at the inquest, the coroner, Mr JAK Ferns declared: "In a man of his type, one never knows what his mental processes are going to do next." What he meant by "of this type" is unclear.
Oh please, we know exactly what the coroner meant by "of this type". He meant homosexuals. He (and many many other people in the medial and government at the time) thought homosexuality was a mental illness and very unnatural affliction.
Then you don't understand the British ruling class of the time - everyone of them, judges, civil servants, politicians, army officers, would have had homosexual experiences at boarding school, not necessarily consentingly, but they were perfectly well used to homosexuals.
The problem as far as the establishment was concerned was that Turing had access to all the nation's secrets and he was inviting anyone home he fancied... That he was gay was just a pretext for what happened next.
Oh yes, for a long time in the UK, the percentage of males whose first sexual experience was with another male was sort 30%. It dropped when the gay rights movement took off.
Although they were aware of homosexuality, and likely to have practised it, don't pretend they were OK with homosexuality. They viewed it as something that one should grow out of. That there was something unnatural about grown men doing it. That it wasn't possible to have a real same-sex relationship. That it was a unseemly, unnatural thing.
If Turing had been inviting random women to his house he fancied (which would have happened to lots of other men in his position), it would not have been nearly as much of a problem.
Turing didn't turn off his homosexuality and settle down in a nice fake loveless marriage (with a woman) and keep up appearances.
The American military has always had a very strange sexuality - on the one hand, "don't ask don't tell", but on the other, at Abu Ghraib and other places, the first thing they do as soon as grown-up supervision's back is turned, is sexually abuse male prisoners, and photograph it and share it. The norm seems to be, rigidly suppressed latent homosexuality.
"Alan and I were left with “the Wards”—always we referred to them as “the Wards.” We were the wards and they were our guardians but no matter—this was to be the centre of our existence for many years and our home from home. I believe it was here, perhaps in the first four or five years at the Wards, perhaps even in the first two, that Alan became destined for a homosexual. Has anyone mentioned it until now?"
So he is suggesting Alan Turing’s homosexuality to be caused by strained relationships with parents… still seeing being gay as some kind of personality disorder, that could have been avoided by people taking better care of Turing?
If anything it might be seen as forward thinking and caring, as opposed to people who thought it was a sin caused by the devil, and/or the person was cruel and wanted to do depraved things.
"It's a mental illness, don't blame the person", is kinder than "They are filthy amoral degenerate", but not as kind as "It's as valid a relationship type as heterosexuality"
That's an interesting piece - a memoir of Turing by his older brother - I'm glad you posted the link. The brother (a lawyer) comes across rather poorly by our standards, but it's worth reading.
Interesting that he cites the half-eaten apple as definitive proof of suicide, when (if the OP is correct) Turing habitually ate half an apple at bedtime, and this one was never tested for cyanide.
The man was a genius. He was largely responsible for creating the foundations of modern society in many ways, in his work with computation, cryptology, AI, and other fields.
"Of this type" means that he was an out of the box thinker and hard to predict. It in no ways should be understood as you are stating.
Smart guy, yes, very smart indeed, but to describe him as "largely responsible" is a disservice to men like William Thomas Tutte, Tommy Flowers and a number of other contemporary collegues who contributed as much but with less fanfare.
We're well into speculative territory here. Are we suggesting that the coroner was aware of his homosexuality but not of the fact he was a brilliant mathematician?
I mean, the coroner must at least have known that he had a chemistry lab, working with dangerous chemicals, in the house. That's way more unusual than gaying it up.
Well, he was a man who had taken female hormones as an alternative to going to prison, and who had indicated that the hormones had given him breasts.
Do you think a dead man with breasts would have gone unnoticed by the coroner? Do you think he might have wondered why Turing had breasts?
It's quite reasonable to think that the coroner would have known that he was homosexual, and it is quite reasonable to think that would have been viewed as a flaw, since, you know, the whole state-sanctioned "choice" between prison and chemical castration thing.
> We're well into speculative territory here. Are we suggesting that the coroner was aware of his homosexuality but not of the fact he was a brilliant mathematician?
That seems quite plausible. The coroner would be aware of his criminal conviction as a matter of course, but might have relatively little information about his profession.
"A man of his type" probably just meant "a mad scientist". The stereotype was as strong as ever at the time (thanks to Einstein and the nuclear-science culture of secrecy), and Turing fit it to a T: he dealt with concepts the average coroner couldn't even start to comprehend (advanced crypto, information theory, Frankenstein-style machinery full of valves and levers, experimental chemistry), he was a loner, socially awkward geek, who somehow didn't really like to hide his homosexual side like a proper Englishman would do (homosexual experiences were much more common at the type for the ruling class, due to boarding schools).
I recommend listening to the audio clip that accompanies the article as it includes the fact, omitted from the text, that while the police were able to smell cyanide in his lab days after his death, 50% of men are genetically unable to smell it at all. This is surely crucial.
I think the point made at the end of the article is what we should take away from this. We will never know the truth about how he died and it does him an injustice to speculate as the coroner at the time did. We should instead celebrate his life and achievements, not let his death and persecution define him.
That's not mentioned by the article, yet it seems important.
4 ounces is 110 ml - a reasonably bug gulp. It's not the kind of dose that you'd get from accidentally licking your finger, or absent mindedly eating an apple that had rested in a splash of cyanide.
The article is right about modern inquests needing clear evidence before they record a verdict of suicide. But that was even more so in the past, when suicide was a crime, and much more likely to be seen as sinful.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. I understand why suicide is illegal (so the cops can intervene before you kill yourself), but I still find it amusing to think about punishing people for killing themselves.
This is stomach turing. Sorry, had to inject a little humor because this is actually making me sad. The way he was treated by the authorities (seriously, chemical castration!?) is beyond hellish. I'm ashamed that I live in the country which perpetrated this. And it all happened just a lifetime ago.
Well, chemical castration is still used to "combat" paedophilia. I'm pretty sure the Ancient Greeks and Romans would find that repulsive.
Now, I'm a child of my time, so I think homosexuality is OK, and I think paedophilia is a crime. But were I a child of, say, the thirties or forties, where in my youth fascist regimes burned homosexuals by the thousands, what would I say? Would I have the empathy, or the courage to understand and express against the strong sentiment of society my understanding for the gay cause?
I also want to note that "chemical castration" is a harsh term, and I find the treatment to be an interesting, indeed even acceptable, alternative to just straight incarceration. In the face of a force society considers dangerous to itself, it is a good thing that we can use medication to combat it — and we still do when applicable, for example also with psychopaths and other severe mental illnesses. That homosexuality was viewed as dangerous to society back then is certainly sad, even terrible. But how will people fifty years hence look onto our debates about whether to allow people to marry? How will they look onto our treatment of socially not accepted sexual deviants. Social ousting, sex offenders list, incarceration, the eroding of free speech in the name of reducing just the chances of sexually "deviant" activity?
People back then did what they did because they thought it right. It is not what they did that we should find repulsive, because their methods are by and large the same we employ today when faced with similar value judgements. It is the why. Homosexuality is not a mental illness. We have finally learned this, and I hope it won't take more than the dying out of the current generation of politicians for society at large to accept this.
(I'm sorry to have drawn a parallel between homosexuality and paedophilia — I'm not meaning to suggest any similarity between the two on a biological or indeed conceptual level. I wanted to explain my view that the concept of homosexuality in the society of the 50s was indeed a similar one to the concept of paedophilia today.)
>Now, I'm a child of my time, so I think homosexuality is OK, and I think
paedophilia is a crime.
Except paedophilia isn't a crime, child abuse (and rape) is. Assering a sexual
preference (which paedophilia boils down to) is criminal is steering into
thoughtcrime teritory. You can think it's wrong all you want, but that doesn't
make it a crime.
It is, therefore, equally as abhorrent and repulsive to use these methods
against paedophiles as it was using them against homosexuals in the 50s. It
is, indeed, abhorrent and repulsive to ever use them on a human being,
regardless of the reason.
But how will people fifty years hence look onto our debates about whether to
allow people to marry? How will they look onto our treatment of socially not
accepted sexual deviants. Social ousting, sex offenders list, incarceration,
the eroding of free speech in the name of reducing just the chances of
sexually "deviant" activity?
They will be equally as disgusted at this nonsense as we are right now at
the heinous things perpetrated in the 50s. In fact, I am disgusted at it right
now.
I think it says something pretty interesting about our idea of "masculinity" that throwing someone in prison to be raped and beaten for the rest of their life is accepted but turning off their sex drive is "abhorent and repulsive."
> Except paedophilia isn't a crime, child abuse (and rape) is.
The reasoning is similar with the reason why we ban even entry-level drugs: it's insurance, preventing weak people to become criminals about more powerful stuff. The line of thought is that it's ok to deny people freedoms that might lead the poor-minded folks into more damaging behavior.
And be it either:
(1): homosexuals that might escalate to raping other men,
(2): people with weird fetishes that might end up doing child abuse,
(3): or LSD people that might end up as heroin addicts,
we've seen thought the history of time that it's ok to punish otherwise-acceptable behavior as long as it acts as an insurance in order to prevent more harmful acts.
For me, (1) and (2) are the most dangerous as they prohibit the thoughts and sexual desires of human beings just because they might have the potential to turn into something dangerous. It's a form of punishment just because statistically there were specific criminals in the past that escalated them into harmful acts. And as our society progresses, we'll have to decide if it's ok to do that for the greater good: if it's ok to snoop credit card bills for fast food purchases in order to charge a higher medical insurance fee each month. I sure hope that the answer will be no, or at least that nobody will go to jail just as an insurance for his potential future criminal behavior.
>we've seen thought the history of time that it's ok to punish
otherwise-acceptable behavior as long as it acts as an insurance in order to
prevent more harmful acts.
I doubt there's actually any evidence for it. It's not that I don't understand
the rationale behind it, it's that I reject it. Outlawing something merely
because of the potential for abuse/escalation is almost always a slippery
slope argument of the fallacious kind.
"Assering a sexual preference (which paedophilia boils down to) is criminal is steering into thoughtcrime teritory. You can think it's wrong all you want, but that doesn't make it a crime."
So, is rape a sexual preference too? Paedophilia, especially when it involves children under 10, is rape.
Whenever someone defends having sex with young children, it really makes me wonder why....It's just not something you hear from a rational adult.
"t is, therefore, equally as abhorrent and repulsive to use these methods against paedophiles as it was using them against homosexuals in the 50s. It is, indeed, abhorrent and repulsive to ever use them on a human being, regardless of the reason."
Homosexuality is between two consenting adults. We should never have done those terrible things to them.
What would you propose as an alternative to chemical castration? The problem is that for some people, they will continue to have sex with children because they can't stop.
Please don't give me the "rational adult" when you are obviously unable
to differentiate between having a sexual preference and acting on a
sexual preference. I've explicitly stated that child abuse and/or rape
is a crime, and I've never questioned this - though there are some quiet
interesting discussions to be had about age of consent, but this is not
the time and place for them.
For future reference, before you jump on the "but think of the children"
bandwagon, try to actually understand what the person you are accusing of
defending child rape is saying.
It's true that we've changed our minds, but not that we haven't learned anything. We've learned things about homosexuality in animals. Also, many have learned that some of the people they know and like (and/or are related to) are gay. That's a big change.
Today most US states deny the right of marrying the person you love.
Which makes me wondering why are we feeling so strongly, as a human race, to regulate what other people are able to do (even in cases where it doesn't affect us) and to inflict punishment on those that break the social norms.
It's probably a combination of evolutionary traits, fear of unknown, desire for protection of self at the expense of others, and the desire to be in groups with similar characteristics of our own. Only lately it appears that we embraced 'diversity', where we respect the right of others to be, behave and think differently than our own ways, without feeling threatened by them or feeling the need to prosecute them.
Why is this happening only now and how can we make sure that we don't revert to the old ways? Part of it is history, I think - we're more aware now of the mistakes of the past, the world-wide wars, and the poverty effects of oppressive regimes. We also improved agriculture and technology to the point where most of us can have a decent living without stealing from others, conducting wars with our neighbors or by practicing slavery / communism. It might very well be the case of the famous saying, "you cannot do democracy on an empty stomach".
I only hope the trend will accelerate and that we'll be able to reap up the benefits of mutual respect and decency for human rights sooner rather than later. And never return to the past.
While all this raises some interesting questions, the assertion that he had born a hormonal treatment robbing him of his sexual desires, and playing havoc with his body’s hormone balance “with good humour” seems ludicrous. In fact, the treatment was more likely a serious burden, both physically and emotionally. And if Turing acted cheerful in spite of that this suggests he was hiding his real emotions under a mask.
Hear hear. It's a dismissive and flippant assertion of the kind made by a people who deservedly feel guilty. The "chemical castration" was an option created by people who were clearly willing to do worse. No doubt the behavior of the Cambridge Five created a climate justifying suspicion by "the type so inclined".
It's now accepted that he didn't. In truth, such hypothesis was clearly ludicrous from the start, to anyone with half a brain; it was kept dangling just to distract the public, trying to paint it as "just another homo killed by his own weird fetish".
Either this was a cold-war style assassination, or the guy brought home a stranger too many; we'll likely never know the truth about it anyway.
I don't know if you have any information not in the Wikipedia article but I don't see anything there suggesting suicide was ever considered as a possibility. All is see is the police and coroner saying he was murdered but they don't know who did it.
A lot of people are surprised to learn of Turing's treatment.
If you're at all interested in this, you might think about reading biographies and other material on Turing and other computer scientists. Or the history of computer science. Or the history of science.
Ask yourself in what circumstances might a coroner come to a hurried 'suicide' conclusion in the absence of any supporting evidence? Instead of evidence engage in character assassination of 'a man of this type' having 'unpredictable mental processes'? If the coroner did not find any suicide evidence it can mean only one thing: there wasn't any. Furthermore, why would he claim that Turing ate a poisoned apple when it was not poisoned?
Why would Turing's visiting Norwegian friend disappear without trace?
Turing had become a convicted criminal and overnight he turned into a security nightmare: someone with detailed knowledge of secrets but without the security clearance.
Could it be possible he was assassinated by the Russians (or I guess even by UK/US if they felt he might end up in the hands of the Russians)? I'm assuming by this time he was well known in intelligence circles for his work during WW2, this is someone that could possibly turn the tide in a war, he was a very valuable/dangerous man.
That's an extremely horrible story that I previously knew very little about. It was 60 years ago, but it felt a bit mentally violating to read it now (how Turing was treated).
It's worth noting that the claims by Copeland are seemingly just as unsupportable as those he's arguing against. For example this:
"immediately after his conviction had told a friend: "The day of the trial was by no means disagreeable. Whilst in custody with the other criminals, I had a very agreeable sense of irresponsibility, rather like being back at school."
"On the face of it, these are not the expressions of someone ground down by adversity."
It's just as plausible that Turing was lying to his friend about his real state of mind. That's an extraordinarily common thing for people to do, and some do it no matter how dire their current circumstances. Copeland doesn't do a very good job of supporting the notion that it wasn't suicide (and it may well have not been).
It's just as plausible that Turing was lying to his friend about his real state of mind
It's also plausible that he wasn't lying, but actually felt more cheerful having made the decision to end his life. This is also not unheard of.
Still, Copeland makes an interesting case. I'm inclined to agree -- the fact that Turing had cyanide in his house, ostensibly for purposes other than suicide, makes accident seem at least equally plausible.
He was also a classic example of a British eccentric inventor, at one point he fashioned his own mercury delay lines for digital storage.
I have no trouble at all with the notion that he (foolishly) had a small unventilated room with cyanide, mercury, bismuth, probably a small kiln furnace for metal casting, floor to ceiling racks of odds and ends and semi regular small explosions and benchtop melt downs.
It's a lifestyle that's accidentally killed more than one person and it could very well have claimed Turing.
Which of Copeland's claims do you dispute? I assume those statements about what he said at varous times a d about his chemical experiments are true. From there, I find Copeland's conclusion perfectly reasonable:
"The thing is to tell the truth in so far as we know it, and not to speculate."
"In a way we have in modern times been recreating the narrative of Turing's life, and we have recreated him as an unhappy young man who committed suicide. But the evidence is not there."*
"The exact circumstances of Turing's death will probably always be unclear," Prof Copeland concludes."
Right, if you look at what Tyler Clementi was saying on and offline before he committed suicide you'll see the same sort of thing. (not trying to draw too many comparisons here)
By the same token we should give up on things like archaeology as well. We will never know for certain, but we can reason that given the evidence we do have, such and such is a likely scenario.
I wasn't speculating either direction about Turing's death, but what I said regarding Copeland's statement was correct.
Judging someone's state of mind by what they project externally is not an accurate approach. Taking a single psych course would inform you of that, so would knowing someone that has committed suicide without the cliche external signals.
Oh please, we know exactly what the coroner meant by "of this type". He meant homosexuals. He (and many many other people in the medial and government at the time) thought homosexuality was a mental illness and very unnatural affliction.