The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [34]
And yet not a single adult I knew was preoccupied with UFOs. I couldn’t figure out why not. Instead they were worried about Communist China, nuclear weapons, McCarthyism and the rent. I wondered if they had their priorities straight.
In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of the evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong.
I came upon a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds written by Charles Mackay in 1841 and still in print. In it could be found the histories of boom-and-bust economic crazes, including the Mississippi and South Sea ‘Bubbles’ and the extravagant run on Dutch tulips, scams that bamboozled the wealthy and titled of many nations; a legion of alchemists, including the poignant tale of Mr Kelly and Dr Dee (and Dee’s 8-year-old son Arthur, impressed by his desperate father into communicating with the spirit world by peering into a crystal); dolorous accounts of unfulfilled prophecy, divination and fortune-telling; the persecution of witches; haunted houses; ‘popular admiration of great thieves’; and much else. Entertainingly portrayed was the Count of St Germain, who dined out on the cheerful pretension that he was centuries old if not actually immortal. (When, at dinner, incredulity was expressed at his recounting of his conversations with Richard the Lion-Heart, he turned to his man-servant for confirmation. ‘You forget, sir,’ was the reply, ‘I have been only five hundred years in your service.’ ‘Ah, true,’ said St Germain, ‘it was a little before your time.’)
A riveting chapter on the Crusades began
Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation. Failing in these, it has some madness, to which it is goaded by political or religious causes, or both combined.
The edition I first read was adorned by a quote from the financier and adviser of Presidents, Bernard M. Baruch, attesting that reading Mackay had saved him millions.
There had been a long history of spurious claims that magnetism could cure disease. Paracelsus, for example, used a magnet to suck diseases out of the human body and dispose of them into the Earth. But the key figure was Franz Mesmer. I had vaguely understood the word ‘mesmerize’ to mean something like hypnotize. But my first real knowledge of Mesmer came from Mackay. The Viennese physician had thought that the positions of the planets influenced human health, and was caught up in the wonders of electricity and magnetism. He catered to the declining French nobility on the eve of the Revolution. They crowded into a darkened room. Dressed in a gold-flowered silk robe and waving an ivory wand, Mesmer seated his marks around a vat of dilute sulphuric acid. The Magnetizer and his young male assistants peered deeply into the eyes of their patients, and rubbed their bodies. They grasped iron bars protruding into the solution or held each other’s hands. In contagious frenzy, aristocrats -especially young women - were cured left and right.
Mesmer became a sensation. He called it ‘animal magnetism’. For the more conventional medical practitioner, though, this was bad for business, so French physicians pressured King Louis XVI to crack down. Mesmer, they said, was a menace to public health. A commission was appointed by the