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Updated: 4 Jun 2001

Designer Superstition for the Twenty-First Century

Further Reading The Demon Haunted World - Carl Sagan A Devil's Chaplain - Richard Dawkins Fashionable Nonsense - Alan Sokal & Jean Bricmont Higher Superstition - Paul Gross & Norman Levitt Professing Feminism - Daphne Patai & Noretta Koertge Some Believe in Chariots - Voodoo Science - Why People Believe Weird Things - Michael Shermer

When I was a young lad, I had a favourite comic book called, to the best of my recollection, Century 21. It was filled with science fiction stories and such future-facing speculations. How far off it seemed, the twenty first century. Surely wonder and enlightenment awaited us there....

If, like me, you imagined that this time – this first few months of the twenty first century – might be a time of enlightenment and reason, then maybe you share my present feelings. Maybe, like me, you expected to find outside your window a brave and rational civilisation, at least among the educated first-world countries? You did not expect, say, to find the Nostradamus’-writings-prove-mankind-descended-from-aliens variety of trash sitting next to A Brief History of Time, sharing the non-fiction shelves at your local book store? Or quartz crystals being sold for therapeutic purposes at the only store in your town which sells mineral specimens? Or a creation "science" stand at the local science shop?

But, it is so.

New Zealand (and, if my observations of these countries are representative, then also Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland and the United States) is slipping backwards into the Dark Ages rather than advancing forwards into any kind of age of enlightenment. In experiencing this apprehension I am in the best of company: Carl Sagan (The Demon Haunted World, 1997, p.29) writes, "I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."

Despite some absolutely mind beggaring intellectual achievements out on the frontier, back home at the ranch we are daily losing our grip on reality. Ignorance and superstition are winning. For example:

• Ostensibly intelligent people – people who had the same education as me, or at least the same opportunity for it – buy mineral specimens (they call them "crystals" nowadays) to ward of colds or concentrate their auras or whatever they’re supposed to do. I once shared a flat with a couple who believed devoutly in these crystal powers. Now know real fear: They were teachers.
   
• Nearly every newspaper and magazine in the country runs a horoscope. Most are just a few simple lines for fun ("this is your week for getting out and meeting new people") but others offer elaborate prescriptions, providing the gullible with detailed instructions for living their lives.
   
• Television shows – mockumentaries – portraying elderly twins from Bournemouth or waning Hollywood stars repackage various events (usually quite ordinary) or vague childhood reminiscences as mysterious supernatural phenomena. Some of the shows try to maintain a pretence at scepticism; most don’t bother. This kind of drivel is far more insidious than even the most outrageous soap, because it masquerades as fact.
   
• Perennial con artists including L. Ron Hubbard, Lobsang Rampa (born Cyril Hoskins in Plympton, Devon), Immanuel Velikovsky, and Erich von Daniken, endlessly recycle favourite titles despite their having been comprehensively discredited years ago.
   
• A recent New Zealand Listener article (22 April 2000) about yet another creationist resurgence, referring to a study based on interviews with fourteen Auckland-based science teachers, noted "... many of them were sitting ducks for poor teaching of evolution, either because they didn’t have a good understanding of the subject, or they were creationists or creationism-prone themselves...." What? Didn’t have a good understanding of the subject? But evolution is the foundation, the central fact of all biology; the sense that makes it all make sense. How the hell were these people ever permitted in a science classroom without "a good understanding of the subject" I must ask?

Sentient plants (as in Lyall Watson’s Supernature), UFO abductions, holocaust denial, Uri Geller and his bloody spoons, clairvoyants, crop circles, pyramid drivel ... I could go on and on but the message is painfully obvious: The ju-ju is alive and well and finding the twenty first century very profitable, thank you.

* * *

Now it’s easy to say that these are harmless forms of escapism – light entertainment – which are not taken too seriously even by their practitioners, so nobody should care. I disagree, for two reasons: Firstly, there are forms of this new wave superstition which are taken very seriously by their proponents. That well-known contradiction in terms, "Scientific Creationism," is a good example. That particular brand of nonsense is actually given serious attention in some of our classrooms. Brush that off, if you will.

Some fringe medicines are even worse in so far as the misguided reliance upon them can bring about genuine suffering. "Christian Science … denies the germ theory of disease; if prayer fails, the faithful would rather see their children die than give them antibiotics" (Sagan 1997, p.13). Every now and again, one of these cases makes the headlines when the medical authorities treat a child in defiance of parental objections or, conversely, when the parents take their sick offspring away into hiding, to seek "alternative" treatment – usually from the Grim Reaper. (Once I would have sided entirely with the authorities in such matters. However, my view of, for example, our education establishment is so low that some feeling of consistency forces me away from that particular dogma.)

I can’t help thinking that some credulous souls may actually order their lives – or at least make important decisions – on the basis of astrology, the ill-considered advice of agony aunt clairvoyants, and other such mumbo jumbo. Nancy Reagan was reputed to consult some charlatan or another, and influence American politics on that basis. Sure, it’s easy to laugh and say "Only in America," but American foreign and economic policy affects all of us, like it or not.

Indeed, Karl Popper (Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 1962) maintained that "The critical attitude may be described as the conscious attempt to make our theories, our conjectures, suffer in our stead in the struggle for the survival of the fittest. It gives us a chance to survive the elimination of an inadequate hypothesis – when a more dogmatic attempt would eliminate it by eliminating us."

But, mainly, it is not from a fear of the consequences of holding such mediaeval beliefs that I oppose them: it is that my whole being simply rebels at the thought of anyone actually swallowing this rubbish. To quote a bemused John Brunner (Science Fiction and the Larger Lunacy, 1976), "Loss of the faculty to discriminate between the real and the unreal ... is perhaps the single most significant criterion by which one defines the onset of insanity. What is one to make of people who simply disregard the difference?"

No: I’m not being too harsh. People who go in for this stuff are not merely ignorant – they are stupid, or at least deliberately perverse, as well. Take sun sign astrology. Your horoscope simply doesn’t come true with any more frequency than mere chance dictates. Yet its adherents completely ignore the failures of the practise and only consider the "successes." Any load of old hogwash is effective by those standards. Consider crystals. They simply do not have any medicinal powers. Clutch them to your bosom as you will, you’ll still get the flu this winter. Cardboard pyramids do not sharpen razor blades. It simply isn’t true. When the planets lined up earlier this year (5 May 2000) the world did not end. We’re all still here for goodness sake!

I’m not going to attempt a hatchet job on every inexplicable phenomenon ever to make it into the limelight, mainly because I’m sure there are strange and delightful things we know nothing about, and I’m equally sure that much of what we currently hold to be self-evident will one day be shown to be false. But, ever since 1686 when Sir Isaac Newton published his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, it has been evident to anyone of ordinary wit that Nature has rational laws and that we can, with perseverance, discover and understand many of them. This "New Age" nonsense, which belongs in much the same category as reading portents into the movements of black cats and throwing salt around, belongs in the sixteenth century – not the twenty-first.

* * *

There remains a fascinating point: Just why do so many people believe this shit? Why do they prefer this kind of fantasy to actually learning something about the real universe? Why do so few of us rejoice in the vastly more wonderful world of the actual?

• Quartz crystals form from cooling molten rock deep underground. The molecules from which they are composed aggregate in such a way as to produce a six-sided crystal. Often they will form around an open space – often referred to as a vug – forming a spectacular crystal lining on the inside walls. How and why is it so? Wouldn’t investigating that question be a thousand times more inspiring, more exciting, more satisfying, than inventing feeble, rather unimaginative, and patently non-existent medicinal properties for them?
   
• Instead of inventing stereotypes for people born in November, wouldn’t it be more satisfying to go outside on a dark night and look at Scorpius? (How many astrologers, do you suppose, would even know when and where to look for Scorpius, or would recognise it if they saw it?) Near the "sting," a cluster of around fifty stars is just visible to the unaided eye. Nearby, several more such clusters are easily visible with binoculars. But what is a star cluster? Are there different sorts? How do they form? How, indeed, do individual stars form? Every time I think about it I am amazed all over again: People actually know the answers to these questions. You can get a book from the library and learn all about it.
   
• Wouldn’t you rather pick your way through a few chapters of Stephen Hawking’s breathtaking A Brief History of Time – even if it is hard work – than swallow von Daniken’s facile mixture of disinformation and ignorance? (You just have to ask yourself how many copies of The Third Eye would have sold if Cyril had been obliged to print his real name on the cover!)

So why does the planet swarm with crystal-toting creation scientists, apprehensively glancing skywards lest they be snatched away by aliens? Why don’t people have much or any interest in the universe the way it really is? Why do we find the real world so unappealing that we would rather "learn" someone else’s make believe than find out something real? (Writing this makes me think of those poor, pathetic sods who memorise vast tracts of Lord of the Rings or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.) Does it have something to do with falling standards of education? Is our whole society slipping away from the ethic of understanding through hard study, seduced away by the lure of feeling good and the expectation of instant gratification which seems so ubiquitous nowadays?

Both, I think.

And, being ill-prepared by either our schooling or any subsequent study (and it is hard to imagine how we might design our own course of study without having been prepared for it at school) we neither realise what we are missing nor possess the critical framework to accommodate any real knowledge.

Here is an example: Some character writes in to a magazine claiming that geological dating is based upon circular reasoning. His thesis was that we know Jurassic rocks are Jurassic only because they have Jurassic fossils in them, and the only way we know the fossils are Jurassic fossils is because they occur in Jurassic rocks. (Wrong and wrong – read more.) Maybe he was just seeking an avenue to use the word ‘tautology’ in a proper sentence but let us suppose he was being earnest. This argument is just so trivial; so blindingly obvious. Did the fellow honestly think that the tens of thousands of highly intelligent people who have dedicated their whole professional lives to the study of geology over the past century could possibly have missed anything as grossly simple as this? The guy obviously doesn’t have even the remotest clue, yet – and this is the key point – he thought he did. He believed that the science of geology is so simple, so easy, that some clod like himself, with no knowledge of or inculcation in the discipline, could spot an obvious failure in the underpinning of a whole science. He just assumed it was so trivial that someone with no knowledge could do it.

Another example – a whole class of examples – is the wholesale, societal "shift to the facile," best seen on television. I could go on about 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less) but let’s look instead at just those places where we’d expect standards to be highest, where we see that even the good shows are bad. Discovery Channel-style technology shows have become mere showcases for technological gimmickry; they are often interesting but do nothing to enhance anyone’s understanding of anything. Occasionally, somebody produces a gem of a nature show (almost inevitably focused upon large animals; even David Attenborough’s The Life of Plants made the plants seem like animals by the use of time-lapse photography!) but most episodes, including the multiply awarded local productions from Wild South Productions, comprise little more than an unsystematic jumble of facts. They, too, are mostly just a showcase; this time for the beautiful (and no doubt technically demanding) photography. There is nothing below the surface of these shows. There may be some knowledge, but there is no understanding.

You can acquire knowledge by playing Trivial Pursuit. Understanding comes from being able to place knowledge into a meaningful framework. How fast a cheetah can run might be a good TP question; the animal’s phylogenetic and ecological relationships with other organisms is better biology.

Carl Sagan, speaking of the outrageous aliens-stole-my-child variety of tabloid story, notes that "Such reports persist and proliferate because they sell. And they sell, I think, because there are so many of us who want so badly to be jolted out of our humdrum lives… [Yet] faith [in UFOs or whatever] is clearly not enough for many people. They crave hard evidence, scientific proof. They long for the scientific seal of approval, but are unwilling to put up with the rigorous standards of evidence that impart credibility to that seal" (ibid., p.59).

I don’t know if this explanation – essentially intellectual laziness – speaks more or less highly of people than naivete, but he has a point. Real science, especially the deductive as opposed to the descriptive branches, is intellectually difficult and mastery requires hard work. Usually, mathematics is required. In my experience, even those adults who have studied the subject at university – and too few have – have forgotten most everything they learned of mathematics beyond the age of 14 or so. Most adults can cope with the simple calculations they require to manage their income but only rarely can anyone outside of academia integrate even a simple polynomial, ax² dx say, despite their having practised dozens if not hundreds of examples and passed exams when they were in the sixth form (age ~16). Like any language, if it is not exercised regularly, mathematics is soon forgotten.

The saddest thing of all is that these people seem to have forgotten that they did, once, wield the key to understanding the Universe: Not only have they lost the key, they’ve forgotten they ever held it.

And so we enter a brave new century....

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