No subtitle (they didn’t do them so often fifty years ago).
(UK, 1973; US: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974, 258pp, including 5pp index.)
Like Nicholas Humphrey’s LEAPS OF FAITH, discussed a couple weeks ago, this is a book I read decades ago, soon after it came out, and revisited recently to see how what it says fits into my current schema. Since the book came out in 1974, I also have to wonder, at this remove, what prompted me to buy and read it back then? I was a year into college, and had sufficient pocket money to buy books, even a hardcover now and then, but why did I spend $7.95 on *this* book?
I can sort of retrace the trajectory of my thinking and reading experiences. Through book services at school, I had discovered writers like Isaac Asimov (ENVIRONMENTS OUT THERE) and Martin Gardner (SCIENCE PUZZLERS, about experiments you could do at home), and also Frank Edwards (FLYING SAUCERS–SERIOUS BUSINESS and later STRANGER THAN SCIENCE). The Edwards books triggered a brief flirtation with UFO mania, as I’ve written about elsewhere on this blog. At my grandfather’s house in Cambridge, IL, I would step outside his house, looking across the road over the pastures and up into the sky, thinking, *I could see a flying saucer at any moment*! After all, they were so common, according to these books. Of course I never did see one.
Then I discovered other books by Asimov (the pertinent one was IS ANYONE THERE?, a collection of essays) and Gardner (FAD AND FALLACIES IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE), that pointed out how easily people are snookered and how mundane explanations exist for all the supposedly miraculous sightings in books by Edwards and others.
So this Evans book, which I bought only a couple months after Gardner’s FADS, was out of extension of that interest, I suppose. Especially since it implicated science fiction! Nearly half the book is a series of chapters under the heading “The Science Fiction Religion.” What could this be about?
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I will not outline the book in detail, as I’ve for others. Its main topics:
- The first part, almost half the book, is about L. Ron Hubbard, at one time a pulp science fiction writer , and his invention of “Dianetics” and later “Scientology.” He got his start in pulp science fiction magazines, and his early Dianetics essays were published in the leading science fiction magazine of the early 1950s, Astounding, by the editor John W. Campbell, who throughout his career was a tad credulous about revolutionary discoveries that would overturn convention wisdom. (He was a frustrated scientist/inventor himself, according to Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, which I read a few years ago but never wrote up here.)
- The second part is about flying saucers, recounting much of the history that we’ve read about in other books. The comment I wrote while reading: it’s about crazies who invent stuff out of thin air, like flat-earthers and the religious folks who are always worried about demons, and wars between good and evil. These topics attract similar personalities.
- The third part is about “black boxes,” which were a thing in those days. They were devices with inputs and outputs and nothing in between, and so of course were rife for fraud. Claims they could detect “vibrations” to detect various ailments. Again as in Evans, there’s the idea of discrediting science: their ideas “are united in showing a preoccupation with the notion of fundamental forces, undiscovered or ignored by science, and closely tied to the psychic powers of human beings.” And their purveyors made lots of money. But claims involving such gadgets have disappeared. Perhaps because modern “gadgets” are far too complex for anyone to mimic.
- The fourth part is about “The Mystic East,” i.e. the attraction in the 1970s to yoga, karma, mystical powers, reincarnation. Ouspensky; Gurdjieff and his seven evolutionary levels of man. And so on. The continued Western interest in oriental religions seems driven by a hope for some great truth waiting to be found.
What’s notable about this book is that Evans finds some amount of sympathy for each group. He understands their motives. Are the bases for our modern religions, simply because they’re endured for a couple thousand years, any sillier than the basis of Scientology?
And my takeaway, after reading this book again, is that cultish ideas appear and disappear over time. Scientology is still around, but black boxes? No. UFOs? Not so much. (And as David Brin keeps pointing out, supposed photos of UFOs, in this day and age when virtually everyone has phone with a camera in their pockets, are no better now than they were 50 years ago. They’re still fuzzy.) Mystic East? Practices have been absorbed into Western culture.
Bottom line: human psychology is forever open to subjective interpretations of things it does not understand objectively. The focus of such interpretations changes over time. Thus the topics in this book, the topics in Gardner’s FADS AND FALLACIES, and the topics of the ur-text on this subject, Charles MacKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds published way back in 1841. (I have a copy of that, too.) The topics change. The gullibility of human nature does not. Or perhaps I shouldn’t say “gullibility.” Human nature did not evolve to accurately perceive the world; it evolved to survive. The stories that humans assign to things they don’t understand gradually give way to objective understanding of reality, via science. But it takes a while.
