News from the Pandemic: Homo sapiens, the Dangerous Species

No one doubts the danger posed by the coronavirus as it spreads around the world. But perhaps the greatest danger posed by this virus is that it provides opportunities for a truly dangerous species—us—to create havoc.

Last week, the week when Americans started to really take notice of the virus, many people started buying up guns and ammunition. According to this article in Time magazine, it is happening not just in rural gun-nut areas but in urban areas as well.

(Time magazine photo)

The people who are buying the guns will not openly say that they plan to use these guns to loot or shoot their neighbors. It is, in fact, unlikely that any of the buyers are thinking about doing this. They think that they are stocking up on weaponry to defend themselves in the event that other people come to loot them.

But this situation could quickly change. One way it could change is for a rumor to get started that government troops are on their way to exert force on people who are building up stores of guns and ammo. These very people would then get their guns ready to use against the government. Mentally, they are already on a hair-trigger response.

The other way it could change is for the pandemic to go on long enough that basic commodities become unavailable, or that water and electricity services are interrupted. Then some people might start trying to take things that their neighbors have stocked up. The moment that this begins, the gun-nuts might decide that, if looting has started, they might as well join in.

In both cases, building up stockpiles of weapons becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Gun nuts already spread rumors about dangers posed by the federal government—usually, but not only, when that government has a Democratic administration. They have already invaded and taken over federal property. And they have already stocked up their supplies and weapons, to be ready for a crisis. Some of them have told me so. They are ready to rumble, and this pandemic may be all it takes to trigger their pent-up violence.

One gun shop owner said that it looked like something out of a Twilight Zone episode. He was probably referring to “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” in which invading space aliens got humans to destroy themselves simply by implanting fears.

Reincarnation and the scientific method: The story of Bridey Murphy

I ran across a book that my late mother-in-law had: The Search for Bridey Murphy, by Morey Bernstein, published in 1956.

Bernstein was a businessman who became interested in hypnosis and all of the many medical benefits it could potentially confer. But his interests went beyond this. He was interested in age regression, in which the person who is hypnotized not only remembers early childhood, but relives it. The memories of early childhood, even infancy, are stored away in the brain, some hypnotists claim, and can be unleashed.

If a subject is hypnotically regressed to infancy, he or she may be able to describe sensations and memories from infancy, in words, even though they could not talk during infancy. This brings up an interesting question. How could one determine whether the subject is actually re-living infancy? Bernstein said that, when a subject is regressed back into infancy, their reflexes actually change. Infants and young children have the Babinski reflex, but older children and adults do not. During age regression, the hypnotist can get the subject to actually change from the adult reflex to the infant reflex. This would be strong evidence of the effectiveness of age regression. I do not know how good the evidence is, having read about it only in this book.

But Bernstein wanted to take age regression back further—not just back to infancy, but back before birth. Just keep going...back into a previous lifetime. If hypnotized subjects had true memories of past lifetimes, this would prove reincarnation. But how can the hypnotist know whether the memories are true, and are of past lifetimes? This brings us to some interesting points about the scientific method.

It is not enough just to dismiss spiritualist assertions on the grounds of inherent absurdity. The most famous agnostic, the inventor of the word agnostic, Thomas Henry Huxley, made this point. What Huxley did was to give spiritualism a chance, after which he (along with E. Ray Lankester) showed that at least the spiritualist seances that he attended were, in fact, hoaxes. He concluded this, rather than assuming it. And he knew this did not prove all spiritualist experiences were hoaxes.

First, consider bias. Bernstein tried very hard to prove that he was not biased. He openly admits that he started off completely agnostic about religious concepts. That is, he claims that his discoveries convinced him despite, not because of, his initial bias. Further, he was rich enough from his business, he did not need to pull a hoax to get rich. These two preconditions are helpful, but do not eliminate the possibility of bias. Some evangelical Christian apologists (most famously Josh McDowell, author of Evidence that Demands a Verdict in which he claims to prove Christian doctrine) say that they started off as atheists and were converted by the evidence that they found. However, despite his lack of initial bias, McDowell definitely developed a bias later. And even though Bernstein was rich enough to not need a hoax, there are plenty of rich people who cannot keep themselves from trying to get richer by unethical means. But at least Bernstein made an effort to begin in an unbiased fashion.

One thing that greatly reduced the chance of bias is that there were independent fact-checkers. This did not completely eliminate the chance of error, however; journalists are looking for an exciting story (even back then, if it bleeds, it leads) and would prefer the reincarnation conclusion over fraud or delusion.

Second, consider how one can evaluate the quality of the evidence of a past life obtained from a hypnotized person. Perhaps the strongest evidence would be if the person provided details that the person could not possibly know. (This is a condition that is nearly impossible to satisfy today. Everyone has a world of information at their fingertips. Give me a little time, and access to the internet, and I could make up a convincing fake story that I am a reincarnated Viking. But in the pre-internet days, this evidence was much harder to get and thus more meaningful.)

Bernstein hypnotized a woman he called Ruth Simmons (she was actually Virginia Tighe), who was born in Iowa in the twentieth century. When he regressed her back before her birth, she revealed that she had been an Irish woman Bridey (Bridget) Murphy who was born in 1798 and died in 1864. She did, indeed, reveal a lot of details that seemed convincing. She even started talking with an Irish brogue during the hypnotic sessions, something she could not do normally. Are you convinced yet? She said that she could dance the “Morning Jig” when she was alive in Ireland. Bernstein gave her a post-hypnotic suggestion: that, upon awakening, she should dance the jig for the observers. And she did. Are you convinced yet? The woman also gave geographical details that a twentieth-century American would almost certainly not know about Ireland (actually, Northern Ireland), including the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics in the nineteenth century. Are you convinced yet?

The Bridey Murphy story became a sensation after it was published in a newspaper in 1954 and as a book in 1956. It seemed like everyone was talking about it. People with a spiritual (but not fundamentalist Christian) inclination were swept up into believing it. Materialistic people subjected it to ridicule. Even Donald Duck’s uncle McScrooge made fun of it. In her copy, my mother-in-law wrote down the address of the Bridey Murphy Discussion Group of Peoria, which met in Marquette Heights in nearby Pekin, Illinois.

The book was rushed into print with too little fact-checking to even satisfy the author. But there was plenty of fact-checking afterward. And here is where the scientific method gets interesting. During the intense discussion, there were two competing hypotheses: that Ruth Simmons was making it all up, either as fraud or delusion, vs. Ruth Simmons really was remembering her past life as Bridey Murphy. (And she even had a vague memory, it seems, of dying as a baby in New Amsterdam, which is today New York, over a century earlier than Bridey Murphy.)

The people who wanted to prove Simmons was making it all up pointed to supposed errors in the facts she recited. But her defenders showed, in every case it seems, that the story was credible. The places she mentioned, and the terms she used, the customs to which she referred, were not inaccurate for the time and place, even when they could not be verified. In a few instances, Bridey seemed to be exaggerating in order to make her husband seem more prominent than he was. She claimed he was a barrister (the highest grade of lawyer), but that he managed accounts for stores, something that only the lowest grade of accountants did. But this may have enhanced the credibility of her account: she was telling—and exaggerating—her life experience, not a mere story.

Besides, someone pointed out, the Bridey Murphy story is, by itself, too boring to be a fabrication. After all, everyone wants to be a reincarnated king, not a serf or something. But Bridey was just a woman who got married, never had kids, and died at age 66 after falling down the stairs. The only interesting thing in her story was that she was in a mixed marriage (she was Protestant, her husband Catholic).

Bernstein provided long transcripts of the tape-recorded hypnosis sessions in the book. In session after session, he asked the same questions, such as what her husband’s name was. One’s eyes start to glaze over. But this repetition was actually quite valuable. They proved that the woman was not just making it up as she went along. The information was deep inside her brain, and came out the same way every time. Even a good liar would have a hard time keeping a consistent story for six sessions of hypnotism. Also, for this reason, it was clearly not a delusion.

In the competition between the fraud/delusion hypothesis and the reincarnation hypothesis, the latter easily won.

This is where it really gets interesting. New evidence emerged. (Don’t you just hate it when that happens? New facts can destroy a nice story.) When Ruth Simmons was growing up in Chicago, an old Irish woman lived across the street. Her name was Bridey Murphy Corkell. The hypothesis that turned out to be true was a third hypothesis not previously considered: that Ruth had learned the story very well from this woman, even learned her accent, and even learned the jig, and then forgot where or even that she had heard it. This is a now-well-established phenomenon known as cryptomnesia, or hidden memory.

There have been other famous cases of possible cryptomnesia from the world of creative arts. The difference between cryptomnesia and plagiarism is whether the person knows that they are recycling the work of another artist. George Harrison of Beatles fame may have plagiarized My Sweet Lord from another musical group (this was the interpretation of the court in the ensuing lawsuit), or he may genuinely have mistaken his memory of the melody for his own creation. This apparently also happened to Umberto Eco, author of Name of the Rose.

In a way, every creative person has a gnawing fear that he or she will unwittingly steal ideas from someone else. I write books; how can I possibly know if I stole an idea from a book that I read maybe forty years ago? I would need a list of every book I have read since I graduated from high school. What kind of nerd would keep a list like that? Me, that’s who. My complete list now contains 1,411 titles, the last of which is The Search for Bridey Murphy. I can always scan the list before sending a final fiction manuscript to a publisher. This does not guarantee that I did not steal a plot from a forgotten movie or an episode of Perry Mason. (In the latter case, I have also kept a list of the Perry Mason episodes I have watched. I used one for an endnote in my most recent book. God, I am such a nerd.) I steal plots from the Bible all the time, but I am aware of what I am doing.

It gets even more complicated. Someone may absorb an idea from the surrounding culture and mistakenly think it is his or her own. This is called a Zeitgeist (a German word for “time ghost”). Science writer Loren Eiseley (Darwin’s Century) famously said that Charles Darwin got the idea for natural selection from Edward Blyth, without realizing it, because it was an idea already floating around in scholarly culture. Probably nobody believes this anymore, since all of Darwin’s contemporaries seemed genuinely surprised at Darwin’s creative hypothesis. Darwin thought of natural selection a long time before Alfred Russel Wallace, but he worried himself sick that it would look to the world as if he had stolen Wallace’s idea. Fortunately, Wallace happily acknowledged Darwin’s priority.

None of this proves that reincarnation does not exist. It just means that evidence, like that of Bridey Murphy, is not good enough.

The scientific way of thinking can help us understand almost anything better than other ways of thinking. This even includes reincarnation.

Trump is Evil, But Is He Dangerous?

Trump is not only evil but is dangerous, and the reason has directly to do with Christianity.

Trump loves to abuse and insult everyone who disagrees with Him in even the smallest way. As documented in the new book (scheduled for release next Tuesday) Very Stable Genius, Trump has repeatedly insulted and lost his temper at his own hand-picked staff, including the former secretaries of State and Defense. He tweets insults, even some that are demonstrably false.

Meanwhile, his followers act like they are nice people. Trump’s worshipers are for the most part people who would not insult you. I know this does not include the Evangelical Core of Trump’s worshipers, but most of them act nice. However, they offer Trump their complete support. Trump says and does the things that they wish they could do to you. But they are too nice to do it themselves. They secretly want Trump to punish you for doubting His Godlike Wisdom.

And this is the danger. If Trump should ever try to suppress all opposition to Himself, something that seems only a matter of time, then these quiet Christians will support Him. This is exactly the way most Germans supported Hitler. They themselves did not kill Jews, but supported Hitler, who made his murderous intentions clear.

Trump will be able to call forth His Christian Army with very little advance warning.

Religion or the Lack of Religion: Not Just a Private Matter

Here is something for us to think about in this new year.

An acquaintance of mine recently lost her youngest son in an auto accident. The fact that it was his fault is irrelevant, as is the fact that the mother is a very gentle and nice person, quiet and inoffensive, and has already suffered much in her life: divorces, and the murder of her eldest son about a decade ago. This essay is not about “why God lets the innocent suffer.” This woman, while not a fundamentalist in any sense, is deeply religious.

Though I am not a close friend, this woman and I have had several meaningful conversations. I mostly listen to her as she talks. But that is what she needs. I do not need her help, but she benefits greatly from having people listen to her seriously, which is what I do. It is a kind of altruism, and like most altruism, it feels good: it makes me feel good to do something to help.

I did not know about her recent tragedy until her car pulled up alongside me as I walked to the bank to pay my mortgages. (I always do this in person and get a receipt, since at this bank they are not very careful with their paperwork.) She considered it a miracle that she happened to encounter me right at that time. She was headed to the same bank to put a freeze on her dead son’s bank account. She said she thought she would collapse without someone with her, someone who took her seriously and supported her. And there I was.

We went to the bank together and, as soon as I paid my mortgages (which for some reason is always a complex process for the poorly-trained tellers) I joined her in the office where she met with a bank representative. I did nothing except to remind her to write down what the number on the piece of paper the representative gave her was for; in her condition, she would easily have forgotten what it was for, just as I would have. Otherwise, I just listened, as she drove me the short distance to my house and we sat in her car.

She said again that it was a miracle that she had encountered me. She said I could call it synchronicity—an unusual coincidence—if I wanted to. She practically begged me to keep up my faith in God. She made it sound as if she would not be able to face the immediate future if I did not believe in God.

I was not able to confirm to her a belief in a God who answers prayer. A more general spirituality—I can admit this possibility. But, even if a woman who has just lost her youngest son begs me to believe in a personal God, I cannot consent. It is not right for her to demand this.

But neither did I have a right to criticize her. It would have been wrong for me to tell her that there was no good reason for her to believe in a personal God.

That is, religious belief is not merely a personal matter. Though each person has to decide for himself or herself what to believe, we must not hurt other people who believe differently.

At first glance, it might appear that we hurt one another—she by asking me to believe, me by refusing. But the relationship is not symmetrical. I am older, I am the man, and she is a vulnerable (slightly) younger woman. I am the professor, she is the office assistant (not of my department). But she is the one who suffers, while at the present time, I am the one who is mostly happy. I am the one with the surviving daughter, and a thriving and perfect granddaughter (by any objective measurement). It would be much, much more wrong for me to tell her that she should not ask me to believe, than for her to ask me to believe. We might have been unfair to each other, but she was the one who had more to suffer from it. I said nothing about this, and never will say anything to her about it.

She asked me to reconsider my skepticism. That was, I believe, a fair request. That evening, I rethought my reasons for not believing in a personal God who is in control of what happens in the world. I was serious about this. I wrote about it at considerable length in my personal journal. I did not change my mind, but I told her I would consider it. I did. I think this is what we owe to the people in our lives.

Part of the process of reconsideration was the synchronicity she considered a miracle: encountering one another at just the right time. But how many other potential synchronicities have not occurred? She considered this synchronicity to be something that God willed. But, while we sat in her car, another car turned onto the small street and drove past. This sensitive woman was nearly overcome by surprised grief. There were only two cars in town that looked like this one. One was the car destroyed in her son’s accident. This was the other one. I did not say anything to her, but I had to consider: was this a synchronicity overseen by the devil? or by a God who wants to make people like this fine woman squirm with agony?

Two thousand years of Christian theology has no answer to this. All I know is that, whether evangelical Christian or skeptic or anything in between, we should not just blab out our opinions without considering their effect on the people who need us. This is especially true for people, like me and like many of you, who are in positions of power. Victims, I believe, do not need to meet as high standards as do leaders.

Blasphemy: Donald Trump and Kim Il-Sung

When I was in elementary school, I enjoyed listening to shortwave radio. I could hear some weird stuff. One transmission I heard was the English language service of RNK, Radio North Korea. This was back when the original communist dictator, Kim Il-Sung, grandfather of the current dictator, was in power. The female commentator said that Kim Il-Sung was “a genius of art, a genius of science, a genius of politics, a torch to light the darkened pathways of modern times.” Of course, no human could be all of those things, and all of us outside North Korea knew he was none of these things. I marveled that anyone could believe such statements.

But there are many Americans who believe such things today about Donald Trump.

Trump continues to say things about himself that no human should ever say because they are blasphemy. One website collected fifteen examples of Trump calling himself a genius or saying that he knew more about every aspect of the economy (jobs, banks, etc.) than anyone else. Trump also referred to himself as having “great and unmatched wisdom.”.

Even some Republicans are now beginning to question their blasphemous dedication to and worship of Trump. But I wonder if most Republicans will renounce Christianity and continue to worship Trump.

I have discussed Trump’s numerous blasphemies with others who know a lot about religion and history, and they agree with my assessment.

George Washington Carver: The Convergence of Art and Science

Many people were surprised that George Washington Carver painted flowers as well as studied them scientifically. But to him, art and science were both ways of approaching the truth, and there was no dissonance between them. Here is a scene from Linda O. McMurray’s book, George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol, page 302:

            [Carver] reached across the table for a tiny green herb. The soil still clung to its threadlike roots.

            “All these years,” the artist continued, looking at the weed in his hand, “I have been doing one thing. The poet Tennyson was working at the same job. This is the way he expresses it:

Flower in the crannied wall

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower—but it I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is...

            “Tennyson was seeking Truth. That is what the scientist is seeking. That is what the artist is seeking; his writings, his weaving, his music, his pictures are just the expressions of his soul in his search for Truth.

            “My paintings are my soul’s expression of its yearnings and questions in its desire to understand the work of the Great Creator.”

George Washington Carver

You have probably heard of George Washington Carver (1864-1943) as the early-twentieth-century Peanut Man who developed hundreds of commercial products from peanuts, and from other southern United States crops, in his laboratory at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. But these products were probably the least important part of his work, at that time and in his legacy today. He is also remembered as the black man who earned respect from whites who might otherwise have dismissed blacks as an inferior, perhaps uneducable, race. I have recently posted a video about Carver, filmed at his birthplace.

Carver had a brilliant mind for botany and chemistry. He was also a teacher whom his students loved, because he was humble despite his vast knowledge, and he cared individually about each student. He wanted each student to experience scientific discovery for themselves. While most science teachers today take this approach, it was uncommon in Carver’s day.

The fame was as much for his personal story as for his scientific work. He was born into slavery just before the end of the Civil War, then kidnapped. His owner got him back in exchange for a horse. After the war, George’s owner raised him as one of his own children. He struggled for years to get an education from whatever school would allow a black man to learn. He was the only black student at Iowa State University. His mentors there wanted him to stay as a faculty member, but instead he accepted a call from Booker T. Washington to join the Tuskegee faculty.

For much of his career, Carver labored in obscurity. Tuskegee president Booker T. Washington was impatient with Carver’s disorganized approach to college duties. Whenever Carver accomplished more, Booker T. Washington always thought of something more that he ordered Carver to do. At one point, even though Carver spent every waking moment working for the institute, Washington told Carver he needed to repair the bathrooms. Washington’s regimented and disciplined approach to everything conflicted with Carver’s slower and more thoughtful approach.

Then in 1921, Carver testified before the federal House Ways and Means Committee about all the food and industrial products that could be made from peanuts. The committee was interested because World War I had interrupted many imports into the United States, and they wanted to know what “home-grown” products we could have in the event of a future war. Even though these products ended up not being marketed, the committee was very impressed with this humble and brilliant man. From that point, Carver became a celebrity, and his fame spread worldwide.

Once at Tuskegee, Carver showed his ability to produce excellent work with almost no resources. Though he eventually had a lot of glassware for his teaching and research laboratories, he had literally nothing to work with when he first arrived. So, he found a whiskey bottle at the dump. He tied a string around the middle. He cooled the bottle in cold water, then lit the string on fire. The fire made the cold bottle crack in two. The top half was a funnel, the bottom half a beaker.

By the end of his life, Carver was receiving many prizes and worldwide recognition. Meanwhile, in American society, the legal rights for black people were becoming ever more restricted. After an initial period of openness after the Civil War, southern states found ways to prevent blacks from voting, and they ended up with almost no political voice. While Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver were widely admired, most white people considered them individual exceptions from their otherwise benighted race.

Max Otto (see previous essay) quoted Russell Lord’s “deeply disturbing” book Behold Our Land. Lord wrote about the soil erosion, which ruined the livelihoods of poor farmers, that was going on “under the eye of a teaching and research staff of considerable distinction; and yet it all was, and is, by them completely ignored. They go right on teaching their geology, their botany, their zoology, their chemistry and physics, their archaeology, their Greek and Latin and English, with no thought or mention of the tragic transformation of the good green country roundabout.” Maybe Lord referred to the major universities, but George Washington Carver was the exact opposite of this disconnected academic lassitude.

Carver never sought fame (though it came to him) or fortune (which he had opportunities to refuse). He lived in a small room on the Tuskegee campus. Books were stacked floor to ceiling in the corner. He had a display case for his crochet work. Rocks and stalactites covered a table, and flowers crowded his window box. His personal space reminds me of my own.

I chose George Washington Carver as my favorite scientist in my recent book. The main reason was not so much because of his scientific research, which was creative but not of the highest quality, as for his motivation. He believed that scientific research at a university should prove directly helpful to the people living around it, and to the world in general. The inspiration of his peanut research (and also research on sweet potatoes and pecans) was to allow poor farmers to produce value-added products, at home, that they could sell for more money than peanuts. He also did research, and taught local farmers, about how to preserve soil fertility, so that they could produce more from each of their acres. This is also one of my main motivations in teaching and research. Like Carver, I am a mediocre scientific researcher, but my heart is in outreach to the wider community, opening their eyes to the wonders and practical benefits of science.

All this, despite the fact that Carver did not really follow what nearly every scientist in his day and today would consider good scientific method. That is the topic of the next essay.