Subject: [vallist] The New Skepticism; Mark Twain, Skeptic (#3)
Date: Mon, 04 Oct 1999 21:14:55 -0700
From: Michele Vallisneri 
To: vallist@egroups.com

Dear friends,

here I am again grinning at you from your mailbox, after almost a month
(or is it even more?) I am now back in California, safely settled and
quite happy to begin serious research again. Of course I was supposed to
do that all summer, but a fair amount of traveling hindered me, mostly
because the way my mind works, I have to readjust to the surrounding
context before I can actually be creative and produce science.

My travel log did not end with Africa and Germany: in September I spent
a week in Sardinia, also for a physics conference: this sounds like a
minor thing (Sardinia is in Italy after all!), but it was actually very
painful to get there, and I would rather not elaborate on this!

While in Sardinia I started writing a short essay for you about ``the
new skepticism''; my involvement in it is actually one of the reasons
why I started this list. Since the essay was a bit too ambitious, it is
not ready yet: so I thought I would break the silence anyway, with an
excerpt from Mark Twain's autobiography that I believe embodies very
well the spirit of skepticism.

Not to leave you completely in the dark, I will say that ``skepticism''
is a thought movement that tries to emphasize the scientific method and
the principle of ``doubt'' when confronting ``para-normal'' or ``extra-
ordinary'' claims such as those of parapsychology, ufology, alternative
medicine, astrology, magic, and the like.

<< What does it mean to be a skeptic? Skepticism is not a rejection of
new ideas, or worse an unwillingness to accept any claim that challenges
the status quo. It is a provisional approach to claims; it is the
application of reason to any and all ideals, it is _a method, not a
position_. Ideally, skeptics do not go into an investigations closed to
the possibility that a phenomenon might be real or that a claim might be
true. When we say we are ``skeptical'', we mean that we must see
compelling evidence before we believe.

<< Modern skepticism is embodied in the scientific method, which
involves gathering data to formulate and test naturalistic explanations
for natural phenomena. A fact becomes factual when it is confirmed to
such an extent that it would be reasonable to offer temporary agreement.
But all facts in science are provisional and subject to challenge, and
therefore _skepticism is a method leading to provisional conclusions_.
Some claims, such as water dowsing, ESP, and creationism, have been
tested (and failed the tests) often enough that we can provisionally
conclude that they are not valid. Other claims, such as hypnosis, the
origin of language, and black holes, have been tested but results are
inconclusive so we must continue formulating and testing hypotheses and
theories until we can reach a provisional conclusion. >> (Michael
Shermer, ``Skeptic'' Magazine)

Ok, here we go... the Twain excerpt is a bit long, but worth reading.
Find a quiet moment, take a deep breath...

My warmest hugs and thoughts to everybody, and I shall be heard soon!

Michele

--> Mark Twain, a Skeptic _ante litteram_...

(Excerpt from Mark Twain's ``My Autobiography'')

[Dictated December 1, 1906] An exciting event in our village (Hannibal)
was the arrival of the mesmerizer. I think the year was 1850. As to that
I am not sure, but I know the month -- it was May; that detail has
survived the wear of fifty-five years. A pair of connected little
incidents of that month have served to keep the memory of it green for
me all this time; incidents of no consequence, and not worth embalming,
yet my memory has preserved them carefully and flung away things of real
value to give them space and make them comfortable. The truth is, a
person's memory has no more sense than his conscience, and no
appreciation whatever of values and proportions. However, never mind
those trifling incidents; my subject is the mesmerizer, now.

He advertised his show, and promised marvels. Admission as usual: 25
cents, children and negroes half price. The village had heard of
mesmerism, in a general way, but had not encountered it yet. Not many
people attended, the first night, but next day they had so many wonders
to tell that everybody's curiosity was fired, and after that for a
fortnight the magician had prosperous times. I was fourteen or fifteen
years old -- the age at which a boy is willing to endure all things,
suffer all things, short of death by fire, if thereby he may be
conspicuous and show off before the public; and so, when I saw the
"subjects" perform their foolish antics on the platform and make the
people laugh and shout and admire, I had a burning desire to be a
subject myself. Every night, for three nights, I sat in the row of
candidates on the platform, and held the magic disk in the palm of my
hand, and gazed at it and tried to get sleepy, but it was a failure; I
remained wide awake, and had to retire defeated, like the majority.
Also, I had to sit there and be gnawed with envy of Hicks, our
journeyman; I had to sit there and see him scamper and jump when Simmons
the enchanter exclaimed, "See the snake! see the snake!" and hear him
say, "My, how beautiful!" in response to the suggestion that he was
observing a splendid sunset; and so on -- the whole insane business. I
couldn't laugh, I couldn't applaud; it filled me with bitterness to have
others do it, and to have people make a hero of Hicks, and crowd around
him when the show was over, and ask him for more and more particulars of
the wonders he had seen in his visions, and manifest in many ways that
they were proud to be acquainted with him. Hicks -- the idea! I couldn't
stand it; I was getting boiled to death in my own bile.

On the fourth night temptation came, and I was not strong enough to
resist. When I had gazed at the disk awhile I pretended to be sleepy,
and began to nod. Straightway came the professor and made passes over my
head and down my body and legs and arms, finishing each pass with a snap
of his fingers in the air, to discharge the surplus electricity; then he
began to "draw" me with the disk, holding it in his fingers and telling
me I could not take my eyes off it, try as I might; so I rose slowly,
bent and gazing, and followed that disk all over the place, just as I
had seen the others do. Then I was put through the other paces. Upon
suggestion I fled from snakes; passed buckets at a fire; became excited
over hot steamboat-races; made love to imaginary girls and kissed them;
fished from the platform and landed mud-cats that outweighed me -- and
so on, all the customary marvels. But not in the customary way. I was
cautious at first, and watchful, being afraid the professor would
discover that I was an impostor and drive me from the platform in
disgrace; but as soon as I realized that I was not in danger, I set
myself the task of terminating Hicks's usefulness as a subject, and of
usurping his place.

It was a sufficiently easy task. Hicks was born honest; I, without that
incumbrance -- so some people said. Hicks saw what he saw, and reported
accordingly; I saw more than was visible, and added to it such details
as could help. Hicks had no imagination, I had a double supply. He was
born calm, I was born excited. No vision could start a rapture in him,
and he was constipated as to language, anyway; but if I saw a vision I
emptied the dictionary onto it and lost the remnant of my mind into the
bargain.

At the end of my first half-hour Hicks was a thing of the past, a fallen
hero, a broken idol, and I knew it and was glad, and said in my heart,
Success to crime! Hicks could never have been mesmerized to the point
where he could kiss an imaginary girl in public, or a real one either,
but I was competent. Whatever Hicks had failed in, I made it a point to
succeed in, let the cost be what it might, physically or morally. He had
shown several bad defects, and I had made a note of them. For instance,
if the magician asked, "What do you see?" and left him to invent a
vision for himself, Hicks was dumb and blind, he couldn't see a thing
nor say a word, whereas the magician soon found that when it came to
seeing visions of a stunning and marketable sort I could get along
better without his help than with it. Then there was another thing:
Hicks wasn't worth a tallow dip on mute mental suggestion. Whenever
Simmons stood behind him and gazed at the back of his skull and tried to
drive a mental suggestion into it, Hicks sat with vacant face, and never
suspected. If he had been noticing, he could have seen by the rapt faces
of the audience that something was going on behind his back that
required a response. Inasmuch as I was an impostor I dreaded to have
this test put upon me, for I knew the professor would be "willing" me to
do something, and as I couldn't know what it was, I should be exposed
and denounced. However, when my time came, I took my chance. I perceived
by the tense and expectant faces of the people that Simmons was behind
me willing me with all his might. I tried my best to imagine what he
wanted, but nothing suggested itself. I felt ashamed and miserable,
then. I believed that the hour of my disgrace was come, and that in
another moment I should go out of that place disgraced. I ought to be
ashamed to confess it, but my next thought was, not how I could win the
compassion of kindly hearts by going out humbly and in sorrow for my
mis-doings, but how I could go out most sensationally and spectacularly.

There was a rusty and empty old revolver lying on the table, among the
"properties" employed in the performances. On May-day, two or three
weeks before, there had been a celebration by the schools, and I had had
a quarrel with a big boy who was the school-bully, and I had not come
out of it with credit. That boy was now seated in the middle of the
house, halfway down the main aisle. I crept stealthily and impressively
toward the table, with a dark and murderous scowl on my face, copied
from a popular romance, seized the revolver suddenly, flourished it,
shouted the bully's name, jumped off the platform, and made a rush for
him and chased him out of the house before the paralyzed people could
interfere to save him. There was a storm of applause, and the magician,
addressing the house, said, most impressively --

"That you may know how really remarkable this is, and how wonderfully
developed a subject we have in this boy, I assure you that without a
single spoken word to guide him he has carried out what I mentally
commanded him to do, to the minutest detail. I could have stopped him at
a moment in his vengeful career by a mere exertion of my will, therefore
the poor fellow who has escaped was at no time in danger."

So I was not in disgrace. I returned to the platform a hero, and happier
than I have ever been in this world since. As regards mental suggestion,
my fears of it were gone. I judged that in case I failed to guess what
the professor might be willing me to do, I could count on putting up
something that would answer just as well. I was right, and exhibitions
of unspoken suggestion became a favorite with the public. Whenever I
perceived that I was being willed to do something I got up and did
something -- anything that occurred to me -- and the magician, not being
a fool, always ratified it. When people asked me, "How can you tell what
he is willing you to do?" I said, "It's just as easy," and they always
said, admiringly, "Well it beats me how you can do it."

Hicks was weak in another detail. When the professor made passes over
him and said "his whole body is without sensation now -- come forward
and test him, ladies and gentlemen," the ladies and gentlemen always
complied eagerly, and stuck pins into Hicks, and if they went deep Hicks
was sure to wince, then that poor professor would have to explain that
Hicks "wasn't sufficiently under the influence." But I didn't wince; I
only suffered, and shed tears on the inside. The miseries that a
conceited boy will endure to keep up his "reputation"! And so will a
conceited man; I know it in my own person, and have seen it in a hundred
thousand others. That professor ought to have protected me, and I often
hoped he would, when the tests were unusually severe, but he didn't. It
may be that he was deceived as well as the others, though I did not
believe it nor think it possible. Those were dear good people, but they
must have carried simplicity and credulity to the limit. They would
stick a pin in my arm and bear on it until they drove it a third of its
length in, and then be lost in wonder that by a mere exercise of will-
power the professor could turn my arm to iron and make it insensible to
pain. Whereas it was not insensible at all; I was suffering agonies of
pain.

After that fourth night, that proud night, that triumphant night, I was
the only subject. Simmons invited no more candidates to the platform. I
performed alone, every night, the rest of the fortnight. In the
beginning of the second week I conquered the last doubters. Up to that
time a dozen wise old heads, the intellectual aristocracy of the town,
had held out, as implacable unbelievers. I was as hurt by this as if I
were engaged in some honest occupation. There is nothing surprising
about this. Human beings feel dishonor the most, sometimes, when they
most deserve it. That handful of overwise old gentlemen kept on shaking
their heads all the first week, and saying they had seen no marvels
there that could not have been produced by collusion; and they were
pretty vain of their unbelief, too, and liked to show it and air it, and
be superior to the ignorant and the gullible. Particularly old Dr.
Peake, who was the ringleader of the irreconcilables, and very
formidable; for he was an F.F.V., he was learned, white-haired and
venerable, nobly and richly clad in the fashions of an earlier and a
courtlier day, he was large and stately, and he not only seemed wise,
but was what he seemed, in that regard. He had great influence, and his
opinion upon any matter was worth much more than that of any other
person in the community. When I conquered him, at last, I knew I was
undisputed master of the field; and now, after more than fifty years, I
acknowledge, with a few dry old tears, that I rejoiced without shame.

[Dictated December 2, 1906] In 1847 we were living in a large white
house on the corner of Hill and Main Streets -- a house that still
stands, but isn't large now, although it hasn't lost a plank; I saw it a
year ago and noticed that shrinkage. My father died in it in March of
the year mentioned, but our family did not move out of it until some
months afterward. Ours was not the only family in the house, there was
another -- Dr. Grant's. One day Dr. Grant and Dr. Reyburn argued a
matter on the street with sword-canes, and Grant was brought home
multifariously punctured. Old Dr. Peake calked the leaks, and came every
day for a while, to look after him. The Grants were Virginians, like
Peake, and one day when Grant was getting well enough to be on his feet
and sit around in the parlor and talk, the conversation fell upon
Virginia and old times. I was present, but the group were probably quite
unconscious of me, I being only a lad and a negligible quantity. Two of
the group -- Dr. Peake and Mrs. Crawford, Mrs. Grant's mother -- had
been of the audience when the Richmond theatre burned down, thirty-six
years before, and they talked over the frightful details of that
memorable tragedy. These were eyewitnesses, and with their eyes I saw it
all with an intolerable vividness: I saw the black smoke rolling and
tumbling toward the sky, I saw the flames burst through it and turn red,
I heard the shrieks of the despairing, I glimpsed their faces at the
windows, caught fitfully through the veiling smoke, I saw them jump to
their death, or to mutilation worse than death. The picture is before me
yet, and can never fade.

In due course they talked of the colonial mansion of the Peakes, with
its stately columns and its spacious grounds, and by odds and ends I
picked up a clearly defined idea of the place. I was strongly
interested, for I had not before heard of such palatial things from the
lips of people who had seen them with their own eyes. One detail,
casually dropped, hit my imagination hard. In the wall, by the great
front door, there was a round hole as big as a saucer -- a British
cannon-ball had made it, in the war of the Revolution. It was breath-
taking; it made history real; history had never been real to me before.

Very well, three or four years later, as already mentioned, I was king-
bee and sole "subject" in the mesmeric show; it was the beginning of the
second week; the performance was half over; just then the majestic Dr.
Peake, with his ruffled bosom and wristbands and his gold-headed cane,
entered, and a deferential citizen vacated his seat beside the Grants
and made the great chief take it. This happened while I was trying to
invent something fresh in the way of a vision, in response to the
professor's remark --

"Concentrate your powers. Look -- look attentively. There -- don't you
see something? Concentrate -- concentrate. Now then -- describe it."

Without suspecting it, Dr. Peake, by entering the place, had reminded me
of the talk of three years before. He had also furnished me capital and
was become my confederate, an accomplice in my frauds. I began on a
vision, a vague and dim one (that was part of the game at the beginning
of a vision; it isn't best to see it too clearly at first, it might look
as if you had come loaded with it). The vision developed, by degrees,
gathered swing, momentum, energy. It was the Richmond fire. Dr. Peake
was cold, at first, and his fine face had a trace of polite scorn in it;
but when he began to recognize that fire, that expression changed, and
his eyes began to light up. As soon as I saw that, I threw the valves
wide open and turned on all the steam, and gave those people a supper of
fire and horrors that was calculated to last them one while! They
couldn't gasp, when I got through -- they were petrified. Dr. Peake had
risen, and was standing, -- and breathing hard. He said, in a great
voice --

"My doubts are ended. No collusion could produce that miracle. It was
totally impossible for him to know those details, yet he has described
them with the clarity of an eye-witness -- and with what unassailable
truthfulness God knows I know!"

I saved the colonial mansion for the last night, and solidified and
perpetuated Dr. Peake's conversion with the cannon-ball hole. He
explained to the house that I could never have heard of that small
detail, which differentiated this mansion from all other Virginian
mansions and perfectly identified it, therefore the fact stood proven
that I had seen it in my vision. Lawks!

It is curious. When the magician's engagement closed there was but one
person in the village who did not believe in mesmerism, and I was the
one. All the others were converted, but I was to remain an implacable
and unpersuadable disbeliever in mesmerism and hypnotism for close upon
fifty years. This was because I never would examine them, in after life.
I couldn't. The subject revolted me. Perhaps because it brought back to
me a passage in my life which for pride's sake I wished to forget;
though I thought -- or persuaded myself I thought -- I should never come
across a "proof" which wasn't thin and cheap, and probably had a fraud
like me behind it.

The truth is, I did not have to wait long to get tired of my triumphs.
Not thirty days, I think. The glory which is built upon a lie soon
becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. No doubt for a while I enjoyed
having my exploits told and retold and told again in my presence and
wondered over and exclaimed about, but I quite distinctly remember that
there presently came a time when the subject was wearisome and odious to
me and I could not endure the disgusting discomfort of it. I am well
aware that the world-glorified doer of a deed of great and real splendor
has just my experience; I know that he deliciously enjoys hearing about
it for three or four weeks, and that pretty soon after that he begins to
dread the mention of it, and by and by wishes he had been with the
damned before he ever thought of doing that deed; I remember how General
Sherman used to rage and swear over "When we were Marching through
Georgia," which was played at him and sung at him everywhere he went;
still, I think I suffered a shade more than the legitimate hero does, he
being privileged to soften his misery with the reflection that his glory
was at any rate golden and reproachless in its origin, whereas I had no
such privilege, there being no possible way to make mine respectable.

How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo
that work again! Thirty-five years after those evil exploits of mine I
visited my old mother, whom I had not seen for ten years; and being
moved by what seemed to me a rather noble and perhaps heroic impulse, I
thought I would humble myself and confess my ancient fault. It cost me a
great effort to make up my mind; I dreaded the sorrow that would rise in
her face, and the shame that would look out of her eyes; but after long
and troubled reflection, the sacrifice seemed due and right, and I
gathered my resolution together and made the confession.

To my astonishment there were no sentimentalities, no dramatics, no
George Washington effects; she was not moved in the least degree; she
simply did not believe me, and said so! I was not merely disappointed, I
was nettled, to have my costly truthfulness flung out of the market in
this placid and confident way when I was expecting to get a profit out
of it. I asserted, and reasserted, with rising heat, my statement that
every single thing I had done on those long-vanished nights was a lie
and a swindle; and when she shook her head tranquilly and said she knew
better, I put up my hand and swore to it -- adding a triumphant "Now
what do you say?"

It did not affect her at all; it did not budge her the fraction of an
inch from her position. If this was hard for me to endure, it did not
begin with the blister she put upon the raw when she began to put my
sworn oath out of court with arguments to prove that I was under a
delusion and did not know what I was talking about. Arguments! Arguments
to show that a person on a man's outside can know better what is on his
inside than he does himself! I had cherished some contempt for arguments
before, I have not enlarged my respect for them since. She refused to
believe that I had invented my visions myself; she said it was folly:
that I was only a child at the time and could not have done it. She
cited the Richmond fire and the colonial mansion and said they were
quite beyond my capacities. Then I saw my chance! I said she was right
-- I didn't invent those, I got them from Dr. Peake. Even this great
shot did no damage. She said Dr. Peake's evidence was better than mine,
and he had said in plain words that it was impossible for me to have
heard about those things. Dear, dear, what a grotesque and unthinkable
situation: a confessed swindler convicted of honesty and condemned to
acquittal by circumstantial evidence furnished by the swindled!

I realized, with shame and with impotent vexation, that I was defeated
all along the line. I had but one card left, but it was a formidable
one. I played it -- and stood from under. It seemed ignoble to demolish
her fortress, after she had defended it so valiantly; but the defeated
know not mercy. I played that master card. It was the pin-sticking. I
said, solemnly --

"I give you my honor, a pin was never stuck into me without causing me
cruel pain."

She only said --

"It is thirty-five years. I believe you do think that, now, but I was
there, and I know better. You never winced."

She was so calm! and I was so far from it, so nearly frantic.

"Oh, my goodness!" I said, "let me show you that I am speaking the
truth. Here is my arm; drive a pin into it -- drive it to the head -- I
shall not wince."

She only shook her gray head and said, with simplicity and conviction --

"You are a man, now, and could dissemble the hurt; but you were only a
child then, and could not have done it."

And so the lie which I played upon her in my youth remained with her as
an unchallengeable truth to the day of her death. Carlyle said "a lie
cannot live." It shows that he did not know how to tell them. If I had
taken out a life policy on this one the premiums would have bankrupted
me ages ago.

(North American Review 184, Jan. 4 1907, chapter 9)

                    --------------------------------

             ("The Vallist" #3; Pasadena, October 4, 1999)