Shaky Step to Realm of Skeptics

John Gardner - 1 May 1990

The following article appeared in The New Zealand Herald of 6 September 1989. It was the most comprehensive coverage of the 1989 Conference to appear in the national press.

Logic and the laws of physics are all very fine, but when experience insists that beds of hot coals are for cooking rather than leisurely strolls, rationality curls itself into a small ball at the back of the mind.

But if you aspire to be a Skeptic, rationality is of the essence. And so inwardly whimpering, I stepped on to the glowing embers. Stepped is, I admit, something of a misnomer. It was more of a prancing charge, like Ben Johnson on speed.

Yet, like all the other volunteers, I emerged from the fiery pit unscathed without the benefit of any spiritual preparation, no concentration of my psychic aura, no astral level meditation or, indeed, any thought at all other than that a cold beer would go down well.

Another small victory to the Skeptics, New Zealand’s band of dedicated debunkers.

The firewalk was the publicity highlight of the fourth annual convention in Christchurch of the New Zealand Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal and the brainchild of its chairman, Dr Denis Duttont, whose distaste for media gullibility is matched only by his willingness to exploit that gullibility,

It was a distinctly odd spectacle. The members of the Skeptics are not a homogenous bunch and, indeed, my neighbour for several of the sessions had to keep nipping off to feed her lambs. Nevertheless there is more than a random sprinkling of doctorates and professorships among the ranks.

And here they all were; along with the television men who will do anything for good footage, and the pen-carrying hacks, solemnly rolling their trousers and hoisting their skirts less as a demonstration of a belief in the principle of differential rates of heat transfer than a show of peer pressure and of willingness to take a risk (and there were those who admitted later to the odd blister) in the cause of the Skeptics.

What that cause is may be read in their six point statement of aims of which probably the most crucial is “To encourage a more critical attitude to pseudo science and to bogus paranormal claims, and to alert people to the dangers of uncritical acceptance of such claims.”

The aim may be to correct ignorance, but the driving moral force is to stop exploitation. They are consumer watchdogs of the mind.

The firewalking exploit, while entertaining, encapsulated the approach. The exposition of the physics which allow the feat was coupled with a demonstration of how firewalking is sold commercially, surrounded with mystique and exploiting the weakness of the client.

Editors note: Dr Dutton is a former chairman and is currently the media spokesman for the NZ Skeptics.

One potential walker [in a British firewalk recorded on video tape] was a cancer sufferer who believed if she could gain sufficient control over her mind, through the agency of the firewalk guru, it could conquer her illness. Another believed the mental power thus invoked would revive her ailing business.

No Skeptic would deny the virtue of confidence building, but their ire is raised by the apparatus of hocus-pocus used only to inflate the status of the guru and to turn a dishonest dollar.

In another of the conference presentations far removed from the knockabout firewalk, Dr Bridget Robinson, of Christchurch Clinical School, soberly outlined the ferocious grip which bogus therapies have on the treatment of cancer.

There is a view, not wholly unrepresented within the ranks of the Skeptics, for whom smugness is an everyawning trap, that it might not really matter if the poor deluded peasantry think their future is revealed by the creases in their palms. After all, what harm does it do?

But most Skeptics will not have a bar of this benign and condescending view. It is obvious that if alternative therapy delays early diagnosis and treatment of many cancers it can have damaging, possibly fatal results.

Less obvious is the distress that may be caused by clairvoyants and spiritualists who inevitably encounter people at their most desperate and vulnerable.

With a mixture of amusement and exasperation one conference member told how he discovered that a woman was still conducting part of her life, refusing to go on boat trips, in deference to a piece of advice he had given in a forgotten and totally bogus palm reading many years before.

The urge to proselytise is clearly as strong for logicians as for believers in the Archpriest Zang from the secret plant Berk. But if the Skeptics are to be judged by the hard rules of evidence to which they subscribe it is difficult to concede that more than a few minor skirmishes are being won in their quixotic battle against credulity.

In a wry study of the gullibility of the New Zealand public over many years, Dr Colin McGeorge pointed out that as long ago as 1908 a Quackery Prevention Act was passed. With the possible exception of reading lumps on people’s heads, all the lunatic fringe remedies that were around then still flourish undiminished.

Quackery prevention failed in 1908 and it will fail now. Who wants to believe statistics when you know personally that your granny’s neighbour’s piles were cured by a brisk rubdown with a quartz crystal?

In some curious way exposure of fraud often reinforces belief. Spiritualist literature abounds in mediums who have gone to even greater public acclaim having been caught redhanded with the speaking trumpet tucked into their knicker elastic. Carbon dating has left the faith of believers in the Turin Shroud completely undiminished.

After years of experience one suspects this still comes as a sad shock to many investigators who find that they are not treated with gratitude by those from whose eyes the scales should have been removed.

Humans cling to irrationality with a fervour that, self evidently, defies rational analysis. Dr Matt McGlone, scientist and apostate astrologer, admitted as much, when he classed his fellow Skeptics as aliens and the rest of population, the overwhelming majority, as normals.

As in the best science fiction movies the aliens, hidden among us, are trying to take over the world. Even if they can walk on hot coal they won’t make it.