The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [145]
CSICOP is imperfect. In certain cases such a critique is to some degree justified. But from my point of view CSICOP serves an important social function as a well-known organization to which media can apply when they wish to hear the other side of the story, especially when some amazing claim to pseudoscience is adjudged newsworthy. It used to be (and for much of the global news media it still is) that every levitating guru, visiting alien, channeller and faith-healer, when covered by the media, would be treated nonsubstantively and uncritically. There would be no institutional memory at the television studio or newspaper or magazine about other, similar claims previously shown to be scams and bamboozles. CSICOP represents a counterbalance, although not yet nearly a loud enough voice, to the pseudoscience gullibility that seems second nature to so much of the media.
One of my favourite cartoons shows a fortune-teller scrutinizing the mark’s palm and gravely concluding, ‘You are very gullible.’ CSICOP publishes a bi-monthly periodical called The Skeptical Inquirer. On the day it arrives, I take it home from the office and pore through its pages, wondering what new misunderstandings will be revealed. There’s always another bamboozle that I never thought of. Crop circles! Aliens have come and made perfect circles and mathematical messages ... in wheat! Who would have thought it? So unlikely an artistic medium. Or they’ve come and eviscerated cows - on a large scale, systematically. Farmers are furious. At first, I’m impressed by the inventiveness of the stories. But then, on more sober reflection, it always strikes me how dull and routine these accounts are; what a compilation of unimaginative stale ideas, chauvinisms, hopes and fears dressed up as facts. The contentions, from this point of view, are suspect on their face. That’s all they can conceive the extraterrestrials doing... making circles in wheat? What a failure of the imagination! With every issue, another facet of pseudoscience is revealed and criticized.
And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you’re sensible, you’ll listen to us; and if not, you’re beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted.
If we understand this, then of course we feel the uncertainty and pain of the abductees, or those who dare not leave home without consulting their horoscopes, or those who pin their hopes on crystals from Atlantis. And such compassion for kindred spirits in a common quest also works to make science and the scientific method less off-putting, especially to the young.
Many pseudoscientific and New Age belief systems emerge out of dissatisfaction with conventional values and perspectives and are therefore themselves a kind of scepticism. (The same is true of the origins of most religions.) David Hess (in Science and the New Age) argues that
the world of paranormal beliefs and practices cannot be reduced to cranks, crackpots, and charlatans. A large number of sincere people are exploring alternative approaches to questions of personal meaning, spirituality, healing, and paranormal experience in general. To the sceptic, their quest may ultimately rest on a delusion, but debunking is hardly likely to be an effective rhetorical device for their rationalist project of getting [people] to recognize what appears to the