Team Dubious

Part 4

by Ellen Barry

The people who end up under the skeptical microscope are a varied group, ranging from Florida televangelists to Harvard professors, but they share one characteristic: they all hate the skeptics. Even Carl Sagan, chairman and CEO of organized skepticism, expressed doubts about the movement's outreach tactics; in his 1996 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Random House), Sagan criticizes CSICOP for "the sense that we have a monopoly on truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons." When this attitude surfaces, people like Ed Warren get angry. At one point, he sent out a flier on which a prominent skeptic was emblazoned with the mark of Cain.

"What they're trying to do," says Warren, "is prove that religion is one big hoax." He's not worried, though. "I think most people want to believe they're going to see their loved ones someday. They don't want to believe all they have to look forward to is six feet of dirt."

Other critics fault the skeptics on more intellectual grounds. In a 1986 book, the science-fiction writer and futurist Robert Anton Wilson described CSICOP as a "New Inquisition," lashing out to protect the "citadel of science" from every perceived threat. This is an opinion shared by quite a number of CSICOP casualties.

"CSICOP takes legitimate unorthodox ideas and subjects them to such ridicule that it becomes quite easy for deans and the power structure to throw them out," says James DeMeo, whose research into Wilhelm Reich's orgone theory was torn apart in the Skeptical Inquirer three years ago, and who subsequently lost his teaching post. "They are in the service of the power structure. Anything that comes along, like alternative medicine, that challenges the agenda of corporate America, the skeptics are all over it. But you never hear them being skeptical of the crazy things that go on in hospitals."

Among the politically charged areas in which the skeptics have weighed in, the most obviously fractious is recovered memory, which one skeptical article dubbed "the ultimate crybaby therapy." Katy Butler, a journalist who has reported on recovered-memory cases in which there was substantial corroboration, says the skeptics are reacting, sometimes dogmatically, to a series of bewildering challenges to the status quo.

"We're in the middle of these paradigm shifts -- ranging from date rape to healing -- in a society that where there's a tremendous influx of alternative models," Butler says. "You have tremendous competition among the working models of the universe. One [response] is to become New Age, to rely on faith. The other is to get really nervous."

Ross Cheit, a professor of public policy at Brown University, complains that the skeptics dismiss all extraordinary phenomena as mass hysteria. Recovered memory has been lumped together with alien abduction for years, and it's a connection that hits close to home; Cheit's own recovered memories of abuse were corroborated by a confession from the perpetrator.

"It's preposterous to put abuse issues in the same category as alien abduction," Cheit says. "Rational people will say there aren't UFOs. It's a smear tactic."

Drawing that kind of parallel is an easy way of sweeping disturbing theories under the rug. By way of example, Cheit cites Princeton English professor Elaine Showalter's Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (Columbia University Press, 1997), a compilation of assaults on "hysterical epidemics" that include alien abduction, repressed memory, and Gulf War Syndrome. The problem? On June 15, a month and a half after Showalter's book was published, a government study came out citing "substantial evidence" that Gulf War Syndrome was the result of exposure to Iraqi nerve gas -- not "war neurosis," as Showalter concluded.

"When [CSICOP founder] Martin Gardner writes that you can't bend a spoon, that's useful," Cheit says. "When an English professor can write off Gulf War Syndrome, skepticism has run amok."

Part 5

Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.