Michael Shermer is the man behind Skeptic and the Skeptic Society. The group talks about all the crazy stuff people believe in and promotes science and
critical thinking. This book was originally published in 1997 and a new edition
came out in 2002. As someone who thinks that there are a lot of crazy ideas in
the mental health fields, I wanted to see if Shermer had any ideas about the nature of weird
beliefs that I had not already come across.
The book looks at some commonly seen unscientific ideas including abduction by aliens, recovered memories,
anti-evolution notions, and Holocaust denial. It tears apart the tricks that
leading “thinkers” in these movements use whenever they are seen in the media.
Shermer has debated many of them, and seems somewhat surprised by how likeable
and intelligent these people can be even when they are pushing very hateful
myths.
Their methods include focusing solely on
opponents’ weak points while avoiding saying anything definitive about their
own position. They use quotations by reasonable experts but use them out of
context. They take honest debates about one aspect of some phenomenon within a
field to dispute the entire field. They focus on what is not known while
ignoring things that are, and they emphasize data that does not fit the
prevailing wisdom while discounting data that does.
One of their tactics I am familiar
with is the use of the fallacy that if scientists were wrong about one part of
a complicated theory like evolution, then the whole theory must be wrong. This
reminds me of attacks on psychoanalysis. Just because Freud was wrong about the
pervasiveness of the Oedipus Complex or penis envy does not mean he was wrong
about the existence of intrapsychic conflicts and defense mechanisms.
All-or-none thinking is a hallmark of groupthink.
Another tactic is one which I have
written about. It occurs when a theory has been misused for foul purposes by a
political or social group. If fact, any idea
can be misused like that. Such misuse does not negate the validity of the
theory. The big one for me is rejection by a majority of evolutionary
biologists of the concept of kin selection because it might be used to justify
social Darwinism. One of the people that is responsible for this turn of events
is noted evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who is someone frequently
quoted in a positive manner by Shermer throughout the book.
And speaking of groupthink, that is
something the author alludes to somewhat briefly but does not seem to completely
understand. In fact, groupthink maintenance is the best answer to the question
posed in the book’s title in a lot of cases. I recall when it hit me that oft-used
logical fallacies like begging the question and non sequiturs were not just random
weaknesses in critical thinking but had a purpose: enforcing group norms, which
are often, in turn, enforced by the use of illogical thoughts. In other words,
they have a biological purpose.
Instead, Shermer focuses on somewhat
more selfish reasons for why folks push a weird point of view. The thoughts are
comforting (like believing in a specific type of afterlife), or the idea helps
advance some political agenda like racist policies, or to sell books and
become famous. He also discusses our ubiquitous tendency to look for data that fits our
beliefs while discounting data that does not (confirmation bias). People are
very good at “seeing what they are looking for.” People of high intelligence
may even be better at that than those lower on that Totem Pole because they can devise
reasonable-sounding justifications for their beliefs.
Another issue I had is that the author seems to think that in many of these cases the people who spout nonsense really believe what they are saying, rather than saying them because of an ulterior motive of some sort. He opines, for example, that some of these people believe in, say, alien abduction because they also mistakenly believed that hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations they experienced in which they saw an alien in their room. These hallucinations are actually a normal phenomenon that occasionally occur as people are drifting off to sleep or awakening from a deep sleep. Most of them only last a couple of minutes and, despite what the author says, feel somewhat dreamlike when the person comes to – at least those I’ve experienced did.
To think that very smart people who don’t know about this phenomenon wouldn’t
question their own sanity rather than believe that what they saw was real seems
to me to be a bit of a stretch. As he points out, a lot of these people are
quite bright, so they have to know that a lot of what they are advancing is
b.s.
Despite these limitations, the book
is a fun and interesting read. The history of fad-like belief systems is informative.
He has a lot of amusing stories about arguing about these nutty ideas with their champions
on talk shows like Phil Donahue.