Thinking, straight

In Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials, Wendy Kaminer reminds us to be skeptical no matter how we feel -- or what we felt last night.

by Michelle Chihara

Wendy Kaminer holds very little sacred. Nothing is above her level-headed brand of criticism: not religion, not recovery groups, and certainly not UFOs. In her new book, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety, due out in October from Pantheon, the Radcliffe scholar tartly indicts the growing American tendency to let religion, spirituality, and a fascination with the supernatural move us to "think with our hearts and not with our heads," not just in private, but also in the public sphere.

Building on her best-selling 1992 critique of the recovery movement, I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, Kaminer targets everything from pop spirituality and the talk-to-your-angels trend to junk science and the fight to teach creationism in public schools. It's one thing to believe in the privacy of your own home that, for example, you slept with an alien, she says. It's another thing altogether to expect everyone to believe you. A citizenry that can't take The X-Files with a grain of salt, that is unable to distinguish reasonable arguments from fantastic conspiracy theories, makes for a dangerous democracy.

And it's not just faith in extraterrestrials that can get in the way of democratic ideals. Politicians such as Republican Henry Hyde, when they call for religion in the public sphere as a means of injecting "values" into politics, suggest that morals can come only from God. Kaminer reminds us that a democracy -- as opposed to a theocracy -- begins with a commitment to a set of secular values. She writes:

The strenuous effort to forge moral consensus in a diverse society is hardly relativism, or subjectivism. It assumes, instead, that we can agree upon a set of sufficiently objective, core values -- like racial and sexual equality or religious freedom. It accepts that at times we will disagree bitterly over fundamentals -- the morality of reproductive choice or the right to die. The values we fashion and ultimately codify are likely to be influenced by religious teachings, of course, but they should be shaped democratically, by the human intellect reflecting on experience, not handed down from on high.

Ultimately, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials is a call to action. Amid the kind of thinking that leads to hysteria on both the right and the left -- on topics from child abuse to the drug war -- Americans, Kaminer says, need to re-dedicate themselves to the rational ideals on which this country is based.

Kaminer is a contributing editor at the Atlantic Monthly and a Public Policy Fellow at Radcliffe. The Phoenix met with her in her Cambridge office in Radcliffe Yard.

Q: Your book's title mentions a "rise in irrationalism." Can you see this rise? Can it be pinpointed?

A: I do see it, but I think it's really difficult to quantify irrationalism. So I can't honestly tell you that we are more irrational as a people today than we were 40 years ago. I think that we are all naturally superstitious in many ways. It would be hard to find a period of history when people weren't irrational in part -- when people didn't believe in some sort of supernatural reality.

But irrationalism has become fashionable even among intellectual elites, and that is what is interesting to me. This notion that we live in this very secular, excessively rational society . . . that's very anachronistic. That's maybe a vision of, I don't know, intellectual life at the beginning of the century, maybe in the first half of the century, when rationalism was ascendant among intellectuals. You had John Dewey writing. You had H.L. Mencken excoriating religion and being published.

Q: But even earlier in the century, that commitment to reason was the norm only among an intellectual elite. Surely the 1920s, which brought us temperance and Prohibition, were no less religious?

A: That's right. Mencken certainly had a lot of material, a lot of things to make fun of, and I know he would have a lot to make fun of today, as well. I think a voice like his is sorely missed.

You see irrationalism in its more debased and simplistic form in something like the recovery movement, which tells us to think with our hearts and not with our heads. Which is such a ridiculous notion. You know what? You should think with your heart and your head. Of course you can't cut out your emotional core, nor should you, nor would you want to. But why would you want to cut out your capacity to reason? Wouldn't you want your reason and emotion to work together, or at least at the same time?

You can see the rise in irrationalism in the number of angel books that have been out there, and in the renewed respectability of a lot of New Age fashions, and the number of people who believe you can channel the spirits of whomever. But I think those kinds of beliefs have always been with us. We see them now in the mass market, and it seems like they're all over the place.

Q: Do you think that the virtuecrats, who are fighting for more religion in the schools and in government, learned some of their tactics from the recovery movement? Aren't they taking the moral high ground for a huge minority by claiming victim status?

A: Well . . . I do think they're sincere. I think they do feel besieged. And I think that their perception that they're under siege is not entirely groundless if you look at their relationship to popular culture. They're responding to the sexual revolution. They're responding to sex and violence in the media. That's why we're seeing more and more legislation being proposed in Congress to restrict sex and violence in the media, to restrict whatever William Bennett and his cohorts don't like. They are, in a sense, besieged by popular culture. But it is a great lie to say, as they do, that we live in an excessively secular society.

Actually, in the last few years they began saying that less and less because is it became so clearly untrue, with all this religious revivalism going on. Here we are facing the year 2000 and we're fighting about evolution and creationism in the schools. It's really quite remarkable.

Q: In I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, you pointed to a covert religiosity in some aspects of the recovery movement.

A: Remember, the recovery movement starts with overt religiosity. AA comes out of evangelical movements, essentially, and all the talk about higher powers. It's quite religious in nature. The ideology of recovery is the ideology of salvation by grace. You give up your will and you become imbued by the will of your god, of your higher power. So it has always been a religious movement, but it was not a sectarian movement. And it's still, if you look at top spirituality books, if you look at angel books, it's all aggressively nonsectarian. That, of course, is part of its appeal in its marketplace.

It's interesting, if you read these top spirituality books -- there is a real antipathy toward organized religion. That's because organized religion has a particular set of rules, dogmas that you have to adopt; it's because it is exclusive, because it says, "This is the way." And the New Age crowd doesn't say "this is the way;" it says, see, there are many paths to God and we can celebrate them all and there really aren't any rules here.

Q: And you're saying that this inclusive spirituality can be dangerous, especially when it affects public life?

A: One of the things that I speculate is that the habits of irrationalism that people develop when they go to the New Age groups, that they develop in their religious training, carry over into realms where reason and not faith is required. It's perfectly appropriate -- it's essential -- to accept on faith that Jesus was the son of God, or that God parted the Red Sea for Moses. Beliefs like that require leaps of faith, and leaps of faith are appropriate. It's not appropriate to make a leap of faith that says that if we eliminate welfare benefits, we'll eliminate teenage pregnancy. That's an empirical question, and it requires empirical analysis. You need to use not your heart, but your mind when you try to answer a question like that.

I think there is a certain kind of magical thinking that we're all prone to naturally. And that finds a more or less harmless outlet in spirituality and religious movements. But it is not at all harmless in the realm of public policy.

Q: Can't certain kinds of skepticism be just as irrational as other kinds of spirituality? You mention the rash of day-care cases in the '80s where a hysteria about child molestation brought about a number of unjust convictions. Don't you think that skepticism can produce a similar counter-hysteria?

A: Well, then it's not skepticism anymore. Then it's something else. It's another unreasoned, instinctive reaction.

Q: Are you familiar with the Fells Acres case?

A: It's hard not to be familiar with it, living in Massachusetts. It's a prime example of hysteria around allegations of child abuse, and it is a horrifying example of the way that hysteria affected the criminal-justice system, where it can do enormous damage.

Q: Do you think the Amiraults were innocent?

A: I have no idea whether any child abuse occurred in this day-care center, and that's the problem. I don't think anyone can have any idea at this point because the investigation and the trial were so corrupted. You had a lot of fantastic allegations that were clearly suggested to the jury.

When you subject children to very subjective interviewing techniques, it becomes impossible at some point to find a core of truth in what they're telling you, because their memories have been so corrupted, their testimony is so corrupted. So it's impossible to know whether or not there was any sort of inappropriate touching or anything that looks like abuse in that case. And we don't send people to jail unless we can establish their guilt within reason. You know, beyond a reasonable doubt.

Q: In your book, you describe recovered-memory syndrome as a closed belief system. Remembering something is seen as proof that it occurred, and not remembering is interpreted as denial.

A: Right, it's insane. So that you either believe it -- you remember it and your memory is true -- or you don't and that's just proof that the memories are really terrible, because they're too terrible to remember. You had this completely hysterical belief in recovered memory that really had no basis in reality. You had the feminist anti-pornography movement that developed a belief that satanic ritual abuse that involved pornography was quite common. You had right-wing Christian fundamentalists who believed in the devil and who believed that the country was filled with these underground satanic cults. And also coming out of the recovery movement, you had something called multiple-personality disorder, which is supposedly another result of child abuse. So you put all these things together and roll it up into a claim of child abuse.

Even for people who aren't involved in all of these crazy movements, you hear a claim of child abuse and it's terrifically upsetting. When you think about an adult having sex with a child, it is the unthinkable. You have a very strong reaction to it and it is something you want to protect children from. So it becomes a very dangerous accusation. And a very disturbing accusation.

Q: Nonetheless, the details in the Fells Acres case are substantially different from the details in some of the other cases. The initial accusations came from the answers to non-suggestive questions that these parents asked their kids. They all got very similar answers, independently. That's very different from details in other cases.

A: Yeah, all these cases are different. But even if you have parents going to the DA's office with plausible accusations, and then you bring in social workers who use a lot of suggestive techniques, it almost doesn't matter how it started. Because in the process of doing the investigation, you're corrupting the testimony, you're losing the ability to make your case beyond a reasonable doubt. You've, in a way, abused these children so that they probably don't know the difference anymore between what happened, what somebody told them happened, and what somebody told them might have happened.

The title of my book comes from an incident where I found myself on a radio show, and the host brings on this woman, without warning me, who claims that she's been abducted by aliens. So, she told this story about how she and her family were abducted. So I said, "You have to understand that it's hard for people to believe that." And she said she had bodily markings, and bodily memories, and metallurgically flattened shrubbery outside her house. I said, "I'm sorry for your troubles." I mean, what else can I say? You can't really get into a debate with somebody who says they've been abducted by aliens, come look at the shrubbery in front of their house.

And I think I said, "Sometimes I feel as if I'm sleeping with an extraterrestrial too." But I don't really know if I said that, or if I just thought it. I really can't tell you for sure if I said it. That's a very, very trivial example of how hard it is to separate what it is that you did from what you remember. I remember being bathed in a sink when I was an infant, maybe a year and a half old. But I can't tell you if that really happened, or if I saw a picture of it.

Q: You cite a Redbook study that showed that an enormous number of people believe there are satanic cults that abuse children. To you, that's evidence of a gullible society. But in a world that's seen Aum Shinrikyo, Heaven's Gate, Columbine High, is it really that surprising that people believe in the existence of satanic cults? Is it even really that irrational?

A: It's irrational to take at face value any fantastic claim without evidence. To take at face value that there are these cults with parents really grossly abusing their own children, fathers getting their daughters pregnant and cutting the fetus out of the child and making her eat the remains. There have been some insane charges, and they make up the myths around these "cults." These are fantastic claims, fantastic claims -- you don't take claims like that at face value.

Q: You point out that democracy is not for the fainthearted. Empirically, we have no basis for our belief that it's going to work in the long run. Why should we believe in it? Why do you, why should we put our faith in democracy?

A: 'Cause we want to be free. I mean, what other choices do we have?

Q: Can we make this grand experiment work?

A: Imperfectly, and only imperfectly. If you'd like me to write a list of all the things that are right about our society today and all the things that are wrong, I suspect the list of things that are wrong would be longer. We've seen a lot of threats to liberty and individual rights in the last 10 years, with very little respect or understanding for civil liberties. We have a whole criminal-justice system that's out of control. We have growing economic inequity and inequalities, we have poverty and deprivation that's not being addressed. We have racism. The list goes on and on and on. We have militias, gun violence that we can't seem to control, we have a health-care crisis. You know how long it is. We have a vastly irrational drug war. So it's not as if I think we've done such a great job.

But what else is there but to try to build a society in which people can be as free as possible without condoning the cruelties that people visit upon each other when you give them their freedom?

I don't know any other way to try to build a relatively free and relatively humane society except democratically. I don't know what else there is to do. I'm not a utopian, I don't think that there are even close to perfect systems or close to perfect worlds.

Q: In a democracy, you write, our feelings are going to get hurt, and that's the way it goes.

A: Yeah There are many worse things in the world than being offended.

Michelle Chihara can be reached at mchihara[a]phx.com.