From the article:
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How to be a modern skeptic.
By Daniel Engber
Posted Wednesday, June 22, 2005, at 4:36 AM PT
In line to get my badge for this year's skeptics conference in
Pasadena, Calif., I recognized the little man standing behind me. He
was bald, with a full, white beard, and he looked older than I would
have imagined. "Excuse me," he said, "is this the line for the
skeptics meeting?" When I nodded, he looked me up and down and
replied, "Oh, I doubt that."
Ladies and gentlemen, meet the worlds' most famous skeptic, the
Amazing Randi.
I was in the seventh grade when I first came across Flim-Flam!
Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions, Randi's 1980 classic of
the early skeptics movement. When I got on board—as a fan, if not a
true believer—the group was entrenched in a slugfest with the
flourishing occult business. The skeptics were a feisty group of
scientists, philosophers, magicians, and atheists, united by their
dedication to rational thought and their intolerance of credulity.
Randi, a professional magician and escape artist who once dangled
upside down in a straitjacket over Niagara Falls, joined up with Paul
Kurtz, a philosophy professor in upstate New York, who had himself
taken on newspaper astrologers. In 1976, Kurtz formed the Committee
for the Scientific Inquiry Into Claims of the Paranormal to explain,
expose, dispel, and debunk the supernatural and all its practitioners.
For decades, CSICOP's members did all of that with fierce passion. But
in recent years the skeptics' enthusiasm for debunking has begun to
subside. Kurtz now disowns the practice, instead favoring what he
calls a "positive" defense of science and reason. Michael Shermer, the
historian of science whose California-based Skeptics Society hosted
the conference in Pasadena, also avoids the D-word. He'd rather talk
about why people are fooled by supernatural hoaxes than spend his time
debunking them. His group has doused the activism of CSICOP's early
days with a program of research, lectures, and meetings.
Why have the skeptics grown so dreary? Their tactics have changed to
reflect a new set of targets. What was once a movement to take down
television psychics and fortunetellers now concentrates on mainstream
foes like President George W. Bush, Intelligent Design theorists, and
opponents of stem-cell research. A tedious battle against the modern
bugaboos of religion and politics demands tedious tactics and more
manpower. Today the skeptics comprise an alliance of interest groups,
only a subset of whom even call themselves skeptics. A recent effort
to choose a common name for the movement failed miserably—perhaps
because the proposed appellation managed to sound both arrogant and
New Age-y.
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Read it at http://slate.msn.com/id/2121239/
J. Spaceman
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