‘New Age’ Skeptics Have a Convergence All Their Own

The First Lady reportedly consults astrologers in planning the President’s travel schedule. Californians flee their state like lemmings because Nostradamus predicted an earthquake, and thousands of average folks converge at sacred sites to chant and sing and help the world reverberate at a harmonic frequency that will compel extraterrestrials to intervene in our affairs.

In the past year or so, more people have taken these signs of the times to mean that a New Age of enlightenment is upon us. Others, however, see such events as evidence that the Age of Reason was all for naught.

A Different Meeting

It was a group of the latter who decided the time was right for a convergence of a different sort.

Right off the bat at this first critical conference on the New Age, moderate members of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal urged their colleagues to refrain from ridicule and name-calling.

“Vicious and hysterical attacks” against the amorphous New Age movement would brand the scientists, philosophers, and lay skeptics themselves as “religious bigots,” a few members warned.

The 600 or so people attending the conference last weekend considered that point of view. And responded with a collective “naaahh.”

Esoteric Terminology

So for the rest of the three-day affair, which was co-sponsored by the Department of Behavioral Sciences at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois Department of Psychology, learned speeches and casual conversations were riddled with such esoteric terminology as: bunk, rubbish, idiocy, and nonsensical drivel.

If the conference’s often-sneering approach seemed defensive, it’s not without good cause, members said. Rational inquiry is besieged by forces of silliness and superstition, and Americans seem only too eager to abandon the scientific revolution of the past 350 years and stampede back to the Dark Ages.

“Symptoms of the distemper of our culture” abound, said Paul Kurtz, a professor of philosophy at State University of New York at Buffalo, who created CSICOP (pronounced sci-cop, as in science police) in 1976.

Since its inception, CSICOP members have conducted studies scrutinizing--and usually debunking--every sort of alleged paranormal activity from fire-walking and numerology to Eric Von Daniken’s “Chariots of the Gods” claims.

The organization’s quarterly Skeptical Inquirer journal regularly publishes these studies, including, in 1980, one of the first critical analyses of the Shroud of Turin, the cloth the Vatican only recently concluded could not bear the actual imprint of Christ’s body, Kurtz said.

But the goal of the committee--whose fellows include astronomer Carl Sagan, psychologist B. F. Skinner, and physicist Murray Gell-Mann--is not “to kill Santa Claus,” but to encourage the testing and analysis of scientific claims and to inform the public that such scrutiny is the basis of all accepted scientific knowledge, Kurtz said.

With the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, though, the “retreat from reason and reality” began accelerating, he said.

Defining the New Age is tricky, for skeptics and believers alike.

“Like Jell-O, it’s very difficult to nail it to a tree,” said Kurtz who, while conceding that he accepts New Age tenets such as positive thinking and self-improvement, labels most New Age-isms “half-baked ideas smothered in emotional goo.”

A lot of what passes for New Age is just age-old spiritualism and trance medium fads repackaged, several speakers said. But many also pointed to New Age catalogues, advertisements and publishing lists that lump in practices and beliefs as disparate as holistic health therapies, faith healing, UFOlogy, positive thinking, Tarot card reading, breathing exercises, various types of meditation, crystals, Rolfing, New Age real estate, New Age travel, and New Age diets.

Expressing a decidedly minority viewpoint, Gordon Melton, director of the Institute for the Study of Religion and visiting professor of Religion at UC Santa Barbara, said the New Age “must be seen as a vital part of the new religious world that is flourishing in America.”

The concept of personal and social transformation, and the notion that people create their own reality are the keystones of the amorphous “religious social movement” some call the New Age, he said. He added that its roots can be traced to such early spiritual endeavors as Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy movement in the 19th Century. But the modern version flowered in the 1960s with new trends in psychology and increased immigration of Asians and Indians, who arrived with their Eastern religious beliefs in tow.

Maureen O’Hara, a professor of women’s studies at San Diego State University, also traced the genesis of the modern New Age movement to the ‘60s.

Feeling powerless against such seemingly omnipotent forces as the military industrial complex and television, whose influence was radically altering culture, people rebelled against the whole Western scientific materialist model and the intellectual traditions that had engendered it, she said.

As the “two-culture” schism between science and the humanities widened, feelings of alienation, impotence and meaningless grew, and increased narcissism sprouted as a defense against the feeling of individual irrelevance, O’Hara added.

Like most speakers at the conference, Jay Rosen, a media critic and assistant professor of journalism and communications at New York University, agreed that the New Age is fueled by vague anxieties. But rather than infuse meaning into people’s lives, the New Age subtly promotes those anxieties, he said. “The New Age is just another name by which the hollowness of modernity has been known.”

Looking for Fulfillment

A product of and promoter of American consumerism, it offers the spiritual equivalent of a shampoo for limp hair which, ads promise, will instantly transform a woman’s existence from emptiness to a life of happiness and sexual fulfillment, he said.

“People want instant and total change,” he said, and “New Age scams”--from psychics to astrologers--flourish by letting people believe they can change themselves without effort or discipline. They “tell people what they want to hear . . . and give them vague advice they’re already predisposed to follow,” he said. “Capitalism has nothing to fear from the New Age.”

American culture, with its media-driven emphasis on celebrity, shallow charm and conspicuous consumption, encourages self-centeredness while undermining the formation of a strong sense of self, he said. The result is the widely observed “culture of narcissism,” he said, describing the narcissist as “the ideal New Age convert.”

Skillful gurus, trance channels, and self-improvement training seminars all confirm the narcissist’s belief that he is the special one in the crowd, the star that no one else appreciates. Narcissists are also likely to be enraptured by the grandiosity of many New Age schemes, such as those that suggest world peace will be achieved through chanting, he said.

Eventually, he said, “the New Ager is made painfully aware that his own sense of self is not as strong as the guru’s. When they find out that they’re just another consumer, this reinforces their weak sense of self.” Which explains why so many New Age seekers “tend to drift from fad to fad.”

People who are susceptible to New Age beliefs generally meet two criteria, he said. They live in their own worlds, which they believe they created, he said, and they possess a ferocious superficiality.

O’Hara said that a shakedown of sorts is occurring within the movement. Many of the “1,001 sillinesses and grandiosities,” into which it has splintered are getting tossed aside as the core of consciousness-raising ideas continue to transform society in important and positive ways.

Rather than focus on fringe elements of the movement, Melton suggested that skeptics would be better served examining the ideas of central figures such as former Harvard-professor-turned-mystical-author Ram Dass, “New Age Conspiracy” author Marilyn Ferguson, and Willis Harman, author of “Global Mindshift.”

The Class Menu

Instead, the conference offered detailed seminars on topics such as “crystal healing,” “the Shirley MacLaine Phenomenon,” “Cryptozoology,” and “Psychics in the Legal System.”

One complete session, for instance, was devoted to channeling, a New Age phenomenon shoved into the media spotlight by MacLaine’s book “Out on a Limb.”

Modern channels, such as Jach Purcell, a financial adviser who channels “Lazaris,” J. Z. Knight (a.k.a. “Ramtha”) and Penny Torres, who brings us “Mafu,” claim to be the vehicles through which voices from the past, or in some cases, from other planets or dimensions address the modern world.

This sort of spirit realm communication has been around since the days of soothsayers and was particularly popular in the 19th Century, when mediums such as the Fox sisters, through whom the spirit world communicated with rapping sounds, reached celebrity status, speakers said.

Although the Fox sisters later confessed that the rapping was a fraud secretly done with elbows and feet, there are still people who refuse to believe their confessions. The difference is that modern channels seldom claim to be talking to dead ancestors, and thus are not as easily tripped up on simple historical details, said the Amazing Randi, a magician born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge, whose debunking of alleged faith healers, psychic surgeons and psychokinetic spoon-benders has earned him celebrity of his own--as well as the MacArthur foundation’s prestigious “genius” grant.

Which is not to say the modern channels are any more believable.

For instance, many if not most of the “entities” allegedly speaking through channels assume an accent. But “most channelers are naive about language and don’t realize how much information they reveal with their voices,” said Sarah Thomason, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh, who analyzed tape recordings of 11 channels representing 12 or 13 “linguistically inept entities speaking strange dialects.”

Linguistic Tests

There are, however, linguistic tests that easily demonstrate whether the sound patterns of a dialect are consistent with a time period and geographical location, and whether they conform to universally consistent patterns of human speech.

Many entities, for instance, use lofty, archaic dialects, “but people who would talk that way would not make the gross dialectical or grammatical mistakes the channels make,” she said.

When one entity gets excited, for instance, he begins dropping the trilled Rs and reverts to an American accent. Another 3,500-year-old entity speaks in a British accent that couldn’t have occurred before AD 500, and another uses words like rapscallion, which, while archaic, was unknown in the era from which the entity claims to come, she said.

“These things are all easy to explain if the person is faking it. They’re very hard to explain if he is not,” Thomason said. “Oftentimes the evidence is so strong, it takes a truly determined believer to overlook it.”

Another way to analyze a channel is to examine the content of the channeler’s advice. Graham Reed, professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, challenged his audience to read the works of Seth, a popular channel and author.

“It’s unadulterated blather,” he said. “It has no intellectual content. My 12-year-old granddaughter, if you give her a double scotch, will produce (work of that quality) in a flash.”

While creative and intellectual thought is processed hierarchically, channels use free association, or a lateral “stringing together of ideas.”

Speaking in tongues “is a bit lower on the strata” of cognitive processing than channeling--but only a bit, he said. “. . . Sit down and try to write something Ramtha-like or Seth-like and you’ll be amazed at how easy it is.”

Most channels would seem to exhibit classical symptoms of schizophrenia or manic depression--delusions of grandeur and of being controlled by external forces, auditory and tactile hallucinations, the broadcasting of thoughts, and blurring of ego boundaries, for instance. But because they can turn the “delusions” on and off at will, Reed and other psychologists at the conference doubt that they are either.

“Some people think they’re just nutty (but) if they can get $100,000 for a one-night seminar, we’re the nuts,” Reed said.

Reed believes, instead, that channels tend to have a hysterical, or “attention-getting” personality disorder.

Ego-Enhancement

The main motivation to channel, he speculated, is simple ego-enhancement. Channels, like university professors, like to be treated with respect and like to hear their own voices, he said. “In channeling you have an additional advantage: You can mask your own idiocies by attributing them to someone else.”

Other motivations include the desire to overcome the drabness of life, and the obvious: material rewards.

Why is channeling so popular?

“Because of its superficiality,” said Reed. While scientific materialism and standard religion alike require discipline and work from adherents, absorbing the advice of a channel is passive. “You’re engaging in receptivity. There are no demands on you. It’s dead easy.”

Although invariably “trite reiterative gobbledygook and rubbish,” channels’ messages do comfort the people who pay for them, he said. “Because they are free-flowing, you can make of them what you will. . . . No proscriptions. No demands. You want a hedonistic message? That’s OK.”

To demonstrate how eager people are to be duped, the Amazing Randi described a stunt he concocted for Australia’s “60 Minutes” in March. He asked a friend who had never heard of channeling to become a vehicle for a sagacious 35,000 year-old entity called Carlos.

“I told him, ‘Just make sure you’re in charge, babble on and on and on and keep saying, “Do you see? Do you see?” ’ “

People filled the Sydney opera house, gobbled up “the Teachings of Carlos,” and bought vials containing “the tears of Carlos,” he said. Someone offered $20,000 for a huge, glass-encased crystal from Atlantis, which in reality was a piece of polished tar, Randi said. The purpose of the endeavor was to show that, like Pavlov’s dogs, “the press would salivate,” Randi said, adding that one Australian television station even spent $60,000 on a satellite hookup to interview Carlos before he arrived in Australia.

Few at the conference would argue with the charge that media are aiding and abetting the enemy in what Kurtz calls “the assault on objectivity and flight from the demand for evidence.” Some believe that the entire New Age is a media event.

Talk-Show Circuit

Like UFO abductees revealing tales of torture at the hands of aliens, skeptics spoke of being outnumbered 4- or 5-to-1 on TV talk shows such as “Geraldo” and “Oprah Winfrey” and “Sally Jessy Raphael,” where they were savaged by the hosts or audience when they challenged the scientific plausibility of psychics or trance channels.

While television bore the brunt of the skeptics’ criticism, they also accused the guardians of the printed word with dereliction of duties.

For example, John Baker, editor of Publishers Weekly, chastised the publishing industry for what he characterized as increasing irresponsibility. A case in point was horror-fiction writer Whitley Strieber’s best-selling book “Communion,” an account of the author’s alleged abduction by extraterrestrials, which was published and marketed as nonfiction.

There is a “growing, deeply credulous readership out there,” Baker said. “People seem eager to be misled, (but) I don’t think that the rest of us should be helping them. . . . Far too much publishing is done in the New Age category.”

The scientifically unprovable should be so-described, he said, adding that it may be time for a truth-in-publishing law similar to truth-in-advertising laws.

It may be hard to get other editors to come out in favor of such a law, however. As George Gerbner, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communications, pointed out: 57% of the budding journalists in a recent survey at Columbia University said they believed in ESP, 57% believed in dousing, 47% believed in aura reading, and 25% said they believed in the lost continent of Atlantis.