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BOOK REVIEW
Why People Believe Weird Things
Pseudoscience, Superstition,
and Other Confusions of Our Time
by Michael Shermer
W.H. Freeman & Co., New York, 1997
Reviewed by Walter Gratzer
Musing on the rows of discarded crutches on display at Lourdes, the journalist H.L. Mencken observed that no wooden legs were in evidence. Why, one might ask, has this paradox not presented itself to the faithful? Mencken also remarked that faith could be defined as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
The efficacy of prayer is not, as it happens, one of the "weird beliefs" featured in Michael Shermer's dissertation. He examines a variety of intellectual perversions of our time, but the one that really gets (as Sam Goldwyn put it) his dandruff up, and to which he devotes half of his book, is the revisionist history that asserts the Holocaust never happened. This is undoubtedly one of the most grotesque and distasteful of aberrations; indeed Primo Levi, whose suicide came 40 years after he emerged from Auschwitz, wrote that the most haunting fear for the survivors was that their testimony might one day be disbelieved. How then to explain this strange phenomenon? It has been often enough remarked that a paper in support of any proposition can be found somewhere in the scientific literature. The same, I am sure, holds true in the field of historical scholarship. But more especially, people tend to believe what they desire, in accordance with their prejudices, to be true.
Shermer, who has engaged in public debates on the Holocaust, has been scrupulous in meeting political rhetoric with dispassionate reason, and has, by his own account, got the better of his adversaries. He sets out in meticulous detail the historic evidence that should scotch the dialectic of the noisy lunatic fringe, but of course this is not how the world wags.
For Shermer has collected some truly awesome statistics on the delusions of our time, as for instance: half his compatriots believe that intelligent aliens have visited the Earth, and half again of these that the said aliens reside in our midst (some names please). Conspiracy theories have a special allure: sizeable minorities of the population are persuaded that the U.S. Government distributes drugs in poor neighborhoods, that HIV was cooked up to kill blacks, and most recently that Pathfinder never landed on Mars and the pictures are fakes.
Shermer sees himself as a champion of rationality. He holds that the antidote to superstition and unreason is science, or at least the "scientific method." Scientists worthy of the name are free of the rats' nests that infest the brains of the less fortunate. This is pleasing to hear, but wait:
Aristotle, the great observer, insisted that women had fewer teeth than men, and though, as Bertrand Russell indignantly pointed out, he was twice married, he never thought to verify his hypothesis by inspection. Elie Metchnikoff, one of the founders of the science of immunology, believed that ageing was engendered by toxins from gut bacteria and that yogurt, being rich in lactobacillus, was thus the elixir of youth. Or then again, two of the most illustrious physicists of the late nineteenth century, Sirs Oliver Lodge and William Crookes (who gave us the cathode-ray tube), habitually communicated with "the other side" through mediums. And Francis Galton took it for granted that both intelligence and criminality were inherited, and urged eugenic measures to promote the one and suppress the other.
But that, I hear you say, was all long ago. Well, what of the mysterious force discovered by professors in the University of London and elsewhere to emanate from the infant spoon-benders, the imprint left by absent molecules in water (published, after all, in Nature, no less), the Harvard professor abducted by aliens? There are plenty more. Flattering as it may be to be told otherwise, I see no evidence to indicate that scientists have a monopoly of ratiocination, that it is only Shermer's scientific training that enables him to discern that the banging in the night stems from the plumbing and not a poltergeist. Lawyers, philosophers and motor mechanics all have to make deductions of a similar nature.
Still, Shermer is worth reading for the gruesome examples of credulity and intellectual contortion that he lays bare. Take, for example, the "recovered memory syndrome," invented by psychiatrists (the witchfinders of our day), who have estimated that one third to one half of American women were sexually abused in childhood. There is a good account of the cliff-hanger in the U.S. Supreme Court, when 72 Nobel laureates and some other luminaries challenged the constitutional validity of a law enacted by the State of Louisiana, decreeing equal and parallel treatment of evolution and creationism in schools. There is a brisk analysis of the race-and-intelligence debate, and an absorbing tale of the bizarre cult that gathered around the novelist Ayn Rand, described by one of her followers as "the greatest human being who has ever lived."
Shermer's generalizations are less compelling. It scarcely needs a quotation from Sydney Hook (who he?) to instruct us that "Raphael's Sistine Madonna without Raphael, Beethoven's symphonies and sonatas without Beethoven, are inconceivable. In science, on the other hand, it is quite probable that most of the achievements of any given scientist would have been attained by other individuals working in the field."
Shermer is more labored and less incisive than (among many others) Bertrand Russell in his numerous essays. Nor does he answer the question of the title. The Flat Earth Society still thrives, and I do not doubt that many people believe that garbage is collected twice a week by the leprechauns and that the moon is the repository of broken vows and unfulfilled desires (which, as we now know, is not the case). These propositions differ little from the conclusion (dressed up in the language of science) of Arthur Koestler and Sir Alastair Hardy, Latterly Professor of Zoology at Oxford, that life's coincidences had supernatural origins.
Dr. Johnson said that wonders are willingly told and willingly heard, and so the majestic dictum of eighteenth century philosopher David Hume, which Shermer quotes with approval - that "no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish" - is disregarded. The improbable is just more interesting, and there's an end of it.
Walter Gratzer is Professor of Biophysical Chemistry at King's College, London, Ontario. He is editor of A Literary Companion to Science (Norton, 1990) and A Bedside Nature: Genius and Eccentricity in Science, 1869-1953 (Nature, 1993).
Excerpt
Either-Or: Also known as the fallacy of negation or false dilemma, this is the tendency to dichotomize the world so that when you discredit one possibility, the observer is forced to accept the other. This is a favorite tactic of the creationists, who spend the ma jority of their time trying to discredit the theory of evolution, concluding that since evolution is wrong, creationism must be right. Similarly, some argue that if you cannot disprove a claim, it must be true. For example, if you cannot prove there is not psychic power, then there must be.
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