Most of these figures are only after your money. That’s the good news. But what worries me is that a Carlos will come along with bigger fish to fry – attractive, commanding, patriotic, exuding leadership. All of us long for a competent, uncorrupt, charismatic leader. We will leap at the opportunity to support, to believe, to feel good. Most reporters, editors and producers, swept up with the rest of us, will shy away from real sceptical scrutiny. He won’t be selling you prayers or crystals or tears. Perhaps he’ll be selling you a war, or a scapegoat, or a much more all-encompassing bundle of beliefs than Carlos’s. Whatever it is, it will be accompanied by warnings about the dangers of scepticism.
In the celebrated film The Wizard ofOz, Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion are intimidated – indeed awed – by the out-sized oracular figure called the Great Oz. But Dorothy’s little dog Toto snaps at a concealing curtain and reveals that the Great Oz is in fact a machine run by a small, tubby, frightened man, as much an exile in this strange land as they.
I think we’re lucky that James Randi is tugging at the curtain. But it would be as dangerous to rely on him to expose all the quacks, humbugs and bunkum in the world as it would be to believe those same charlatans. If we don’t want to get taken, we need to do this job for ourselves.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise.
Seances occur only in darkened rooms, where the ghostly visitors can be seen dimly at best. If we turn up the lights a little, so we have a chance to see what’s going on, the spirits vanish. They’re shy, we’re told, and some of us believe it. In twentieth-century parapsychology laboratories, there is the ‘observer effect’: those described as gifted psychics find that their powers diminish markedly whenever sceptics arrive, and disappear altogether in the presence of a conjuror as skilled as James Randi. What they need is darkness and gullibility.
A little girl who had been a co-conspirator in a famous nineteenth-century flimflam – spirit-rapping, in which ghosts answer questions by loud thumping – grew up and confessed it was an imposture. She was cracking the joint in her big toe. She demonstrated how it was done. But the public apology was largely ignored and, when acknowledged, denounced. Spirit-rapping was too reassuring to be abandoned merely on the say-so of a self-confessed rapper, even if she started the whole business in the first place. The story began to circulate that the confession was coerced out of her by fanatical rationalists.
As I described earlier, British hoaxers confessed to having made ‘crop circles’, geometrical figures generated in grain fields. It wasn’t alien artists working in wheat as their medium, but two blokes with a board, a rope and a taste for whimsy. Even when they demonstrated how they did it, though, believers were unimpressed. Maybe some of the crop circles are hoaxes, they argued, but there are too many of them, and some of the pictograms are too complex. Only extraterrestrials could do it. Then others in Britain confessed. But crop circles abroad, it was objected, in Hungary for example, how can you explain that”! Then copycat Hungarian teenagers confessed. But what about . . .?
To test the credulity of an alien abduction psychiatrist, a woman poses as an abductee. The therapist is enthusiastic about the fantasies she spins. But when she announces it was all a fake, what is his response? To re-examine his protocols or his understanding of what these cases mean? No. On various days he suggests (1) even if she isn’t herself aware of it, she was in fact abducted; or (2) she’s crazy – after all, she went to a psychiatrist, didn’t she?; or (3) he was on top of the hoax from the beginning and just gave her enough rope to hang herself.
If it’s sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit that we’ve been wrong, this is also information about ourselves worth having.
A scientist places an ad in a Paris newspaper offering a free horoscope. He receives about 150 replies, each, as requested, detailing a place and time of birth. Every respondent is then sent the identical horoscope, along with a questionnaire asking how accurate the horoscope had been. Ninety-four per cent of the respondents (and 90 per cent of their families and friends) reply that they were at least recognizable in the horoscope. However, the horoscope was drawn up for a French serial killer. If an astrologer can get this far without even meeting his subjects, think how well someone sensitive to human nuances and not overly scrupulous might do.
Why are we so’easily taken in by fortune-tellers, psychic seers, palmists, tea-leaf, tarot and yarrow readers, and their ilk? Of course, they note our posture, facial expressions, clothing and answers to seemingly innocuous questions. Some of them are brilliant at it, and these are areas about which many scientists seem almost unconscious. There is also a computer network to which ‘professional’ psychics subscribe, the details of their customers’ lives available to their colleagues in an instant. A key tool is the so-called ‘cold read’, a statement of opposing predispositions so tenuously balanced that anyone will recognize a grain of truth. Here’s an example:
At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary and reserved. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety, and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. Disciplined and controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. You have a great deal of unused capacity, which you have not turned to your advantage. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a strong need for other people to like you and for them to admire you.
Almost everyone finds this characterization recognizable, and many feel that it describes them perfectly. Small wonder: we are all human.
The list of ‘evidence’ that some therapists think demonstrates repressed childhood sexual abuse (for example, in The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis) is very long and prosaic: it includes sleep disorders, overeating, anorexia and bulimia, sexual dysfunction, vague anxieties, and even an inability to remember childhood sexual abuse. Another book, by the social worker E. Sue Blume, lists, among other telltale signs of forgotten incest: headaches, suspicion or its absence, excessive sexual passion or its absence, and adoring one’s parents. Among diagnostic items for detecting ‘dysfunctional’ families listed by Charles Whitfield, MD, are ‘aches and pains’, feeling ‘more alive’ in a crisis, being anxious about ‘authority figures’, and having ‘tried counseling or psychotherapy’, yet feeling ‘that “something” is wrong or missing’. Like the cold read, if the list is long and broad enough, everyone will have ‘symptoms’.
Sceptical scrutiny is not only the toolkit for rooting out bunkum and cruelty that prey on those least able to protect themselves and most in need of our compassion, people offered little other hope.
It is also a timely reminder that mass rallies, radio and television, the print media, electronic marketing, and mail-order technology permit other kinds of lies to be injected into the body politic, to take advantage of the frustrated, the unwary and the defenceless in a society riddled with political ills that are being treated ineffectively if at all.
Baloney, bamboozles, careless thinking, flimflam and wishes disguised as facts are not restricted to parlour magic and ambiguous advice on matters of the heart. Unfortunately, they ripple through mainstream political, social, religious and economic issues in every nation.
14
Antiscience
There’s no such thing as objective truth. We make our own truth. There’s no such things as objective reality. We make our own reality. There are spiritual, mystical, or inner ways of knowing that are superior to our ordinary ways of knowing. If an experience seems real, it is real. If an idea feels right to you, it is right. We are incapable of acquiring knowledge of the true nature of reality. Science itself is irrational or mystical. It’s just another faith or belief system or myth, with no more justification than any other. It doesn’t matter whether beliefs are true or not, as long as they’re meaningful to you.
a summary of New Age beliefs,