This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 2, Issue 5, from 1988.
Parapsychology continues to exist as a research area marginally recognised as legitimate, on the fringes of the academic world. In the UK, the first Chair of Parapsychology has been founded at Edinburgh on the money left by the late Arthur Koestler, but we should remember that a Chair in Phrenology was once established at Glasgow University1.
Just occasionally there are scandals in which it is revealed that a previously respected academic has been publishing results that were obtained by carefully planned fraud, and this is true in science as well as in pseudoscience. But while cheating in research is by no means confined to parapsychology, the significance of it within the latter is unique. For in the general sciences cheating is merely a nuisance variable that weakens and slows research; but cheating is the very life-blood of parapsychology, and discussion of it has always loomed largely in its literature.
We do not even get close enough to examine the pretensions of the parapsychologists because, as Stephen Toulmin points out, ‘For the moment, the world of the paranormal embraces enough plainly unscrupulous quackery and exploitation to keep us fully occupied.’3 Here Toulmin implies that at some future hypothetical date we will have succeeded in cutting through all the dead wood of charlatanism and be in a position seriously to examine and assess worthwhile phenomena produced by the world of parapsychology. In this he displays the weakness of the pure scientist, as exemplified by the following example.4
A group of ‘pure’ and a group of ‘applied’ scientists were once given the following test. It was essentially the classic pea-and-thimble trick in which the subject has to try to detect under which of the three thimbles the operator has concealed a pea. After he demonstrated the method, the operator removed the pea by sleight of hand. In this test the operative measure was to see how many trials it took the subject to realise that there was no pea under any thimble. The group of ‘applied’ psychologists realised this after about six trials, but it took the ‘pure’ psychologists over twice as many trials before they realised that it was all a trick. It seems that ‘pure’ scientists are slow to realise that in parapsychology there is really nothing to be explained other than the human propensity to deceive oneself and others.
No-one would expect a branch of science such as biology to collapse if people stopped cheating in biological laboratories, but it is arguable that all activity in parapsychology would literally come to a full stop if a relatively small number of people stopped planning and producing fraudulent results. I refer to these dedicated people as the ‘Saints and Martyrs of Parapsychology.’
I do not use the latter terms ironically; I use them perfectly seriously in the sense that Jean-Paul Sartre used them in referring to the novelist and playwright Jean Genet.5 Sartre sees Genet’s sanctity as stemming from the fact that from his youth onwards he became a dedicated person cut off from the ordinary run of humanity and devoted in a mystical way to a system of values that ordinary people can hardly comprehend. Thief, cheat, sex worker, and above all betrayer, Genet became a being apart, not only seeing beauty in vileness, but as Coe6 has expressed it, ‘One of Genet’s most disturbing paradoxes: that the most miraculous of miracles is the fake’ (p.51).
Sartre sees Genet as much a saint as those medieval characters who were quite cut off in their habits, aspirations, and values from the ordinary concerns of more or less honest working people. The saints were fakes as Genet is a fake, but not in the pursuance of the mundane human goals that motivate the occasional dishonesty of ordinary people. For ordinary people a lapse from an accepted code is generally regarded as ‘sin,’ but where this code does literally not exist for an individual, he or she is sinless and achieves sanctity.
Of course Genet’s dedication to the beauty of vileness and falsity involved martyrdom. Sartre saw Genet’s prolonged Calvary as being inevitable and consciously adopted by him, at least in the earlier bourgeois society which demands certain standards of honesty, morality and loyalty. Much of Genet’s early life was spent in abject poverty, in prison, and in subjection to the coarse hoodlums whom he loved and venerated whilst fully understanding the nature of their baseness. The sight of the manacles on the wrists of a condemned murderer produced in Genet a hallucination of a fragrant garland of roses, all the sweeter for his knowing that the apparent boldness of the man was no more than the fake bravado of a trembling coward.7
In parapsychology there are, and have always been, those who are dedicated to faking. In one sense one must respect them more than those who merely capitalise on their dedicated dishonesty. In the latter category there are those who have not to my knowledge ever published any fraudulent results, because they have never claimed any ‘positive’ results at all. Instead they have pursued the more comfortable course of retaining their formal integrity whilst celebrating the outrageous miracles of those like Eusapia Palladino who may have done their cheating for them.
These respectable, and some might say cunning, celebrants of other people’s cheating are not saints and martyrs; they have determined on a course wherein they have their cake and eat it. No one can accuse them of being cheats and liars: at worst they can be publicly accused of being naive, trusting souls, but perhaps their naivete is more apparent than real. But the saints of parapsychology have sacrificed much so that others may exploit their sacrifice. They have laid upon the altar their own personal integrity.
In the academic world they pose as scientists in order to betray science; in the world of entertainment they be tray their magician colleagues by pretending that effects that are achieved by the ordinary techniques of conjuring are achieved by mysterious ‘ psychic’ powers. They cut themselves off from ordinary humanity and endure the martyrdom of lonely, singular lives in which they cannot admit the truth to their fellows. Always there is this convention of pretence that has to be maintained. The saints and martyrs have to pretend to believe in the reality of one another’s miracles, just as in Genet’s world of thieves and braggart hoodlums they keep up a pretence of believing one another’s foolish boasts and poses of indomitable courage.
The mutual pretence of belief in what everyone knows to be false is not invariable outside the academic world of parapsychology, Soal’s two ‘telepathic’ Welsh cousins no doubt had many a good laugh over what they probably perceived as the old fool’s credulity (not realising his deeper purpose in encouraging the farce); Eusapia Palladino perhaps had cronies with whom she could mock at her dupes; Uri has his Shipi, Yasha Katz and others. But in the academic world they must be more wary.
It does not do to admit frankly to colleagues how experiments have been rigged, for there is always the risk of betrayal, as Walter Levy found to his cost at the Institute of Parapsychology. Joseph Rhine,8,9 who more than any other man can be said to have been responsible for the corruption of Levy, turned upon his protege and denounced him after associates had plotted to demonstrate how he performed his miracles with rats. A case of martydom at the hands of three Judases? Levy should have known what Genet tells us what all thieves know – that you can trust no one in the same game as you.
The business of denunciation between parapsychologists is, of course, a two-edged sword. Thus Carl Sargent, parapsychologist at the University of Cambridge, now says, ‘My feeling, for what it’s worth, is that Geller is definitely a fake. It seems to me that there are enough documented incidences of definite trickery for us to be able to say this.’10 It is, of course, open to Geller to retort that in his opinion, for what it is worth, Carl Sargent is definitely a fake and there is enough published evidence to support such a conclusion. Earlier I referred to the fact that in the fake world portrayed by Genet, the criminal boasters had in general to pretend to believe one another’s lies, but there would, of course, be fights. Betrayal was at the heart of the mystical fascination this phoney world had for Genet.
CSICOP, as its title proclaims, exists to investigate the claims for the paranormal. If a little boy tells me that there is a unicorn in the back garden, naturally I look to see what (if anything) is in the garden, but also I try to ascertain why he is making the claim. Is he claiming it for fun? Is he trying to find out how gullible I am? Is it a misperception or an hallucination?
My inquiries naturally go beyond seeing if there is a unicorn in the garden; in fact I am being somewhat dishonest with him if I pretend that I am going out to look for the unicorn, because I honestly do not believe in unicorns. It strikes me that constantly looking in gardens and finding out that there are no unicorns there, as some members of CSICOP do, is a rather dull and unrewarding exercise. Rather I think that we should be concerned with why parapsychologists continue to make the preposterous claims they do.
To treat the claims of pseudoscientists as one treats the claims of scientists is not logical. One is right in assuming that scientists are interested in finding out facts and constructing models to explain these facts. It is true to say that they are also interested in furthering their careers, doing down rivals etc., and this occasionally leads to cheating. But t his mundane and all-too-human propensity to resort to dishonesty just occasionally, does not explain pseudo-science, and we make a big mistake if we approach it with this assumption.
I have used the analogy of Genet’s world of thieves because, as Sartre shows us, it cannot be understood simply by acknowledging that people steal things because they want material goods. I do not mean to impugn the morality or the dignity of those whom I have designated the saints and martyrs of parapsychology; indeed, I have said that they merit more respect than those who merely exploit their dedication to fraud, whilst cunningly abstaining from fraud themselves. In parapsychology there are dedicated and indeed religious people, but their dedication is not to finding out facts and constructing useful theoretical models.
It would be foolish and ignorant to argue with a sincere Roman Catholic over the fact that after the miracle of transubstantiation has been performed, the bread and wine are demonstrably not flesh and blood. Similarly, it would be pointless to insist to the ecstatic Genet that manacles on the wrists of the condemned man were not garlands of flowers. The critic who,with ponderous care, examines the experimental controls on the miracles claimed by such people as Targ and Puthoff, risks making a fool of himself. Miracles are a mockery of science.
It is the scientist who is being obtuse when he does not acknowledge and understand when and why he is being mocked. While uneducated and unsophisticated Roman Catholics may believe that by some divine magic, bread and wine become flesh and blood, this is hardly so of the educated. An educated Roman Catholic knows as well as I do that the physical and chemical nature of the host remains unchanged after the miracle has been performed, so what does he actually believe?
This matter has been the subject of argument by Catholic theologians for a long time, and by and large the views of Thomas Aquinas are accepted today – that the accidents of the bread and wine do not change, but the substance does, so in terms of substance it is correct to believe that it is the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Thus human reason is mocked and humiliated, to the greater glory of God.
Similarly, a true believer in ·parapsychology, when not on the defensive, may agree with me that in terms of accidents, parapsychology is made up of error, fraud, and selective publication, but that these accidents do not matter, for in another sense the substance of parapsychology is genuine. Indeed, if every report and every experiment in parapsychology that have ever taken place could be demonstrated to be a fraud, that would not make the slightest difference to the grounds for belief, as the substance of parapsychology is genuine. Once one has grasped this fact , it becomes evident why much debate about the credibility of the paranormal is idle.
It strikes scientific critics of parapsychology as extraordinary, bizarre and perverse that intelligent defenders of parapsychology such as Collins and Pinch11 should advance meaningless rubbish – their postulation of ‘backwards causality’ – as a defence. But would such scientific critics expect sensible and meaningful arguments, in a scientific sense, to be advanced if the Virgin Birth were to be debated in medical journals devoted to obstetrics, or the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand to be discussed in The British Journal of Nutrition?
As I see it, the people who are at fault are the scientific critics who are prepared to extend the ordinary standards of scientific debate to discussing reports of what are in fact miracles, even if these miracles are given such names as ‘ psychokinesis’, ‘precognition’ , and ‘ telepathy’, and are performed, or are alleged to be performed, in places that are dignified by the name of ‘laboratories’.
The only interesting and valid line of research seems to me to inquire why certain people become so divorced from ordinary human concerns that they are dedicated to fraud, mockery and deceit. The easy answer is that this is just the outcome of a wish to advance their careers, and perhaps to court a little easy notoriety, but I think that this invokes too facile a concept of human motivation. Some businessmen occasionally resort to fraud to advance their business interests, but there is all the difference in the world between such occasionally dishonest characters and the criminal devotees such as those portrayed and exemplified by Genet, who accept their inevitable martyrdom at the hands of a bourgeois society. I call attention to the latter to find a useful analogy in seeking to understand the parapsychologists enamoured with fraud and dedicated to the mockery and perversion of science.
References
- M.D. Altschule, Roots of Modern Psychiatry: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, Chapter 5. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1965.
- K.M. Dallenbach, ‘Phrenology vs Psychoanalysis’, in S . Rachman (Ed.), Critical Essays in Psychoanalysis. New York: Macmillan, 1963.
- S. Toulmin, ‘The new philosophy of science and the ‘paranormal’, The Skeptical Inquirer, IX, 1984, pp.48-55.
- For a discussion of this experiment, see H.J. Eysenck, Uses and Abuses of Psychology, p.11. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
- J-P. Sartre, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, (trans. B. Frechtman) London: W.H. Alien, 1964.
- R.N.C. Coe, The Vision of Jean Genet. London: Peter Owen, 1 96 8 .
- J. Genet, The Thief’s Journal (Trans B. Freachtman), Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
- J.B. Rhine, ‘A new case of experimenter unreliability’, Journal of Parapsychology, 38, 1974, pp. 215-225.
- J .B. Rhine, ‘Second report on a case of experimenter fraud’, Journal of Parapsychology, 39, 1975, pp. 306-325.
- Interview with Carl Sargent, Omni Magazine, November 1987.
- H.M. Collins and T.J. Pinch, Frames of Meaning: the Social Construction of Extraordinary Science. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
