Another silly season

17 October 2002, 870 words

No sooner has one silly season ended, it seems, than another has begun. Elections are over, and all of a sudden I'm reading about psychics and gurus and milk-drinking statues. It's almost as though Trinidadians find stupidness as necessary as oxygen.

Last week, the Express carried a feature-length interview with a US psychic named Hans King. All well and good: such stories have entertainment value. But there was a sidebar to the main article headlined "Facts about psychics". This sidebar listed mind-reading, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, ghosts and auras as though these phenomena actually exist.

Last week, too, the Trinidad Guardian carried an advertisement by one Swami Brahma Deo Upadhyay who was described as "an ocean of lobe [sic] and wisdom and spirit of pure knowledge". The ad offered astrology and aura readings, including "a full-body aura photo in colour". The swami, it appears, will diagnose your health, and also tell you about your past, present and future. Not only was this false advertising, but for anyone but a qualified medical doctor to diagnose a person's health can be criminal.

Still, the editors were responsible in their coverage since, for King's group session, they sent intellectual, rather than credulous, journalists. The Guardian's Kim Johnson was entirely unimpressed, while the Express's Raymond Ramcharitar tried to offer rational explanations for some of King's insights.

The tricks these supposed psychics use are, of course, quite familiar to professional conjurers. The most common - and the one people are most impressed by - is called a "cold reading". Using this technique, the 'psychic' can make it seem as though they know all sorts of personal details about members of the audience. But the trick isn't very complicated.

The psychic's insight comes from a combination of knowing what's common (e.g. causes of death, illness or emotional distress), being able to read personality types and body language, and by the tendency of people to remember hits and forget misses and to give the game away when the psychic gets warm. The psychic also often has an ally or allies in the audience who eavesdrop and report back to him, or even strike up conversations with people in the audience to dig for information.

Such underhand methods are well worth the time and effort. We are, after all, talking about a profitable business. When I called, Upadhyay was completely booked up. The cost, I was told, was $250 per reading. King charges US$250 for a session.

Both these men, along with other familiar psychics like Yesenia Gonzalves and Solomon Babu and Sean Harribance, are utter frauds. And I can say that without the slightest danger of being sued by them: because both they and I know that, if called upon to prove their claims by the standards of proof required in a court of law, they would fall short. And, by the even more rigorous standards of a scientific laboratory, all these telepaths and clairvoyants and astrologers would be - and have been - shown to have no supernatural abilities at all.

Take astrology. Scientists have examined the alleged link between zodiac signs and character and found no connection at all. In the case of a few individuals, there was a weak statistical correlation: and it turned out that these individuals were actually just very familiar with what their signs predicted their characteristics should be. As for prophecies, whether Biblical or seer man, no prediction has ever been clearly worded enough to prove its veracity.

And, contrary to the propaganda you'll get from the Catholic Church and the Maha Sabha, no miracle has ever been scientifically verified. Nor do eyewitness accounts prove anything. The philosopher David Hume wrote, "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish."

In his essay collection Unweaving the Rainbow biologist Richard Dawkins, Britain's most prominent atheist, chose the Fatima miracle of 1917, where 70,000 people reportedly saw the sun move, to apply Hume's principle. "On the one hand, we are asked to believe in a mass hallucination, a trick of the light, or mass lie involving 70,000 people," Dawkins writes. "This is admittedly improbable. But it is LESS improbable than the alternative: that the sun really did move...If the sun had moved in truth, but the event was seen only by the people of Fatima, an even greater miracle would have been perpetrated: an illusion of NON-movement had to be staged for all the millions of witnesses not in Fatima."

No doubt, though, some idiot will write to say that that is exactly what happened, just as Maha Sabha head Sat Maharaj insists that murtis really do drink milk in defiance of all laws of physics and biology. The more probable explanations - capillary action in the stone, delusion or deception on the part of devotees - are readily overlooked.

Me, I expect the average person to be taken in by such nonsense. The problem with our society is that it is the supposedly educated individuals who also swallow this crap: and I guarantee that such rejection of rationality is a key component in our underdevelopment.