“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is perhaps the greatest cliché of the skeptical movement, tied with “correlation does not imply causation.” Many people, however—from serious philosophers to cynical charlatans—take issue with this idea, mainly because extraordinary seems far too vague a concept, perhaps even a subjective one. A display of balance and agility that strikes me as extraordinary may be nothing more than a routine performance for a circus acrobat.

For that reason, some suspect that extraordinary is just something a crafty skeptic pulls out of their pocket whenever they decide to pick on a particular claim.

At first glance, this seems like an objection with some merit. And there is no denying that the label is sometimes misapplied. But a little more reflection is enough to show that, even if the concept is not perfectly well defined, neither is it arbitrary. Consider an example: if my friend’s word is good enough for me to believe him when he says he took the bus, why shouldn’t it be good enough when he says he was abducted by a flying saucer? Yet the fact is that almost anyone, skeptic or not, accepts the bus ride without batting an eye, but reacts with surprise to the abduction—and asks for more details. Why?

Because riding the bus is a common, ordinary event. Someone being carried off by aliens is something that, if it happens at all, is exceedingly uncommon—extraordinary. The frequency with which an event occurs, or we imagine it occurs, is therefore one indicator. But it is not the only one: we can refine the picture by introducing the concepts of the possible, the plausible, and the probable.

Possible

Possible is a category that is at once simple and deceptive—in fact, deceptive precisely because of its simplicity. To get straight to the point, anything not forbidden by the laws of logic, anything that does not entail a blatant and irreconcilable contradiction, is possible. Even things that violate the laws of physics may, in principle, be possible if, for example, our understanding of those laws is incomplete or inadequate.

This makes the universe of impossible things both infinite and, at the same time, remarkably limited: infinite because it is absurdly easy to generate contradictions ad nauseam (four-legged bipeds, square triangles, odd numbers divisible by two), but limited because, except under very special circumstances, that infinity is profoundly uninteresting—a toy box filled with toys no one wants to play with. What use would a square triangle be?

The universe of possible things is also infinite, and that is precisely why it deceives us: we tend to imagine it as much smaller than it really is. Faced with the question, “But isn’t that possible?”, a creative person can easily conjure up an outlandish scenario in which, yes, 99% of the world’s climate scientists have conspired to destroy the oil industry, or NASA faked the Eagle module’s landing on the Moon.

A judgment of possibility is insufficient. If the mere fact that something is possible also makes it seem reasonable, it is probably because we are confusing the possible with the plausible.

Plausible

Imagine you are someone who loves television series, lives alone, and has no children. One day, when you arrive home, you hear what sounds like a baby crying from behind your apartment door. What is the first thought that crosses your mind? “Someone broke into my apartment, left a baby behind, and locked the door on the way out!” or “Damn—I think I left the television on when I went out.”

Read more

Edgar Allan Poe’s relationship with science was ambivalent. Scientific and mathematical subjects fascinated him, and he kept abreast of the latest developments; at the same time, he resented the special prestige accorded to scientific rationality—in a poem from his youth, he called Science a “Vulture, whose wings are dull realities,” a bird that “preyest…upon the poet’s heart”—and suspected, or rather knew, that the rhetoric and vocabulary characteristic of science lent themselves remarkably well to every variety of charlatanism.

Indeed, the use of what we might call a “scientific mode of expression” to package and embellish absurdities is one of the hallmarks of Poe’s fiction. Nor did he shrink from perpetrating one or two such pranks himself, such as the story “The Balloon-Hoax,” initially published as a news report by the New York Sun in 1844, and the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, whose opening installments appeared as fiction but whose book edition was presented as a “true” account.

This is how Poe later described the effect produced by the publication of “The Balloon-Hoax” in the pages of the Sun:

“Of course there was great discrepancy of opinion as regards the authenticity of the story; but I observed that the more intelligent believed, while the rabble, for the most part, rejected the whole with disdain. Twenty years ago credulity was the characteristic trait of the mob, incredulity the distinctive feature of the philosophic; now the case is exactly reversed.”

When the charlatan deploys the proper vocabulary and tone—implicitly, the vocabulary and tone of science—the “philosophic” becomes easier to hoodwink than the “mob.”

But the most impressive and effective of all Poe’s hoaxes was an inadvertent one—a story sent out as fiction but taken as fact on both sides of the Atlantic, meriting even a notice in The Sunday Times of London (dated January 4, 1846): “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.”

As I don’t believe in spoilers for material published more than a century ago, here’s a synopsis: M. Valdemar is at death’s door but is hypnotized (“mesmerized”) just before passing away. It is implied that the mesmeric condition imprisons the soul in the dead body, or perhaps keeps the body an open channel for the soul, still tethered to it, in the Great Beyond. After some months, the hypnotic state is eliminated, and the body suffers, in a single instant, all the decomposition that had been delayed by the trance.

Mesmerism in the United States was a very serious matter during the 1830s and 1840s. German physician Anton Mesmer had promoted in Europe during the late 1700s the belief that some kind of vital force, called “animal magnetism,” could be channeled from one person to another.

Mesmer used this power to purportedly cure physical and mental illnesses and achieved great success in France: historian Robert Darnton notes that the popular Parisian press spent more time discussing Mesmerism than politics or social unrest even up to the eve of the Revolution. However, a series of carefully designed experiments showed that the patients’ imagination could explain all the noticeable effects: once drama and suggestibility were taken into account, the “animal magnetic fluid” became an unnecessary hypothesis.

But some people will never let scientific facts spoil their fun, so even after the experiments were published, Mesmerism retained a large cadre of enthusiasts. As tends to happen when a cult becomes too big for its leader to keep the acolytes on a short leash—and, history tells us, Mesmer was a difficult man, jealous and prone to alienating even his most faithful allies—the movement soon fragmented into sects with divergent interpretations of what “animal magnetism” was and how to use it.

The version that eventually arrived in America in 1836, at the hands of Frenchman Charles Poyen, emphasized what was then called “magnetic somnambulism,” an altered state of consciousness that apparently opened the human mind to almost miraculous capacities. It proved, people believed, the superiority of mind over matter; it rationalized things like precognition and clairvoyance; some said it proved the immortality of the soul. And it was (or so Poyen declared) solid science. In his famous 1836 essay Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson lists animal magnetism as one of the “gleams” of man’s still-untapped powers.

Poe greatly appreciated the subject. He enjoyed the 1844 book The Facts of Mesmerism, by Chauncey Hare Townshend; in February 1845, the year “M. Valdemar” was published, The Broadway Journal—a publication that would soon have Poe as its chief editor—printed a letter from a physician describing a minor surgery performed under mesmeric anesthesia.

The wave of belief, or half-belief, in the “facts” of the liminal death of M. Valdemar seems initially to have amused, but eventually to have annoyed, the story’s author. When The New York Daily Tribune printed, in December 1845, that “several good matter-of-fact citizens” were taking the tale perhaps a little too seriously, Poe rejoined in the pages of The Broadway Journal that “Why cannot a man’s death be postponed indefinitely by Mesmerism? Why cannot a man talk after he is dead? Why? — Why? — that is the question…”

When noted British mesmerist Robert Collyer, then touring the United States as the new great apostle of animal magnetism after Poyen’s departure, wrote Poe to say that he not only believed the Valdemar case to be true but had himself effected a resurrection—“he was placed in his coffin ready for interment”—by mesmeric means, Poe published Collyer’s missive followed by a short comment:

“We have no doubt that Mr. Collyer is perfectly correct in all that he says — and all he desires us to say — but the truth is, there was a very small modicum of truth in the case of M. Valdemar—which, in consequence, may be called hard case—very hard for M. Valdemar, for Mr. Collyer, and ourselves. If the story was not true, it should have been…

But he soon lost his patience. When a British science-popularization magazine pirated the tale and published it with an editorial comment about its “internal evidence,” the American writer went off the rails, ridiculing the idea that statements made as part of a narrative can be used, without external validation, as evidence for the veracity of the selfsame narrative: “the story is proved by these facts… now all we have to do is prove these facts. Ah! they are proved by the story.”

Finally, in December 1846, Poe gave the most direct answer possible: to a correspondent in Scotland, he wrote, “ ‘Hoax’ is precisely the word suited to M. Valdemar’s case… Some few people believe it—but I do not—and don’t you.” However, as proof of the powerlessness of even the most lucid explanation to dispel strongly held beliefs, in April 1847 the correspondent, a man called Ramsay, sent the following response:

“The Pamphlet on Valdemar is published in your name as the sole conductor & operator in the case so that I thought you could at once affirm or deny it, but from the tenor of your letter to me this appears not to be the fact.”

In the 19th century, as now in the 21st, hoaxes, even unintentional ones, acquire a life of their own. Paraphrasing Shakespeare, the lies men tell live after them; the truths, especially when disappointing, may very well be interred with their bones.

A Moveable Feast is the title of the book in which Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) recounts his experiences in the French capital a century ago, during the 1920s. The winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature describes a city teeming with artists and intellectuals from America and across Europe, all set adrift by the First World War: the Lost Generation.

This Parisian magnetism, which attracted not only genuine geniuses but also harmless eccentrics and the most brazen impostors, did not begin with the Great War.

Roughly a century and a half before Hemingway’s “moveable feast”—during the hundred years between about 1740 and 1840—the City of Light was a paradise for charlatans and audacious frauds. Immortals, alchemists, miracle healers: they all passed through Paris, and many prospered handsomely there, dining in aristocratic salons, draining the fortunes of nobles obsessed with the secret of eternal life, and serving as confidants to high-ranking officials of the State, or even to the king himself (while there still was a king: the Century of Charlatans spans the French Revolution).

The era opened in grand style with the Count of Saint-Germain (c. 1690–1784). This mysterious figure first appeared in England as a musician and composer. Horace Walpole (1717–1797), the English politician and writer best known for launching the Gothic horror craze with The Castle of Otranto, mentions him in a letter written in 1745:

(…) they seized an odd man, who goes by the name of Count St Germain. He has been here these two years, will not tell who he is or whence, but professes two very wonderful things, the first that he does not go by his right name; and the second, that he never had any dealings, or desire to have any dealings with any woman—nay, nor with any succedaneum. He sings, plays on the violin wonderfully, composes,32 is mad, and not very sensible. He is called an Italian,33 a Spaniard, a Pole; a somebody that married a great fortune in Mexico, and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople; a priest, fiddler, a vast nobleman. The Prince of Wales has had unsatiated curiosity about him, but in vain.

Walpole adds that this “odd man,” arrested on suspicion of espionage, had already been released but had not left London, “what convinces me that he is not a gentleman.”

Three Hundred Years

We find Saint-Germain in Paris, well established and on good terms with King Louis XV (1710–1774) and his mistress, Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764), by 1758. Some letters from the previous decade, however, suggest that he already enjoyed access to the court at Versailles as early as 1748 or 1749. One hypothesis holds that he was a Transylvanian nobleman fleeing persecution by the Habsburg Empire. This theory was championed by the composer Johan Franco (1908–1988) in an influential article published in 1950. Against it stands the obvious objection that becoming famous as a magician, alchemist, and immortal—especially in Parisian high society—hardly seems a practical way of remaining anonymous.

In his voluminous memoirs, the celebrated seducer Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) refers to Saint-Germain as the “king of impostors and charlatans,” who “calmly and confidently claimed to be more than three hundred years old, to know the secrets of Universal Medicine, to command the forces of nature, and to melt diamonds, fashioning from ten or twelve small gems a single large diamond of the purest water.”

Casanova himself fits perfectly into the landscape of the Paris of the Great Charlatans. Better known for his sexual adventures, the Venetian had no hesitation in resorting to magic whenever winning the favor—and the money—of a society lady was at stake. Casanova presented himself as a magician and alchemist in order to gain the confidence of the wealthy widow Jeanne Camus de Pontcarré, Marquise d’Urfé (1705–1775).

The seducer writes that, after dazzling her with a trick involving Kabbalah and numerology, “I left her, carrying away with me her heart, her soul, her mind, and what little common sense she still possessed.”

The Marquise believed that, being a woman, she could never master all the secrets of the mystical arts, and therefore wished to produce a male child into whom her soul could be reincarnated. Casanova agreed to help, but postponed the “fertilization ritual” year after year, meanwhile extracting favors, money, and assistance from her. The ceremony was finally performed in 1763, and the Marquise broke off relations with the Venetian shortly thereafter.

Magnetic Magic

It was in this cultural climate that the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) settled in Paris, some fifteen years after Casanova’s adventures with the Marquise and less than a decade before the scandals surrounding another great mystical charlatan, Count Cagliostro (1743–1795).

Read more

In researching the roots of the obsession that some intellectual currents have with fabricating “scientific proof” of the existence of immaterial souls that survive death, I always find—besides, of course, the visceral, narcissistic fear of extinction—the same emotional thread: a deeply felt need to refute “materialism.” You can see it in the works of the theological Newtonians we discussed last week; it’s in the preoccupations of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, the first organization dedicated to the scientific investigation of survival after death; it’s in Arthur Conan Doyle’s sermons defending and promoting Spiritualism.

It’s even in the works of J. B. Rhine, the father of modern parapsychology, who is usually credited with separating psychic “science” from religious urges. But in his book The Reach of the Mind, he disparages:

It’s almost Pavlovian: “spiritual” is good, generous, elevated, makes you smile; “materialism” is ugly, crude, superficial, treacherous, it knots up your gut. But, as Carl Sagan used to say, we shouldn’t think with our gut. So what, exactly, is the problem with materialism?

First things first: let’s clear the air a bit and distinguish between what we might call “moral materialism”—the idea that the supreme goal of human life is to pile up jewels, land, and money—and what I’ll call “ontological materialism,” the idea that matter and energy (in the technical sense that physicists use, not the vague, woo-woo mystical sense) are the fundamental basis of everything that exists.

That moral materialism is an aberration has been known at least since Aristotle drew the distinction between means and ends: wealth is a means. That many people turn its accumulation into an end in itself is a serious distortion, but one that in no way affects ontological materialists exclusively. Quite the opposite, actually: just look at how well prosperity cults, well, prosper out there.

The problem is that many people see moral materialism as a kind of logical consequence of ontological materialism: if so-and-so sees nothing in the Universe beyond matter, the reasoning goes, then so-and-so will obviously value only material things.

Yes. Of course. Obviously.

What this line of thinking overlooks, however, is that by dissolving the distinction between the spiritual and the material, ontological materialism also encompasses love, friendship, aesthetic pleasure, culture, and everything else we cherish. All of these become products of matter. Love arising from the activity of neurons and glands is no less love than love supposedly arising from the communion of souls, whatever “communion of souls” might mean beyond a poetic shorthand for “the activity of neurons and glands.”

What remains are the objections that matter is “brute” and “crude,” and that seeing one’s neighbor as a walking matrix of molecules is somehow less dignified than seeing them as a spirit created in the image and likeness of God.

As for the first objection, it is nothing but sheer prejudice. It comes from imagining, whenever the word “matter” is invoked, a rock, a dead animal, or a brick. But fresh flowers and hummingbirds in flight are matter too, as are the delicate clouds of light and gas photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope in the spaces between the stars.

As for the second objection (setting aside, for the moment, the question of which description contains more objective truth), it ignores the fact that, in the materialist view, we are all walking piles of molecules, and that we have, to console our afflictions, only each other—and nothing else.

Ironically, almost every single attempt to scientify “spirituality” ends up making the soul into something that is indistinguishable from matter, even if, as Conan Doyle used to say, of an “elevated” or “rarefied” kind. From Emanuel Swedenborg’s visions in the 18th century to the descriptions of the “Summerland”—paradise—brought by spiritualistic mediums in the 19th and 20th centuries, we always get souls that have their own bodies and interact with spiritual “objects” as if they were solid. Physicist Sir Oliver Lodge even published mediumistic dialogues in which spirits describe otherworldly houses of brick, meals, cigars, and whisky. “Spiritual” immortality is, in its own way, a deeply materialistic preoccupation.

(A related point, which most of the time is conveniently overlooked in polite conversation, is the relationship between science and ontological materialism: one way to avoid awkward situations is to say that science “presupposes” materialism, so it can’t really be brought to bear on any discussion of the subject because, of course, that would constitute a circular argument. But it is just not really true: if ontological materialism were empirically inadequate in any way, scientific investigation would eventually hit a wall—the presupposition would suffer a reductio ad absurdum, much as when a mathematician proves a proposition by assuming its negation and then showing that it inevitably leads to a contradiction. Well, in the case of science, materialism has survived all attempts at reductio, and there have been several over the last 600-plus years.)

People who disparage ontological materialism sometimes say they feel vertigo, or despair, or revulsion when faced with the possibility that “there is nothing more.” But if only they could manage their metaphysical loathing for a moment and consider one particular implication: if there’s nothing more, then the love you receive (and give) here is all you get. “Loving thy neighbor” suddenly becomes so much more urgent.

It doesn’t make sense to undervalue your fellow human being for being “just atoms” if you are “just atoms” too.

This realization, if fully understood, strikes me as far more capable of leading to a genuine state of humility and universal brotherhood than the myth that we are all “the Owner’s children,” who’d better mind our manners or Daddy will beat the tar out of us.

One thing to know about bad ideas is that they are like weeds in a garden: no matter how sure you are you've gotten rid of them, or how long they stay away, sooner or later they will pop up again. “Scientific” creationism and its more generic form, natural theology—the belief that one can use scientific facts to prove religious dogma—is one of them. Nowadays, this kind of stuff tends to hijack and distort biology and geology (“Intelligent Design,” anyone?), but long before the reaction to Charles Darwin (1809–1882), they tried to do something similar to physics.

In 1796, French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) proposed his Nebular Hypothesis, a model for the origin of the Solar System grounded exclusively in Newtonian celestial mechanics and probability—a genesis story predicated only on science and mathematics, without requiring divine action, intention, or intervention.

According to a well-known anecdote, when Laplace was asked by Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) why his works on astronomy did not mention God, he answered, “Because I have no need for this hypothesis.”

No contemporary documentation confirms the exact words of the exchange, but the diaries of astronomer William Herschel (1738-1822) register the Laplace-Bonaparte meeting and the gist of the conversation. A century later, social scientist Max Weber (1864–1920) would write about “the disenchantment of the world,” the modern age in which “technology and calculation” replace magic and prayer.

Ironically, all these developments would have appalled the man most responsible for the eventual enthronement of “technology and calculation,” Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727). Newton and the intellectual circle that formed around him were staunch Protestant Christians (albeit, at least in the case of Newton himself, of a very unorthodox bent) who believed that the newly discovered laws of mechanics showed that the “Book of Nature”—that is, scientific observation—revealed God’s truth as plainly as Holy Scripture.

When theologian and classics scholar Richard Bentley (1662–1742) used Newtonian principles to underpin a series of religious sermons in 1692, Newton famously commented that “When I wrote my treatise upon our Systeme I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the beliefe of a Deity and nothing can rejoyce me more than to find it usefull for that purpose.”

The members of the first generation of Newtonian intellectuals were not only adepts and proponents of natural theology, but also theological voluntarists: they saw a God who imposed His will on the universe in real time, always present and active in His Creation, always adjusting and interfering to impede base matter from collapsing into decay and inertia. He was pantokrator, the arbitrary and absolute ruler of the cosmos.

In the Newtonian view, matter is simple vis inertiae, and without continuous divine intervention the Universe would ultimately grind to a halt.

Because of that, the Newtonians would engage in a long and acrimonious polemic with German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Besides disputing the priority in the invention of integral and differential calculus with Newton, Leibniz also proposed a God who, having created “the Best of All Possible Worlds,” would have no reason to keep meddling with His work: a perfect Creation (and God could do nothing less than perfect), once realized, should be self-sufficient. For Leibniz, a God who must needs adjust or sustain His oeuvre continuously after completion would be less than competent; for Newton, a God who never interferes would be impotent.

Each considered the other’s position untenable and offensive. In a letter later published by the noted theologian (and Newtonian) Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), Leibniz complains that, according to Newton and his followers, “God Almighty needs to wind up his watch from time to time… He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion.”

The theological dispute affected even the scientific models of physical reality proposed by each camp. The Newtonians argued that force—something imposed from outside that could be neutralized or extinguished, as when two moving spheres collide and come to rest—was the fundamental measurable quantity involved in a material body’s movement, while the Leibnizians argued instead for vis viva, seen as an intrinsic and indestructible property of matter itself.

Read more

It seems that it has become unavoidable to talk about Christopher Nolan’s new movie, The Odyssey. But even harder than not talking about the movie is finding something relevant that has been said about it. I mean, it’s a decent enough production, with good performances (some of them very good); the decision to use Goya’s paintings as inspiration for the Cyclops sequence was genuinely brilliant. However, the “message” about the loss of civility leading to the collapse of civilization is driven home with all the subtlety—and corresponding awkwardness—of the moral lesson at the end of an old Saturday-morning cartoon. Odysseus almost becomes He-Man (or Orko).

But what would you expect? It’s a summer blockbuster, for Athena’s sake, not an art-house film!

There are complaints—such as those about the “diversity” casting—that are really below contempt, and the fact that serious people have felt the need to take the time to address them shows how low we have fallen. Fifty years ago, Jesus Christ Superstar had Black actors playing Judas both on stage and on screen, and in 1993 Denzel Washington starred in Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, and I don’t recall heated debates about a loss of authenticity back then. Someone was crying bloody murder because, supposedly, the casting of Elliot Page (who transitioned from woman to man a few years ago) as a Greek male warrior violated “biological reality,” but I guess that particular critic missed the part about the one-eyed giant.

The more interesting—or perhaps less uninteresting—of the purportedly “deep” criticisms accuse the movie of violating the “spirit” or the “true meaning” of the original material. This represents, first, a very narrow understanding of what an adaptation is, or can be. Yes, there are adaptations meant to serve as digests of the original, like the old Classics Illustrated comic-book series, but others become great works precisely by deliberately going against the grain of their source. One may think here of Robert Aldrich’s 1955 Kiss Me Deadly, which turns the ultra-macho and almost infallible detective Mike Hammer, from Mickey Spillane’s novels, into a bumbling gigolo and idiot, or Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 Starship Troopers. And there is, of course, a whole range of possibilities between the digest and the lampoon—as any fan of, say, Agatha Christie can attest.

Now, someone may raise a hand and accuse me of mixing apples and oranges here: I am giving examples from mystery fiction and science fiction, but The Odyssey is a classic; it is a myth. Myths tell eternal, archetypal stories and shouldn’t be violated!

Well, thanks for asking, because that brings me to my second point. All this talk about archetypal stuff is really nothing but a big misunderstanding. I’ve discussed elsewhere all that Jung-Campbell bullshit, so, cutting right to the chase: myths aren’t stories. Myths are vehicles for stories. A myth is a structure into which you can plug any story you wish to tell. They are to narrative what the sonnet is to verse: a way of formally organizing what you want to say. You can take, for instance, the myth of Prometheus and use it to create either a cautionary tale (as in Frankenstein) or an ode to defiance (as in Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound).

The “classic” part only reinforces this. As with the Bible, The Odyssey is so old and has had so many layers of meaning imposed upon it by centuries of readings and interpretations that almost any verse can be plucked out and used as a point of departure for... well, anything. It is not only a myth; it is an enormous fractal structure of myths within myths.

People are, of course, free to love, like, or dislike Nolan’s movie, or to think—as I did—that it’s an OK, perhaps slightly above-average, summer blockbuster. But trying to judge it against some fantastical standard of the Eternal Truths of Western Civilization, or whatever, is a serious—and quite silly—category mistake.

Lo and behold, when I woke up this morning, my corner of the internet was sort of up in arms about a recent New York Times supplement on “How to Be Cultured.” The biggest complaint is that, once again, whatever the concept of “culture” assumed by the newspaper, it excludes any kind of scientific knowledge — the NYT online quiz that readers are invited to answer in order to assess their level of “culture” asks about Riesling wine and furniture design, but absolutely nothing about, say, biology or physics.

It seems that, according to The New York Times, you can be a flat-earther creationist and a highly cultured person at the same time.

As this article in Physics World correctly notes, the whole “How to Be Cultured” supplement seems to be nothing more than a ploy to push advertisements for luxury goods, so the emphasis on wine and furniture makes sense; the other “culture” indicators go from the cliché (classic novels and movies) to the downright pretentious, always in the artistic/abstruse sense.

The fact that such a view of culture, excluding any knowledge of what the world is and how it works, is plausible enough to carry the ploy — with only a few complaints here and there, most of them in niche publications — merits attention. After all, what does it mean to be “cultured?”

The best definition I can come up with is that “to be cultured” means to possess the necessary lexicon to engage meaningfully and comfortably with the civilization you happen to find yourself in. There are myths, works of art, concepts, turns of phrase, and simple facts of knowledge (real or assumed) that lie behind even the most commonplace human interactions within a culture — that really are that culture. A cultured person is someone who can identify, understand, and analyze these elements, even when they are hidden, distorted, or remain implicit.

In the past, when print was the only medium and books were rare and expensive, to be “cultured” in the West meant little more than some familiarity with the classics from Greece and Rome and with Christian thought. Diversification complicated things: culture fragmented into subcultures, and today one could argue that you can be highly “cultured” in, say, pop music without ever having read a verse of Homer. But even there, there are caveats: if you want to understand why the songs we sing express emotion in the way they do, you’ll probably have to find your way back to the classics.

Snobbery and populism add even more layers of complexity: yes, the “necessary lexicon to engage meaningfully and comfortably” with others may be artificially inflated to keep the lower classes, the underprivileged, and the exploited in their “proper” place. From preposterous codes of table manners to obscure Latin quotations, the strategies deployed are legion. Populism is the equal and opposite reaction: the presumption that any code or requirement is maliciously exclusionary, so there should be none.

This snobbish-populist tension tends to loom large in every discussion of what it means to be “cultured.” People who like to think of themselves as “cultured” may be only eager to play one-upmanship with each other (and those are, I bet, the target audience of the Times supplement and its dazzling advertisers), while people who decry the very concept may be just licking their wounded egos.

As someone who has been immersed in two new cultures in less than a decade — first by falling in love with a Jewish woman, and then by moving to another country — I can attest that the effort of becoming minimally “cultured” can be fun and exciting, if the people around you are eager to help.

And what about science? To paraphrase no less an authority than the late Pope John Paul II (someone who can hardly be accused of “scientism”), science is that which is unreasonable to ignore. As such, it is obviously part of any meaningful engagement with the world. No matter how many tasting notes you can extract from a sip of Riesling, without science you are not really cultured, just pretentious.

Biologist Sir Peter Medawar, winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, famously said that psychoanalytic theory represents “the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century.” What is less known is the time and context of the remark: it appears in Medawar’s review of a 1975 book on dystonia musculorum deformans, or torsion dystonia, a genetically based neurological disorder that causes involuntary movements and muscle spasms which, in some cases, can produce severe bodily deformities.

Among the cases described in the book under review—The Victim Is Always the Same, by neurosurgeon Irving Cooper—are three patients who, in Medawar’s words, “first fell into the hands of the psychoanalysts—men whose glib and self-assured interpretations of their illness did much to impede diagnosis and treatment.”

One patient, whose spasms affected the pelvic region, was diagnosed by his psychoanalyst as suffering from “exhibitionism,” “conversion hysteria,” and a “neurotic fear of touching his own penis.” When the poor young man was finally discharged from the psychiatric ward, the perceptive analyst recorded the following in his chart: “Diagnosis on discharge: psychoneurosis, conversion hysteria. Condition on discharge: Improved.”

Another victim, a woman, was accused of contorting herself merely to “attract attention.” Her parents were persuaded to undergo therapy as well, a process that nearly drove them to divorce. Reading the review, one can almost hear Medawar’s righteous indignation at the mixture of arrogance and conceit displayed by the analysts, exercised at the expense of the well-being of their patients and their families.

Iatrogenesis

Whenever the relative merits of different forms of mental health treatment are debated, the discussion sooner or later falls into the false dichotomy between talk therapy, which emphasizes the interpersonal relationship between therapist and patient, and drug therapy, which places greater emphasis on pharmacological treatment.

Read more

What follows was published in 1920 as part of the book The Adventures of a Modern Occultist, by the pseudonymous author Oliver Bland, and was presented not as a work of horror or science fiction but as a factual account:

“Like a terror-charged cloud this mass hovered some eight feet high, a clear two feet off the floor; its brilliance waxed and waned and its confines drew in. Slowly the cloud was taking shape as a pillar and within the pillar one could see the ghastly shaping of the rudimentary form (...)

“Carefully I stretched out my hand to the leaden box, unscrewed the cylindrical lid, and threw into my right hand the precious vial of radium salt.

“The energy-charged tube glowed in the dark with all the beauty of intense phosphorescence, and as I held it at arm’s length toward the pillar of semi-materialization that represented all the evil forces of discarnate Hate—the mists of vapour rolled away. As if by magic the whole apparition was dissipated, and in twenty seconds was as if it had never been.”

The true identity of “Oliver Bland” has never been established, but the book displays a good knowledge of the state of the art in early twentieth-century psychical research. It is also a smorgasbord of mysticism, contemporary cultural clichés, and (pseudo)science: in one chapter, “Bland” uses nuclear radiation to dissipate a ghost; in another, he spews Freudian boilerplate about the latent power of unconscious sexual desires; and in a third, he discusses the dangers of trying out the instructions found in a medieval manuscript on raising the spirits of the dead.

The prose is at times lurid, reminiscent of the pulp fiction of the era (for example: “Spots of amorphous fungus cling to the walls, and here and there wallpaper has peeled off in long leprous strips, exposing the corpse-grey plaster behind”), and today The Adventures of a Modern Occultist is little more than a quaint historical footnote. At the time, however, it was taken seriously, at least up to a point: it is quoted and discussed, for instance, in Hereward Carrington’s technical volume Laboratory Investigations into Psychic Phenomena, published in 1939.

It’s true that Carrington’s reputation hasn’t aged well. Among other things, he made money promoting fraudsters such as the fake medium Eusapia Palladino and the “Oriental” fakir Rahman Bey, who was in reality an Italian stage performer named Antinesco Gemmi. But for a time, he was regarded as a competent scientific investigator of psychic phenomena. In his book Pioneers of the Unseen (1972), a series of profiles of scientists who researched spiritualist matters, Paul Tabori all but treats Carrington, who had died in 1958, as the last of the great ones.

And Hereward Carrington had, in 1921, proposed using what was then cutting-edge experimental technology to detect the radiations of the soul. His original idea was that, by anesthetizing an animal inside a cloud chamber—a closed container in which the trajectories of electrically charged subatomic particles, such as electrons, can be traced through the condensation of droplets of water or alcohol—it might be possible to see the spirit, or “astral form,” leaving the body.

Read more

My favorite astrology newsletter informs me that Mercury began a new retrograde period last Monday. I didn’t have much space to deal with the whole “Mercury retrograde” brouhaha in my book What Science Says About Astrology, so I’ll make a kind of extraneous footnote about it here. It’ll be kind of fun.

The fact that we are now in “Mercury retrograde” means that from now until July 23, as seen from Earth, the planet Mercury will appear to be “moving backward” along its path against the backdrop of the fixed stars: whereas just a few days before the retrograde phase Mercury, as seen from Earth, had been moving away from star “A” and toward star “B”, it now appears to reverse course toward “A”, pulling away from “B”.

This apparent reversal, or retrogression, is an illusion caused by the fact that Earth — where we happen to live — has just lapped Mercury in its orbit around the Sun. Picture the planets as runners on a circular (eliptic, if you like pedantry in your metaphors) track, each orbit a lane, each runner moving at a more or less constant speed.

Now imagine that one of those athletes — the planet Earth — has an ant named Humanity riding on its shoulder. The moment Earth overtakes another planet, the ant sees the overtaken runner falling behind. That “falling behind” is retrograde motion: it exists only from the ant’s particular point of view.

With astrology’s growing popularity in the 21st century, periods of “Mercury retrograde” have become a kind of cultural event, with many otherwise sophisticated people bracing for a string of minor personal disasters or a sudden magnification of everyday annoyances.

Astrologers advise patience and caution, especially in matters involving communication and business, because during this period of regression “its [Mercury’s] energy” is more “keenly felt” (Louise Edington, The Complete Guide to Astrology). Edington adds that “the retracing of the path through an area of the zodiac takes us on a more inward or night journey, or invites us to exhale and release some lessons from the period when the planet was direct.”

None of this makes any sense — and on multiple levels. Take “its energy,” for example: the planet Mercury is a rocky world with a large metallic core, devoid of life and only about 40% larger than the Moon. Mercury orbits the Sun at a distance of more than 60 million miles from us. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that Mercury’s gravitational pull on a 154-pound person standing on Earth’s surface is orders of magnitude weaker than that of a car parked three feet away. If Mercury retrograde is causing you grief, a car rolling past you in reverse ought to bring unemployment, destitution, and family tragedy in its wake.

Of course, when an astrologer speaks of Mercury and its “energies,” they are not exactly picturing the lifeless space rock and its feeble gravitational field, but rather the associated symbolism: Mercury, messenger of the gods, the Roman deity of commerce, communication — and of thieves and tricksters as well, though the merchants and trade associations that use Mercury as their emblem would rather not be reminded of that. So “Mercury retrograde” — Mercury appearing to move backward — is a bad omen for economic activity and anything requiring communication.

Laid out this way, the flaw in the reasoning behind the anxiety around Mercury retrograde becomes clear: it is magical thinking, rooted in the Law of Correspondences — the idea that what resembles or symbolizes something holds some kind of power or influence over what it represents. It is the same logic as sticking pins into a voodoo doll or scrawling horns and a mustache on a picture of someone you dislike.

At this point, someone usually argues that astrology is “ancient wisdom,” that the symbolic link between the planet Mercury and the activities associated with the god Mercury is not arbitrary but exists “for a reason.” And that reason, supposedly, is the planet’s perceived influence over those very activities.

This would be a compelling argument — if it had any grounding in reality, historical or empirical. The fact is that it does not. The idea that astrological principles are based on careful observation rather than superstitious correspondence is popular, but false (hey, I just wrote a book on the subject). In 2006, a reporter for The New York Times contacted the agencies responsible for various services that were supposedly disrupted during Mercury retrograde periods — traffic management, the police — and found no trace of the expected effect.

“But things go wrong for me when Mercury is retrograde!” an indignant reader may protest (or their best friend might). Psychology and chance go a long way toward explaining what is actually happening.

Starting with chance. Every year brings three or four Mercury retrograde periods, each lasting about 23 days — or close to two months, if we factor in the “shadow” periods that many astrologers claim surround the retrograde itself and are equally ominous.

That amounts to roughly 70 days per year during which things are supposedly more likely to go wrong — or nearly half the year if we include the “shadow” periods — spaced out more or less evenly across the calendar. In 2026, for example, we had a Mercury retrograde period between February and March, are in one now between June and July, and will have another between October and November. Counting the shadow periods, these intervals occupy almost six months. It would be surprising if nothing went wrong across such stretches of time.

And now for the psychology: things go wrong constantly, more or less at random, but if you are worried about Mercury retrograde, then when something does go wrong during that specific window, your attention is likely to lock onto it. It is like the driver who files away every instance of a woman cutting him off but promptly forgets every time a man does the same, and comes away convinced that his road-going sexism rests on solid empirical ground.

It is a combination of confirmation bias — we are more readily impressed by what confirms our existing beliefs and prejudices, and we dismiss contradicting evidence as “irrelevant” — and directed attention. If I tell you that when you walk out the door today you are going to be followed by a man with a mustache, and you believe I have some special power or wisdom, you are likely to be glancing over your shoulder every few minutes — and the first innocent mustachioed stranger who appears behind you will “confirm” my prophetic gift.

In the astrological version of this story, the innocent man with the mustache is the poor planet Mercury.

Paywall Alert!

I’ll soon be moving some content to paid subscribers only and start creating more in-depth content that will be exclusive to paying subscribers. The present free content level will be reserved for lighter pieces and teasers for the more “serious” material. I know that paywalls are annoying and that information wants to be free, but unfortunately, bills are also annoying, and mouths want to be fed…

I hope many of you will follow me into this new phase of Idea Smasher. I already have plans for a new book on pseudoscientific follies, and one of the things I am excited to share with subscribers is ideas and notes on this next project! The first paid-only article will be up in the next few weeks. So, stay tuned.

Ghost hunting has become a hobby perhaps even more popular than looking for flying saucers. There are conventions and specialized stores offering everything from sophisticated equipment to beginner kits. Book catalogs with titles such as Ghost Hunter’s Guide or Ghost Hunter’s Manual now list dozens of works. You can find everything from books by reputab…

Read more

As cinema—the art of using moving images to tell a story—Steven Spielberg’s latest effort, Disclosure Day, is a triumph, perhaps one of the greatest triumphs of his career. The suspense is gripping, the tension steadily builds, and the absurd action sequences feel rough and real. Time passes, and the audience, hypnotized, barely notices.

It’s just a pity that the science-fictional and philosophical underpinnings—the reasons behind the tension, the action, the suspense—are so stupid. The movie has all the ideological vices of Spielbergerism: scientists are evil, the government is shady, children are pure, cute animals are cute, and “normal” people have hearts of gold. And, of course, E.T. wants you to be good, whether your name is Elliott or not. But Disclosure Day’s problems go way beyond that.

(From this point on, spoilers.)

The main conflict of the movie involves two conspiracies working at cross-purposes. One, made up of government-backed scientists and paramilitary creeps, wants to keep the presence of aliens on Earth a secret; the other, composed of good people backed by the aliens themselves, wants to bring about total disclosure.

And therein lies the film’s main logical fissure: if the aliens want people to know they are here, all they have to do is show themselves. Preferably by bringing a flying saucer to the lawn of the White House, or to the Eiffel Tower, or atop the Giza Pyramids, or to Corcovado—and not, say, by drawing circles in a wheat field in the middle of nowhere in northern England.

There are enough brilliantly staged chases, frantic pursuits, cliffhangers, comedic asides, and close escapes to leave the audience with neither the time nor the breath to think about this sort of thing. It is only when the pace slows, and the movie wants us to reflect on ideas, that the whole house of cards in Spielberg’s mind nearly topples over.

The main point of the—pardon my French—“philosophical debate” that unfolds during the quieter stretches of the film is whether humanity is ready to know the truth about aliens. The entire anti-disclosure conspiracy exists, it seems, not primarily to hoard galactic technology but to keep us in the dark “for our own good.” The pro-disclosure faction believes the opposite: truth belongs to everyone, let it out, and people will deal with it.

I know that many people in the conspiratorial fringe of real-world ufology believe—or pretend to believe—that disclosure would trigger civilizational collapse, but really? Is that an argument that sane, reasonable people would even contemplate? To put it simply: why would it? More than a century of science fiction, plus several decades of ufology, have totally normalized the idea of extraterrestrials in the collective mind. My bet is that if some incontrovertible evidence came to light proving that all those fuzzy things people see in the sky really are alien ships, the reaction of 99% os the world population would be something like, “Oh, cool!”

The movie tries to lend the anti-disclosure camp’s fears a veneer of rationality by invoking theology: alien life would destroy faith in God.

Putting aside the fact that faith in God has survived much stronger challenges—the Problem of Evil, anyone?—and that its hypothetical destruction might not be such a bad thing, the chain of reasoning is utterly broken. Why would the existence of alien life threaten anyone’s faith? Unless you are a flat-earther or a Biblical literalist—but then your faith has already been under assault for centuries. Why worry about one more challenge?

(As a matter of fact, one character — a Catholic nun — argues that the theological objection to disclosure is pointless. So, come on: a solitary nun in her convent can see it, but the industrial-military complex can't?)

To summarize: first, the fear that motivates the villains is irrational. Disclosure-induced civilizational collapse is not plausible, and the movie’s attempts to make it plausible within its own universe fall flat. Second, if the aliens themselves want to be known, they do not need a conspiracy of government insiders and secret agents to achieve that goal. Their actions are therefore irrational as well. Nothing that happens in the movie has a genuinely believable reason to happen.

A final note on the “evil scientist” trope. One of the movie’s most effective scenes occurs when Jane, the hero’s girlfriend, is shown a secret video of researchers interacting with an imprisoned alien. The camera suddenly pivots away from the monitor to reveal Jane’s face, played by Eve Hewson. We never see what she is watching; we see only her reaction: pity, revulsion, disgust, shame. Judging by her expression, there's some unmentionable form of torture being inflicted on the defenseless alien.

The implicit message is that scientifically analyzing something is tantamount to violating it in the worst way imaginable. At another point, the villain attempts to justify his behavior by appealing to rationality, while the leader of the pro-disclosure conspiracy explains his actions in terms of empathy. Reason produces atrocities; feelings produce goodness.

These prejudices are deeply ingrained in American culture. One might expect that, after everything we have witnessed in this century—the costs of setting rationality aside and allowing tribal feelings to take control—responsible storytellers would be wary of mobilizing them.

One, it seems, would be wrong.

The opening editorial of the June 1875 issue of the Rio de Janeiro periodical Revista Espírita – Publicação Mensal de Estudos Psychologicos (“Spiritist Magazine – A Monthly Publication of Psychological Studies”) offered what, to its author and readers, must have seemed a careful evaluation of a séance performance presented to the press in the then Brazilian capital by two visiting Americans, William Fay (1840–1921) and Harry Keller (1849–1922). Among the marvels observed were flying tambourines and a performer who, even when tied up by members of the audience, managed to change coats—in the dark.

This was the Golden Age of so-called “physical mediumship,” when phenomena such as the levitation of objects or the spontaneous playing of musical instruments were taken as signs of contact with the Beyond. Just a year earlier, in 1874, the British chemist William Crookes (1832–1919) had concluded his investigations of physical mediums D.D. Home (1833–1886), Florence Cook (1856–1904), and Kate Fox (1837–1892), and declared them genuine.

Crookes’s incompetence as an investigator of the paranormal would be exposed years later, when another medium he had “authenticated,” Annie Eva Fay (1855–1927), explained in detail to the magician Harry Houdini (1874–1926) how she had deceived the eminent scientist. Today, the technical—and also ethical—failings of Crookes’s spiritualist studies are widely recognized. In 1875, however, his work was seen as respectable, if controversial.

But back to the capital of what was then called the Empire of Brazil. The student of “psychology” wrote of Fay and Keller:

“…we recognize Mr. Fay’s mediumistic faculty. It is, therefore, our opinion that he is a nocturnal medium of physical effects…”

This was no hasty judgment. The author had made some effort to detect trickery, as he himself describes:

“After an examination of the instruments, ropes, etc., Mr. Fay was tied to a chair a short distance from the table. As soon as the gas jets and then the candles were extinguished, we extended our arms and bodies in such a way that, if anyone approached the table to handle the instruments, we would perceive it through the impact we intended to deliver.

“This attempt proved futile. The instruments began to move, and before long their sounds issued from various points in space. After some time, Mr. Keller, who was seated and held by one of the spectators, struck a match, and at that very instant the instruments fell in different places…”

Impressive, perhaps—but hardly original. Fay and Keller (who in 1876 would alter the spelling of his stage name to “Kellar”) had been assistants in the United States to the legendary Davenport Brothers, Ira Erastus (1839–1911) and William Henry (1841–1877), an innovative duo of illusionists responsible for the “spirit cabinet” trick—a cupboard in which the supposed medium is tied up and locked while “supernatural” phenomena occur.

After William’s death, Ira Davenport tried to distance himself from spiritualism, stating that he and his brother had never claimed to possess supernatural or spiritual powers, nor had they preached the religion; the mystique of their act, he said, lay precisely in its ambiguity. The account is somewhat disingenuous: early in their career, the brothers’ performances were always preceded by a sermon delivered by a spiritualist minister.

In any case, by the time of Ira’s “confession,” professional magicians had long since exposed the brothers’ methods. Even today, however, there are those who believe the Davenports were genuine mediums.

After breaking with the brothers, Fay and Keller embarked on a tour of Latin America, which Kellar describes in a pair of chapters of his 1890 autobiography, A Magician’s Tour. The two traveled down the Pacific coast of the Americas, entered Brazil through its southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, and worked their way up to the capital.

In A Magician’s Tour, Kellar remarks that he performed for “the thrifty coffee planters of Campinas” (I imagine he didn’t sell many tickets), but that in Rio de Janeiro, by contrast, he not only had Emperor Pedro II in attendance, but also saw scalpers selling tickets for “four or five times the regular price.”

Curiously, at least one biography of Kellar claims that he and Fay never presented themselves as bona fide spirit mediums. The book states: “Fay and Keller told audiences that the sounds and objects coming from within the cabinet were part of a magic trick. Unlike the Davenport Brothers, they made it clear that no ghosts or spirits were involved” (The Amazing Harry Kellar, by Gail Jarrow).

In fact, Keller had begun to adopt an openly hostile stance toward the very idea of mediumship. In 1878, during a stay in India and already using the name “Kellar,” he became embroiled in a controversy with the spiritualists of British Calcutta (now Mumbai), writing to a local newspaper that “I unequivocally and without reservation declare all so-called spiritualistic phenomena to be frauds.” In 1879, Kellar staged an evening in Washington devoted to exposing the tricks of mediums, including the Davenport cabinet.

That same year, nearly bankrupt, he decided to return to Rio de Janeiro. There, he once again found financial success, and the emperor attended his show again. In A Magician’s Tour, this second visit to the Brazilian capital is described in glowing terms: to the magician, the city “seemed the most wonderful place on Earth.”

Later, Kellar collaborated directly with scientists, submitting himself to a series of experiments conducted by psychologist Joseph Jastrow (1863–1944) to determine whether professional magicians possessed sharper senses or faster reaction times than untrained people. The inconclusive results were published in Science in 1896.

And what of William Fay, who had so impressed the Revista Espírita editorialist in 1875? The Fay & Keller partnership dissolved after the ship carrying their equipment—and the profits from their Latin American tour—sank off the French coast. Devastated, Fay returned to work for the Davenports and, after a few years, settled in Australia.

What was the error of the Rio editorialist? I suggest two, working in tandem: arrogance and bias. The arrogance of assuming that one’s inability to explain an effect by natural means implies that no natural explanation exists. And the bias of interpreting everything observed as evidence in support of a desired, predetermined conclusion.

Operating together, these errors transform a failure of imagination—the inability to conceive an explanation—into theological virtues: hope and faith. The stubborn silliness of the Revista Espírita – Publicação Mensal de Estudos Psicológicos may seem incomprehensible to us today, but if so, it is only because of historical distance and the specificity of its context. Change those conditions, and you will find much the same all around you.

During the promotional tour for his new UFO movie Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg told the Brazilian media that he knows of the case of the “Varginha ET", and of a documentary that alleges that the American military took the corpse of that purported alien creature out of Brazil. The interview was edited in a way that doesn’t let us know if the famed director believes the story he's telling — but if he does, it makes Spielberg about as reliable a source of information as I am a blockbuster filmmaker.

But what exactly is the “Varginha ET”? Well, as they say, therein lies a story.

When I worked at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), one of Brazil’s leading institutions of higher education and scientific research, the university’s communications office regularly received inquiries about that elusive creature. According to some conspiracy theorists, the corpse of an extraterrestrial being allegedly captured by the Brazilian Army on January 20, 1996, in the city of Varginha, in the state of Minas Gerais, had been taken to Unicamp for examination. Depending on which version one believed, the autopsy had either taken place in a “secret room” at the Institute of Chemistry or in an “underground facility” stretching from the School of Medicine to the Institute of Biology.

The underground-facility version was my favorite. The medical and biology schools sit at opposite ends of the campus, and a tunnel connecting them would probably need its own subway line. If anything like that existed at Unicamp, students would have discovered it long ago and put it to use—campus traffic is terrible.

The (very few) Facts

At the core of the “Varginha Case” was the sighting, by three young women—Kátia, then 21, Valquíria, 14, and Liliane, 16—of something “neither man nor animal,” crouching beside the wall of a vacant lot. It was shortly after 3 p.m. on January 20, 1996.

Through the speculations of UFO enthusiasts and the workings of the media, this central event became linked to a series of other occurrences spanning from January 13—when a couple living on a rural property claimed to have seen something strange in the sky—to February 15, when a police officer died from a hospital-acquired infection.

There were also reports of Army trucks moving through Varginha on the fateful January 20 (a military investigation later placed those movements on January 25), activity by the local fire department that morning, and a severe hailstorm that struck the city that same afternoon.

What ties these disparate events together, in the complete absence of any physical evidence, is a web of witness testimony that generally follows a familiar pattern. Witnesses who attach their names to their statements insist that nothing extraordinary happened and that the whole affair consists of confusion, embellishment, exaggeration, and misunderstanding. Meanwhile, those who supposedly saw, verified, or participated in direct interactions with extraterrestrials—or in military cover-ups—remain almost entirely anonymous. The main exception is the three young women who described the being that was “neither man nor animal.”

Between these two extremes are witnesses willing to identify themselves but who offer little more than rumors and speculation: stories about things that happened to a friend-of-a-friend, fleeting glimpses of something with red eyes on a dark night. Commotion in a hospital corridor! And, of course, not a shred of hard evidence.

The Military Investigation

Some of the anonymous witnesses reportedly told UFO researchers that, about an hour before the three young women’s encounter, soldiers captured a pair of unidentified creatures in nearby woodland and placed them in military field bags. According to Marco Antônio Petit’s book Varginha: Toda a Verdade Revelada (Varginha: The Whole Truth Revealed), the capture had been preceded by at least two rifle shots.

In addition, the February 1996 death of a young military police officer in a Varginha hospital became linked to the case. Rumors spread that he had participated in the capture of an alien that appeared shortly after the January 20 hailstorm. Anonymous witnesses claimed the ET had injured the officer, leading to speculation that his death—weeks later—was caused by an infestation of extraterrestrial microorganisms.

The Army’s Sergeant Training School (EsSA), based in Três Corações, about 20 miles from Varginha, conducted two investigations into the affair: an internal inquiry in 1996 and a military police investigation in 1997. Soldiers associated with the school had repeatedly been named as participants in the alleged capture and cover-up of the “Varginha ET.”

The investigations determined that EsSA trucks had indeed been in the city—but on January 25, for maintenance work at a dealership located there. They also concluded that the mysterious being seen by the young women was likely a local resident known as “Mudinho” (“Little Mute”) or “Luizinho,” a mentally disabled man who habitually walked through town in a crouched posture, collecting cigarette butts and small objects. Luizinho lived—or at least lived at the time—directly across from the vacant lot where the “creature” was spotted.

Regarding the officer’s death, the military investigation included testimony from the commander of his police battalion, stating that he died of a hospital-acquired infection following surgery, as well as a copy of the autopsy report reaching the same conclusion. Speculation surrounding the officer’s death forms the climax of the book UFO Crash in Brazil by American author Roger Leir (1935–2014), a physician who became famous in UFO circles for performing surgeries to remove alleged “alien implants.”

Culture

At the beginning of this century, in February 2001, the Brazilian Air Force published a statistical summary of UFO cases reported to the service between the 1950s and 2000. The twentieth-century UFO craze began with pilot Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting of “flying saucers” in the United States and gained momentum in Brazil after 1952, thanks to a photographic hoax published by O Cruzeiro, then the country’s most popular magazine.

The Air Force statistics show two pronounced peaks: 1977–78, which account for 22.3 percent of all reported cases between 1954 and 2000, and 1996–97, which account for 18.27 percent. Together, those two periods make up more than 40 percent of all recorded UFO reports over forty-six years.

Interestingly, 1977 saw the release of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Meanwhile, 1996–97 coincided with the explosion in popularity of The X-Files in Brazil, where it had been airing since 1994—another year that saw an unusually high proportion of UFO reports (6.5 percent).

The year 1996 also brought Independence Day, the space fantasy in which the President of the United States (in the pre-Trump era) saves humanity from an alien invasion carried out by giant flying saucers. The movie was a massive box-office success, becoming the year’s top-grossing film and one of the biggest hits of the 1990s. It premiered in Brazil in August, months after the Varginha affair, but it serves as a useful indicator of the cultural climate of the time.

And the two phenomena fed into each other: on August 18, the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo published a two-page feature on the boom in “ET tourism” in Varginha, with explicit references to the film.

To complete the picture, hoaxed footage showing an “alien autopsy” had been heavily promoted by the international media throughout 1995—including in Brazil by both Folha de S. Paulo and Globo TV’s Fantástico. Fantástico is a weekly variety show that sometimes does excellent journalism, but it also has a penchant for sensationalism and rarely lets the facts get in the way of a “good” story. It was through Fantástico, by the way, that Spielberg shared his beliefs about the Varginha affair.

The Appeal of Conspiracy

The juxtaposition of a mundane explanation based on named witnesses and published documents with a fantastic alternative built almost entirely on anonymous allegations, rumors, and speculative leaps is, of course, perfect fuel for conspiracy theories.

The very strength of the debunking is taken as evidence of a powerful cover-up, just as the insistence on anonymity by alleged insiders is treated as proof of authenticity. But once one steps outside this inverted logic—where absence of evidence becomes evidence of presence—nothing remains.

Anonymous sources are valuable when they point investigators toward concrete evidence. In this case, believers want anonymous sources themselves to count as concrete evidence. That makes the entire case unsustainable.

Those determined to keep the “mystery” alive must either pretend the military investigation never existed or try to strengthen their argument through negative evidence—supposed inconsistencies between witness accounts and the official version. One example is the date of the Army trucks’ maintenance trip: January 25, according to official records, versus January 20, according to some witnesses. But even if weaknesses exist in the military report, they do not lend support to the alien hypothesis. The argument presents a false dichotomy.

An American example may help. A few years ago, the U.S. government finally acknowledged that Area 51 had indeed been used to research and test secret technologies—something UFO enthusiasts had long suspected. But the technologies were not recovered alien spacecraft. They were entirely terrestrial projects, including the U-2 spy plane and captured Soviet jets.

What the three young women actually saw on January 20, 1996, will probably never be known with certainty. Not because it is an immense mystery in itself, but because most things in life are like that: elusive. When you find a lost coin on a busy sidewalk, it is virtually impossible to know who dropped it.

The Luizinho/Mudinho hypothesis is stronger than the extraterrestrial one for many reasons, not least because there is clear physical evidence that Luizinho/Mudinho actually existed.

It is easy to dismiss the thirty-year-old Varginha Case as folklore or a tourist attraction. But if recent years have taught us anything, it is that conspiracy fantasies fermenting within small groups, no matter how absurd they may seem to opinion-makers, have the potential to blossom into obscurantist social movements with significant political consequences.

My book from Columbia University Press, What Science Says About Astrology, is out! You can get it directly from the publisher by following this link. You can also get it from Amazon, IndiePubs, Barnes & Noble, and other places. Come on, you know you want it!

My book from Columbia University Press, What Science Says About Astrology, is finally out! You can get it directly from the publisher by following this link. You can also get it from Amazon, IndiePubs, Barnes & Noble, and other places. Come on, you know you want it!

A recent essay in The Atlantic tries to summarize Traditionalist philosophy—the mystical far-right vision that supposedly animates the likes of Steve Bannon and “Putin’s philosopher” Aleksandr Dugin—in a more-or-less sympathetic tone, aiming to present an image of the movement that may be close to how traditionalists see themselves. It’s a noble effort, but it leaves out what may well be the most important affect that attracts people to the Traditionalist enterprise: resentment.

Many authors have pointed out that resentment is a defining feature of far-right movements in general. The argument appears, for example, in an editorial by The Economist. Resentments arise from the perception (justified or not) that one is the victim of injustice, and they turn septic when combined with the conviction (again, justified or not) that those responsible for correcting the harm are incompetent, dishonest, or negligent.

The resentment that fuels adherence to fascism tends to be hierarchical in nature: it presupposes the existence of a “just” hierarchy that ought to be observed in the natural order of things, and it establishes the perception that this hierarchy has somehow been subverted—and that this subversion is not only a moral wrong in itself, but also the cause of some social ill. That ill may be real or imaginary: the possibilities range from legitimate concern about high unemployment rates to moral panics about sexual perversion in preschool or orgies in universities.

The effect becomes more dramatic the more these supposedly violated hierarchies are ingrained in common sense and encoded in social structures—for example, men first, women after; heterosexuals first, homosexuals after; whites first, blacks after; our people first, immigrants after; respectable citizens first, riffraff after; Christians first, Muslims, Jews, atheists, and the rest well behind. And so on.

Divine Privilege

A particular—and particularly ridiculous—aspect of fascist hierarchical resentment is the myth of the oppressed elite. Here we are no longer dealing with large groups or social identities (men, whites, straights, etc.), but with specific slices, often minority ones, that do not merely feel undervalued relative to some other group: they are simply better and superior to everyone else. The fact that they do not receive the honors and glory they deserve—that they are, in general, not even taken seriously—is more than an error or an injustice; it is a sin.

The oppressed elitist is the incel of the socio-political-intellectual world. The seminal prophet of this breed was probably the reactionary French philosopher Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), who left a copious body of work in which he affirms (and reaffirms) his outrage at the loss of power and prestige of the hereditary aristocracy during the French Revolution—an event he regarded as an abomination of cosmic proportions. One example, taken from Considerations on France:

“The rights of the people, properly so called, almost always emerge from the concessions of sovereigns, and thus can be historically located; but the rights of the sovereign and of the aristocracy have neither date nor known authors.”

Thus, when deprived of its divine powers and privileges (because something that did not arise in history can only, of course, have come from on high) by the revolt of the rabble, the aristocracy takes on the form of an unjustly oppressed elite under the heel of an unworthy mob. The Italian Julius Evola (1898–1974), the favorite philosopher of eleven out of ten fascists or neo-Nazis literate enough to go beyond The Daily Stormer, cites de Maistre approvingly, for example, in his classic Revolt Against the Modern World:

“God makes kings in the literal sense. He prepares royal races; He matures them under a cloud that conceals their origins. They appear at last, crowned in honor and glory; they take their places; and this is the surest sign of their legitimacy.”

British historian Mark Sedgwick, who studies the foundational thinkers of postwar far-right ideology, describes Evola as a right-winger “too radical for the Italian fascists” of the World War II era. “Evola was to Mussolini what Trotsky was to Stalin,” he says.

Tradition

Evola’s work built a bridge between the “vintage” Traditionalism of Frenchman René Guénon (1886–1951) and fascism and neo-Nazism. Not that the gap to be bridged was especially wide or deep. Traditionalism has two components.

First, the idea that there exists a primordial knowledge, a tradition of magical or divine origin, underlying the doctrines and rituals of the world’s great religions and the political institutions of the great civilizations of the past. This is an idea entirely devoid of meaning and unsupported by historical or anthropological reality. It makes about as much sense as the radical diffusionism embraced by pseudo-archaeologists who argue that because the Maya and the Egyptians built pyramids, the two peoples must have been trained by the same extraterrestrials.

Second, the claim that the ideal state of human societies would be a rigid four-caste system, with divine kings and priests at the top and the working masses at the base, with soldiers and businessmen/merchants occupying the second and third strata, respectively.

Human history would be cyclical, each cycle composed of four stages. The first is this ideal world, which declines; then kings yield power to the military (second stage), who yield to the moneyed class (third), who finally—horror of horrors—allow power to fall into the hands of (ugh) the people. This final stage is the Kali Yuga, the Age of Darkness, and corresponds, in case anyone has not guessed, to the point we are at today. After the Kali Yuga completes its work of destruction, history “reboots,” and we return to the Golden Age.

From this, let us say, “philosophy of history” arise three possible courses of action—one more contemplative, and two with strong affinities to practical fascism and terrorism: option one, conspire to restore the theocratic elite to its proper place, by force if necessary; option two, form a “secret” elite that will serve as a spiritual Noah’s Ark, the seedbed of the next Golden Age, run for some monastery in the mountains or desert retreat, wait out; option three, accelerate the chaos, work to throw the world into the fire as soon as possible, so that the Kali Yuga may end quickly and we can all return to Paradise without further ado.

Like the concept of primordial wisdom, the cyclical view of history has no grounding in reality whatsoever. There is no possible defense based on facts (Evola attempts to refute the theory of evolution by appealing to Greek mythology and biblical accounts), and the arguments are more fragile than rice paper (ultimately, everything is declared “supra-rational,” beyond the reach of discourse, grasped through “intellectual intuition”; trying to impart Traditional wisdom to inferior minds is a wasted effort).

Guénon, in particular, constantly resorts to the sly rhetorical move of implying that either you recognize that his premises are self-evident—in which case you are part of the elite—or, if not, you are unworthy of him, just another member of the rabble. This is not an argument, but it convinces readers with fragile self-esteem.

The father of Traditionalism makes some accurate (because obvious) criticisms of specific aspects of modernity—such as the monetization of human relations, or the naïve confusion between technological progress and “progress” in a broader sense—but his diagnosis, that the blame lies with the separation of Church and State and with democratic aspirations and institutions, stems not from the analysis of facts or arguments, but from personal arrogance combined with nostalgia for a mythical past that never existed.

The only reason for anyone to take this seriously is some level of personal identification with the author’s prejudices, worldview, and wounded narcissism. In The Crisis of the Modern World, Guénon declaims:

“The elite can only, by definition, be few, and its power, or rather its authority, deriving as it does from their intellectual superiority, has nothing in common with the numerical force on which democracy is based (…) therefore, the leadership function exercised by a true elite—since, necessarily, it fulfills this role if it exists—is literally incompatible with democracy, which is closely linked to the egalitarian conception, and therefore with the negation of all hierarchy.”

In the world of the Kali Yuga, those who, in a just and divinely ordered age, ought to govern or guide governments—the intellectually and spiritually superior—are oppressed or rejected by the masses and cannot fulfill their noblest function. By sheer coincidence, of course, those who embrace and spread Traditionalist ideas tend to see themselves as members of this unjustly oppressed elite, dispersed and “literally incompatible with democracy,” since legitimate rulers are made by God, not elected by the great unwashed.

Traditional-Capital

The myth of the oppressed elite is not exclusive to Traditionalism (itself a mishmash of mythologies), and it is very popular in fiction—part of the ease with which the whole framework gains adherents may stem from how easily compatible fantasies can be found in adventure books, cinema, and television. Tales of lost-and-found princes, humiliated hereditary heroes who ultimately triumph, disinherited heroes who come back to exact revenge, and anointed saviors all flirt with the broader theme of the superior man crushed by injustice.

Low-grade literature glorifying capitalism and entrepreneurship (there are good defenses of both principles, but that is not what I am referring to here) also leans heavily on the myth of the oppressed elite, emphasizing the fearless entrepreneur crushed between the anvil of exploitative government and the hammer of lazy workers. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand (1905–1982), could be a Traditionalist novel if, in the myth of the Golden Age of Tradition, the philosopher-king had been advised by Wall Street types rather than priests.

Selling people the dream of belonging to a supposedly oppressed elite, tasked with saving the world from darkness (and, “out of sheer necessity,” hoarding privileges and ultimately exercising absolute power over everyone else), requires appealing to base instincts—resentment and narcissism—through a carrot-and-stick rhetoric: a little game of punishment (those who disagree are unworthy) and reward (those who agree are elite), applied to the egos of the susceptible.

This mishmash can produce an intoxicating cocktail, but I confess I find it hard to understand how anyone in their right mind can seriously contemplate, for even three seconds, ideas such as “natural hierarchy,” “oppressed elite,” or “wronged superior caste” without bursting into laughter—or exploding in outrage.

My book from Columbia University Press, What Science Says About Astrology, is finally out! You can get it directly from the publisher by following this link. You can also get it from Amazon, IndiePubs, Barnes & Noble, and other places. Come on, you know you want it!

The “neutrality of science” question is one of those debates that exist only because people are either being intellectually dishonest—deliberately using the words “science” and “neutrality” in two or three different senses within the same sentence—or intellectually sloppy, doing the same thing without even noticing the unnecessary mess they’re creating.

Once you define the terms with the minimum precision needed for a productive conversation, it becomes clear that the question “is science neutral?” admits two answers: yes and no. It depends on what exactly you mean by “science” and “neutral.”

Read more

So, by the end of last month, Richard Dawkins had published an article in UnHerd magazine announcing that, after a long dialogue with Anthropic’s Claude large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence, he could see no reason not to think of Claude as a conscious being. Social media — an arena in which Dawkins-bashing is something of a spectator sport — went wild.

Unlike most of the bashers, I took the trouble to check Dawkins’s piece. It is somewhat rambling, and it is not very clear whether Dawkins is really declaring Claude conscious or whether he is merely using the LLM’s amazing imitative powers as a springboard to ponder things like the nature of consciousness, the evolution of minds, or simply to play his good old role as an intellectual agent provocateur — a role the evolutionary biologist and author seems to relish more and more as time passes.

The fulcrum of the “Claude consciousness” argument, as articulated by Dawkins, is Alan Turing’s “imitation game,” put forward by Turing — the father of modern computer theory — in a 1950 essay, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” and then briefly discussed by him in later work. In the 1950 paper, Turing argues that the question “Can machines think?” should be replaced by the following game: a test.

Take two human beings, A and B, and a computer, C. Communicating through some kind of veil or shield that effectively hides their identities — a curtain, a screen, a keyboard, a voice synthesizer, whatever — B and C try to convince A that they are both human. If C succeeds, or if at least A cannot distinguish B from C, then that is equivalent to affirming that a machine can think.

The assumption that being a “thinking machine,” in Turing’s sense, and being conscious are one and the same thing is quite common, but a close reading of Turing’s own paper complicates that assumption considerably. It does not help that Turing never precisely defines what he means by “thinking.” On the contrary, he declares the question “Can machines think?” to be “too meaningless to deserve discussion,” and it is precisely because of that that he proposes the imitation game: the idea seems to be that winning the game fulfills the common-sense criteria for possessing the capacity to think.

At no point in his original paper does Turing equate “thinking” with “consciousness.” As a matter of fact, one of the objections to his proposal that he considers is precisely “The Argument from Consciousness,” which holds that a thought, to be legitimate, must emanate from a conscious being. Here, Alan Turing quotes from a 1949 lecture by neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson:

“Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain — that is, not only write it but know that it had written it.”

Jefferson’s point is strikingly similar to present-day critiques of artificial intelligence “intelligence.” These systems are not really intelligent because they do not know what they are doing; they merely scan immense databases and predict what should be the next appropriate answer.

Turing’s answer here is somewhat ambiguous. First, he seems to rehearse a kind of phenomenological theory of consciousness — the only way we can know that other people have thoughts and feelings is because they behave in ways that convince us of that, so why not extend the same courtesy to machines? But then he dismisses the consciousness question as beside the point: “I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness. (…) But I do not think these mysteries necessarily need to be solved before we can answer the question with which we are concerned in this paper.”

So, to recap, Turing never asserts that his game is a test for consciousness. What he proposes is that the question “Can a machine win the imitation game?” is more fruitful and meaningful than “Can a machine think?”

But anyway: should we consider the imitation game — which LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT can now so easily beat — a valid, robust test for thinking, intelligence, or consciousness? The answer, as far as I am concerned, came exactly 70 years ago, in the introduction to the volume Automata Studies, written by two other giants of information theory and computer science, Claude Shannon and John McCarthy. They observed that if a machine had access to a sufficiently large “dictionary” of plausible responses capable of covering all possible human inputs, such a contraption could beat the test without really thinking, being intelligent, or being conscious. It would merely search the dictionary mechanically, parrot the appropriate response, and that would be that.

And that is, broadly speaking, what LLMs do. The “dictionary,” which in Shannon and McCarthy’s time was merely an abstract possibility, is today the very concrete internet.

So it seems that Dawkins — and the more recent batch of Dawkins bashers — have merely rehashed a “debate” that had already been quietly settled seven decades ago. Or have they?

The most interesting part of Richard Dawkins’s article is the final section, where he invokes the philosophical “zombie,” a hypothetical being that behaves exactly like a conscious creature but lacks any subjective experience whatsoever — a creature that, to quote Shakespeare, could say, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”, yet would in reality feel no pain, no fear, no ticklishness, not even offense after being wronged (and before exacting revenge). It would merely respond automatically, as a piano sounds a note when a key is pressed.

As Dawkins points out, if such zombies are at all possible — if complex creatures could live and reproduce successfully by reacting to their environments through crude, automaton-like stimulus-and-response pathways, without subjective intermediaries like fear, pain, hatred, anxiety, or love — then why consciousness? And are LLMs on the way to becoming proof-of-concept philosophical zombies?

Now, those are a pair of good questions.

(And yes, in case you are wondering, the image above is based on Jim Steranko’s “Prime Mover” android, first seen in Marvel Comics’ “Strange Tales” 167, from April 1968)

Stop waiting for permission to want something different. That’s the advice astrology app Co-Star had for me last Monday, the day I started writing this article. As a piece of oracular rhetoric, it’s brilliant: it’s vague to the point of meaninglessness, alluding to things neither explicit nor implicit in the text (permission from whom? something different from what?), but this same vagueness will guarantee that many people will read it as deeply personal—the app’s users know what their particular inhibitions are, after all, and will unconsciously fill in the gaps, and then be amazed by the advice’s pointed precision and pertinence.

It also bears noting that, as far as oracular pronouncements go, this one is rather bland and safe: it tells one to stop waiting for permission not to do something, but to want something. It doesn’t say anything about not asking permission before acting on that want. After all, who knows what crazy desires people may have? Careful there, kids!

Frequent readers of this space already know that my book from Columbia University Press, What Science Says About Astrology, is coming out May 19. (You can get it directly from the publisher by following this link. If you go there and use the code CUP20, you may even get a discount. You can also get it from Amazon, IndiePubs, Barnes & Noble, and other places.) One thing people ask me every so often is why bother debunking something like astrology. After all, it’s not like, say, the spurious and totally fictional vaccine-autism “link.” Nobody is suffering or dying because of their horoscope. Right?

My first answer is that people who are genuinely curious about a subject, be it vaccines or black holes or horoscopes, have the right to find good and reliable information on the subject—and the marketplace of ideas is so chock-full of misleading stuff about how wonderful astrology supposedly is that a debunking book is really just a minor effort in trying to balance the scales.

The second answer is that, wrong, as a matter of fact, people may suffer or die because of horoscopes or, more broadly speaking, from taking astrology in general seriously. Tiberius, the second Emperor of Rome, had hitmen going after people whom he believed, because of their horoscopes, could menace his power. Nowadays, there are people making decisions about when to give birth or whom to hire based on astrological considerations.

It is true that oracular utterances, like the one that opens this article, can seem innocuous, fun, or even useful, in a thought-association-exercise kind of way: as they are totally open-ended, what they really do is give one something to consider—the seed of an idea, a prompt, if you will: a nugget that can develop into a curious train of thought, a legitimate insight, or nothing at all. What’s the harm there?

Not every astrological pronouncement is oracular, however: some, like those around the feared Mercury retrograde periods, are quite definite. Besides, oracular sentences are not as innocuous as one might think: received as coming from a source of wisdom or authority, they communicate such authority to the conclusions they inspire, and a proposed course of action born of nothing more than random musings may be seen as endorsed by higher powers, even when cold logic suggests it may lead to catastrophe.

And oracles, of course, are unimpeachable: as the numerous anecdotes about the most famous of all, Delphi in Ancient Greece, show, every time someone flounders by following oracular advice, the blame is placed on the victim, who is said to have failed to interpret the message correctly. That’s the most glaring characteristic of divination systems, be it astrology or anything else: they get the credit when things go right, but not the responsibility when they go wrong.

Astrology today is big business. Co-Star made national news after raising $ 15 million from investors at the begining of the decade, and the global market for astrological services is expected to grow to $ 23 billion by 2031. So, why the book? Among many other things, because people have a right to be well informed before deciding to pay for something — and, if they decide to go for it, to know what they are paying for.

From time to time, some “scientific truth” from yore emerges in public debate and, having been proved completely wrong, is used to show how scientists are pompous fools who don’t know what they are talking about. Putting aside the fact that science is, by construction, open to new evidence and perpetually self-correcting — hence, the eventual defeat of old “truths” is just what one would expect — there are cases in which the purported “challenged orthodoxy” never really existed: its supposed prominence is entirely imaginary.

The poster boy of this fake past consensus stratagem is probably the idea that, some 50 years ago, scientists were “hysterical” or “in a frenzy” about imminent global cooling. This myth has been thoroughly debunked, and it was born from a very selective, biased reading of the news media of the 1970s, a time when scientists were still debating long-term climate trends, though the consensus was already tending toward global warming. A particular story published by Newsweek on April 28, 1975, “The Cooling World,” is usually cherry-picked by those willing to make the bogus case.

Some time ago, I stumbled upon a recent paper in Nature describing signs of adaptive genetic change in human populations over the last 10,000 years, which was presented by a social media commentator as putting the lie to the “consensus” that humans “stopped evolving” tens of thousands of years ago. There’s an undeniable undercurrent of academic schadenfreude here — the purported, misguided “consensus” is attributed to historical/social disciplines: you know, those obscurantist, politically correct, lily-livered, bleeding-heart liberal morons who don’t know that facts don’t care about your touchy feelings.

I really believe one can legitimately worry about some anti-empiricist, overly romantic, and irrationalistic tendencies that creep into certain corners of the humanities, social sciences, and related areas (as I have, for instance, here and here), but accusing them of maintaining a consensus of evolution denialism seems a little too much.

Curiously, the piece of “evidence” mobilized for the supposed existence of such a consensus comes from a second-hand quotation attributed to the late paleontologist (not anthropologist or sociologist) Stephen Jay Gould, who is presented as having said that:

“There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.”

On its face, the quotation seems to endorse some static evolutionary view of Homo sapiens, even if the second clause (“everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain”) suggests that perhaps Gould was talking more about macro-continuity (we are still fundamentally the same species our ancestors from the Stone Age were) than about micro-continuity (we are still the same in every minuscule genetic detail), and nothing at all about population continuity (that all human groups have remained absolutely identical).

Nonetheless, the quotation has been hijacked to support the allegation that some “social science consensus” denies that genetic differences have accumulated between human populations over the last millennia. Chasing the quote to its source, we find it not in an academic paper or even in one of those popular essays that Gould did so well, but in an interview, the kind of interaction in which the rigor of scientific discourse tends to be at its loosest. In a proper context, what Gould said was:

“(….) the speed of cultural change works at orders of magnitude greater than anything possible with natural selection, and why natural selection has almost become irrelevant in human evolution.

There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.

The other major difference is that in natural biological evolution, once a lineage becomes separate, it’s separate forever. It interacts with others ecologically, but it can’t join with them to create something new. But in human culture you do that all the time. A traveler to a distant land sees a wheel, goes back home, and changes his culture forever—so you have constant cross-penetration, which again makes things unpredictable and wildly variable and fast-moving.”

Two things that jump off the page are the “almost” in “natural selection has almost become irrelevant in human evolution” and, in the third paragraph, the confirmation that Gould was thinking in terms of large-scale evolutionary change — like the splitting off of a new species — not small-scale adaptive change, like lactose tolerance or skin pigmentation.

The gimmick of denouncing a purportedly preposterous consensus is a particular case of the straw man fallacy, in which a position is caricatured into absurdity to be more easily refuted. Of course, what is really refuted is the straw man version, not the real, serious argument, but a little use of rhetorical smoke-and-mirrors helps to muddle things.

Gould’s real point is that, over the last thousands of years of human existence, cultural change and diversification have been massively more conspicuous and relevant than genetic change and diversification, at least when considering the species as a whole. And who would disagree with that?

Fake consensuses have a limited field of application — debates about the reliability of scientific information — but using decontextualization to build straw men is a much more versatile weapon. The tactic isn't exactly new, but, like everything else, it has evolved with technology. In the internet/social media/artificial intelligence era, it gains impetus from the new facilities and opportunities for quote-mining, as in the case of Gould’s interview snippet.

By the way, there’s a great Gould quote about this kind of stuff. You can find it in the first chapter of his book Full House: “Nothing can be more misleading than formally correct but limited information drastically yanked out of context.”

To the ease with which nowadays it is possible to locate anything said or written by anyone, we should add the speed expected in online exchanges — a rhythm that drastically reduces the time for proper checks and verifications — and the undercurrent of emotional charge and moral intimidation that are ubiquitous in contemporary discourse: if the last out-of-context denunciation of this or that does not instantaneously wrench your gut and elicit an indignant response, you are obviously a monstruous person.

And I am only talking about what could be considered gray areas (decontextualization, after all, may be deliberate or inadvertent); I didn’t even touch on deliberate fraud, like deepfakes and their ilk.

There is, of course, no simple way out of this. The best one can do seems to be to make a deliberate effort to refuse to play by the unspoken rules of the game: avoid the urge for speedy, snappy responses and refuse to be intimidated into hasty acts of contrition/indignation. Breaking such tacit rules will most likely lead to short-term costs, but it may help create a healthier environment in the future.

What Science Says About Astrology is (almost) here!

Here’s a shameless commercial footnote: my book from Columbia University Press, What Science Says About Astrology, is coming out May 19th. You can guess the subject by the title, I suppose, and I add that, besides the usual criticisms from the astronomical and statistical angles, there’s a lot of psychological and social science in the mix — areas that have a lot to say about astrology and its impacts in the world, but that tend to be neglected in critical treatments of the subject.

And there are some very juicy historical anecdotes there, too. Astrology is today a multibillion-dollar industry, and it’s quite interesting to know where it comes from and how it can appear so enticing for so many people. These answers are in the book!

You can get it directly from the publisher by following this link. If you go there and use the code CUP20, you may even get a discount. You can also get it from Amazon, IndiePubs, Barnes & Noble, and other places. Come on, you know you want it!

Every time the media calls out one of those “new” problems that end up framed as socially relevant, but are no more than sorry excuses for narcissistic navel-gazing by members of the audience (“masculinity crisis,” anyone?), someone suggests that the root cause may be connected with the stresses of modern life. Which implies—even if the rationale is seldom spelled out—that in the past, when the problem didn’t exist (because if it did, it wouldn’t be “new”), people were less stressed than today. But were they?

I mean, think about the 20th century, if you please: the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the oil shock, two world wars, the Holocaust, the Great Depression, the Spanish flu—I mean, if you were an American teenager in the late 1960s, you could have been drafted and sent to die in Southeast Asia! It certainly sounds a wee bit more stressful than fearing some girl will laugh out loud in your face if you ask her out.

In my native country, Brazil, kids still can be drafted into the military when they turn 18 (not to fight wars, thankfully, because we don’t have any of those at the moment, but to undergo one to two years of compulsory basic training), and I can tell you, waiting to see if my name would be on the list of draftees was the most stressful time of my life, bar none—bullies, mean girls, unemployment, marriage, divorce, all the storm and thunder of adult life have been apple pie in comparison.

Someone might say: the 20th century was already part of the modern world! The problem is life under capitalism!

Yeah, sure. Because feudalism was peachy. Work the land until your back breaks, have ten children and see eight of them die of starvation, smallpox, sepsis, dumb-luck accidents, or brute violence. Get raped. Get bullied by knights in filthy armor with swords.

Ah, but what about the ancient world? The great democracy of Athens!

Well, if you were lucky enough not to be a slave, then you’d have had to deal with the Persian invasion, then the Peloponnesian War, the plague, the reign of terror of the Thirty Tyrants… all while surviving in a world without vaccines or antibiotics. Or eyeglasses or painkillers. Or basic recognition as a human being, if you happened to be a woman.

The theater was great, however.

And what about the rest of the world? I know it is becoming once again fashionable to think about non-Western or pre-colonial societies as stress-free utopias that ended up tainted by the vicious touch of European modernity, but that’s a myth.

It is one thing to acknowledge that it is morally wrong to subjugate, oppress, and exploit others. It’s quite another to imply that those identified as the most recent victims of such crimes knew nothing of oppression and exploitation—as perpetrators, even—before the most recent wave of conquerors arrived. Famine, disease, warfare, massacres, and even genocide are well documented in the archaeological record of every continent except Antarctica.

Keeping all of this in mind, the idea that there’s something uniquely stressful about the contemporary world sounds implausible. Staying alive is stressful. Always has been and probably always will be. What arguably has changed in the last 100 years or so is our perception of “stress” as a causative factor in health outcomes, which harkens back to the first half of the 20th century. Once the concept was in place, it became easy to apply it everywhere—with good reason or not.

People in the past were probably as stressed as we are today, or even much more so (hiding from Nazis? fearing polio? waiting for the Visigoths?). What they didn’t have was the concept of “stress” to hang their anxieties on.

Which is not to deny that every moment in history may very well offer some stressors that are context-specific and affect people in peculiar ways. That may well be the case. But the suggestion that somewhere in the past there was a carefree, just-so environment from which humanity was expelled by colonialism, or capitalism, or feminism, or wokeism, or whatever, doesn’t hold any water.

Perhaps the reason we fall so easily for the “stress of modern life,” instead of just “stress of life,” causal explanation is that we conflate the historical past with a particular view of the personal past—with idealized memories of childhood.