When the educational psychologist Sir Cyril Burt died in 1971, at the age of eighty-eight, he was one of the most highly respected men in his field. Five years later, that reputation was in ruins. What had happened was simply that Burt had been caught cheating. He had been one of the most influential advocates of the view that we inherit intelligence from our parents, and that our upbringing has relatively little to do with it. And this apparently harmless conclusion became a matter for bitter controversy when it was used to argue that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Professor William Shockley in America and Professor Hans Eysenck in England, were denounced as racialists; Eysenck was actually attacked by left-wing students at one of his lectures. Both defended themselves—as scientists should—by replying that science is completely non-political, and that their views were true, whether they happened to suit the leftists or not.
Then Burt died. And two of his colleagues noticed simultaneously that there was something wrong with his figures. One of his best-known pieces of research concerned identical twins. When raised together, said Burt, their intelligence tended to be almost identical—a correlation of over •90. Now if the ‘environmentalists’ are correct, there ought to be a large and dramatic difference if the twins are separated, and one is raised in a far less favourable environment than the other. This, said Burt, did not occur; there was a difference, but it was fairly small—a drop from •90 to •77.
Burt’s colleagues found one outstanding inconsistency. In different papers, Burt mentioned a different number of twins—between twenty-one and fifty-three. Yet the intelligence correlation was identical—even to three decimal places— •771 for twins raised separately, •994 for twins raised together. That kind of accuracy was impossible with a varying sample unless Burt had started with the result and worked backwards. Once this suspicion had dawned, there were further investigations, and it was soon being suggested that Burt had invented two of the colleagues with whom he was supposed to have collaborated on scientific papers.
But why should a famous and highly esteemed scientist risk his whole reputation on a careless piece of skulduggery? In a letter to a Sunday newspaper, Professor Eysenck suggested charitably that the answer lay in carelessness rather than dishonesty, and reasserted his view that science is concerned with facts, not opinions and prejudices. But another newspaper probably came closer to expressing the general view when it commented that Grand Old Men of science tend to become increasingly possessive about their theories as they get older, and defend their work with force of personality rather than scientific argument. In short, that ‘facts’ often matter far less than personal prestige.
And why do I drag this sad cautionary tale into a book about the ‘paranormal’?
Because it touches on a fundamental problem of human nature and raises some disturbing questions about man’s attitude to events beyond his everyday experience. Men have a deeply ingrained habit of starting with the ‘facts’ they want to believe, and then working backwards to find the evidence to support them.
I am not now suggesting—what every crank would like to believe—that all scientists are involved in a conspiracy to suppress unpalatable ‘facts’. I was trained as a scientist, and I firmly believe that most scientists do their level best to face the facts as they understand them. Eysenck himself is a good example; although he is a tough-minded behaviourist, with a deep suspicion of all forms of ‘occultism’, he was open-minded enough to allow Michel and Françoise Gauquelin to persuade him to examine their statistics on astrology. And when, contrary to all his expectations, these proved to be indisputable, Eysenck caused dismay among his colleagues by publicly acknowledging his finding, and admitting that, for some odd reason, astrology really seemed to work.
But the problem goes deeper than this. We are probably being naïve if we imagine that Burt consciously decided to be dishonest. If he had intended to cook the figures, he would have taken more care to make them convincing. What almost certainly happened is that he became totally convinced of the correctness of his early findings, and unconsciously ‘adjusted’ the later figures to demonstrate what he saw as a foregone conclusion.1 If he noticed any small discrepancies, he probably dismissed them as ‘experimental error’. So Eysenck was right: it was a kind of ‘carelessness’—but a carelessness unconsciously directed at increasing his personal prestige, at proving that he knew best.
This is the problem that most scientists prefer to ignore: the sheer voracity of man’s appetite for recognition and self-esteem. The late Abraham Maslow has pointed out that man is swayed by three basic appetites: for security, sex, and self-respect. All three produce irrational behaviour; but the appetite for self-esteem causes more damage than the other two put together. At its worst, it can produce a form of insanity accompanied by delusions. And in spite of their ideals of honesty and fair-mindedness, scientists are as prone to this appetite as anybody else.
Satirists and philosophers have always recognised the intensity of man’s craving to be ‘in the right’. Alfred Adler even formulated a ‘psychology of self-esteem’, based on the recognition that man’s most dominant urge is his will-to-power. But the first man to recognise the disturbing implications of this curious defect of human nature was neither a philosopher nor a psychologist: he was the writer of science fiction, A. E. Van Vogt.
It was in the 1950s that Van Vogt became interested in what would now be called ‘male chauvinist piggery’, and began to study examples of it in divorce cases. He observed that there is a type of man who demands one code of conduct for himself and another for his wife. And it dawned on him that he had stumbled on an aspect of human nature that had been overlooked by orthodox psychology.
The chief characteristic of this type of male was an obsession with being right. Under no circumstances would he ever admit that he might be wrong. If something upset him, he would tend to look for somebody to blame and pour his irritation on the head of the nearest person, particularly if it happened to be a member of his own family. He could never admit that he might be to blame. With strangers, or colleagues at work, he would usually seem to be a perfectly reasonable human being. Where his family was concerned, he was a kind of miniature Hitler. He was prone to pathological jealousy and could behave like the most puritanical of Victorian fathers. Yet he was often a philanderer and a seducer; sexual conquest was one of his most important sources of self-esteem. He made a habit of indulging every emotion without regard to the rights or wrongs of the matter. If contradicted, he was likely to become violent. Van Vogt labelled him ‘the Right Man’, or the Violent Male.
Understandably, such conduct often led to family conflict and divorce. One Right Man went into business five times, using money that his wife had inherited; each time he went bankrupt. When his wife went to work to support the family, the husband talked about divorce and asked the children to live with him. To his surprise, they refused. At this, he called them together and told them that their mother had not been a virgin when he married her, twenty years earlier. His wife was stunned by this treachery, and pointed out that he had constantly had affairs since they were married. At this, the husband fell into a violent rage, asserting that she had no right to reveal his weakness to the children.
This kind of thing sounds comic; but anyone who has ever lived in a house with a Violent Male (or a Violent Female, for that matter) knows that it can be a long-drawn-out tragedy, a ruthless attempt to force other people into one’s own mental moulds. All human beings have a tendency to daydream, to indulge in fantasies that flatter the ego. The Right Man tries to act out his fantasies and uses his authority to force others to support the charade. If, as occasionally happens, he manages to achieve a position of authority, he is likely to become utterly corrupted by self-indulgence, like so many tyrants and dictators of history. He can now indulge his fantasy of being omnipotent; he regards anyone who opposes his will as a criminal who deserves to suffer. Stalin and Hitler were Right Men; so, probably, was Mao Tse Tung. When, shortly before Mao’s death, the Chinese demonstrated in the Square of Heavenly Peace in Peking against the downfall of the moderate Teng Hsiao-Ping, many were arrested; these were all shot or sentenced to long terms in prison. Mao was old and sick but he could still be roused to murderous rage by the least sign of contradiction or opposition.
But the tendency to live in a fantasy world can be the Right Man’s downfall. He has constructed an edifice of self-delusion, a sandcastle that can be kicked down by reality at any moment. The total submission of his wife—real or apparent—is often the foundation stone of the fantasy. Van Vogt discovered that if the wife summons up courage to desert the Right Man, he often undergoes total collapse; he may suffer nervous breakdown or even commit suicide.
Now Van Vogt emphasises that the Right Man is not simply an habitual liar. ‘He has a strong desire for truth, but the story of his life is an unconsciously distorted version, which shows him to have been a hundred per cent right and everyone else to have been wrong.’ And, paradoxically enough, this ‘strong desire for truth’ may make the Right Man a good scientist or philosopher. It is only where he is concerned that his perception of truth is distorted; besides, which, the pursuit of abstract knowledge provides a welcome relief from his obsession with himself.
An example will serve to underline the point. The late C. E. M. Joad was an evolutionist philosopher and a disciple of Bergson and Shaw. During the Second World War, he became famous as a member of the BBC’s Brain’s Trust team. His manner was waspish, erudite and overbearing, the kind of man the audience ‘loves to hate’. In private life he was a philanderer. He once said he had no interest in speaking with a woman unless she was willing to sleep with him. His wife apparently accepted these affaires.
On April 12, 1948, readers of the evening newspapers were startled by a headline: ‘Dr Joad Fined for Common Ticket Fraud.’ On a train from Waterloo to Exeter, Joad had attempted to save himself seventeen shillings and a penny by telling the ticket inspector that he had boarded the train at Salisbury. It was revealed later that Joad made a habit of defrauding the railway. The BBC dropped him from their programmes and the scandal ruined his career; he died four years later of cancer.
The case has obvious parallels with the Burt scandal; but where Joad is concerned, we are fortunately in possession of some of the answers. His personality emerges clearly in his books, and in the testimony of acquaintances.2 Even the titles reveal his obsessive self-preoccupation: The Book of Joad, The Testament of Joad, The Pleasure of Being Oneself. Most friends agree that he was a touchy man who could be thrown into a towering rage by any affront—real or imagined—to his dignity. But an appeal to his vanity could bring instant and magnanimous forgiveness. Like most Right Men he was not very deeply interested in the personality of other people; he preferred to impose his own over-simplified notions on them—even to calling all his mistresses Maureen.
Why, then, should he risk his career for this silly offence? When a friend later asked him this question, he admitted ruefully: ‘Hubris.’ But this tells us nothing. What we really need to know is that the Right Man lacks all sense of personal morality because he can always find a thousand reasons for believing that anything he does is correct. He is a spoilt child, who believes that his desires ought to be laws of nature. Joad actually wrote some perceptive books on moral philosophy, and there can be no doubt that, where mankind in general was concerned, his sense of morality was acute and profound. And anyone who believes that a Right Man cannot be a good philosopher should look at Joad’s books; the best of them are witty, intelligent and stylish. Joad’s moral blindness applied only to himself. His ‘Rightness’ was something he had to live with, like a lifelong illness.
The really disturbing implications of the Right Man theory begin to emerge when we try to draw the line between ‘unbalanced’ people like Joad and normal, decent people like ourselves. For it proves impossible to do it. The need for self-esteem is a fundamental appetite of human nature; to lack it would be as serious as lacking white corpuscles in the blood. All healthy, normal human beings dislike being in the wrong; we all feel embarrassed about making mistakes and being seen to make them. What is wrong with the Right Man is that he has never conquered a childish desire to have everything his own way, to have the universe bow to his wishes. But is there anyone who is totally free of this attitude? For example, anyone who doesn’t swear when he hits his finger with a hammer? Or who doesn’t feel furious when the taxi he has hailed stops a few yards away and someone else jumps in? But the hammer is an inanimate object. The other person has as much right to the taxi as you have. Nevertheless, the frustration arouses a flood of anger that would have made our Neolithic ancestors reach for their stone axes.
We accuse Joad of being basically uninterested in other people; but again, the cap fits any of us. We never, for example, fall in love with a whole person—simply with a pleasant smile, a musical voice, an attractive mannerism. These provide the basis for a kind of portrait; we add the rest ourselves, drawing the other qualities from some mental image of the kind of person we would like to fall in love with. Many people are married for a lifetime to a person they never really know, because they experience no real curiosity as to what the other person is actually like. Hundreds of wives of murderers have assured the police, with total sincerity, that their husband would be incapable of harming a fly. Provided the other person conforms to our mental image, we ask no questions.
Van Vogt points out that there are far more Right Men around than we ever realise. They are adept at concealing it from other people and from themselves. And again, the same thing applies to the rest of us. People who strike us as selfish or egocentric are the exceptions; yet as soon as we get to know them well, we become aware that even the nicest people are full of their own little vanities and delusions and bigotries. As to myself, I freely confess that I can detect some nasty pockets of Rightness in my own personality, although I doubt whether my friends are aware of them. Like certain butterflies, we have learned to adapt our coloration to the environment. It helps us to feel we are living in a society of normal, balanced people like ourselves.
It is when we begin to grasp its implications that this insight becomes truly alarming. Freud made us recognise that sex plays a far greater role in human life than the Victorians cared to acknowledge (although it now seems clear that he carried it to the point of absurdity). Van Vogt’s achievement is equally striking; he has shown that egoism can produce a form of mild insanity, and that we all suffer from this to some extent. This immediately undermines one of our basic assumptions about human nature: that men can be relied on to behave sensibly out of ‘rational self-interest’. Rightness overrules self-interest; it can make a man blind to his own destruction provided he can inflict damage on his enemy—or, better still, make him beg for mercy. And we are living in a society where practically everyone suffers from some degree of ‘Rightness’. Good manners and social conventions have been developed to minimise the friction. But whenever these fail, the conflict comes out into the open. Governments issue ultimatums and threaten war, and whole nations are willing to agree that a few million dead is a small price to pay for avenging an insult.
In discussing the paranormal, all this turns out to be highly relevant. There is no subject that arouses more extreme reactions than ‘the occult’ (I use the term as a convenient label). The majority of scientists seem to feel that ‘occultists’ are mildly insane and should be locked up. The ‘occultists’ reply that scientists are conceited, prejudiced and intellectually dishonest. Both sides talk about reason, logic and evidence, and neither believes that the other side knows what these terms mean.
On the whole, the scientists seem to be in the stronger position. They point out that science is simply an attempt to understand the universe by asking intelligent questions. The scientist has no axe to grind; he sits down before fact like a little child, in the famous words of T. H. Huxley, and follows humbly wherever she leads. It is the religious people and the ‘occultists’ who distort the facts to accord with their own wishful thinking. They shrink from reason because it threatens their superstitions and dogmas. The whole shameful story can be read in Andrew White’s remarkable History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, published as long ago as 1894, but still the classic account of the clash between superstition and reason. Seen in this light, the modern ‘occultists’ are simply the last lingering remnants of the forces of the Inquisition, who burnt Giordano Bruno and forced Galileo to recant by threats of torture.
It is a powerful and convincing argument. But we are in a position to see its basic weakness. Most good scientists are fairly dominant individuals, and dominant individuals are inclined to like to have their own way. This picture of the scientist as a detached investigator, pursuing truth with a humble and pure heart, is too good to be true. He may have the best intentions in the world; but unless he is aware of his innate tendency to ‘Rightness’, he will never achieve scientific detachment.
When we read The History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in the light of this recognition, it seems to change into a completely different book. White tells a harrowing story of the persecution of honest scientists by dogmatic churchmen; but when we read between the lines, or take the trouble to study the biographies of men like Bruno and Galileo, it ceases to be the story of reason versus superstition, and becomes a tale of Right Men locked in violent conflict.
Giordano Bruno, burnt at the stake in 1600, is usually regarded as a martyr in the cause of reason. Francis Yates’s book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition reveals not only that he was boastful, thin-skinned and paranoid, but also that he was the advocate of a sinister anti-Christian form of magic. Galileo was not the gentle, dedicated scientist portrayed in the play by Bertolt Brecht; he was conceited, bad-tempered and sarcastic. And, unfortunately, both of them came into head-on collision with an ecclesiastical opponent who was another Right Man. Bruno locked horns with Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, Jesuit consultant to the Inquisition, who was canonised in 1930. Bellarmine is described by a sympathetic biographer—Giorgio de Santillana—as ‘immensely ambitious, direct, prompt to flashing anger…conceited about his intellectual gifts’—in fact, very like Bruno himself. Even so, had he been the gentlest and most compassionate soul in the world, he would have been unable to save Bruno. In order to escape the stake, Bruno would have had to recant and admit that he was—theologically speaking, anyway—in the wrong. He refused to recant, and left Bellarmine with no legal alternative to the death sentence.
Galileo’s case has been the subject of even more misrepresentation. In fact, the Catholic Church was not doctrinally opposed to the belief that the sun is the centre of the solar system. This had first been proposed in 1543 by Copernicus, who was a canon of the Church; his book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was actually dedicated to Pope Paul III. Protestants disliked it because it seemed to cast doubt on Holy Scripture. Catholics might suspect that it was ultimately nonsense, but no one seemed to regard it as a danger to the faith. In the normal course of events, the new ideas about the solar system would have flowed quietly into the Church until they were generally accepted, and no one would have made a fuss.
This ‘normal course’ was interrupted by the clash of two Right Men, Galileo and Pope Urban VIII. This is Jacob Bronowski’s description of Urban VIII: ‘He had a confident, impatient turn of mind: “I know better than all the cardinals put together…” he said imperiously. But in fact, Barberini as Pope turned out to be pure baroque: a lavish nepotist, extravagant, domineering, restless in his schemes, and absolutely tone-deaf to the ideas of others. He even had the birds killed in the Vatican gardens because they disturbed him.’ It would be difficult to find a better description of a Right Man. But so was Galileo, although certainly to a lesser extent than Bruno. He was a man who refused to suffer fools gladly, and he had alienated his colleagues at the University of Pisa by writing satirical verse about them. In 1616, Galileo heard rumours that the Church was about to prohibit the teachings of Copernicus, so he went to Rome and talked to Cardinal Bellarmine. Bellarmine told him that he could not, in fact, teach that the system of Copernicus was a proven fact; but he could use it as a hypothesis. When Barberini became Pope Urban VIII in 1623, Galileo hurried along to see him. The Pope was sympathetic, but unwilling to go further than Bellarmine (who was now dead). Galileo was welcome to discuss the ideas of Copernicus in the form of a dialogue, putting the opposite case as well as his own, but he must not state dogmatically that Copernicus was right. He was also particularly insistent that Galileo should state in print that it would be absurd for anyone to limit God’s power and wisdom to his own conjectures. He also made various other suggestions about the dialogue, which Galileo promised to include.
Eight years later, in 1632, the Pope saw a copy of the printed book Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, and was infuriated to find that Galileo had not stuck to his side of the bargain; he had come down squarely in favour of the system of Copernicus. But the crowning insult was that he had put one of the Pope’s suggestions into the mouth of a fool (in bocca di un sciocco) who was actually named Simplicio. This was not only defying the Pope, but twisting his tail. Understandably, Galileo was summoned to Rome and ordered to retract. When he did so, there was no stake, or even prison. He was allowed to return home and remain under house arrest; he was also made to promise not to write any more. He ignored this and wrote a book on physics, which was printed in the Netherlands; but the Holy Office made no attempt to punish him for breaking his word.
What is perfectly clear is that Galileo could have published all his arguments in favour of the heliocentric system if he had ended it by saying: ‘Of course, only God knows if all this is true.’ It would have had precisely the same effect as the book he actually wrote and would probably have been accepted by the Church within a decade or so. Instead, he went about it with the tactlessness and stubbornness of a Right Man and infuriated the Pope to whom he had given his word. And since the Pope was the stronger of the two, Galileo was rapped on the knuckles and ordered to apologise. The Pope emerges from it without much credit, but so does Galileo. (...)
In his important study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas S. Kuhn has a story that goes to the heart of the matter. In 1949, J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman devised an interesting experiment in perception. Subjects were asked to call out the names of playing cards that were shown to them. Some of these cards had been specially made, and included deliberate ‘freaks’ such as black hearts and red clubs. When exposures were brief, the subjects would call ‘hearts’ or ‘clubs’ without noticing anything wrong. When the exposures were longer, they became puzzled; they knew there was something amiss, but couldn’t tell what. If exposures were long enough, most of them finally saw what was wrong. But there were a few who never fathomed what was going on, and these experienced ‘acute personal distress’.
Kuhn argues that once scientists have become comfortably settled with a certain theory, they are deeply unwilling to admit that there might be anything wrong with it. If small facts contradict the theory, they tend to ignore them. If the contradictory facts grow larger, they become distressed and angry. But they are totally unaware that there is anything unreasonable about this reaction; they feel that it is the natural annoyance of a reasonable man in the face of time-wasting absurdities.
Kuhn might also have cited one of the most significant experiments in the history of scientific research; it was conducted at Radcliffe College in 1942 by Dr Gertrude Schmeidler, and has become known as ‘the sheep and the goats experiment’. Dr Schmeidler was testing a group of students for evidence of extrasensory perception by asking them to guess cards. Before the experiment, she asked which of them believed in the possibility of ESP. Those who said yes she classified as sheep; those who said no were goats. The results of the test showed that the sheep scored significantly above chance, which was interesting enough. What was even more extraordinary was that the goats somehow managed to score significantly below. That is to say, they were quite unconsciously ‘cheating’ to support their view that there was no such thing as extrasensory perception. They must have been ignoring their genuine ‘hunches’ about the correct identity of the cards. In doing so, they were revealing as much ESP as the sheep, but using it negatively. They were being influenced by their determination not to believe in ESP.
Kuhn was not the first to analyse this unconscious negativity. William James had already put his finger on it in an essay with the significant title ‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings’. And James’s recognition of this deliberate ‘blindness’ formed the basis of the work of another New Yorker who spent his life haranguing the scientists on their lack of open-mindedness. His name was Charles Hoy Fort, and, by a peculiar irony, this rigidly methodical collector of ‘awkward facts’ has become known as a kind of patron saint of cranks.
Fort was the eldest son of a wealthy and bad-tempered businessman; he grew up with a smarting sense of injustice and a dislike of both his parents. At the age of twenty-two, he supported himself by writing stories in a style that owed something to Mark Twain. He also cultivated a taste for oddities—books about the Great Pyramid, Atlantis and the canals of Mars. His first non-fiction book, written in his mid-thirties, was called simply X and argued that our civilisation is controlled from Mars. In his next book Y, he espoused the hollow-earth theory and described a civilisation inside the South Pole. After many rejections, both manuscripts were lost. They seem to have been an anticipation of the kind of thing that was to make Erich von Däniken famous in the 1960s. The reason for their rejection was fairly certainly Fort’s atrocious style—a disability that obviously bothered publishers more in 1910 than it did in the 1960s.
In 1916, when Fort was forty-two, a small legacy enabled him to devote his days to writing another book, originally to be called Z. He began to spend his days in the public libraries of New York, searching the periodicals for reports of strange and unexplained events. It struck him that although scientific journals often reported curious happenings, no one seemed to want to explain them. Particularly numerous were reports of things falling from the sky: not just meteorites, but showers of stones, coal, fishes, frogs, sand, even blood. They sounded too silly to be significant. But Fort pointed out that in September 13, 1768, French peasants in the fields near Luce heard a violent crash like a thunderclap and saw a great stone object hurtle down from the sky. The French Academy of Sciences asked the great chemist Lavoisier for a report on the occurrence; but Lavoisier was convinced that stones never fell out of the sky, and reported that all the witnesses were mistaken or lying. It was not until the nineteenth century that the Academy finally accepted the reality of meteorites.
The Book of the Damned was a collection of hundreds of unexplained events, and it made Fort’s reputation among literary men. It failed to reach a wider public because Fort wrote in an almost unreadable style, hopping from subject to subject. But the facts are certainly astonishing enough. He describes, for example, a strange series of events that took place in the early 1860s. In July 1860, a great meteorite covered with ice crashed down in Dhurmsalla, India, and was described by the British Deputy Commissioner in the area. But how could a meteorite—which becomes red hot as it falls through our atmosphere—be covered with ice? The following evening, the Commissioner saw lights moving in the sky like fire balloons. At the same time, a Benares newspaper carried a circumstantial report of a shower of live fish, while at Farrukabhad a red substance rained from the clouds. In 1861 there was an earthquake at Singapore, followed by days of torrential rain; in the pools left in the streets, live fish were found swimming. The popular theory that the rain had caused a river to overflow seemed to be contradicted when fish were found in a courtyard surrounded by a high wall.
Fort suspected that these curious phenomena were somehow connected with space; there were luminous effects in the sky like an aurora borealis at the time of these curious events, a period of darkness during daylight hours, a dark spot on the sun, and an earthquake. We may know a great deal about the surface of our planet, but we know very little about the billions of miles of space that the earth travels through. Fort’s biographer Damon Knight was inclined to take the same view after he had gone to the trouble of making a vast card index of all the odd events described in Fort’s books, then making graphs showing the times of their occurrence. He discovered an immediate correlation between storms, things seen in the sky, things falling from the air, and things seen in space (like sunspots and comets). For example, all of them reached a peak in 1887 and again in 1892. Knight suggests tentatively that such events could be connected with forces exerted by heavenly bodies—the forces astrologers believe in. But Fort makes no attempt to present a coherent argument, in either The Book of the Damned or the three volumes that followed it. He is capable of suggesting on one page that there was some sort of floating continent hovering in the sky over India in 1860, and on the next, that there is a sort of universe parallel to ours but in another ‘dimension’. You get the feeling that he takes neither idea seriously. His aim was to provoke ‘anger and distress’ in the scientists, and to force them into examining their assumptions. He succeeded in neither object; the scientists ignored him.
After his death in 1932, Fort’s work was largely forgotten, except by a small circle of admirers who formed a Fortean Society. It began to attract attention again in the late 1940s, after the curious affair of Kenneth Arnold and his sighting of nine Unidentified Flying Objects near Mount Rainier in Washington State.3 As the flying saucer cult gained momentum, somebody remembered that Fort had been talking about such things for years. For example, in The Book of the Damned he had cited the experience of the astronomer E. W. Maunder, of Greenwich Observatory; in November 1882, Maunder had observed a kind of aurora, and in the midst of it, a great circular disc of greenish light that passed across the moon. In the same book, he suggests that there have been many ‘visitors’ to earth, and even —probably his most famous idea—that mankind might be the ‘property’ of such aliens. But Fort had never committed himself to any single Däniken-type theory about gods from the stars. Fort’s attitude to data could be described as sitting on a fence with both ears to the ground.
All the same, the increasing discussion of UFOs, the moon landings, the speculations about life on other planets, suddenly made Fort’s work relevant to a wider public than ever before. He became known as the Prophet of the Unexplained. This was, in a sense, a misrepresentation. After all, if scientists should finally discover that UFOs are visitors from other planets or other dimensions this would qualify as a scientific discovery, and Fort would be simply a far-sighted pioneer. But that is not what really concerned him; he had no desire to join the scientists. His books are so irritating and repetitive because he was struggling to enunciate a basic criticism of the whole idea of science. And it was, fundamentally, the criticism we have examined in this chapter: the feeling that no matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort’s Principle goes something like this: people with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.
So let us conclude this chapter by re-stating Fort’s basic argument—which also happens to be the basic argument of this book.
Science is a method of investigating the universe. Any good investigator begins by trying to take his bearings. He attempts to form a mental map of the kind of universe he thinks he is investigating (Ptolemy’s ‘map’ showed the earth at the centre of the universe and the stars and planets all revolving round it). Such a mental map is called a ‘paradigm’.
When we look at the history of science, we see that paradigms are always being scrapped and replaced by new ones, but this is not quite the automatic process one might expect. Scientists seem to hate to abandon their old paradigms and cling to them as long as possible, determinedly ignoring or dismissing the new evidence that is trying to push them into reconsidering.
We all have a basic need to believe that the universe is a stable and orderly place, as was interestingly demonstrated in an experiment conducted by Dr Anton Hajos at Innsbruck University in the early 1960s. Hajos constructed a pair of spectacles that made everything look distorted. Straight lines became curved, angles were twisted out of shape, and outlines were fringed with prisms of colour. Objects were not where they were supposed to be and made abrupt movements when the subject turned his head. Yet when people were made to wear these spectacles all the time, they quickly became used to them. Lines straightened out, prismatic colours disappeared, and after six days, the world once again looked perfectly normal. When the spectacles were taken off, the trouble began all over again, and it took several days for things to return to normal.
Human beings possess a powerful stabilising mechanism, which operates on the psychological as well as the physical level. This explains why they can accomplish such an apparently impossible feat as riding a bicycle and why people whose lives have been shattered by some appalling disaster—like an earthquake—can pick up the pieces and start anew. A person who feels deeply insecure is afraid to begin living. That is why we tend to ignore things that upset our basic sense of normality—or to forget them as quickly as possible. It is not ‘choice’ but a subconscious mechanism.
Admittedly, a world full of ‘exceptions’ would become a kind of nightmare. We can all remember the difficulties of the first day at a new school, or the emotional upheavals of adolescence, when the certainties of childhood seemed to cave in beneath our feet. Nobody could stand too many of these ‘revolutions’. But a world with no ‘exceptions’ would either turn us into vegetables or drive us insane with boredom. Poets have been known to become alcoholics or drug addicts to escape too much ‘stability’.
The problem is to strike a balance between the two extremes. We need a world with enough strangeness and ‘newness’ to keep us awake but not enough to produce a feeling of insecurity. And here we have to recognise that different people can stand different degrees of uncertainty. As we have seen, most scientists seem to have a strong compulsion to cling to their old paradigms. By contrast, people like Fort and Lethbridge take pleasure in the fact that the world is bursting with anomalies. It is true that Lethbridge compared his discoveries to a feeling of ice collapsing beneath his feet; but he never seemed unduly alarmed at the coldness of the water.
Both Lethbridge and Fort, however, failed to offer a new paradigm. Lethbridge tried hard, but there is nothing in his books to make an open-minded scientist start revising his view of the universe. Fort openly admitted that he had no new theory of the universe to offer. His major contribution was to repeat, over and over again, that the paradigms of the scientists were totally inadequate. Both men could be accused of not being sufficiently conversant with the sheer extent of the field of the ‘paranormal’.
For example, Lethbridge’s observations of the behaviour of the pendulum clearly imply that there is some ‘other’ part of the mind that knows the answers to all kinds of questions. He writes in ESP: Beyond Time and Distance: ‘Although this influence may well be Jung’s psyche, it seems unlikely that it is unconscious. In fact it appears to be very much awake and much more knowledgeable than the brain.’ He recognised Jung as one of the chief pioneers of these unknown areas of consciousness; yet he seems never to have taken the trouble to read Jung systematically and find out what he had to say about the collective unconscious. In fact, Jung’s studies in multiple personality—with which he began his career as a psychologist—were anticipated by Pierre Janet, whose insights into the structure of the psyche explain how a part of the mind can be ‘unconscious’ and yet ‘more knowledgeable than the brain’. Until we begin to study these actual mechanisms and how they relate to ESP, precognition, and the strange energies that produce poltergeist activity, we cannot hope to begin to produce a paradigm that will satisfy the scientists.
The same kind of criticism could be directed at Jung. At a fairly early stage in his career, he recognised instinctively that the parts of the mind that interested him were also connected with ‘paranormal’ cognition, second sight, and so on. He also came to recognise that the half-forgotten science of alchemy is full of clues to these areas of the psyche. Yet, although he wrote three large books on alchemy, he made no attempt to connect his interest in alchemy with his interest in the paranormal, presumably because he had no idea of how to go about it. He might have found his clues in the work of Gurdjieff, who referred to his method as a form of alchemy; but apparently he never took the trouble to investigate.
There is no reason why we should not take our clues wherever we can find them—in Lethbridge, Jung, Janet, Gurdjieff, alchemy, astrology, even ritual magic. Let us see, therefore, if we can at least supply some of the missing parts of Lethbridge’s paradigm.
From: Mysteries
An Investigation into the Occult, the Paranormal and the Supernatural
Colin Wilson
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