Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [42]
Since the time of the Greeks, skepticism (in its various incarnations) has evolved along with other epistemologies and their accompanying social activists. The Enlightenment, on one level, was a century-long skeptical movement, for there were no beliefs or institutions that did not come under the critical scrutiny of such thinkers as Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Locke, Jefferson, and many others. Immanuel Kant in Germany and David Hume in Scotland were skeptics’ skeptics in an age of skepticism, and their influence continues unabated to this day (at least in academic philosophy and skepticism). Closer to our time, Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley were skeptics par excellence, not only for the revolution they launched and carried on (respectively) against the dogma of creationism, but also for their stand against the burgeoning spiritualism movement that was sweeping across America, England, and the Continent. Although Darwin was quiet about his spiritual skepticism and worked behind the scenes, Huxley railed publicly against the movement, bemoaning it in one of the great one-liners in the history of skepticism: “Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a ‘medium’ hired at a guinea a séance.” In the twentieth century Bertrand Russell and Harry Houdini stand out as representatives of skeptical thinkers and doers (respectively) of the first half, and skepticism in the second half of the century was marked by Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, launching what we think of today as “the skeptics.”
No movement or institution leaps into existence out of a sociohistorical vacuum, spontaneously erupting like a universe out of a quantum foam fluctuation, but we have to start a historical sequence somewhere, so I date the modern skeptical movement to 1950 with the publication of an essay by Martin Gardner in the Antioch Review titled “The Hermit Scientist.” The essay is about what we would today call pseudoscientists, and it was Gardner’s first-ever publication of a skeptical nature. It not only launched a lifetime of critical analysis of fringe claims, but in 1952 (at the urging of Gardner’s literary agent, John T Elliott) the article was expanded into a book-length treatment of the subject under the title In the Name of Science, with the descriptive subtitle, “An entertaining survey of the high priests and cultists of science, past and present.” Published by Putnam, the book sold so poorly that it was quickly remaindered and lay dormant until 1957, when it was republished by Dover and has come down to us as Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, still in print and arguably the skeptic classic of the past half century. (Gardner realized his book had made it, he explained, when he turned on the radio “at three A.M. one morning, when I was giving a bottle of milk to my newborn son, and being startled to hear a voice say, ‘Mr. Gardner is a liar.’ It was John Campbell, Jr., editor of Astounding Science Fiction, expressing his anger over the book’s chapter on dianetics.”)
What caught the attention of a youthful Martin Gardner half a century ago was the “hermit scientist,” working alone and usually ignored by main-stream scientists: “Such neglect, of course, only strengthens the convictions of the self-declared genius,” Gardner concluded in his original 1950 paper. “Thus it is that probably no scientist of importance will present the bewildered public with detailed proofs that the earth did not twice stop whirling in Old Testament times, or that neuroses bear no relation to the experiences of an embryo in the mother’s womb” (referring to L. Ron Hubbard’s dianetics theory that negative engrams are imprinted in the fetus’s brain while in the womb).
Gardner was, however, half wrong in his prognostications: “The current flurry of discussion about Velikovsky and Hubbard will soon subside, and their books will begin to gather dust on library shelves.” While Velikovskians are a quaint few surviving in the interstices of fringe culture, L. Ron Hubbard has