Total Eclipse of Descartes, by Robert Newman, Soho Theatre, London to 10 March, and touring the UK
FOR a show that promises a comedy romp through 2500 years of thought, the opening gambit of Total Eclipse of Descartes evokes the punchline of an old joke: “I wouldn’t start from here.” Forget “I think, therefore I am”, comic Robert Newman wants to discuss the work of a largely forgotten psychology professor, who was involved in developing the 11-plus school admission test system in England and Wales.
Ah, yes, Cyril Burt, head of psychology at University College London from 1931 to 1950. Rarely mentioned in the same breath as Descartes, but when Newman begins to spin his yarn you quickly see where he is going.
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Burt’s science is a fine example of how ideas matter in the real world. He was highly influential in education circles in post-war Britain, where he championed the claim that academic ability was largely inherited, and hence there was no point trying to educate less able people. His work justified condemning countless children to a second-class education.
Newman is no fan of selective education or genetic determinism so finds reasons to put the boot in. Burt’s research relied on testing the IQs of identical twins raised apart – a rare commodity, but not one Burt seemed to have trouble procuring. Starting in the 1940s, he published studies involving dozens of pairs of twins separated at birth or soon after. All showed the same correlation in IQ scores – 0.771, to be precise.
If that wasn’t strange enough, Burt stretched credulity to breaking. One study of a well-off couple who had identical twin boys, kept one, and gave the other away… to a shepherd. Then there were Burt’s assistants, Margaret Howard and Jane Conway, who published papers with him or wrote glowing reviews of his work. When suspicions grew that they were fabrications, Burt claimed they had “emigrated”. He didn’t know where.
This is excellent material, and Newman – whose dishevelled Oxford don demeanour belies a rapier wit – makes hay with it. There’s only one problem: the Burt affair is not as open-and-shut as he tells it. Burt was indeed denounced by the British Psychological Association in 1980, but later investigations largely exonerated him. For one thing, he was an accomplished statistician: if he “cooked the books”, why leave such a glaring clue? Howard and Conway turned out to be real. There is still a whiff of suspicion about him, but the case has never been proven either way.
“Does Newman really think he’s outmanoeuvred the great minds of the past with his homespun credo?”
Newman’s economy with the truth is no surprise. After splitting from his double act with David Baddiel, he reinvented himself as a writer, activist and broadcaster, often turning to science. His Radio 4 series, Robert Newman’s Entirely Accurate Encyclopaedia of Evolution, critiqued the selfish gene, while Neuropolis targeted neuroscience. Both tend to sacrifice the science in search of a point or a laugh.
This is all the more irritating because Newman doesn’t need to do it. When he does get around to Descartes, his dualism take-down is spot on (though perhaps not a total eclipse). His Pythagoras skit is brilliant, and a myth-buster on Pavlov’s dogs hilariously surreal.
But underlying it all is a grating arrogance. Does Newman really think he has outmanoeuvred the great minds of the past with the homespun credo he calls “terrestrial philosophy”? The monkeys-with-typewriters experiment is dismissed because monkeys can’t and won’t type; the tree falling in the forest gets short shrift because small creatures will hear it fall. As for the ethics of driverless cars, “Nobody has thought about it properly.” Really?
Pointing this out is humourless and pedantic, of course. Newman knows this, and lampoons it via a peevish character who calls out the errors – only to be skewered by the comic’s wit. I laughed, but couldn’t help recalling a catch-phrase from an earlier Newman incarnation: “That’s you, that is.”
At risk of being a humourless pedant, I think this stuff matters. Science and philosophy are not above comedy, but why attack straw men? Why not wrestle with the nest of vipers that is free will, or call out the lingering influence of Freudianism in psychiatry?
Suspend your scepticism, and the show is brilliant: Newman is always witty and often wise. But in the final analysis, he is too ready to play fast and loose with facts.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Curb your scepticism”
Article amended on 29 May 2018
We corrected where the “11-plus” exams were administered