Article/Document:
War of the Words: Part 2
Peter Brookesmith, Fortean Times, August 2001
original source | fair use notice
Summary: Belief and disbelief can both become extremes, but why do true-believers and true-disbelievers pursue their mutual hostility with such religious fervour? Some clues can be found in the ways society classifies deviation from perceived and sanctified order.
Belief and disbelief can both become extremes, but why do true-believers and true-disbelievers pursue their mutual hostility with such religious fervour? Some clues can be found in the ways society classifies deviation from perceived and sanctified order. In this concluding part of his study, Peter Brookesmith looks at attitudes to Chance, Uncertainty, Purity and Danger for insight into the clash of two opposing world views. ILLUSTRATIONS BY STEFAN STRATIL.
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There is a factoid to the effect that of all Internet exchanges on anomalies, some 90 per cent consist of abuse. The true figure may be lower or higher, but the advent of the Net has exposed for all to see the degree of emotion that people invest in their allegedly rational positions on either side, and even in the very thinly populated middle ground, of the believer-unbeliever divide. A chosen few have a history of being bumped from one discussion group after another because of their unremitting and remorselessly choleric style. A few others become increasingly agitated in a po-faced and pompous fashion as debates degenerate - as they almost always do - from relative decorum to uninhibited mutual defamation.
Statisticians like to point out that the reason one finds oneself so often in the longest queue at the supermarket checkouts is that, it being the longest queue, you must be more likely to be standing in it than in a shorter one. By analogy, if a huge majority of those discussing anomalies slide rapidly into vitriolic slanging matches, then it seems probable that the chance of having a fine argy-bargy is a major reason they join such discussion groups in the first place. Believers and unbelievers can be wondrously inventive in dressing up their prejudice and invective as loftily principled, rational and dispassionate – as opposed, of course, to the primitive emotionalism, logical fallacies and unscrupulous disregard for the facts demonstrated by their deluded opponents. They do seem to love hating one another.
Additional insight into the ferocity with which extreme believers and disbelievers defend their world view and attack those deemed threatening can be found in Buddhist philosophy. Addiction to the fruits of the ego is ‘attachment’; the ego can become so attached to its view of the world – its opinions, conclusions, perspectives – that to relinquish the associated intellectual positions, it fears, would amount to destroying one’s very identity. So a Buddhist analysis might conclude that the phenomenal rage generated in debates among believers and unbelievers in the realm of anomalistics is the product of a deep threat that the participants feel to their identity. For them, this has become so entangled with a point of view that the individual holding it cannot distinguish between ego and belief.
Cultural ideas of ‘chance’ and ‘purity’ play a big part in the creation of this animosity and its intensity, as both are reflections of fundamental views of the way in which the universe is ordered, ie. what can be included and what excluded, what is approved of and what is not. Let’s look at chance first.
In his (as it happens, sceptical) discussion of grand unified theories, Theories of Everything (1992; pp126–9), Professor John Barrow notes: “One of the curiosities of history is that the now thriving subjects of probability and statistics did not exist before the mid-17th century.” And this strikes him as surprising because these mathematical analyses arose from studying “gambling problems, dice, cards, and all manner of games of chance” – a remarkably late development of intellectual curiosity, given that these occupations have existed worldwide for millennia.
Barrow suggests two reasons for this. In the pre-industrial world, most gambling paraphernalia consisted of bones or irregularly shaped sticks. Observing the behaviour of an irregular ‘die’ over a long period would give its owner inside knowledge of its biases. Even regular dice (our familiar spotted cubes) show biases, which will have been both exaggerated and idiosyncratic before they could be manufactured with any precision. “There is thus,” says Barrow, “no real need for any general theory of such devices; in fact, given that each randomising device would differ from all others there would appear to be no general theory in any case.”
One could go further and suggest that there was a general recognition, even among gamblers, that chance did not affect the dice for, as Barrow points out, random phenomena, such as casting lots, were once commonly regarded as a means of communicating directly with divine powers. The element of chance extracted any human bias from the oracle’s answer. So, says Barrow, “dabbling with random devices was a serious theological business… Moreover, the results are not random… They were not natural phenomena. Rather, they were the answers of God which were not available to them by other forms of revelation.”1
Barrow notes too that in other ancient cultures there is “a ready association of randomness with chaos and darkness.” In these societies, chance “is at root something undesirable” because it is associated with uncertainty and unpredictability and hence with danger. If things are not certain… then there are serious consequences that are readily identifiable with divine punishment.”
Statistical and probability theories arise, then, only in a society that places a premium on rationality and is at least incipiently secular and agnostic. One of the more fascinating elements of Barrow’s book is his tracing of various strands of Western thought that lead to an enterprise like seeking a ‘Theory of Everything’ in physics – and he shows persuasively that they flow directly from the imprint of monotheism. The One God is the ultimate Grand Unified Theory personified.
But what, restless readers will be wondering, has all this to do with belief, disbelief, rage, hatred, and the price of apported fish? Hidden in the mutual believer-unbeliever antagonism is the issue of chance – randomness, uncertainty, the unknown. True-believers characteristically distrust (even detest) established science, with its apparent certainties, its fundamental laws and its sometimes quite hieratic insistence on the virtues of its ‘method’. The true believer has a faith that the laws of nature are not absolute: a faith that God or Nature or the Grand Design knows more than those coldly rational fish in white coats.
Nor do true-believers embrace randomness; if they did, fewer of them would find it necessary to include a denial of Darwinism in their spectrum of sentiments.2 Rather, their trust is analogous to the ancients’ faith in casting lots – that humanity does not (may never, perhaps cannot) know everything there is to know about the Universe. This essentially religious instinct is pitted against a caricature of science as both Know-All and Know-Nothing. It is a caricature, because without a constant recognition of ignorance and curiosity about the unknown there would be no real-life science at all.
The undeclared absolutism of True Belief seems unable to accommodate the messiness of actual science. The true-believers’ aversion to this image of science is comprehensible enough as a rage against arrogance, smugness, and perhaps especially hubris – the ultimate sin of Dr Faustus in his pact with Satan; hence their fury at those they call sceptics and debunkers. It may also be seen as a revulsion against the scientistic pretence that the scientific view is the only adequate approach to all phenomena. Scientism would render everything unquantifiably experiential – an adolescent crush or the closing chorus of Die Meistersinger – into vacuous mensurations. Scientism is science without its creativity, curiosity, or adventures into the unknown; this is science as dead language, its inert grammar the laws of nature in rigor mortis.
Whether unbelievers, deniers and pseudo-debunkers as a class are more scientistic than scientific is a moot point. True sceptic Michael D Sofka refers to the prejudice that “belief in a deity is incompatible with the truly sceptical mind.” 3 Like miracles, abduction by aliens, the spontaneous conflagration of live humans, falls of fish, marine monsters, weird patterns in crops and all the rest of the fortean catalogue are random, superficially inexplicable events. They must strike the scientistic mind with terror in the same way that chance events brought to some pre-industrial societies. They are “damned phenomena” precisely because they are unexpected, break the rules and threaten the equilibrium of the known Universe.
Our second diversion – into muck and filth – now begins. In her great study Purity and Danger,4 anthropologist Mary Douglas produced a ground-breaking analysis of both ritual and secular ideas of purity, cleanliness, impurity, and dirt. Douglas first observed that anthropologists’ understanding of pollution in other cultures had been heavily distorted by inappropriate modern Western notions of medical pathogenicity and hygiene. She then trawled a range of cultures to conclude that their concepts of impurity were rooted less in a regard for public health than in a concern for order, taxonomy, and categorisation.
“Where there is dirt there is system,” Douglas writes. “Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. [..] We can recognise in our own notions of dirt that we are using a kind of omnibus compendium which includes all the rejected elements of ordered systems. It is a relative idea. Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining-table; food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom... similarly, out-door things in-doors; upstairs things downstairs… and so on. In short, our pollution behaviour is the reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications.” (p48)
Douglas notes that anomalies are dealt with in a variety of ways by both individuals or cultures. Redefining an event is one strategy. “So, the Nuer treat monstrous births as baby hippopotamuses, accidentally born to humans and, with this labelling, the appropriate action is clear. They lay them gently in the river where they belong.” Physical sanctions are another: “If [night-crowing cocks’] necks are promptly wrung, they do not live to contradict the definition of a cock as a bird that crows at dawn.” In some situations and societies, avoiding anomalies “affirms and strengthens the definitions to which they do not conform.”
Anomalies may be labelled dangerous, which is “one way of putting a subject above dispute,” so strengthening social bonds. Or anomalies may be incorporated into ritual, so that “by using symbols of anomaly, [it] can incorporate evil and death along with life and goodness, into a single, grand, unifying pattern.” (pp52–53)
Douglas uses the insight that concepts of pollution are recognitions of anomalies to show (pp54–72) that the animals forbidden as food are, in the eyes of the ancient Hebrews, in some way imperfect, and therefore neither whole nor conducive to holiness. Particularly, their ‘imperfection’ lies in the way their attributes are confusing. Thus, for example, shellfish are not ‘proper’ fish: they have neither scales nor fins, and seem to be like land animals living in the wrong element. The weasel, mouse, and crocodile appear to have hands, not feet, yet go on all fours. This is confusion. Similarly, an accurate translation of the passage forbidding bestiality ends “it is confusion” (Hebrew: tebhel), not “perversion” as the Authorised version renders it. Unclean animals are all manifestations in some way of disorder.
There is, then, an internally consistent logic to the Jewish dietary laws which has nothing to do with hygiene, allegory, or ethics, but much to do with aligning the observant with what is holy and shunning what is not. “By rules of avoidance,” writes Douglas, “holiness was given a physical expression in every encounter with the animal kingdom and at every meal.”
Which brings us back to anomalous phenomena and those who deny their authenticity. The true-blue unbeliever, who reacts to a proclamation that America is rushing “headlong into fantasy” by scribbling a cheque to CSICOP – see panel below – would appear to see true believers in forteana as distinctly unholy in this ancient sense. And the objects of their belief are damned (polluted) for being disordered – for existing, or for being said to exist, in the interstices and twilight zones of a world that, because it is amenable to rational (orderly) enquiry, has been deemed as, itself, rational and orderly.
A cursory glance at any newspaper would indicate otherwise, and most of the non-believing fraternity (notably scientists) not only acknowledge the relative disarray of reality but ignore, rather than become incensed at, the putative presence of weird goings-on and their aficionados. For true unbelievers, tolerance is not enough; for them, everything not forbidden is compulsory. 5
Where, if anywhere, do true-believers fit into Douglas’s scheme? There are people who, presented with almost any kind of prick, can’t resist kicking against it. But many true-believers have an air of religious fervour about them that does not suggest that the type is congenitally heretical or rebellious. Rather, one might see true-believers as perceiving a different kind of order in the cosmos from unbelievers; if so, their notions of purity and danger will be different too.
True Belief doesn’t readily embrace randomness – as the believer’s characteristic aversion to Darwinism illustrates – except perhaps when misunderstandings of quantum mechanics spuriously underpin claims of extra-sensory perception. In the cosmos of True Belief, everything is imbued with purpose; thus we have aliens descending to interbreed with us and overrun the planet; crop circles are encrypted geometrical messages from the goddess Gaia, or from distant stars, or the collective unconscious; extra-sensory perceptions and hauntings are converted into ‘proofs’ of life after death. No anomaly lacks significance. Hence, one may surmise, the ease with which fortean extremists are seduced by conspiracy theories, whether the ostensible issue is remote viewing, alien spacecraft, or patterns in cornfields.
In essence, this insistence on meaning – often hidden – is a sacralisation of anomalies. As noted, many true-believers clearly detest established science, yet find it necessary to proclaim that they themselves adhere to scientific principles, and they habitually execrate sceptics and unbelievers for preaching the scientific method but omitting to apply it. Some confusion, surely? Not if one views True Belief as a reaction against scientific rationalism and, as such, a mirror image of it.
As long ago as 1969, John Rimmer wrote: “Like all effective magic the UFO is a perversion of the orthodoxy rather than something totally different from it. It is the spacecraft of the scientist, but a spacecraft that does strange and irrational things: the occupants although weird and unearthly apparently wear spacesuits not so different from the ones worn by those symbols of scientific progress, the astronauts. The UFO parodies the developments of science. Its essentially unscientific nature can be seen in the strange, almost obsessive interest it holds for scientists who are most vehement in denying its existence… One is reminded of atheists who spend a disproportionate amount of time disproving the existence of the devil.”
Rimmer continues: “Concurrent with increasing scientific development and technological advances, there is a vast opposing, populist emotion. It is little wonder… that the UFO is being adopted by many as a sort of symbol of the neo-Luddite cause. It is the last refuge of the old magic. It is seen, literally and metaphorically, as the Holy Grail, unattainable, unimaginably remote, yet always near enough to lead us on, in a hopeless chase.” (See panel below.)
Significantly, in light of Mary Douglas’s thesis, Rimmer speculated that: “Perhaps in its permanent inaccessibility [the UFO] is a symbol of purity. In a world violated and sullied by radiation, smoke, fumes, the excrement of a scientific society, the UFO is almost a Virgin image of our time. Consider the so-called occupants of these craft. What are they but the dwarfs and elves, the pastoral inhabitants of unsullied hedgerow… and the dark northern forests that we have left behind… They come now from the UFOs, reminding us of our rural background. The hippie mystic sees the UFO as the Grail above Glastonbury; the French farmer sees the ‘occupants’ as small grotesque creatures of tree-root and woodland glade; the American factory worker sees the Men in Black as a re-creation of a romantic Chicago gangsterdom that never was (even their cars are from the past). Each perceives a phenomenon that is a part of their past, a movement against the Establishment’s glorification of scientific progress.”
In a belief system of this sort, the precision, detachment, laws, and rationality of science seem to be a kind of disorder, a pollution of innocence and nostalgia and, even, a pollution of nature. The theme is picked up and amplified in both the gnomic and the symbolic messages of ufonauts to abductees. Linda Cortile is incensed by a dead fish, the victim of industrial pollution. David Jacobs’s abductees are contaminated with mysterious pregnancies and by being pawns in a hybrid-breeding programme, conducted by impersonal, super-scientific aliens who will ultimately inherit and defile the planet. Metaphorically, this is the same message conveyed by War of the Worlds and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The contactees of the 1950s proffered a similar underlying sentiment, but the sense was not then presented through symbolic inversions and dissociations; in those days aliens were angelic, and humanity retained some bungling charge of its own destiny.
The believers’ universe is always defined – as in the pre-industrial societies Mary Douglas adduces – by what it is not… by what threatens it. To the True Believer, then, a ‘pure’ and therefore ordered and orderly universe is one free of science and, by extension, free of analytical logic too. The position is as untenable as the stance of scientism. As Douglas notes (p191): “The quest for purity is pursued by rejection. [..] Purity is the enemy of change, of ambiguity and compromise.”
The internal contradictions in True Belief result in parodistic, and parasitic, mirrorings of science. They are finely illustrated not only by ufologists’ love/hate affair with science but also in the quest for laboratory evidence of psi – such as the attempt by engineer Ronald Pearson not just to ‘prove’ the survival of life after death, but to do so with formulæ that, at the same time, supposedly oust Einstein’s relativity theories.
In the purer manifestations of True Belief, a kind of intelligent visceralism is offered in place of objectivity. For Michael Glickman, “the fundamental lesson” of the crop circles is to “abandon consensus wisdom, which is in fact consensus lunacy, and to accept the intuitions and discernments of our own hearts.” But that way madness also lies: witness the flypaper paranoia of David Icke, or the comprehensive conspiracy brew of Bruce Alan Walton in The Dulce Book.6
The seething indignation with which believers attack the disdain of unbelievers – and vice-versa – springs from a clash of perceptual orders. Each side is affirming the structure, definition, and meaning of its own construction of reality through negative, hostile and excluded terms emanating from the other side. And so, regardless of pleas to “work together” from a few scattered peacemakers who only wish to “seek the truth”, the unruly, often vicious ‘debates’ between different camps of anomalists will go on. And on. That is the way of their worlds.
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Inset:
REASON UNDER SIEGE?
A hallmark of true believers in the paranormal is an insistence that their critics lack “open minds”, while they themselves refuse to countenance criticism. They also characterise established science as a temple of closed-minded prejudice against the truth as they have discovered it. True unbelievers, often erroneously called debunkers, are of course capable of being equally well-corked mentally.
Here, for instance, is CSICOP parading itself as a rare and endangered bastion against the forces of unreason that skulk all about us: “As America seemingly rushes headlong into fantasy, our achievements may seem modest. But imagine if CSICOP never existed! Scary, but true: CSICOP may be one of the last bulwarks against a future where children will grow up believing that they’re alien transplants – that prayers sick people don’t even know about can heal them – or that folks wielding forked sticks can find water underground.”
To near-universal lack of amazement, the next sentence in their 1996 promotional flyer read: “To keep up the battle for rationality, I must ask you to make your most generous gift to CSICOP today.”
In Myths of Skepticism, critical sceptic Michael D Sofka considers this kind of claim under the heading “Myth #16: Skeptics are defending science and reason from a rising tide of irrationality: Corollary: There is a rising tide of irrationality.” This is one of my favourites. It is in almost every CSICOP fund-raising request, it is repeated in Skeptical Inquirer and taken as something of a matter of faith. And, faith is what it is, because, so far, I can find no evidence of an increase in irrationality or superstition. Even the polls published over the years in Skeptical Inquirer indicate, at most, a shift in emphasis as one belief replaces another in the popular imagination.
On the whole, I suspect that irrationality, belief, and credulity are at about the same level as they have always been, just distributed in different ways. I further suspect that the term used to describe the belief of others has more to do with ‘how new’ versus ‘how established’ that belief is in society. When these sceptics attack New Agers, I always have this uncomfortable feeling that their religion is being singled out. Somebody makes a testable health claim? Ok, test it! Somebody professes belief in a one-ness of life? Let them get on with their own life, and find another hobby for yourself.
End of Inset
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Inset:
UFOS & MAGIC
Some years ago, John Rimmer wrote: “There is nowhere on the face of the earth and never has been, any society that has existed without magic. We are, in Europe, America and some other technologically advanced nations, very close to this situation. We have driven magic underground, but we have not eliminated it. It may be a dangerous thing if we do. The UFO is a fairly pleasant, often beautiful, rarely malignant piece of magic, far preferable to the violence and ugliness of some other magical survivals in our age.” (‘The UFO As An Anti-Scientific Symbol’, Merseyside UFO Bulletin, vol 2, no 4, July/August 1969)7
That article, of course, was written before UFOs had turned into black triangles and their occupants were reported as raping and torturing innocent citizens. Nonetheless, the ‘craft’ still perform ærobatics and the Greys perform magic, floating abductees through walls, reading their minds, and using them as breeding tanks. Rimmer’s insight compares interestingly with this from Ed Bullard: “The meaning of a narrative or custom lies only partially in the item itself. It reveals its full meaning only when viewed amid the web of relationships associating the item with the rest of culture. In this spirit the study of folklore has become the study of whole cultural systems as they intersect with folklore items or activities. [..] A folklorist using this revised concept is not only able to accommodate UFOs, but has good reason to welcome them. UFO reports count among the most common and widespread narratives of extraordinary experience active in the modern world. They update the legend of the supernatural encounter by replacing ghosts and fairies with visiting aliens, and usurp its functions by continuing an age-old relationship between humans and superhuman beings. Substitution of a super-scientific technology for magic restores the credibility of the fantastic in a secular age with little faith in things magical. The broader ties between UFO reports and beliefs about alien visitation, especially aliens as saviours and agents of change in human culture, expand UFOs to mythical proportions and challenge the fullest capabilities of folklore scholarship. These folkloric dimensions remain valid whatever the actual nature of UFOs may be. Fact or fantasy, they have provoked an extensive cultural response...” (‘Folkloric Dimensions of the UFO Phenomenon’ in Journal of UFO Studies no 3 (1991), 1–57.)
In believer vs unbeliever exchanges, nothing changed much between July 1969. when Rimmer published his article, and the time he posted his comments, quoted earlier, on ‘UFO UpDates’ in January 2001. The latter strikingly echo the former. Which tends to bear out Bullard’s analysis.
End of Inset
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A hallmark of true believers in the paranormal is an insistence that their critics lack “open minds”, while they themselves refuse to countenance criticism. They also characterise established science as a temple of closed-minded prejudice against the truth as they have discovered it. True unbelievers, often erroneously called debunkers, are of course capable of being equally well-corked mentally.
Here, for instance, is CSICOP parading itself as a rare and endangered bastion against the forces of unreason that skulk all about us: “As America seemingly rushes headlong into fantasy, our achievements may seem modest. But imagine if CSICOP never existed! Scary, but true: CSICOP may be one of the last bulwarks against a future where children will grow up believing that they’re alien transplants – that prayers sick people don’t even know about can heal them – or that folks wielding forked sticks can find water underground.”
To near-universal lack of amazement, the next sentence in their 1996 promotional flyer read: “To keep up the battle for rationality, I must ask you to make your most generous gift to CSICOP today.”
In Myths of Skepticism, critical sceptic Michael D Sofka considers this kind of claim under the heading “Myth #16: Skeptics are defending science and reason from a rising tide of irrationality: Corollary: There is a rising tide of irrationality.” This is one of my favourites. It is in almost every CSICOP fund-raising request, it is repeated in Skeptical Inquirer and taken as something of a matter of faith. And, faith is what it is, because, so far, I can find no evidence of an increase in irrationality or superstition. Even the polls published over the years in Skeptical Inquirer indicate, at most, a shift in emphasis as one belief replaces another in the popular imagination.
On the whole, I suspect that irrationality, belief, and credulity are at about the same level as they have always been, just distributed in different ways. I further suspect that the term used to describe the belief of others has more to do with ‘how new’ versus ‘how established’ that belief is in society. When these sceptics attack New Agers, I always have this uncomfortable feeling that their religion is being singled out. Somebody makes a testable health claim? Ok, test it! Somebody professes belief in a one-ness of life? Let them get on with their own life, and find another hobby for yourself.
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