HYSTORIES: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media.<i> By Elaine Showalter</i> .<i> Columbia University Press: 244 pp., $24.95</i> : WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS: Pseudoscience, Superstition and Other Confusions of Our Time.<i> By Michael Shermer</i> .<i> W.H. Freeman & Co.: 306 pp., $22.95</i>
Headlong passion was always said to be female, while men, even as they lost their heads, were supposed to be cool. Throughout history, men have been the accusers, diagnosticians and judges, women the witches, patients and victims. Today, allegations of satanic abuse, extraterrestrial abduction, multiple personality and chronic fatigue tend to come from women too. What is new is that, curiously, many of these charges come from feminists apparently more committed to unearthing evidence of their own frailty than to claiming their human powers.
Elaine Showalter, Avalon Foundation professor of the humanities and a professor of English at Princeton University, a historian of medicine and one of America’s distinguished feminist literary critics, will have none of what she calls today’s “psychological plagues.” “As we approach our own millennium,” she writes, “the epidemic of hysterical disorders, imaginary illnesses, and hypnotically induced pseudo-memories that have flooded the media seem to be reaching a high-water mark.”
Such delusions merge with the conspiracy theories, religious revivals and mass paranoia traditional in America, especially at century’s close, when Heaven’s Gate swings open for many of the credulous. As the mass suicide in Rancho Santa Fe shows, such fads are not harmless: “The hysterical epidemics of the 1990s,” Showalter writes, “ . . . do damage: in distracting us from the real problems and crises of modern society, in undermining a respect for evidence and truth, and in helping support an atmosphere of conspiracy and suspicion. They prevent us from claiming our full humanity as free and responsible beings.”
For criticizing the literature of recovered memory to an audience of other feminists, Showalter writes that she has been accused of washing “our dirty linen, so to speak, in front of men.” Just so, the feminist psychologist Carol Tavris, who has written comparable criticism, was accused in three full pages in the New York Times of joining “the side of the molesters, rapists, pedophiles and other misogynists.” Such love-it-or-leave-it Manichaeism of cultivators of victimhood is a sign of shoddy thinking and panic, not of clearheadedness and confidence. Showalter writes boldly and valuably when she points out that to believe in women’s equality, you are required to believe that huge proportions of women have been routinely and systematically subjected to sexual abuse.
Showalter displays both the strengths and the weaknesses of her profession. She is adept at scrutinizing texts, “cultural narratives of hysteria,” which, with academia’s penchant for labored puns and neologisms, she calls “hystories.” Drawing on philosopher Ian Hacking’s critique of multiple personality and on various journalists’ critiques of Gulf War syndrome, chronic fatigue and other “hystories,” she amasses many good reasons to cast a skeptical eye on them.
She is less thorough, though, in accounting for them or tracing their origins. She does not systematically compare American paranoias with French, Italian or Latin American. She writes interestingly on the case histories of Charcot, Freud and Lacan and the dramas of Ibsen and others, but these anatomies are only loosely connected to an analysis of social trends.
As for the dating of these uproars, is it as clear as she suggests that the final decades in various centuries (the 1690s and Salem witches, the 1890s and the original hysteria diagnosis and the 1990s and Satanism, recovered memory, chronic fatigue, multiple personality and Gulf War syndrome) are peculiarly prone to binges of wild paranoia? This conclusion is warranted only if we compare those decades with others. But then what of the 1750s’ anti-Indian panic, the 1850s’ anti-immigrant nativism and the 1950s’ McCarthyism and alarms over fluoridation and horror comics? If hysteria is “a cultural symptom of anxiety and stress,” when would it ever be out of fashion?
Showalter is also prone at times to a sort of ultra-Freudian logic, in which the eruption of a symptom is taken to be evidence that its preconditions were present or is explained by the previous nonexistence of its symptoms. The British are unflappable, but “the furor over mad cow disease in 1996 owed some of its intensity to British fear and denial of anything mad.” Heads you’re nuts; tails you’re really nuts.
Showalter is on stronger ground when she draws on a considerable body of refutations in dissecting today’s fads. She points out that between 1922 and 1972, according to the standard psychological literature, only 50 cases of multiple personality disorder were diagnosed in America; between 1973 and 1990, about 20,000 were diagnosed. What might be going on? Waves of hysteria--or the circulation of unwarranted “hystories,” to use Showalter’s ungainly neologism--reflect the return of the repressed. But why in the United States? Today’s cults involve “the projection of sexual fantasy and real or imagined guilt.” Puritan heritage lives! Abstractly, she hopes feminism can “resist regression into victimization, infantilization or revenge.” Most of all, and rightly, she regards with favor the much-scorned Enlightenment, knowing that to cede reason to those who reason badly is always mistaken.
In a brisker style and with less theoretical ambition, Michael Shermer, a onetime born-again Christian who is now the editor of Skeptic magazine and a specialist in debating popular cranks, has written a valuable primer debunking many of the crackpot obsessions of our time--alien abductions, creationist science, Holocaust refutal, the statistics-bespangled racism of the bell curve and pseudoscientific theology among them.
In the spirit of longtime debunker and Skeptic patron saint Martin Gardner, columnist for Scientific American, Shermer catalogs the misunderstandings of science that run rife among people still eager to cash in on science’s prestige. From close observation, he shows a pattern in the formulas with which misunderstanders explain away inconvenient facts. “Why People Believe Weird Things” is studded with tales of close encounters with irrationalists of many stripes. Shermer has walked across hot coals, confronted creationist Duane T. Gish, pointed out the inconsistencies of Nazi apologist David Irving and lived to tell the tales.
The book is more interesting than the title. Shermer’s answer to the question--why do people believe in weird things--is simple: It is because people are irrational that they believe weird things. Although he has a degree in psychology, Shermer is concerned not so much with inner compulsions but with the identifiable characteristics of erroneous reasoning. Do the similarities of many “eyewitness” accounts of, say, alien visitations support the claim that they must be real?
Shermer offers a cultural explanation for these apparently spontaneous versions. The witnesses live, after all, in a tightly coordinated culture, amid positive feedback loops, where breathless first-person narratives are steadily shaped into bestsellers, talk show material and scripts to be pumped out into a credulous populace. What indeed is spontaneity when a whole culture is at work retelling the stories that have been pumped into circulation?
Our public opinion pool, in short, is tainted. Garbage in; garbage out. No stranger to his own credulity, Shermer offers a harrowing tale of the time when, exhausted during a long-distance bicycle race in Nebraska, he hallucinated that his crew turned into murderous extraterrestrials and mistook the lights on their motor home for the spaceship’s beacon. The will to believe is a staple of the human condition, but in recent centuries, it comes equipped with a certain peculiarity. Credulity likes to wear the cosmetics of sophistication. There is a scientific gloss on what would otherwise look like plain mumbo-jumbo.
Append the word “science” or the suffix “-ology” to a root term and your fancy picks up prestige points. The cult of fascination with charts, graphs, measurements and meters bespeaks an age when the irrational pays tribute to science by borrowing its vocabulary. Shermer’s directly written book is the perfect handbook to thrust on anyone you know who has been lured into the comforting paranoias that circulate amid the premillennial jitters.
