The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [118]
Most of these figures are only after your money. That’s the good news. But what worries me is that a Carlos will come along with bigger fish to fry - attractive, commanding, patriotic, exuding leadership. All of us long for a competent, uncorrupt, charismatic leader. We will leap at the opportunity to support, to believe, to feel good. Most reporters, editors and producers, swept up with the rest of us, will shy away from real sceptical scrutiny. He won’t be selling you prayers or crystals or tears. Perhaps he’ll be selling you a war, or a scapegoat, or a much more all-encompassing bundle of beliefs than Carlos’s. Whatever it is, it will be accompanied by warnings about the dangers of scepticism.
In the celebrated film The Wizard ofOz, Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion are intimidated - indeed awed - by the out-sized oracular figure called the Great Oz. But Dorothy’s little dog Toto snaps at a concealing curtain and reveals that the Great Oz is in fact a machine run by a small, tubby, frightened man, as much an exile in this strange land as they.
I think we’re lucky that James Randi is tugging at the curtain. But it would be as dangerous to rely on him to expose all the quacks, humbugs and bunkum in the world as it would be to believe those same charlatans. If we don’t want to get taken, we need to do this job for ourselves.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise.
Seances occur only in darkened rooms, where the ghostly visitors can be seen dimly at best. If we turn up the lights a little, so we have a chance to see what’s going on, the spirits vanish. They’re shy, we’re told, and some of us believe it. In twentieth-century parapsychology laboratories, there is the ‘observer effect’: those described as gifted psychics find that their powers diminish markedly whenever sceptics arrive, and disappear altogether in the presence of a conjuror as skilled as James Randi. What they need is darkness and gullibility.
A little girl who had been a co-conspirator in a famous nineteenth-century flimflam - spirit-rapping, in which ghosts answer questions by loud thumping - grew up and confessed it was an imposture. She was cracking the joint in her big toe. She demonstrated how it was done. But the public apology was largely ignored and, when acknowledged, denounced. Spirit-rapping was too reassuring to be abandoned merely on the say-so of a self-confessed rapper, even if she started the whole business in the first place. The story began to circulate that the confession was coerced out of her by fanatical rationalists.
As I described earlier, British hoaxers confessed to having made ‘crop circles’, geometrical figures generated in grain fields. It wasn’t alien artists working in wheat as their medium, but two blokes with a board, a rope and a taste for whimsy. Even when they demonstrated how they did it, though, believers were unimpressed. Maybe some of the crop circles are hoaxes, they argued, but there are too many of them, and some of the pictograms are too complex. Only extraterrestrials could do it. Then others in Britain confessed. But crop circles abroad, it was objected, in Hungary for example, how can you explain that”! Then copycat Hungarian teenagers confessed. But what about...?
To test the credulity of an alien abduction psychiatrist, a woman poses as an abductee. The therapist is enthusiastic about