Revenge of the Nerds

National Review, July 28, 1996 

BUFFALO Midsummer. A thousand years ago our ancestors danced around bonfires and, doubtless, slaughtered a maiden or two. These days we like to think we have moved on. True, the scandinavians still throw a good Midsommar, but even there virgins are not sacrificed, at least in the conventional sense of the word. Progress, schmogress. For all our science we still live, as Carl Sagan puts it, in a demon-haunted world. Naturally, there have been changes. The nearest soothsayer is only a 900 line away. Of course we no longer think that ghouls will steal our offspring--but give those creatures space ships and we will believe they are abducting children, carrying out ghastly experiments, and, for all we know, spoiling the crops. Scratch away our sophisticated veneer, and the New Age very quickly goes dark.

All is not lost, however. The epoch of Shirley Maclaine has its opponents, and one thousand of them recently gathered outside Buffalo. The occasion was the first World Skeptics Congress, a four-day-long-discussion of "Science in the Age of (Mis)Information" sponsored by CSICOP—the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal. CSICOP does what its name would suggest. Over the past twenty years it has encouraged the exposure of a sorry sequence of spurious spacemen, cranks, and charlatans. CSlCOP's fascinating magazine. Skeptical Inquirer, sells around 50,000 copies across the world, but none, probably, in any supermarkets. Much of the Congress covered familiar ground. Aliens, junk medicine, and psychic detectives all took their knocks, Patriots will be glad to know that this nonsense is not just an American problem. China seems obsessed by Pseudo-Qigong (don't ask), but, hey, that's a country with fifty million Communists, and they will believe anything. Perhaps the Chinese should turn to India, to the monomial Premanand, for help. Confusingly, Premanand's style was high guru (flowing white hair, beard, orange clothing) but his message was not. The fakirs are fakers, and in an entertaining talk Premanand demonstrated just how they do it.

This would not have been news to Skepticism's stars, many of whom were on display. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould spoke, preceded by a Darwin impersonator. Magician James ''the Amazing" Randi was on hand, outwardly unscarred by years of litigation with Uri Geller. In between drags on, appropriately enough in this anti-witchcraft crowd, a Salem, Aviation Week and Space Technology's Philip Klass was signing copies of his UFOeuvre. Full refunds ("not just the royalty") were promised in the event of a proved landing.

More surprising was the appearance of X-Files creator Chris Carter as a guest speaker. With his compelling stories of the occult and the alien, often filmed in a pseudo-documentary style, Mr. Carter might have expected a rough ride. He need not have worried. The Skeptics were a pushover, clever to be sure, but with more than a hint, shall we say, of the school chess club about them. They never stood a chance against the sly cool of Chris Carter, media wizard and surfer. Besides, most were fans, shocked only when their guest revealed that he had never watched an entire episode of Star Trek.

Anyway, The X-Files is fiction, nothing more. Much more serious, in the view of the Congress, was media response to paranormal "facts." The wildest claims are accepted at face value, turned into documentaries, and shown on prime time. A scientist may be asked to comment, but for about thirty-seconds, most of which ends up on the cutting-room floor (this may sound familiar to conservatives). In part, this is inevitable. The paranormal is fun. An alien autopsy is great TV, rather more exciting than four chemists gathered round a Bunsen burner. ''What we need," said one speaker, 'is LA Science." He should not hold his breath.

Some knew what to blame: Commercialism, or at least its alleged surrogate on earth. Mention of the name Murdoch generated slightly forced laughter. Murdoch the bringer of joy, the destroyer of words. Scientific types, the skeptics see themselves as high-minded, spelling-bee sorts of people who still give money to NPR. TV was meant to be the great educator: McNeil, not Oprah; Kunta Kinte, not Beavis. Instead, ran the argument, commercial pressures have led to a debased medium, serving only to fuel the prejudices and superstitions of a degenerate mob.

It's a neat explanation, but it is only part of the story. Intellectually, after all, the mob has always been in poor shape. That's why it is the mob. What has changed is the attitude of the opinion-forming classes. Temple University professor John Paulos highlighted part of the problem. The Kaczynski-haired Paulos is, as the title of his most recent work suggests, a mathematician [who] reads the newspaper and, as his acerbically insightful talk made clear, he is not impressed. Numbers are bandied about, he says, but with little understanding even in the media's more upmarket corners. It is not difficult to agree. All too often Right Data are replaced with numerical assertions that are left unchallenged and unanalyzed by a press too slovenly, innumerate, or biased to care.

To the Skeptics, an honest bunch looking for objective, critical thought, this must be anathema. The Joe Fridays of philosophy, all they really want is the facts. Instead they find themselves in a subjective, post-modern world. In the past their fight was straightforward and pleasantly elitist, the enemies trailer-park science and bayou religion. Now the problem is among their own, within the intelligentsia and the academy. History has been abolished, to be replaced by the study of alternative myths, while science itself is suspect, a product, allegedly, of white male power.

Ironically, much of this rubbish comes from the Left, once a reliable source of support for Skeptics, particularly on religious matters. Skeptics, to say, the least, arc unlikely to be great churchgoers, and there was a time when that could imply a sort of leftism. No immortality—except for the Rosenbergs. CSICOP itself has close ties to CODESH (the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism), an interweaving visible even at the Congress's bookstall. The alien and the paranormal were on display, but so were the great thinkers (Voltaire, Darwin, Kevorkian), the Bad News Bible, The Trouble with Christmas and, most shockingly of all. Lessons of the Locker Room: The Myth of School Sports. Is nothing sacred?

Not much, probably, to many of the Congressgoers. But should that imply a liberal tilt? In an era when the First Lady communes with the dead, conventional political afllliations can truly be said to be breaking down. When what one speaker described as "preposterism" rules, the rationalist can no longer rely on traditional allies. True, the Congress felt vaguely liberal. Naturally enough, the Religious Right took a pounding, and, at a guess, most attendees would still vote Democratic, if a little uneasily. The voice of the Old Left could still be heard in some of the speeches and in a feeble anti-Rush Limbaugh joke or two, but it was fading away, just (to take Matthew Arnold somewhat out of context) another pan of liberalism's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar."

Thirty years ago the stupidities of the Sixties pushed many social scientists into neo-conservatism. Today's junk intellectuals with their crystals and their shamans, their ludicrous universities and their "politics of meaning,'' may do the same for the skeptical and the scientific. Rationalism can then complete its reconnection with the thought of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, a journey which must take it rightward, if never to Ralph Reed. This should be welcomed. Skeptics may be an ornery lot, but their search for that objective truth is somehow very American. Indeed, it is as American as the apple pie that Eve never baked.