By Max Dunbar.
Why Statues Weep: The Best of The Skeptic, ed. Wendy M Grossman and Christopher C French, The Philosophy Press 2010
In the British character hard-headed pragmatism is entwined with a kind of madness. 75,000 of us phone psychic hotlines on a monthly basis. Another 150,000 claim to have psychic powers themselves. Thirty per cent of our students believe in creationism or intelligent design. Our newspapers are full of conspiracy theories and woo coverage – the Daily Mail, in Ben Goldacre’s words, has ‘an ongoing ontological program to divide all inanimate objects into ones that will either cause or cure cancer.’ Those same newspapers run astrology columns and people take them seriously. A Mirror sub, bored out of his mind on star duty, amused himself by writing an apocalyptic forecast. The switchboards lit up, and the man was fired.
Sceptics ask questions like: Why do ghosts always appear in Victorian costume? Why was no one ever preincarnated as a Roman peasant? And if you can see the future, why haven’t you won the lottery? Yet this anthology of pieces for The Skeptic magazine, remarkable as it is, represents a history of failure. We hear no more about crop circles, the Turin Shroud, false memory syndrome and the Loch Ness Monster, but homeopathy, astrology, 9/11 and Holocaust conspiracy theories are going strong despite being discredited over and over again. Indeed, recent research shows that having a personal myth debunked is likely to make us believe the delusion all the more. It is a mental abnormality affecting millions of us, and there is no telling where it will end.
Fashionable nonsense does no harm to our social status because everyone likes to think of themselves as open-minded. Saying that ‘there may be something’ in alternative medicine is more attractive than going: ‘No, this is bullshit, and here’s why.’ Give a dog a good name and it’s harder to lose than a bad one. A tolerance for woo is still seen as a mark of the open mind even though woo mythology closes more doors than it opens (astrology divides millions of human beings into twelve basic personality types). And quack merchants still retain an aura of spiritual benevolence despite the fact that, like Matthias Rath and Gillian McKeith, they are capable of being as bullying, grasping and vainglorious as the lowest corporate running dogs.
Psychologists Richard Wiseman and Emma Greening set up an undercover operation to test psychic abilities. They got an actor to approach five psychics claiming to seek advice for emotional problems. You would expect the results to be laughable. They were disturbing. None of the psychics advised the actor to get professional help despite the fact that she broke down in three of the consultations. Several psychics suggested to the actor that a friend or family member had laid a curse on her. One psychic advised ‘that the actress buy some white underwear and return in a couple of days for a herbal bath.’ Wiseman found that ‘each and every psychic suggested that they alone could solve the client’s problem, and asked between £400 and £900 for their services.’ It goes without saying that not one psychic realised that the actor’s problems were fiction and that the consultation was being covertly filmed.
The anthology contains a fascinating piece on cold reading, the psychic’s art of eliciting information from a subject that is fed back as revelation. South Park ran an episode where Stan tries to expose the methods of psychic fraud John Edward. Here he is pretending to communicate with the dead:
Stan: Okay, watch, Kyle. Uh, it’s an older man, someone very close to you.
Woman 4: My father?
Stan: Does this month, November, hold a special significance?
Woman 4: [gasps] My birthday’s in November!
Stan: Right, because he’s saying, ‘Tell her ‘Happy Brithday.’
Woman 4: Oh my God.
Stan: See, Kyle? I just started with something really vague. I chose an older man because I’m betting that, based on this woman’s age, her father is most likely dead. But if her father wasn’t dead, I could still say it was some other older man.
Man 2: Well then how’d you know her birthday was in November?
Stan: I didn’t. I just asked her if November meant anything. Her father could have died in November, or Thanksgiving could have been really special for them. But I go with the birthday and validate it now, as if I knew, by saying ‘He wishes you a Happy Birthday.’
Woman 4: [gasps] What else does he say?
Stan: Okay, I’ll just use an old standard. He saying ‘the money. Stop worrying about the money.’
Woman 4: [gasps] Oh my God! My sister and I have been fighting over his inheritance.
Woman 3: That’s amazing.
Stan: No it isn’t! When a father dies, inheritance is usually an issue, and money is something everyone worries about.
Low-level meanness and exploitation run through Why Statues Weep in a dirty stream. More worrying is the continued public sector financing of worthless mysticism. We still fund homeopathy on the NHS, police forces consult psychics in serious cases, and this year a company director was arrested for selling bomb detectors to Iraq’s security forces that consisted ‘of little more than a telescopic antenna on a molded plastic handle’ and were supposed to ‘detect explosives in the same way as a dowsing rod finds water.’ (The director admitted that ‘One of the problems we have is that the machine does look a little primitive. We are working on a new model that has flashing lights.’)
And of course no vista of superstition or creation myth contains even a fraction of the wonder inherent in, say, the process of grapes into wine, or the workings of the human eye. This is why so many accomplished magicians – James Randi, Penn and Teller, Paul Daniels, Derren Brown – are also convinced sceptics: like scientists, they make their living pushing the boundaries of the possible, and know on some level that it’s all magic. As Daniels says:
I think that because of bad education – capital B-A-D – people have a need for mysticism; they’re missing out on the simple fact that what you are is amazing; what you are is wonderful. What you are… the most developed animal of all in terms of thinking, and movement, and sense – and yet they look for mysticism, and that just drives me up the wall.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals. He is reviews editor of 3:AM.
