TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041392/0413640.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 6KB | 124 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 80

Help Stamp Out Absurd Beliefs


By James Randi

[James Randi, a magician, lecturer and skeptic, is best known
for debunking claims made by purveyors of the paranormal.]


     As an investigator of unusual claims, I'm accustomed to
being confronted with incredible examples of medieval thinking
in the 20th century. Everywhere we look, we find antiscientific
bias and belief in the unbelievable -- from demons causing
susceptible serial killers to act up to researchers who find
top-secret code words in George Bush's speeches when they are
played backward, leading them to the conclusion that the
President and others thereby unconsciously reveal this
information. Thousands of Americans think bacteria do not cause
disease, and are convinced that death is an aberration; they are
known as Christian Scientists.

     Local police departments all over the U.S. regularly
consult clairvoyants, who they feel give them supernatural clues
in tough cases. In Washington weekly parties of goggle-eyed
believers sit about caressing spoons so that their mind power
can cause the silverware to bend, paying $30 for half an hour
of this mind-expansion instruction. Late-night TV viewers can
call a 900 number to be advised on their future -- for a price
-- by soothsayers whom they will meet only by telephone,
introduced by Israeli "superpsychic" Uri Geller. Blissful
devotees of meditation techniques sit for endless hours in yogic
positions in ashrams, bouncing about on mattresses and trying
to fly with mental power. With my experiences of these and
hundreds of other incredible examples of human credulity, the
notion of foreign agents' playing presidential speeches backward
is hardly surprising.

     The scorecard for the crazies is not very impressive.
"Police psychics" have been investigated scientifically and
found to be of absolutely no use; in fact, they impede
investigations. Yet they flourish, are consulted by law officers
and promoted lavishly in the press. Spoons vigorously stroked
all the way to a high polish don't deform unless a little actual
physical bending is applied, but that fact doesn't interfere
with the parties taking place in Washington. The "flyers" of
transcendental meditation spend $5,000 and up to learn how to
bounce around on a rubber mattress, but they never get airborne.
No amount of evidence against any transcendental claims will
dampen the fervor of the believers.

     We in the U.S. are not alone in our credulity. In China a
large percentage of the public visits "Qi Gong" hospitals for
diagnosis and treatment by a mystic who never touches them; he
merely waves his hands about. If a patient is in a remote
location and cannot visit an expert in person, he merely mails
a slip of paper with his name written on it, and the
practitioner performs both the diagnosis and the cure -- an
exotic hand-and-body dance designed to "re-establish the balance
of yin and yang" -- from any distance away. Thousands of
visitors pour into the Philippine Islands to have local
sleight-of-hand artists apparently dip bare-handed into their
body to remove cancerous tumors. They dip into their bank
accounts rather dramatically too.

     Currently, German science is agog with its exciting
discovery of "E rays," which are said to come from deep within
the earth and cause cancer and which cannot be detected by any
known scientific instrument. Fortunately, they can be sensed by
a dowser carrying a forked willow stick. The trusting viewer in
what was the Soviet Union places a bottle of water atop his TV
set every morning so that a faith healer can "charge" the
contents with curative power via Channel 6. In Finland and
Sweden the private, expensive and government-accredited Rudolf
Steiner schools teach children to cast horoscopes and believe
that sprites inhabit trees and rocks.

     Why are the populaces of every culture so eagerly
embracing claptrap that should have been left behind with the
superstitious and emotional burdens that brought about the Dark
Ages? The reason is to be found in the uncritical acceptance and
promotion of these notions by the media, prominent personalities
and government agencies.

     Those Washington spoon-bending parties are regularly
attended by top brass from the Pentagon. The German government
paid DM 400,000 (about $250,000) in 1990 to hire dowsers to scan
federal offices and hospitals so that desks and beds could be
relocated out of the path of the deadly E rays that authorities
have accepted as real. Our own Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode
Island, chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee,
has urged government funding for supernatural research, fearful
that Russian scientists might be ahead of the U.S. in paranormal
matters. Until recently, Pell retained a special assistant with
top-secret security clearance who devoted himself solely to such
research, for a paycheck of $49,000 a year. And, can we ever
forget, a U.S. President and his First Lady arranged even their
official schedules on the advice of an astrologer in San
Francisco? Even TIME magazine sometimes slips into the trap, as
it did in a recent cover story on alternative medicine when it
included the absurdity of "crystal healing" as a possible
medical remedy.

     Acceptance of nonsense as a harmless aberration can be
dangerous to us. We live in a society that is enlarging the
boundaries of knowledge at an unprecedented rate, and we cannot
keep up with much more than a small portion of what is made
available to us. To mix our data input with childish notions of
magic and fantasy is to cripple our perception of the world
around us. We must reach for the truth, not for the ghosts of
dead absurdities.

     At the risk of being unbearably realistic, I must tell you
that Elvis is really dead, the sky is not falling, the earth is
not flat, and the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves.