status in science or the media, but it is
professional journals of an appropriate
unrelated to investigation of the para-
specialty.
normal.
Table 6 Characteristics of Scientific Societies Contrasted With Those of
CSICOP.11
virtually nothing to do with the running of CSICOP; they serve as mere figureheads. They lend their names to campaigns but rarely comment publicly on the paranormal. When they occasionally do, they reveal a vast ignorance. Consequently, the scientists are not the main debunkers; that task is relegated primarily to journalists, magicians, and philosophers. The most active are Kendrick Frazier, journalist and editor of The Skeptical Inquirer; Joe Nickell, writer; Martin Gardner, writer-magician; James Randi, magician; Philip J. Klass, journalist; Paul Kurtz, philosopher and chairman of CSICOP. The four psychologists who are active debunkers, namely Ray Hyman, James Alcock, Susan Blackmore, and Richard Wiseman, certainly do not rank among the more eminent of the scientists.
Although markedly different from scientific societies, the Committee still has some parallels with science. For instance, CSICOP is particularly attuned to status issues. The Committee honors highstatus scientists, invites them to conventions, gives them awards, and writes favorable articles about them. CSICOP‘s members are typically recruited because of their prestige rather than for their research on the paranormal. Their status allows the Committee to speak with a voice of authority, and those who disagree are portrayed as marginal or without scientific standing, and thus can be disregarded.
Structure, status, and hierarchy are now central to science, and to bureaucracies generally. In the classic, The Sociological Imagination (1959), C. Wright Mills devoted an entire chapter to science’s “bureaucratic ethos.” Many years of training are required before one becomes a practicing scientist, and there are many levels of status after becoming a practitioner (ranks of professorships, grades of schools, and varying levels of professional honors). The hierarchy is international in scope. Those who have been most amply rewarded by this system give it their allegiance. They have spent their lives building and climbing the edifice that will perpetuate their legacy. The personalities most suited to operating in the hierarchical institutional structures have great vested interests. They obtain positions of influence, award grants and honors, and permit publication of papers. Max Weber pointed out that bureaucracies are part of the rationalization process. They help disenchant the world and are inimical to pure charisma, which involves manifestations of supernatural power. Considering all this, it should be no surprise that sociologist James McClenon found that the so-called elite (i.e., high status) scientists were some of the most hostile to parapsychology.
Anti-religion and Rationalism
In my 1992 overview of CSICOP I provided an extended discussion of religious factors affecting the Committee. Later, some of its members and supporters complained to me privately that I devoted too much space to that. It was obviously a sensitive issue for them, and they were clearly uncomfortable with the implications.
CSICOP is pervaded with anti-religious sentiment, and I easily compiled a list of 29 members who had publicly identified themselves as holding nontheistic or atheistic views. This constituted more than 25% of the official membership of the organization. That percentage was not unexpected given the group is composed primarily of academics, but it was the aggressive public profession of religious unbelief that was so striking. Those people vigorously promote their religious opinions, and a number of them contributed to periodicals such as Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s American Atheist.
As an organization, CSICOP is formally allied with atheistic groups. It shares a building, personnel, office equipment, and fund raising with the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism (CODESH). The two organizations overlap extensively, and both are headed by Paul Kurtz. When I visited their offices in 1991, I sat in the reading area that happened to be next to a copy machine. Several times I overheard employees inquiring whether copies should be charged to CSICOP or CODESH, further illustrating the lack of demarcation between the organizations. Some might be puzzled why such a long cumbersome name was selected for the Council and also why the acronym CODESH was used, rather than CODASH, with “A” for “and.” When one knows that “kodesh” is Hebrew for holy, it makes sense. The acronym was obviously chosen as a slap at the Jewish religion. Someone probably complained because the name was changed to the Council for Secular Humanism as of June 1996.
The Council publishes Free Inquiry, a magazine that belittles religion; it also published the Secular Humanist Bulletin, which was edited by Tim Madigan, a cofounder of Catholics Anonymous. Kurtz founded the Academy of Humanism to honor eminent people who have held secular humanist beliefs; roughly a third of the Academy members were affiliated with CSICOP. Another organizational connection is the Rationalist Press Association (RPA) in Great Britain, with several of its Honorary Associates being CSICOP Fellows. In addition, the American Rationalist was edited by CSICOP member and employee Gordon Stein.
The explicit affiliation of rationalists with debunker organizations is in keeping with historical precedent. Rationalism is inherently antagonistic to the paranormal and supernatural, and this was seen in the early days of the societies for psychical research. A century ago, the RPA served in a capacity similar to Prometheus Books today. Under their imprint, Watts & Co., the RPA published a number of volumes attacking spiritualism and psychical research. This long antagonism is inherent, because fundamentally, the debunkers are a force for the rationalization and disenchantment of the world (in Max Weber’s terms).
CSICOP is an exceedingly rich example of rationalization and its consequences. As discussed in the chapter on Weber, rationalization is a long-term, ongoing process. It is particularly marked in academe, but it is also found in religion. The marginalization of mysticism and miracles in mainline Protestant denominations is an example. In fact virtually all religions acknowledge supernatural power but put strictures around it. They keep it somewhat distant. Early peoples understood that the supernatural was dangerous. It needed to be hedged off from the mundane world. There were rules, prohibitions, and taboos surrounding it. The process continues today, but at an unconscious level. Establishment religion and CSICOP, each with their own means, discourage engagement of the phenomena. Both impose taboos. Religions decree occult dabbling a sin; CSICOP marginalizes it by ridicule. Both enforce the taboo, but in slightly different ways.
The skeptical movement exemplifies trends in scientific and academic thinking. It makes them explicit. Many social scientists and psychologists have been predicting the demise of religion for decades and have largely avoided studying it. The eminent sociologist Peter Berger stated “in recent years sociologists, with very few exceptions, have shown very little interest [in religion], probably because they have sworn allegiance to a scientific ‘progressivism’ that regards religion as a vanishing leftover from the dark ages of superstition and do not care to invest their energies in the study of a moribund phenomenon.”15 Many psychologists are even puzzled by people who believe, yet a 1994 survey by U.S. News & World Report found that 93% of adult Americans believed in God or a universal spirit.16 Obviously many social scientists cannot comprehend a vast realm of human experience. They are isolated from ordinary people, and their alienated, ivory-tower existence destroys their understanding.
Even scholars sympathetic to religion are heavily influenced by the trends. For instance, Peter Berger, who is actively religious himself, in his book A Rumor of Angels (1990) refers to the supernatural saying: “It is impossible to know for sure whether any such rediscovery [of the supernatural] will remain the property of more or less isolated cognitive minorities” (emphasis added). Yet a 1993 survey by Time magazine showed that 69% of adult Americans believed in angels. Clearly, it is the academicians who are the “isolated cognitive minorities.” Berger specializes in the sociology of religion. His ignorance of basic
data of human experience is comparable to a physicist who doesn’t know the density of water, and publicly flaunts it. Yet Berger is typical! This is difficult for ordinary people to understand, but much academic work is marked by extreme abstraction, and that is inimical to comprehension of the supernatural.
In some ways, the skeptics are more astute than the average academic, and philosopher-businessman-debunker Paul Kurtz probably has a greater intuitive feeling for the problems posed by the supernatural than do the vast majority of religious scholars. Most of them no longer comprehend the numinous and the supernatural and the deep problems they present. Many consider the supernatural to be only a crude superstition, and the issues have been banished from the awareness of academe, even though they were extensively discussed at the beginning of the twentieth century. In The Idea of the Holy (1917), the eminent German religious scholar Rudolf Otto recognized that “In truth the enemy has often a keener vision in this matter than either the champion of religion or the neutral and professedly impartial theorist. For the adversaries on their side know very well that the entire ‘pother about mysticism’ has nothing to do with ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’.”
The personality dynamics of some skeptics may make them unconsciously sensitive to crucial issues. Perhaps they feel the subversive, destructive, chaotic potential of the trickster, anti-structure, and the paranormal. Sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda in his book Deviance and Moral Boundaries (1985) noted: “The sense of awe and bewilderment experienced repeatedly in science fiction and occultism necessarily brings one very close to what O’Dea (1966) called existential ‘breaking points,’ or to a liminal situation, that is, a state of existential transit … It becomes impossible to encounter either science fiction or
occultism and remain indifferent to them, unless one is well shielded by
21
some other strong belief (emphasis added). He went on to state that “occult-related phenomena [ghosts, possession, reincarnation, trances, séances, automatic writing] can have a deeper, more pervasive experiential impact on an observer than science fiction.” As will be dis-cussed in the chapter on totemism and the primitive mind, these passages hint at the power of the numinous.
Whereas religions place strictures against dabbling in the supernatural, atheists and rationalists prefer to banish (i.e., repress) the ideas entirely. Yet the supernatural is found in all cultures, and it cannot be effectively eliminated with rationalistic incantations such as: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The paranormal is part of the human condition, and its repression has consequences. John Wren-Lewis, a mathematical physicist and religion professor, writing in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology discussed the antagonism to parapsychology and noted that “the plain fact is that the clearest evidence of strong emotion nowadays comes from those who have antireligious feelings” (Wren-Lewis’ emphasis). He wrote this in 1974, even before CSICOP was formed. Others have recognized these strong feelings. John F. Schumaker, a clinical psychologist as well as a debunker, reported that based on data from his own studies “people with traditional religious beliefs had significantly fewer symptoms of mental illness than the atheists.” He concluded that there was a need for paranormal belief, and that those lacking it had higher levels of stress and anxiety.
Some authors have noted the irrational behavior of skeptics when they confront paranormal claims. Walter Franklin Prince’s book The Enchanted Boundary (1930) was devoted entirely to the matter. Prince was an Episcopal clergyman and one of the most careful and respected psychical researchers in the first decades of the twentieth century. His extensive and detailed analyses demonstrated over and over that when many critics cross into the realm of psychical research and attempt to examine the evidence, they lose the common sense and good judgement that they display in other activities. CSICOP’s inability to mount a systematic scientific research program and their choice to denounce, rather than investigate, the paranormal indicate the power of the enchanted boundary. In essence, Prince’s enchanted boundary is the limen of van Gennep and Turner.
The Trickster Figure
The sheer volume and intensity of the debunkers’ activities suggests something other than dispassionate inquiry; rather, one suspects the operation of some energetic, unconscious, archetypal process. The trickster figure Prometheus illuminates this, and he has much in common with the skeptics. Prometheus was not a god, but a titan,
who stole fire from the gods for the benefit of humanity. He shares some, though not all, of the qualities of Hermes. In his book Hermes and His Children, Rafael Lopez-Pedraza explains: “Prometheus in no way shows the undignified, weakened side of Hermes; on the contrary, he wants to rule the world, but because of the undifferentiated energy of his Titanic nature, it becomes only a power-ridden ambition. He shows only a suspicious and boastful rebellion against the archetypal forms of life, forms he is keen in finding ways to blackmail or destroy. He shows a lack of tolerance, which we feel in the many ways of missionarizing so predominant in today’s life, so different from the variety in a Hermes attitude.
“Hermes thieves and then sacrifices to the gods all that he has thieved, whereas Prometheus sacrifices to the gods and within that sacrifice he cheats and thieves. If the Hermes sacrifice seems to be the religious sacrifice par excellence, then the Prometheus sacrifice is just the opposite—it is openly anti-religious. From this we can assume that the anti-religious function in man is Promethean.”25
Lopez-Pedraza’s comments were made in regard to a psychological understanding of Prometheus and were totally unrelated to the psi controversy. In light of that, they are all the more striking when one knows that Prometheus Books is the most active publisher of debunking works and a major purveyor of atheistic and anti-religious tracts; it was founded by Paul Kurtz, chairman of CSICOP. (In keeping with the trickster constellation, Prometheus Books also publishes a number of titles that challenge conventional sexual morality.)
Although the above aspects of Prometheus are not flattering to the skeptics, he does have many positive attributes. For his theft of fire, Prometheus was chained to a rock by order of Zeus, and an eagle ate his liver. It grew back daily, but to Prometheus’ agony, it was eaten again and again. Prometheus suffered for helping humans and upholding their dignity; he defied the gods who could be vain, unreliable, vengeful, and even malicious. Their powers needed to be curtailed.
The trickster’s influence on CSICOP is also seen in the disproportionate number of magicians in the organization. In my 1992 study, I found that at least 13 magicians had been official members of CSICOP (approximately 10% of the official membership). This goes back to the beginning, and in fact, the immediate predecessor to CSICOP was RSEP (Resources for the Scientific Evaluation of the Paranormal), a group of magicians including Martin Gardner, Ray Hyman, James Randi, and Marcello Truzzi. Truzzi and Hyman are also professors, and Gardner is a writer, but all three have made substantial contributions to conjuring and are well recognized therein. Randi and Gardner have been some of the most effective promoters of CSICOP, and they have been leading figures in the popular-level debates on parapsychology.
CSICOP’s Contributions to Scientific Parapsychology
I have focused on CSICOP’s social role and given little attention to its contribution on technical matters in parapsychology. That is a minor aspect of its activities. Nevertheless, two of its members deserve special mention. Psychologist Ray Hyman has provided detailed comment on various parapsychological experiments, and he must be considered the preeminent outside critic on technical matters. Though I must add that some of his critiques are seriously marred by flaws, a number of which have been documented. Martin Gardner has incisively criticized shortcomings in controls against deception in parapsychological studies. He is an exceedingly important figure in the skeptical movement, and his work will be addressed later in this book.
The Committee has made a valuable contribution in emphasizing the paranormal’s frequent association with deception
. They were a strong influence for my interest in that topic. I have published a number of critical papers myself, and CSICOP members Philip J. Klass and Martin Gardner provided valuable help on some of them. Many of my colleagues in parapsychology ignore the problem of deception, and most have been unwilling to seek training in conjuring to help exclude trickery in their studies. Indeed, in my 1990 survey of 23 former presidents of the Parapsychological Association, only 4 had ever taken a course in magic and only one owned more than eight books on the topic. Their training of students perpetuated what I have labeled the “legacy of magical ignorance.” The 988-page Handbook of Parapsychology edited by Benjamin Wolman (1977) is revealing. Its 30-page index contains no entries under “conjuring,” “deceit,” “deception,” “fraud,” “legerdemain,” “sleight of hand,” or “trickery.” All entries under “magic” and “magicians” refer to the anthropological or occult types. It is perhaps not too strong to say that such neglect has been pathologically naive.
Summary
CSCIOP was founded during a period of surging popular interest in the paranormal, and its expressed purpose was to combat that tide. The Committee has since become the most visible institutional body
addressing the issues; it speaks with the voice of establishment science. The Committee is a fascinating organization and deserves far more analysis than it has heretofore received.
CSICOP is a valuable specimen for anyone studying the role of the paranormal in our culture because its hostility to the paranormal is overt, not hidden. CSICOP’s social position, its demographics, its operations, and its constituency tell us much about the supernatural in the world today. The Committee’s primary function is to marginalize the paranormal. Yet almost paradoxically, its activities serve to emphasize the paranormal’s importance because it has expended such great energy in its endeavor.
The Trickster and the Paranormal Page 18
