1 State of things
 

The proposition according to which "the mere fact of being in a technologically advanced society induces a rapid elimination of irrational thinking" is dead.
In France a few years ago a teacher (of all people) who was full of joy of becoming a mother was led to let her child being drowned. This teacher was an adept of the "birth under water" mystique of an ex-soviet guru..

 

1.1 The facts...

Nowadays astrology, parapsychology, magic healing and other paranormal phenomena are trendy. Can we understand why ?
In France, the very birth place of Descartes, beliefs and the irrational in a broad sense are thriving much more than one could have imagined and the situation is more than alarming. Better than a description or than semantic detours, here are self explanatory statistics.

Fig. 1 summarizes the results of an investigation (made by me in 1982-83) among first cycle university students on the scientific value of metal bending by mind power (psychokinesis), compared to relativistic dilation of time (as explained by the relativity theory and as observed in the laboratory via the life span of particles). These shocking data, as well as the evidenced growing influence of paranormal concepts among students in sciences) underline the urgent necessity of doing something.

These data were not the result of some local context or of some ambiguous formulation of the questions. They were statistically significant and were supported by nation wide enquiries made by professional pollsters. The following table reveal interesting and somewhat surprizing aspects. These data are based on an investigation on the belief in parasciences among Frenchmen (published in 1986). The level of belief decreases almost continuously with ageing, and, as widely asserted previously, the men/women disparity is clearly confirmed, at least for astrology.

Contrary to what might have been thought, the level of belief in the paranormal is directly proportional to the level of education, whatever the religious persuasion may be. Those with higher scientific degrees fare slightly better, although their level of belief is superior to the average !

The level of belief as a function of socio-professional categories is as eloquent. The investigators found that the group having the strongest belief in both astrology and the paranormal was that of the primary school teachers (noted "instructors") As one will note, the credibility of the reputed and so often debated opinion concerning beliefs in the country vacillates as farmers are the least believing group for what concerns astrology and the paranormal. In reverse and sadly enough, professors make a group of stronger believers in the paranormal than the average French. Their belief in astrology although "low" is still close to 30 %. With such teachers there is no doubt that our children and grandchildren will be able to master the technological world of next century !

Summarizing, we see that, rather surprizingly, the education world - students and teachers alike - are caracteristically strong believers in the paranormal.

The situation has known no improvement since 1986, far from it. Its degradation has been exceptionally rapid. More recent figures reflecting this dramatic trend were presented by various participants at the conference "La pensée scientifique, les citoyens et les para-sciences" in 1993 at the City of Sciences and Industry (Paris, France).

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An example among others (cf. fig. 5).

One remarkable feature of this table is that while 81 % of the French think that the progress of humanity is a result of the development of science, 58 % believe that astrology is... a science; meaning that the answers on the development of science have to be accepted with precaution.

 

1.2 A paradoxical situation ?

Obscurantism and its sad consequences know an unprecedented diffusion. Yet in an apparent paradox the corpus of paranormal phenomena expands neither in quantity nor in quality. On the contrary its sphere is shrinking and no witches roam the skies on their broom any more.

To illustrate this, the figure shows the decrease of the power of mind over matter in relation with time.

The so-called "mana" was supposed to have - centuries ago - displaced the Easter Island statues with a mass of many tons. Around 1850 the same power had heavy (ca. 100 kg) tables dancing. A few decades later the very same power could move a pan of about one kg. Around the seventies only small objects, such as a chessman. Nowadays, heavy concentration would allow a psychic to displace a small piece of paper...

Psychokinesis or PK power has decreased by a factor of a million in the course of time. This trend is found in any other type of psychic phenomenon as the means of control get more sophisticated. The power of Lourdes water suffers the same fate as the frequency of miracle-healings has diminished dramatically.

This paradoxical situation, i.e. the strong increase in belief vs the marked decrease of the number and size of phenomena, may easily be explained.

1.3 Possible explanations...
 

1.3.1 "Electronic" media resonance effect

The information related to psychic events is amplified in a fashion unknown to previous generations. An example: a haunted house would have remained a local event, while in the nineties the "poltergeist-ing" of a belgian country house became news to both Superchannel and CNN (world wide diffusion).
 

1.3.2 Deontologic drifting of the press

"Media-lies" and their evil influence are well known. Characterized lies are commonplace with certain programmes devoted (or not) to the paranormal. Members of the press do not hesitate to sacrifice the truth on the altar of audience ratings.

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1.3.3 The transmission belt of the... educative sphere !

Contrary to an a priori view, the teaching world is all to often the communication channel of beliefs. This is in accordance with what we know of the socio-professional categories and their levels of conviction.

Stunning as it may seem the pupils of four classes (first year of secondary school) of a public college in the south of France were sorted out according to astrological criteria. This was done for three years until 1995 with the agreement of the whole pedagogic team and of the principal.

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1.3.4 The replacement of reason by emotion

The actual change in the process by which knowledge is acquired could provide a fourth explanation. The expansion of information is characterized among others by the bloating of visual images and by immediate sensations, both detrimental to the value of the written symbol and of supported analysis.

The written symbol allows detailed, constructed, critical analysis, also available for a long time while contemporary media make much room to instantaneous images and to the stimuli they trigger.

The couple "Written symbol + supported analysis" is replaced by the couple "Visual image + Immediate emotion". This insidious and progressive replacement of reason by sensation should be studied in a global fashion, even beyond the type of thinking that supports the paranormal.

The lack of reading or of writing, being "pushed aside" and replaced by the blind absorption of images leads with no doubt to the extension of illiteracy.

Quite often will we see that people, although being able to read and write, have completely lost this practice after so much time spent watching the tube.

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2 What to do concretely ?
 

The ever increasing diffusion of pseudosciences and their emergence as true mediatic stars poses in a more pressing way than ever before the problem of the efficacy of the diffusion of scientific and technical culture and of its immediate corollary the prophylaxis against pseudosciences.

2.1 No taboo

Pseudosciences and as well as those who organize and profit from the diffusion of this loss of conscience should be demystified. Not only the (so-called) basis of these pseudosciences should be explained, but also how they are exploited.
Within this framework, a few lines should sometimes be devoted to a particular - identified - person. Not that personal comments are specially ethical, but they are unavoidable. It be by lucid action or by naive incompetence the complicity of these people in the clouding of our fellow citizens brains or the stultification of our culture, should be underlined.

While participants in the scientific debate are presumed to be both competent and honest it is necessary to bluntly state the obvious. Including what can be thought of the intellectual rectitude of a bishop making use of a "miracle", also of the producer of a TV show diffusing harmful information, and finally of a parapsychologist presented as being a "scientist", yet with neither title nor function...

Those who for various reasons hesitate to denounce this type of behaviour make a mistake, for it adds a different but constructive view to the debate.

Here are illustrations of my remark.

If I wish to discuss about physics, Jean Perrin or Henri Becquerel will be quoted.
If it concerns metal bending by the power of the mind, or the action of an absent molecule, I will quote psychics and the like.

The basic difference between the two groups will be that physics can be approached without having to refer to Perrin or to Becquerel while for the paranormal the phenomenon disappears with its inventor. Perrin and others have created concepts, laws, theories which will last, until amended. The psychics have nothing of the sort.

This does not mean that a person will be judged as an individual, but as a promoter of ideas. His or her credibility has then to be taken in account.

One should also remember that "an intelligent intellectual" person is not a pleonasm. In this respect Noam Chomsky has written the following concerning journalists: "They have created the image of a stupid mass that has to be ruled by intelligent intellectuals. In fact, what we have often found is that those intellectuals, those educated classes, form the most endoctrinated, ignorant, and stupid part of the population. There are very good reasons for that. Fundamentally, two of them. Firstly, as an "erudite" population, they are the first to be submitted to a massive propaganda. The second one is more important, yet more subtle. They are ideological managers. Consequently, they have to internalize the propaganda and believe it." (cited in french by G. de Selys in his conclusion to the collective work "Mediamensonges", EPO 1991).

Let's not believe that Chomsky's findings are simply due to the fact that he has investigated the neo-primate intellectuals of the New World with its short and narrow-minded cultural roots. This being approximately the vision shared by quite a few, in the land of Descartes.

Let us remember that in France, the investigations showed that the belief in the paranormal increases with the cultural level.

Briefly an "intellectual" is a person whose job is based on a major activity of the brain; but that implies in no way that this activity has to be intelligent.

2.2 The development of the scientific culture

The main wish and one of the major objectives of the educative system in a broad sense is to recommend the development of scientific and technical culture.
But to master this method and to be able to apply it practically, one should use proper concepts and rules
That is the essential, beyond any epistemological discussion.
What indeed would be the interest of a exclusively discursive power or knowledge, with no operative capacity ?

Keeping this in view, one should be careful not to lose contact with matter, with reality.
The role of observation, of experimentation, is fundamental. Especially in our society where all too often one teaches the results of science instead of explaining the manner by which these results were obtained.

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2.3 The right to dream has a counterpart: the duty of vigilance

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To be really efficient, a researcher has to have in mind some of the Zetetics rules.

Zetetics is the "method used to penetrate the reason and the nature of things" (Littré). Taught since the Antiquity, Zetetics is in fact the nonacceptance of any dogmatic statement. In brief the method could be defined as the Art of Doubting.

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A Conclusion...
 
 It is time that things change radically if we do not want the future to turn into a disaster. The actual moral dusk is overwhelming enough for the intellectual dusk not to be added. It is time to curb the excesses of the occult. A strong will is required. That's were the shoe pinches for the personalities ready to tackle the problem are very few.

A scientist being also a citizen can, and even has to, raise the interrogation concerning the progressing of pseudosciences. His role as a citizen can be emphasized if one remembers that science is what embarasses dogmatic people.

Credulity is the first and essential cause of the success of the paranormal. Yet priority should be given to the exposing of systematic lies.

One action should be directed towards the prevention of pseudosciences, another one aiming at the development of Zetetics.

Therefore perfect methods of intellectual practices should be acquired. The effective launching on a large scale of this necessary prophylaxis against the occult depends on the good will of goverments. It involves also a concerted action as well for information exchange on a international level as for educative action.

Educative action does not mean an action reduced to the sole teaching system, from nursery schools to the university.
On top of the traditional or non-traditional activities (such as a Center for Scientific and Technical Culture which by the way should be expanded) it would be necessary that all the information vectors be also concerned.

Paraphrasing Jean Rostand on astrology, I could say that what is dramatic it is not so much that so many people believe in the paranormal, it is that they judge serious things with brains that believe in the paranormal.
Such as the school orientation of children in relation with the astral theme, an aberration practiced by "astroteachers" of which I spoke hereabove.

Beliefs in the paranormal basically discredit true science and they generate wider and more serious consequences.

Believers in the paranormal contribute factually to a mystification of knowledge, mystification resulting in a view of the world in which numerous elements escape irrevocably the comprehension - hence the control - of most people.
Among others, this deformation of thinking induces a very peculiar stratification of the world. Those having powers are mediums, the chosen. They know and act and on the other hand those - below - who are bewildered and follow without understanding.
This stratification contributes to the emergence of a blind fatalism and the loss of any sense of responsibility on the part of the individual.

It is mainly for this last consequences in the behaviour readily observed in many youngsters that in the educative system the prophylaxis of pseudo-sciences is crucial.

An essential goal of the agencies diffusing scientific culture should be to form people with aptitude to reflexion, to be receptive to new ideas and to be capable of having a critical attitude. We should not limit ourselves to the transmission unavoidably finite of a matter, a subject or a discipline. The relation teacher-teached, diffusors-receptors reaches its full meaning only if it stimulates the dynamic process of a quest for information.

Sociological investigations illustrate the consequences of the gaps in our educative system.
The most important of these voids is maybe that science is seldomly taught as a cognitive tool.
Science is indeed taught in the context of a specified field. This induces the student to receive the message as "kitchen recipes", applicable to one field as being only valid for that very field.

The diffusion of the scientific culture is the sine qua non condition of closer relation of those who "construct" science and those who are "subjected" to it. With all the connotations and implications infered by this last word.
The dialogue is more than urgent if one wishes society not to be clouded by obscurantism and unreason.
But the acquisition of a scientific culture requires first the comprehension of what is a scientific approach. With all its facets including external and internal debates demonstrating that science is a self-corrective process of discovery; hence contrary to all dogma, all pseudosciences.

Paradoxically, pseudosciences have a positive role to play in illustrating the scientific process.
While they have a null performance power (that is : no progress can be attributed to pseudosciences), yet - by the example of their sheer absurdity - they lead to the consolidation of reason and a more popular diffusion of scientific methodology.

Evaluating the paranormal requires special tools. This same tools will help to reflect on the scientific and technological options that wil condition our future.

A last word.

It is legitimate to be interested in "out of the ordinary" phenomena and nobody will attempt to outlaw the seductions of the paranormal.

But if by any chance we are sitting aroud the table in view of invoking a spirit, instead of classically asking "Who is there ?", I suggest giving a new form to the question :

References:

The two following books are the main references:
1) Henri BROCH, "Le Paranormal", ed. Le Seuil, Paris 1985, 1997
2) Henri BROCH, "Au coeur de l'Extra - Ordinaire", collection "Zététique", ed. on the web ---> www.book-e-book.com
(original edition: Horizon Chimérique, Bordeaux 1991, 1994). This book offers a thematic index and a bibliography of about 1000 zetetic titles allowing one to find some documentation on almost any "paranormal" field.

Zetetics laboratory, University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis