the Human Rights Settlement, whilst continuing to pontificate about concern for children on the largest platform possible, only personal smearing could do the job of “protecting their fantasy kingdom”, the brave new world in which Andy Lewis, aka Mr Steiner, is applauded by skeptics all across the UK for drawing attention to the dangerous misleading elements of Steiner Education on a comprehensive platform of “What Every Parent Should Know”.
In order to achieve this though, the reality of an actual child, whose accounts of being expelled after suffering bullying even the school have admitted through Human Rights process, have to be rubbished by Andy and lots and lots of other supposed evidence-based skeptics who were not there. That’s some evidence-based platform!
At this point I can actually borrow Edzard Ernst's own language to describe our experience, he writes:
"Diluting the truth to the extreme, they almost unanimously insisted that, contrary to my previous assertions, I had no training/qualifications in homeopathy. Thus, they began to argue, that I was an imposter and had insufficient knowledge, expertise and experience after all"
When we refused to take the authoritarian, victimising actions of Steiner skeptics lying down, (I guess you could say this amounts to ‘criticism’ of skeptics), we experienced exactly the same turn-around from the gushing sympathy and support to absolute obliquoy complete with an active smear campaign that still goes on today. Nothing we said should now be believed, we were “vile”, “liars” etc., there was no bullying, everything we said was “demented drivel”.
Ernst goes on to quote some of the smears launched about him by homeopaths, "He failed as a homeopath, and then turned a skeptic".
We had that, here from Alicia Hamberg, "I notice that #disability didn’t gain her enough support on twitter so she moved on to abuse other topics, like feminism and genital mutilation, for her own benefit."
And of course it wasn’t homeopathy that was at fault, but Ernst himself. "His failure is only his failure- it does not disprove homeopathy by any way."
This is a point of view also held by skeptics. The fact that the only Human Rights initiative concerning the notorious unchecked bullying in Steiner needed to be trashed to save skeptic reputations, doesn’t mean that unchecked bullying is any less real, or important, or that totally unevidenced, anecdotal accounts of it shouldn’t be widely peddled to bolster skeptic domination of a platform.
Ernst goes into more detail of the labyrinthine ways homeopaths found to smear him: “Some went even further claiming that I had also lied about my medical qualifications."
Andy Lewis’ only public acknowledgement that some people found a way to take a school to task precisely for misleading parents and victimising children, actually suggests that the school was right to expel the children because the parents supported their child in following school procedure in reporting bullying.
In fact, this is now a common theme among Steiner skeptics -all Steiner schools are outrageous misleading institutions (including those that don’t actually exist yet) apart from the one that has admitted that it did expel a bullied child rather than address the bullying. That was completely acceptable.
Ernst says that he started his career in homeopathy because it was the only job he could get. His skepticism was awakened when one of the top bods suggested that any potential effects from homeopathy may not have been due to the actual remedies, but a combination of what Ernst now refers to as "a multitude of phenomena". As he realised this 'truth' about the system he'd been schooled in (although he had no formal qualification in homeopathy), and began to state his conclusions more clearly and widely, he says that "all sorts of ad hominem attacks were hauled in my direction".
I hear you brother - once we called out the crystal clear lack of “evidence-based skepticism” that was actually a minefield of authoritarian control, carefully managed public profiles and personal ambition, the gloves really came off and the evidence for how far that went is provided many months later by none other than Edzard Ernst himself, who was “policed” for engaging with Steve Paris, after having first retweeted Steve’s appreciation of this particular article of Ernst’s.
Nevertheless Ernst says he was even fired from the editorial board of the journal "homeopathy', (although it beats me why he had not resigned as he didn't believe in homeopathy), and we can relate to that as we have been carefully expunged from all critical blogs, and pages where we were either praised or mobbed disappear regularly.
Ernst says: ”I don’t mind any of that - but I do think that the truth about ‘my double-life as a homeopath’ should not be diluted like a homeopathic remedy until it suits those who think they can defame me by claiming I am a liar and do not know what I am talking about.”
And we agree that the fact that we managed to do something of undeniable importance for bullied kids should not either be diluted like one of Andy Lewis’ tweets until it suits those who think they can defame us by claiming we are liars and do not know what we are talking about.
A final thought is that in his careful positioning in this article, Ernst obviously never intended to align himself with people like us, in spite of the clear parallels illustrated here. In his “middle-aged man inured in woo who has finally seen the light” narrative, he is in fact much more obviously in line with Gregoire Perra on Steiner.
For both Ernst and Perra it seems that, regardless of labels, once you’ve spent years in the badlands, it’s hard to resist the call by authoritarian groups to victimise others when ordered to. So also Perra, whilst simultaneously being lauded by skeptics for denouncing cultishness has nevertheless fallen straight back into line. His communication with us went from:
“Gardez confiance en vous et ayez la tête haute : ce que vous avez dénoncé est vrai et vous avez bien fait de le faire!” (Stay strong and hold your heads high, what you have exposed is the truth and you have done well to do it),
to the supremely un-evidence based post-mobbing comment:
“Comme je ne connais pas l'histoire je ne souhaite pas prendre partie”. (As I don’t know the story I don’t want to get involved).
His “neutrality” then led him to cease communications with us.
These two men’s similar stories of years of immersion and then a rather late life-changing epiphany, bears very little relation to what happened to us. We were just a family, with real children involved, who sussed it out pretty quickly, did something about it there and then, and uncovered decades of abuse within the community in the process.
Unfortunately such a no-nonsense, child-centred and practical approach doesn't go down with all those paternalistic, ambitious, academic types, AT ALL.
In conclusion I shamelessly borrow Erns’t last paragraph and with only two tiny changes, voila!
“this rather depressing story shows, I think, that some skeptics (homeopaths,) rather than admitting they are in the wrong, are prepared to dilute the truth until it might be hard for third parties to tell who is right and who is wrong. But however they may deny it, the truth is still the truth: I have achieved a historic Human Rights settlement with a Steiner School. (been trained as a homeopath)”.
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