New Age snake oil is a bigger threat to scientific literacy than Christianity

The Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side near my shrink's office has a big and deep science section, as you'd expect from its scholarly environs. It's an ongoing project of mine to see which books by crackpots or intelligent design apologists occasionally get misfiled there. Today while shopping for Lee Smolin, I spotted The Akashic Field by Ervin Laszlo. At a casual glance, you might think this book was about physics or something. It has a computer graphic of warped gridlines on the cover, and the text is full of references to Schrödinger and Dirac. The big tell is the blurb on the cover from Deepak Chopra. I have nothing against Deepak, he seems like a nice enough guy with a lot of useful advice about the value of present-moment body-centered awareness. But reading New Age authors on quantum mechanics is like getting fashion tips or relationship advice from physicists.

To really understand nature, you need to be free of wishful thinking. The New Age is founded on wishful thinking, for sound psychological reasons. A sense of specialness and purpose is adaptive, it's powerfully motivational, whether you get it from Deepak or L Ron Hubbard or the Bible or anywhere else. Science is adaptive for a society, but being a scientist is not necessarily adaptive for the scientist. The really good ones tend to be social pariahs, and there's no money in it. There are, however, endless buckets of money to be made with wishful thinking.

I think that New Age misreadings of ideas like the Uncertainty Principle are more dangerous than Intelligent Design. Skeptics and seekers of my acquaintance get turned off by ID when it inevitably reveals itself as a marketing scheme for the Bible. If you're not prepared to join the club, the Bible is a singularity, an intellectual dead end. Christianity and theistic faiths like it will always be with us, but their political power in America has been on the decline for a hundred years, and if we're lucky, George W Bush will be their last hurrah as a dominant power. Much more persistent will be magical thinking hiding in the considerable confusion surrounding things like big bang cosmology, neuroscience and evolution. Here I'm looking at authors like Deepak Chopra, films like What The Bleep Do We Know, the psychic and astrology industries, and all the other memes of the New Age.

What's especially annoying is when a smart guy like Gary Zukav starts in with the magical thinking. GZ wrote a mostly wonderful book called The Dancing Wu Li Masters that does as good a job as any text I've come across at conveying the essential qualities of quantum mechanics in prose. He draws metaphors from Buddhism that get directly at the heart of wave-particle duality and other affronts to our traditional Western modes of logic. Some of his prose is genuinely poetic:

We are a part of nature, and when we study nature, there is no way around the fact that nature is studying itself.

So it's particularly exasperating when GZ calls subatomic particles "conscious" and "organic" because "they respond to processed information." GZ is right that the boundary between organic and inorganic can be hazy - see, for example, the case of the bacteriophage. But GZ misses the larger point: hazy though it may be, the boundary between organic and inorganic is still very real. Cell phones and iPods respond to processed information, but I don't think anybody's ready to call them "organic" yet. GZ and other New Agers make much of the fact that living things have the same basic chemical constituents as the rocks, gases etc around us. To me, this is getting carried away by a romantic notion of the fundamental interconnectedness of everything. To my mind, the desire to imagine inorganic matter as 'alive' is a sublimated wish for life after death, a back door for vestigial Christian mythology.

Also, GZ also endorses telepathy. Oy. I'm sure it's good for business, but seriously, dude.

Susan Blackmore is my major intellectual hero right now in large part because of her history with the memes of the New Age. I quote from her web site:

It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena - only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic.

Why do people feel so threatened by materialism? I think it's a defense mechanism of the New Age memes themselves, manipulating their hosts' emotions for their own protection. Astrology, Tarot, psychics, any and all variations on the Judeo-Christian afterlife, angels, witches, Scientology - these are clever and successful parasites indeed. They cling to Darwin and Einstein like barnacles to a whale. The barnacles create drag on the whale, making it expend extra effort carrying them around. When humpback whales do those magnificent slo-mo leaps out of the water, they're mostly doing it to knock the barnacles off.

Lee Smolin in The Life Of The Cosmos:

I believe in nature, in its dominance over us and in its recalcitrance to our fantasies and schemes.

Do we skeptics have to be such a downer all the time? I want us to be more affirmative. To really love the world and ourselves as part of it, we need to be open to it, whether it flatters our sense of self-importance or not. The true spirituality is the spirituality of no spirituality. Let's get scraping!

© ethan hein 2007 | back to memebase | back to top