It's always a conundrum: give dopey criticism oxygen by responding to it, or ignore it? There's also the issue of decorum in tussles like this: no room for subtlety; "debates" descend pretty quickly into brawls.
But I realised early in this column-writing business, and public life in T&T, that anything resembling restraint (aka "shame") is a drawback. This becomes evident with people like Trevor Sudama out there, who write lengthy, ludicrous screeds to protest simple facts. Like Sudama's jokey expertise which predicted a Jack Warner loss in Chaguanas in 2013; or his concern for integrity which led him to betray thousands of people who voted UNC to hand over power to the PNM in 2001, thereby changing the history of T&T irrevocably for the worse.
Trevor Sudama is not the subject of this column, though I consider it my duty to mention him every now and then to remind the world who he is and what he did. This column is about another fellow, a professional writer, author of three novels and co-author of a history book, named Kevin Baldeosingh, my co-columnist who sits beneath me on this page. He who has taken the responsibility of debunker-in-chief of intellectual ignorance (as in his column last Sunday).
Baldeosingh has also been consistently attacking another Guardian columnist (and my pal) gender academic Dr Gabby Hosein. Gab can defend herself, as can Dr Sherene Kalloo, also mentioned in said column. As for me, I was accused of lacking rigour and accuracy in my citation of "a slew of studies" in a NY Times article supporting the idea that mindfulness training helps children perform better in school.
Mindfulness studies, Baldeosingh wrote, suffer from "poor methodology", and "the consensus among psychologists is that meditation has no significant effects for cognitive functioning." Really? On what authority and experience are these claims made? How could he know what the consensus among psychologists is? What does he know about the methodology of psychological research?
Very little, I suspect, as other things he's debunked include Freud, Marx, Michel Foucault and socialism, despite having no knowledge of any of these. There seems to be a pattern here.
But I went back to the NY Times article I cited, and was flabbergasted. Baldeosingh mentions, by way of illustration, one study involving ADHD children (and if you're going to be pedantic, it's Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, not ADD), which is an egregious misreading of the article.
The article cited four separate studies: a 2015 Study in the journal Developmental Psychology (posted on the US National Institute of Health web site), another in the journal Mindfulness, and one in the Journal of Pediatric Nursing which studied elementary school children in Korea, and a meta-survey, from the Handbook of Mindfulness in Education.
The abstract for the 2015 study states that children who underwent SEL (social and emotional learning) training, which includes mindfulness, "improved more in their cognitive control and stress physiology; (b) reported greater empathy, perspective-taking, emotional control, optimism, school self-concept, and mindfulness, (c) showed greater decreases in self-reported symptoms of depression and peer-rated aggression, (d) were rated by peers as more prosocial".
This is pretty unambiguous. I also Googled "mindfulness and education", and found, inter alia, the Journal of Social Issues (Spring 2000), had devoted an entire issue to it. Ergo the journalistic articles I've been seeing these last few years.
So, again, whither this magisterial dismissal which casually throws around epithets like "publication bias"? I take that to mean something is wrong with the review and/or publication process. Well, the peer review process is not perfect. Journals and publishers are biased, and will more readily accept some points of view than others. And researchers do falsify results to get published. Another NY Times article (by Benedict Carey of August 27, 2015, "Many Psychology Findings not as Accurate as Claimed") supports this with much evidence.
But if the academic world is far from blameless, Baldeosingh has no expertise to make definitive pronouncements on MDs, psychological research, and gender studies. So far as I know (and he'll correct me if I'm wrong) he's never actually published a scholarly article, been through the academic peer review process, or been educated past the undergraduate level in anything, much less psychology. If he had done any of this, he'd know the difference between undergraduate and postgraduate reading skills, among other things.
This isn't to say academics, and anyone who makes authoritative statements in the public sphere, should not be challenged. I've been on both ends of that many times. I hedge my bets by usually knowing what I'm talking about. But Baldeosingh doesn't seem to know what he's talking about, and doesn't seem to know that he doesn't know. (Psychologists call this state anosognosia.) If Freud hadn't been so comprehensively debunked, a Freudian might also detect suppressed animus driving this urge to attack people who have achieved things he hasn't–a higher degree, scholarly publications, an academic career.
But there's a less amusing side to this. I get the sense some people recognise what's going on and simply sigh and turn the page, which lack of rebuttal Baldeosingh takes for assent. Not cool. He's like a one-man Fox News, and it's dangerous for the people who don't know better, to take what he says at face value. An impressionable person might actually believe this nonsense, and not know the writer scarily illustrates a Naipaulian character–I'm thinking Elias from Miguel Street, or Ganesh from Masseur–one so embroiled in his delusion, there's no coming back.
At any rate, pointing this out isn't enjoyable to do, and I hope I don't have to do it again any time soon.