The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

by Will Storr

  ‘The ones you told Dog World you had done. In New York. The owner was killed, the dogs are in Mexico and you lost the files in a flood.’

  ‘That was one of the hurricane floods,’ he says nodding.

  ‘So what prompted these tests?’

  ‘I must admit to you that I don’t recall having said that these tests were even done. But I’m willing to see the evidence for it.’

  ‘I have these emails.’

  ‘Oh.’

  When I ask for a second time what prompted him to do these tests, his memory stages a sudden recovery. ‘Curiosity,’ he says. ‘I’m an experimenter.’ He remembers the name of the dog and its breed and that the experiment was ‘very informal. I napped most of the time.’

  When I press him about his treatment of Sheldrake, he insists that he didn’t lie because when he made the offer to send the information, the data hadn’t yet been lost. But he says that they were swept away in Hurricane Wilma, which happened in 2005 – four years before he stated that the data was available. And in the email, he tells Sheldrake a different story still – that the flood took place in 1998.

  Nevertheless, we move on. I tell Randi about Hebard, the professor who was surprised to read in Flim Flam that he had called someone a ‘liar’. ‘Hebard told me he didn’t say that,’ I note.

  ‘I don’t know that he did, or not,’ says Randi. ‘That’s the way I recall it.’

  ‘What about Zev Pressman, the photographer who signed an affidavit saying that you lied about him?’

  ‘This is stuff I really have to look into,’ he says.

  More recent, then, was the incident in which Randi falsely claimed that Dr Krippner had agreed to be on his committee, accused someone who accurately reflected the case of being a liar, and then offered to push a peanut naked across Times Square if he could be shown to be wrong.

  ‘Well, that was perhaps a mistake of mine,’ he admits.

  ‘You called this woman a liar,’ I say. ‘But you were the one who was telling the lie.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I’d have to look over the whole sequence.’

  ‘Might you have been telling a lie?’

  He turns a little on his seat.

  ‘I’m not denying it,’ he says. ‘I’m not denying it.’

  ‘What about the Greek homeopath?’

  ‘Vithoulkas,’ he nods.

  Randi tells me that he approved the test’s protocol in 2006 and then, before I can continue listing the events as I have been led to understand them, he says, ‘Let me interrupt you. Vithoulkas has never made an application for the JREF prize. That is the first rule. He will not do that and he says he doesn’t have to because he’s too important.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I say. ‘You agreed with his protocol, you waived the pilot study and you told him the test could go ahead.’

  ‘But he didn’t sign the document,’ he says. ‘They backed out when they would not fill out the form.’

  ‘But you and your team had already agreed the protocol,’ I say.

  Suddenly, Randi is furious.

  ‘We agreed with the protocol, yes!’ he shouts. ‘Okay! Now you sign the document and we’ll go ahead with it. But he will not sign the document.’

  ‘They were ready to go, and you wrote to them and said everything was starting from scratch.’

  ‘I decided to tell them that until we received the application forms signed they were not applicants.’

  ‘Why do you need a signature on a document after five years, just when everything was ready to go?’

  ‘I need it! That’s the rules! Vithoulkas says he’s too important to do it.’

  ‘That’s not what he’s saying.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, sarcastically. ‘That’s not what he’s saying.’

  Of course, Vithoulkas and the team of European Skeptics spent half a decade trying to make this experiment happen. They lobbied politicians, negotiated terms and protocols, raised funds, recovered repeatedly after setbacks and fallings-out and bitter compromises. Then, just as it was about to happen, Randi insisted on a successful pilot study and changed the protocol. I ask Randi, ‘Can’t you see why he is furious?’

  ‘Oh, I can see why he’s furious.’

  ‘So why did you change your mind at the last minute, just when they were ready to go?’

  ‘He won’t sign the fucking document! Will you get that through your skull? He wants out of it and that’s the way he’ll get out of it. When Vithoulkas signs the document we will go ahead with the test as agreed. End of discussion. I will not talk about it any more.’

  I begin to feel as if I am ambushing Randi. Perhaps it is his age, but it almost feels as if I am committing some sort of violence upon him. He deserves some air. So I move on to an area which I believe that he will find easier to discuss, and presumably dismiss. I quote some of his comments that have concerned me, about his wish for drugs to be legalised so that users will kill themselves.

  But, to my surprise, he does not dismiss them. Not even slightly.

  ‘I think exactly the same thing about smoking,’ he says. ‘They should be allowed to smoke themselves to death and die.’

  ‘These are quite extreme views,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘But it’s social Darwinism.’

  ‘The survival of the fittest, yes,’ he says, approvingly. ‘The strong survive.’

  ‘But this is the foundation of fascism.’

  ‘Oh yes, yes,’ he says, perfectly satisfied. ‘It could be inferred that way, yes. I think people should be allowed to do themselves in.’

  ‘These are very right-wing views.’

  ‘I don’t look at them that way,’ he says. ‘I’m a believer in social Darwinism. Not in every case. I would do anything to stop a twelve-year-old kid from doing it. Sincerely. But in general, I think that Darwinism, survival of the fittest, should be allowed to act itself out. As long as it doesn’t interfere with me and other sensible, rational people who could be affected by it. Innocent people, in other words. These are not innocent people. These are stupid people. And if they can’t survive, they don’t have the IQ, don’t have the thinking power to be able to survive, it’s unfortunate; I would hate to see it happen, but at the same time, it would clear the air. We would be free of a lot of the plagues that we presently suffer from. I think that people with mental aberrations who have family histories of inherited diseases and such, that something should be done seriously to educate them to prevent them from procreating. I think they should be gathered together in a suitable place and have it demonstrated for them what their procreation would mean for the human race. It would be very harmful. But I don’t see any attempt to do that because everyone has the right to do stupid things. And I suppose they do,’ he concedes. ‘To a certain extent.’

  As I sit, quietly stunned, in the nearly empty Las Vegas conference hall, I still feel as if we haven’t quite exhausted the question that I first sought to answer. Is James Randi a liar? I begin gently, by telling him that my research has painted a picture of a clever man who is often right, but who has a certain element to his personality, which leads him to overstate.

  ‘Oh, I agree,’ he says.

  ‘And sometimes lie. Get carried away.’

  ‘Oh, I agree. No question of that. I don’t know whether the lies are conscious lies all the time,’ he says. ‘But there can be untruths.’

  *

  During our conversation, I asked Randi if he has ever, in his life, changed his position on anything due to an examination of the evidence. After a long silence, he said, ‘That’s a good question. I have had a few surprises along the way that got my attention rather sharply.’

  ‘What were these?’ I asked.

  He thought again, for some time.

  ‘Oh, some magic trick that I decided on the modus operandi.’

  ‘Just the way a magic trick was done?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So you’ve never been wrong a
bout anything significant?’

  ‘In regard to the Skeptical movement and my work …’ There was another stretched and chewing pause. He conferred with his partner, to see if he had any ideas. ‘No. Nothing occurs to me at the moment.’

  I had thought that this alone condemned the great ‘free-thinking’ Skeptic. After all, how free can the mind be that has never travelled an inch? But, on reflection, I now believe that there is at least some indication that he is capable of heading to unwelcome places when compelled to do so by the evidence. It is the brave admission of dishonesty that he gave this afternoon.

  There are two narratives told of James Randi. In the heroic version, he is a fearless and genius free-thinker, a messiah of truth. The villain’s tale speaks of a closed-minded bully and a liar. Which is correct? The answer, of course, is neither. Because they are stories, and stories are never true.

  EPILOGUE

  The Hero-Maker

  I left Alice Springs in the early morning, dropped off the tarmac on the outskirts of town and drove northwest for six hours into the Australian Central Desert. Everywhere, it seemed, there was death. I saw skeletal kangaroos, the picked remains of starved calves, the upturned shells of cars, distant abandoned outstations and, every now and then, a lonely white cross that had been planted in the dirt. The west Macdonnell Ranges behind me were once higher than the Himalayas, but eight hundred million years of weather have reduced them to low, crumbling bluffs. Dead animals, dead mountains, dead earth; from the bloodwood trees and the ghost gums to Mount Unapproachable and the Sandy Blight Road, the soul of this landscape is revealed in the way that it has been christened by its early white explorers. It is a place of murderous beauty: a wasteland of spiny shrubs, barren rivers and psychotic centigrades.

  After six hours, I neared the remote community of Yuendumu. Alcohol is forbidden there and the town’s limits were forewarned by a meteorite-shower of beer cans and broken stubby glass that had been thrown from car windows. A little over eight hundred men, women and children live in Yuendumu – it is mostly Warlpiri and Anmatyerr people who dwell in the forlorn government breeze-block houses. Its few dusty streets were scattered with abandoned cookers and snapped CDs and hounded by delinquent dogs that yelped and chased and fought. An atmosphere of dolorous stillness held the place. The violent jags of a shouting woman interrupted the silence every now and then. A derelict petrol pump rusted in the heat.

  At the art centre, an old man with yellowish curly hair, oil-stained jeans and a pale Stetson hat rattled open the wire gate. A pack of worshipful mongrels followed him in, fussing around his legs, shooting him meaningful glances. He settled on the concrete floor outside the building and I watched him use a narrow dowel rod to mark a large canvas with yellow dots of paint, apparently not bothered by the dogs that had begun making themselves comfortable, circling and lying on his work. The man was Shorty Jangala Robertson. A superstar.

  Shorty’s generation was born in the desert – the last nomads ‘came in’ as recently as 1984 – and so nobody knew his age, but he was thought to be in his nineties. Earlier, the manager of the art centre had told me his story. One day, Shorty was wandering unhappily around Yuendumu when she said to him, ‘Shorty, come paint for me.’ He told her, ‘I’m hungry.’ She replied, ‘Well, I’ve got these nuts. If you come to the centre to paint tomorrow, I’ll give you three hundred dollars.’ The canvas that Shorty painted the next day currently hangs in the National Gallery of Victoria. He has since produced more than a thousand works. Each one sells, typically, for between eight and twenty thousand dollars.

  I asked Shorty, via an interpreter, why he thinks his canvases are especially popular.

  ‘He says he paints the water dreaming,’ says the interpreter.

  ‘But why do his paintings sell, while the paintings of others don’t?’ I asked. ‘What is it that Shorty’s doing that’s unique?’

  ‘He says it’s water dreaming.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know he paints the water dreaming. But what does he think white people like so much about the water dreaming?’

  ‘He says it’s because it’s water dreaming.’

  ‘Yes, but why does he paint water dreaming?’

  By now, both Shorty and the interpreter had become visibly frustrated.

  ‘Because it’s water dreaming, water dreaming.’

  It was only later that I understood. Aboriginal people don’t see art in the same way that we do. They don’t look at Shorty’s work and judge it on its aesthetic quality but on something more fundamental. A painting is only as good as the story that it relates. As the manager told me, ‘I’ve got lots of artists who paint a really good story but I can’t give their paintings away and they don’t understand.’ For the Aboriginal people, story is everything. It is their history, it is their religion, it is their sense of identity and their register of ethical lore. It is how they have survived in these hostile lands for forty thousand years and more. It is their map of survival.

  Every Aboriginal newborn is assigned a ‘tjukurpa’ – a story from the time of the world’s creation which, in its details, will tell them everything they need to know about where to find food, medicine and water for hundreds of miles around. It will teach them about magic and spirits and detail an elaborate moral code. A tjukurpa is a cross between a Bible parable, a Just So story, a supermarket plan and a travel guide. It is a multi-dimensional map of life that speaks of time, space and meaning. Events in the story’s plot – battles and birthplaces and hideouts – correspond to actual facets of the physical landscape, so you will know that you can find carrots, for instance, in the spot where the bush carrot beat the bush potato in a fight. Tjukurpas are incredibly complex. They are taught in stages, with each new level of detail being revealed by elders when an individual is considered ready. They are imparted in as many ways as possible: dance, song, body-painting, rock-carving and sand-drawings that cover a hectare. But they are highly secret. They are passed down strictly between members of the same ‘skin group’. Men do not know the women’s tjukurpas, and women do not know the men’s. White people have only ever been told as much as the youngest Aboriginal children. The paintings that artists such as Shorty produce are highly codified and obscured, so that their tjukurpas remain hidden. But they are all based on these essential, ancient lessons.

  It is said that the Australian Aboriginals belong to the oldest surviving culture on earth. It appears profoundly different from ours. But I have come to believe that, in one crucial sense, we are just like the Aboriginals. We share their means of negotiating reality. Our lives, to an almost unimaginable degree, depend on stories.

  *

  When you begin to look for stories – when you purposefully seek out that familiar, seductive pattern, the sly hook of the narrative – you realise that you are surrounded. On the news, in literature, film and song, in your memory, your sense of who you are and how you got there and in most of your conversation. I did this, and it was terrifying. Cause and effect plus emotion. It is the fundamental formula of your brain’s understanding of the world. It is the fundamental formula of narrative.

  Our compulsion for emotional narrative is why the BBC news chooses to report on ‘Astro’, the Australian horse that got stuck in some mud, and not the nameless thousands of humans who happened to die, the same day, in road accidents and of curable diseases and the effects of poverty. It is why $48,000 of US taxpayers’ money was once spent on a twenty-five-day mission to rescue a small dog. It is why Saxon families revelled in the monster-slaying drama of Beowulf and why, twelve hundred years later, cinema-goers by the million queued to watch the monster-slaying drama of Jaws. It is why, in the seventeen years that followed the birth of silent cinema, more than ten thousand films were made in Hollywood alone. It is why we are addicted to celebrity magazines and to the grandest Russian literature. It is stories that lie at the root of vast world religions that hold genuine power over billions of faithful followers.

  It is thought that hum
anity’s earliest stories sought to explain the world. They were a primitive form of science, and indistinguishable from religion. At some stage we began to use those tales like the brain uses its models – to attempt to predict and to change the world. Rituals developed around them. We made sacrifices, sang songs and prayed to the gods to effect natural phenomena. The historian Mircea Eliade writes of the ‘culture heroes’ that were subsequently created to effect social phenomena. Western storytellers imagined legendary characters – Hercules, Aphrodite, King Arthur – whose ghostly archetypes appear in the myths of faraway cultures and in the blockbusters and bestsellers of today.

  Sigmund Freud believed that we are emotionally satisfied by the hero’s slaying of the monster because we are all secret Oedipuses, murdering our fathers to win the hand of our mothers. For the psychologist Otto Rank, the hero narrative unconsciously tracks our struggle out of childhood and into independence. For the mythologist Joseph Campbell it speaks to the formative adventures of early adulthood. These academics understood that fiction is the journalism of the unconscious, reporting back sensed truths from the silent realm of feelings.

  Today’s scientists have discovered that we experience the tales that we immerse ourselves in as if they are happening to us. We feel the heroes’ feelings, fight their fights, love their lovers. This is possible because stories mimic the illusion of consciousness. The novel’s narrator, the film camera’s eye – they are points of singularity in which sound, sight, emotion, motive and mission are combined. As we surrender ourselves to the tale, we surrender our own minds to that of our hero. We become infected by the tales that we expose ourselves to.

  Observing how fear spreads through a herd of antelope, Professor Bruce Wexler writes that ‘contagion is at the heart of emotion.’ It is significant, I believe, that contagion is also at the heart of stories. But to become contagious, a story requires surprise. According to Professor Daniel Kahneman, ‘a capacity for surprise is an essential aspect of our mental life’ and when we experience it, we feel ‘a surge of conscious attention’ as our minds seek new information to feed in to their recreation of the world. And so it is with narrative.