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Why Did We Call Prince Charles Foolish and Immoral? (Skeptical Inquirer) - C C - Jun 7, 2018
https://www.csicop.org/si/show/why_did_we_call_prince_charles_foolish_and_immoral
EXCERPT: I was recently reported for calling Britain’s heir to the throne “foolish and immoral.” The quote happens to be correct; it comes from our new book titled More Good Than Harm? The Moral Maze of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. In it, the ethicist Kevin Smith and I discuss the many ethical issues around alternative medicine and essentially conclude that it is not possible to practice alternative medicine ethically.
The exact quote from our book relates to Charles’s promotion in 2004 of something called the Gerson diet for cancer:
Despite the fact that they have attained their high positions merely through accidents of birth, monarchs undoubtedly have a good deal of influence over their “subjects.” It is therefore inescapable that many cancer patients will have been given false hope by the utterances of Prince Charles. Accordingly, we consider his public support for unproven cancer treatments to be both foolish and immoral.
Charles’s foolishness in respect to the promotion of quackery has, in my opinion, been demonstrated multiple times. His love affair with all things alternative started early in his life. As a teenager, Charles was taken by Laurence van der Post on a journey of “spiritual discovery” into the wilderness of northern Kenya. The fantasist van der Post wanted to attune Charles to the vitalistic ideas of Carl Jung, and it clearly is this belief in vitalism that provides the link to alternative medicine.Throughout the 1980s, Charles lobbied for the statutory regulation of chiropractors and osteopaths in the United Kingdom. In 1993, this finally became reality....
MORE: https://www.csicop.org/si/show/why_did_we_call_prince_charles_foolish_and_immoral
RE: Why Did We Call Prince Charles Foolish and Immoral? (Skeptical Inquirer) - Syne - Jun 7, 2018
Yeah, they have free speech.
RE: Why Did We Call Prince Charles Foolish and Immoral? (Skeptical Inquirer) - Magical Realist - Jun 7, 2018
I take issue with the claim that Carl Jung advanced some sort of vitalism. At least not in the sense defined here:
"Vitalists hold that living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things. In its simplest form, vitalism holds that living entities contain some fluid, or a distinctive ‘spirit’. In more sophisticated forms, the vital spirit becomes a substance infusing bodies and giving life to them; or vitalism becomes the view that there is a distinctive organization among living things."--- https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/vitalism/v-1
Jung's approach was essentially a deep and guiding respect for the 6 million year old wisdom stored in our body's evolved biological systems. That the unconscious surfaces in our lives with naturalistic and symbolic images and forces that push us toward the goal of individual wholeness. He was basically applying the sense of biological determinism to the psychological model of Freud, with far less emphasis on the sexual and much more emphasis on the ancient and mythopoetic patterns that persist in our brain and our DNA.