New Age 101

Bill Malcolm - 1 November 1991

Among the papers at the Skeptics conference were Bill Malcolm’s four. entertaining “illustrated truth kits” — short two-projector slide-shows on topics like fad diets, the New Age, fringe therapies, and scientific method. This one is the New Age primer.

In the three decades since the “me generation” of the 1960s, a rag-tag array of irrational beliefs, jargon, and ritual has grown up that’s come to be called the New Age. The beliefs which New Agers accept are diverse enough (and weird enough) for anybody’s taste. For example, a lively New Age cult has grown up around Dr Wilhelm Reich, a neo-Freudian psychologist who in 1939 claimed he had discovered “orgone energy”, the hidden cosmic energy of the orgasm. He wrote a book about it entitled The Function of the Orgasm.

Reich said that orgone energy is non-electromagnetic radiation coming from outer space, it’s coloured blue, and it’s responsible for the colour of the sky…and sexually excited frogs. His Orgone Institute built huge boxes lined with metal — he claimed that the boxes could concentrate orgone energy. His patients leased them and sat inside to absorb the accumulated orgone energy. Reich went on to explain far more than just the blue colour of the sky and frenzied frogs.

“Clouds and thunderstorms”, he wrote, “phenomena which to date have remained unexplained, depend on changes in the concentration of atmospheric orgone.” He built a rain-making device, huge tubes which squirted orgone energy into

October 1991 Number 21 the clouds. He also claimed to be able to cure cancer and other serious diseases with orgone energy.

His contemporaries dismissed him as a crank — he took that badly, insisting that his discovery of orgone energy ranked in importance with the Copernican Revolution. Eventually he was arrested and convicted for medical fraud, but in spite of that, his books still sell like hotcakes in New Age bookstores.

Pseudoscience

Because New Agers are openly irrational and not interested in testing their explanations, they’re clearly anti-scientific, and yet paradoxically they’re often attracted to beliefs like Reich’s which have a scientific flavour. Such beliefs are said to be pseudo-scientific —

they’re touted as being rigorously scientific, but in fact they’re cheap imitations. They either prove to be false or else they can not even be tested by science.

Pseudoscientists often borrow a Scientific word or phrase and re-define it —

“energy-fields”, “vibrations”, and “quantum effects” are examples — or else, as Reich did, they simply invent new words like “orgone”.

Pseudoscientific beliefs have become popular since the 1960s, possibly because they’re more appealing to some people than real scientific ideas are. Many people fear science. They say that it’s inhuman and threatening because it has spawned some runaway disasters like nuclear weapons, CFCs, thalidomide, and acid rain. At the same time, though, they envy science. They realize that it’s successful and powerful because it has also spawned antibiotics, miracle crop strains, heart transplants and the silicon chip. A pseudoscientific idea is “warm and fuzzy” enough to calm their fears, yet “sounds” scientific enough to command their respect. They hope to get the best of both worlds.

Make no mistake, though — for New Agers, the science in pseudoscience is only a wrapping, merely attractive packaging. New Agers are not looking for explanations. Rather, they’re looking for emotional therapy, like the joys of love and friendship, the pleasures of massage and touch, the excitement of the paranormal, the wonders of meditation, trance, and hypnosis, the comforts of quick and easy cures. Anything which sounds like science in there is valued not for its testable truth but rather for its emotional pay-off.

Said another way, New Agers — in contradiction of their very name — are looking for ancient values and truths, not modern testable explanations. They wrap up some of their truths in pseudoscience, but only because the success and power of science lend prestige and respect to their hokum. Not surprisingly, scientists do not want science polluted by such bunkum.

Tough luck — they’ve got little hope of stemming the on-coming flood of the stuff, because the big publishing houses have struck gold with it. Since the 1960s, New Age fallacies have become increasingly popular, and cynical money-grubbing publishers have aggressively pushed the fad for quick and easy profit. In the US, whole bookstores are devoted to New Age titles. One distributor alone lists 11,000. They touch on every conceivable topic — one shop carried two dozen books on New Age business management, tax planning, and market investing. The respected US business magazine Forbes branded them “interchangeably moronic”.

Science writer Martin Gardner laments that it’ll be a long time before people are well enough informed about science to make pseudoscientific books unprofitable. As long as there’s money to be made, the books will be written and printed.

That worries astronomer Carl Sagan, who thinks we’re headed for disaster. He thinks that it’s dangerous and stupid for people to be ignorant about problems like global warming, acid rain, ozone depletion, toxic or radioactive waste, and species extinction. With problems like that facing us, it’s idle and decadent to be reading New Age flimflam. A whole generation cannot see the difference between reality and fantasy, can neither ask the right questions nor recognise the answers.

New Age Hustle

New Age gimmicks are shamelessly hustled with the same advertising techniques as consumer products like shampoos. The blatant message of shampoo ads is “You can transform your life if you buy this product”. A woman with blah hair and no man lathers up and within seconds we see her stunningly beautiful and on the arm of a rich handsome suitor. With a bottle of soap, she’s bought an instant change to her life. In the New Age ads, you can do the same thing if you buy not a shampoo but a guru or a magic crystal or some new therapy.

Both ads target narcissists, people who have a weak sense of self and do not easily bond to other people or even to places. For them, work and family are not fulfilling enough. Their day-dreams are overheated fantasies of beauty, fame, money, power, or happiness which shore up their chronically weak egos.

As a result, they’re easy prey for ads that promise instant change in their humdrum lives — “You are unique, you are God, you have truly unlimited potential, you need only learn how to tap your creative powers…and we can show you how to do that”. The narcissist has always fantasized about being the centre of attention, the star, in control, relaxed and happy, and so these phoney New Age clichés are irresistible.

The New Age is like a pyramid with the narcissists at the base. They believe…and so they spend on one claptrap promise after another. Their spending supports the guru at the top of the pyramid, who gets rich and famous, ironically the very thing that the guru promises them. But the guru somehow always remains the star, and alone gets the cosmic buzz from a thriving cult of adoring acolytes, a sold-out lecture, or a best-selling book. Shirley MacLaine has made millions of dollars by telling narcissists how to overturn the pyramid and put themselves on top (she coyly calls it “sharing”). But of course, her advice doesn’t work — they haven’t got the strength of ego to pull it off.

The scam guru knows it, and he cynically exploits that weakness while pretending not to. He tells the narcissists that all of their problems are their own fault, brought on by a lifestyle “polluted” by “negative energy”, “bad karma”, and “imbalances”. Their colds and even their cancers are their fault for not thinking more positively. But he’ll show them how to think positive thoughts, reverse the vibrational energy-field, drive out the bad karma. In the end, though, the narcissists can not do it even with all that expensive advice, and so they drift from one New Age fad to another, still hoping and still spending.

Dark Side

As with fringe medicine, there’s a dark side to this. New Agers say that truth is whatever “feels right”, and they’re convinced that if they believe anything strongly enough, it’ll come true.

Their slogan is “You are God”. It’s repeated tirelessly by high-profile gurus like Shirley MacLaine. It blatantly assures people that their personal versions of truth are the absolute truth, that there’s no right or wrong, and true believers can do whatever they like, no matter what. In the New Age, all endings are happy, and there’s no such thing as a mistake.

It gets still darker. MacLaine enthusiastically endorses an American channeler named J. Z. Knight, author of the best-selling book Ramtha. Knight channels for Ramtha (or the Ram), who she claims was born an astonishing 35,000 years ago in the mythical city of Atlantis. The Ram likes to tack the suffix “-ness” onto words, and his favourite word for God is isness — “God is the isness of all that is.”

Ram says that God does not have the ability to judge you, and there is no forgiveness of sins because there are no sins to forgive. “Every vile and wretched thing you do”, Ram goes on, “broadens your understanding”. Murder is not a sin, but a learning experience. The slain go on to better lives, the slayer experiences remorse, while God is indifferent to both.

Not surprisingly, Ram does not encourage you to help the poor, the suffering, or the starving:

The…starving or crippled…have chosen the experience for the purpose of gaining from it…Leave them alone and allow them to evolve according to their own needs and designs…Allow them the freedom to be limited, which is true love, because…this is the only way they can learn…

MacLaine has been told that her only daughter was her sister in a past life, her mother in another. In past lives, MacLaine herself has been a pirate and a Buddhist monk, has helped write the US constitution, has talked with elephants by telepathy, and has been a hooker more times than she can remember. She buys it all. I’d recommend that you read all about it, but second-hand through Martin Gardner’s book The New Age, or through the several authors in the summer 1989 issue of The Skeptical Inquirer.

Proof? What Proof?

When scientists ask for proof of such things, the cultists reply that science is only one way to explain the world, and there are countless others. Reason is much too confining, they go on. So what if dowsing fails when cheating is ruled out, and so what if spirits come only in total darkness? These are all mysteries lying on a remote spiritual and intuitive plane which science simply can not explore. By narrow-mindedly insisting on evidence from crucial tests, scientists miss having experiences which prove that psychic forces exist.

Cranks often argue that because nothing is certain in science, then we can’t really know anything at all, and so everything is equally likely, and therefore you might just as well believe whatever feels best.

Of late, cranks loudly proclaim that science itself has come up with evidence that reality is stranger than even the cranks believe. They’re fond of pointing out that physicists showed a long time ago that a particle like an electron is somehow not really there until it’s measured, even though the measurer can be a machine rather than a person. In the arcane jargon of the particle physicist, the measuring apparatus “collapses the particle’s wave packet” and thus allows the particle’s property to become “definite” for the first time.

Nobody knows yet what that fact actually means, but some philosophers and even a few physicists nonetheless have seized on it to assert that nothing is real until it’s observed by conscious minds. If that’s so, then presumably the universe was just a featureless fog before life began, and it got steadily more and more complicated only as life evolved.

Frog, The Creator?

Einstein openly scoffed at that idea, and asked just how conscious a mind had to be to make the universe real. Was the moon non-existent until the first mouse saw it, or was a moth sentient enough to do the job? And what would happen if all life was snuffed out? Would the universe fade back into a gloomy fog again just because no minds were left to observe it?

Clearly, the idea is just silly. Just because a particle seems not to be out there until measured, it simply does not follow that the whole universe is not out there until it’s observed.

You have plenty of evidence for that from your own experience. For example, just as with an electron, a rainbow isn’t there until it’s seen by somebody — no arc of colours is literally there, and nobody has found the proverbial pot of gold at its base. But it does not follow that there’s nothing out there. Rather, there’s sunlight and a highly organized structure of raindrops. Without both, nobody would see a rainbow.

Although the idea that the universe doesn’t exist until we observe it is plain silly, in the hands of its believers it gets even sillier. Some take the short step to insisting that we actually create the universe. For example, when we think we’ve “discovered” a natural law, they say that in fact we’ve invented it. So, Newton didn’t discover the law of gravity — he made it all up. Copernicus didn’t discover that the earth revolves around the sun — he dreamed it up, just as a composer pens a new tune.

It’s just plain stupid to think that the enormous predictive power of science is nothing more than predictions of a made-up world inside our heads.

Testing Gravity

But you shouldn’t just take that on faith. Try it and see, by making up your own private reality about something important. Gravity will do nicely. In Life, the Universe, and Everything, you’re told that you can learn to fly by hurling yourself at the ground and missing. Okay, do it — skeptics at least would agree with you that “you just can’t miss”.

If you manage to pull off that crackpot attempt, you’ll then live forever free of the universe’s annoying law of gravity. Other successes are sure to follow, like bucking the one-way arrow of time, or the inevitable entropic decay of everything, including your own body.

Happily enough, some crackpot ideas are torpedoed by events rather than skeptical scientists.

A Californian geologist named Jim Berkland reckons that he can _ predict earthquakes using the phases of the moon and the number of advertisements for runaway cats published in his local newspaper. When the ads rocket, he says, a biggie is on the way. During the month up to what laid-back Californians now call the “pretty big one”, the 7.1 magnitude Loma Prieta quake, cat ads steadily declined. Another Frisco quake-quack nutter confidently reassured Californians just two months before the shake that the entire year would be free of major earthquakes.

That shake killed scores of people, collapsed freeways and buildings, and closed the Bay Bridge. And besides scuppering quake-prediction by runaway cats, it seriously damaged the reputation of Nancy Reagan’s astrologer Joan Quigley.

Since Reagan’s near-assassination in 1981, Nancy had been secretly paying Quigley US$36,000 a year for astrological advice on exactly when the presidential-jet Air Force One should take off, when Reagan should hold press conferences, even the precise time that he should sign a treaty. And yet, Quigley did not know enough to get out of town before the “pretty big one” hit — in fact, she admitted she’d “never been so jolted, so shaken”.

How can an astrologer claim to know precisely the best instant for the presidential jet to lift off, and yet not know when a 7.1 quake will hit? Afterwards, Quigley said she knew a quake was coming, but not when - well phooey! Everybody in California knows that much.

And how many psychic gurus and seers predicted the crumbling of communist power in eastern Europe or the military coup in the Soviet Union and its dramatic collapse? Not a single one! Surely they would not have missed that chance to prove their psychic powers to the doubters.

And what about Iraq’s sudden invasion and annexation of Kuwait? Nary a precognitive whisper about that, nor about the startling outcome. The psychics would not have had to see into the future further than a single day for their powers to be worth many billions of dollars to the United States military, which would gladly have shelled out such megabucks for reliable predictions on how long the ground war would last.

Parapsychologists claim that psychic powers improve dramatically with a promise of a big pay-off, and yet they had just that for the six nail-biting weeks of the Gulf war. They couldn’t have asked for a better test - billions of petro-dollars at stake, yet not a single guru or seer was able to read even the near future.

Dare we conclude that in fact they do not have the powers they claim to have? We surely can. In fact, the nightly news of what’s just happened in the world is high-quality evidence that they’re all utterly phoney.