My mother enjoys these shows on television which purport to show hauntings and the paranormal. I do too, really, owing to my own experience “seeing a UFO” when I was much younger. I write that in quotes now because other circumstantial evidence has led me to conclude that I probably dreamed the whole thing (I was in bed at the time, etc.), but I can’t really dismiss all UFO sightings, ghost sightings, cryptozoological encounters, and the like as similar delusions. Making a sweeping assumption that that many people are all bonkers is to start saying that a significant percentage of the population literally doesn’t know what reality is…that’s when you enter territory where “reality” as you yourself see it might need to be redefined.
In any case, Mom gave my lovely wife a book called Science and the Paranormal, which, she must have thought, would give a sympathetic treatment to the latter half of the subject. (My favorite TV show on the subject is Ghost Hunters, which Mom likes though she finds it irritating that they end up debunking so many of the “ghosts” in their investigations…which is one of the very reasons that my wife and I like it. We like singing the theme from “Casper, the Friendly Ghost” while she complains at the TV.) Alas, the book is written by CSICOP, and has many of its luminaries involved in the chapters (Isaac Asimov, Martin Gardner, Carl Sagan, Philip Klass, James Randi, and so on). efbq was a bit disappointed, but hopeful that since this was written long enough ago that they were still scientific; unbeknownst to us but in a greatly illustrative fashion, as of about a year ago, CSICOP changed their name, ostensibly to remove “Paranormal” from it, but which also had the effect, in a bit of irony lost completely on the organization, of removing “Scientific” from it as well.
Previously, CSICOP and its fellows and similar skeptics gave birth to a movement which was extremely timely and welcome. Claims of the paranormal were encroaching on legitimate scientific inquiry, and too many people were too ignorant to know the difference. In some sense, that continues today – I made mention of it recently in this blog as it pertains to the field of statistics. At that time, I found the effort slightly annoying, as they were killjoys to those of us who knew better anyway, and some of them were crashing bores as writers, but all in all, they practiced good science at the very least. That is, they knew what science was and what it wasn’t, and they didn’t attempt to use science to “prove” something that it wasn’t meant to do. Sometimes they evinced some annoyance themselves when this was the case – Sagan is a good example – but they did stick to their guns.
Unfortunately, that didn’t last long. Most of these guys knew science and that was all, and when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It became a simple flip-side to the intelligent designists of religion and the “true believers” of the paranormal: I have the “theory of everything”, and if your thing doesn’t fit, then you are wrong. If music opens worlds of consciousness to you…if the ruins of Chernobyl connote to you the folly of man…if you speak to God…if you love someone…then sorry, my little box doesn’t measure that. It doesn’t exist. Robert Anton Wilson correctly nailed this phenomenon on the head with the coinage “fundamentalist humanism”.
It’s gotten worse of late, much worse. Scientific skepticism has entered the Richard Dawkins Phase (link prolly NSFW) of its existence, where any yutz with a lab coat can pontificate on any subject imaginable because He Has ScienceTM. Attempts to discuss matters of philosophical, ethical, or spiritual import with such folks – or indeed, attempts to argue matters of scientific merit that originate beyond the university walls or journal pages of their sheltered existence – are met with the echoing clang of the gates of their mind closing, familiar to any who has attempted to engage a fundamentalist in any new thing or exercise.
Unfortunately, I’m being called away to parental duties, and I can’t think of a really decent way to conclude this, except:
- Please don’t do this,
- This might end up inspiring a rule on this blog,
- If it does, I will not become Cory Doctorow or Teresa Hayden or the rest of the BoingBoing Censorship Guild,
- The book looks kinda cool, but I don’t know if I’m going to read it or not.
Mahalo.
Filed under: science | Tagged: general weirdness, ghosts, science, scientists, the paranormal, TV | 6 Comments »
The Hidden Message 