Madam, - Though most people attracted to new age fads are harmless, Donald Clarke (August 1st) is right to speculate that it may be no accident that the opportunist psychopath Radovan Karadzic found his way into alternative medicine.
However, he repeats a modern right-wing fallacy by tracing new ageism to the 1960s and the decline of traditional religion. Michel Houellebecq has popularised this lie in his best seller Atomised.
New ageism actually had its heyday at the start of the 20th century, attracting people like Arthur Conan Doyle, WB Yeats and, of course, Adolf Hitler. Traditional religion and new ageism are not alternatives belief systems. The vegetarian Hitler's Catholicism (which he never renounced, no matter how often Pope Benedict tries to rewrite the history) was no bar to his dabbling in all sorts of such nonsense in the Viennese bohemian circles of his youth. Likewise Karadzic happily combined his "human quantum energy" business with his sincerely held Orthodox Christianity. Religion and superstition have always co-existed side by side - indeed it is difficult to make a firm distinction. The most important difference is that organised religion does not allow the individual to make it up as he goes along. It is this freedom to make up the truth that makes new ageism attractive to psychopaths like Karadzic and Hitler. Psychopaths not only ignore the difference between right and wrong, they place no value in the difference between lies and truth.
Their rejection of morality and and their rejection of science are thus simply two sides of the same psychopathic coin. That is why those people who believe in truth and science are duty bound to expose the claims of alternative medicine, even at the risk of upsetting its harmless devotees. - Yours, etc.,
TIM O'HALLORAN,
Ferndale Road,
Dublin 11.