The New Age: Notes of a Fringe-Watcher
by Martin Gardner
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Book Reviews of The New Age: Notes of a Fringe-Watcher
Book Review: The magic touch
Summary: 5 Stars
In the second half of the 20th century, there was no more tireless campaigner against bumfoozlement than Martin Gardner.
In the world of skeptics, Gardner was best known for bringing magic into the realm of rationalism. He was a science writer who did the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American for many years, a philosopher and an amateur magician.
For years he preached that any experiment that claimed to test for psychic powers should be observed by a magician, because only a professional trickster can catch another trickster. This was not an original idea with Gardner -- Houdini had a standing challenge against "real" mediums, which no one ever beat -- but a generation passed between Houdini's death and Gardner's revival of this crucial rule.
During that generation, many claims that "scientific experiments" had proved the existence of "psi" powers passed almost unchallenged into the public consciousness.
The great vindication of Gardner's skepticism came in the fiasco of the James McDonnell bequest.
The aviation millionaire left $500,000 for research to demonstrate psi activity. Skeptics from the Gardner circle recruited an Iowa teenager, gave him a few lessons in magic and turned him loose on the "researchers."
After a long search, the psi team announced it had discovered one, and only one, person that stood up to their most rigorous tests.
You guessed. The Iowa boy.
The counterattack of the organized skeptics has been so successful that even psi believers now limit their "proofs" to awkward statistical samplings that show psi "adepts" merely scoring "better than chance would predict."
In many cases, "better than chance would predict" is still less than 50 percent correct, so that even if psi could be proven to exist that way, so what?
The skeptics have branched out from criticizing psi to all sorts of "fringe" beliefs, like UFOs, cryptobiology (Bigfoot, yetis, Nessie), quackery, dowsing, astrology, reincarnation, perpetual motion, creationism, Freudianism, spoon bending, channeling. lost continents -- the list is almost endless. Gardner assessed them all, many in columns collected in this book.
Living on the fringe is harmless for most people. They often act foolishly in public and they pay money for worthless junk and advice, but so do skeptics sometimes. Unfortunately, a few give their lives for their beliefs.
Gullible diabetics are told to give up their insulin in favor of Chinese herbs, and they die. Psychic surgeons in the Philippines and Brazil and chiropractors in the United States steer people away from rational treatment that could help them, sometimes with fatal results.
It is unlikely that the rationalists will ever outnumber the irrationalists. Gardner put up a good fight, but he was outnumbered.
Book Review: Some of the essays would get a 10, others a 5
Summary: 4 Stars
THE NEW AGE is a collection of a number of columns and essays that Gardner has written over the years, and while it is almost impossible to maintain the highest degree of excellence over some thirty odd pieces, Gardner does a marvelous job. Many of the piece in this collection--especially those dealing with New Ageism, fundamentalism, or individuals operating on the edge of the Occult--would get a 10, while others could receive a rating as low as 5.
What I most appreciate about Gardner is the balanced perspective he brings to his subjects. Unlike many sceptics, Gardner does not succumb to universal and indiscriminate debunking. There are those who are not able to comprehend the difference between being a religous believer, for instance, and espousing Creationism and fundamentalism. Gardner understands the distinction perfectly, however, and never engages in ad hoc attacks on religion when his real target is an irrational right-wing religion. In this I find his work to be much more convincing than such sceptics as Michael Shermer and a bulk of the writers publishing on Prometheus Books. One of the best examples of Gardner's balance is his obvious liking for Shirley MacLaine despite his abhorence of many of her inane preoccupations. So, although there is an inevitable unevenness to the quality of the essays in the book, they overall stand at a very high level.
Gardner reprints many letters written to him in response to the original printing of many of the articles, and I would like to take an opportunity to quibble on one small point, though on something that he mentions several times. In writing of pentecostals, he mentions that they believe that when one is baptised in the Holy Spirit, one gift of the spirit is the ability to speak in "The Unknown Tongue." In my contact with Pentecostals, the stress has been on "other tongues," many of which are known, and some of which are not. There is no one such "unknown tongue." Some pentecostals like to recount anecdotes of supposedly uneducated people speaking in Latin, French, or German even though they have never learned the languages. A small point, but I think it is important to realize that the emphasis with many charismatics is in speaking not "the unknown tongue," but in other tongues than their own.
Book Review: More Martin Gardner gems.
Summary: 5 Stars
The material in this volume consists of essays from various periodicals, among them the Skeptical Inquirer, Nature, Discover, et al. It's a more mature work than Gardner's seminal opus, "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" (which I do recommend as an overall summary of the nonsense that gets MORE rather than less popular). Mr. Gardner, I now designate you as my second favorite author, next only to Arthur C. Clarke.
Like, say, James Randi, Gardner pokes fun at various fads, most of them known as "New Age." I must say I was a little confused that the text was broken into two sections both of them entitled "The New Age." That must have been a minor editor's error and, at worst, wastes a couple of pages of paper.
The most amusing character covered at some length in the text is Shirley MacLaine. A friend of mine passes from one New Age fad to the next but he doesn't hold a candle to Shirl who communicates with the dead, the gurus from millenia ago and God knows who else. In the text to which I referred above, Gardner covers L. Ron Hubbard when he was still limited to "dianetics," before that "movement" became a religion. In this volume, he confesses that long ago he just felt Hubbard to be a b-grade sci-fi writer with delusions of literary and spiritual authority. Now he finds L. Ron a pathological liar without any moral merit to speak of; that's what happened when Gardner learned more from two biographies of that founder of Scientology.
Oh, then there's J. Z. Knight who has been responsible for a real estate boom in the Pacific northwest where her disciples are flocking to get wisdom from 35,000 years ago. And the relatively short chapter on "Prime Time Preachers" was a real education to me who remembers Oral Roberts from the early 1950s!
Anyway, many other personalties and fads are reviewed here and it would take pages to mention them all. Like Randi's "Flim Flam," I recommend this as a general overview of silly fads most of them categorized as "New Age."
Book Review: A collection, not an overview
Summary: 4 Stars
I reserved this book at my local public library, based on its title, which is somewhat inaccurate. The book is, as other reviewers have noted, a collection of magazine articles and book reviews, with some added comments at the end of each, rather than a historical overview of the New Age phenomenon. Gardner does richly deserve credit for his fairness in including replies from people who disagreed strongly with him. Still, much of the book is dated, describing people and phenomena it was important to challenge at the time of writing but now faded from the public eye; I skipped or skimmed many parts. I find Michael Shermer's book Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time more comprehensive; though it too is largely a collection of articles, they are longer and generally go deeper; Shermer has expanded many of them well beyond what he originally published in periodicals.
In spite of my criticisms, I find much of Gardner's book interesting -- the most useful parts for me were his devastating exzmination of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, and the book reviews, as a guide to further reading.
Book Review: A voice of sanity in a crazy world
Summary: 3 Stars
Most of this book consists of Gardner's columns from CSICOP's magazine Skeptical Inquirer, though it's filled out with similar articles that found homes elsewhere. Overall, Gardner surveys the realm of mysticism and pseudoscience, lingering on paradigmatic exemplars like Uri Geller and Shirley Maclaine. It's moderately entertaining reading for a skeptic (as I am), but I am reminded of Joel Achenbach's comment about reading such things: there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of point since you always know what the answer is going to be before you start. Still, in a world filled with silliness and pseudoscience, it's nice to have some voices of sanity, and Gardner's is certainly one of them.