“Ben Azzai … used to say: Despise no man and consider nothing impossible, for there is no man who does not have his hour and there is no thing that does not have its place.”
— Pirkei Avot 4:3 (tr. Judah Goldin)
Marcello Truzzi, whom I knew (though not very well) at Cornell fifty-some years ago, cuts a tragic figure. Not primarily because he died so young, at age 67, which once upon a time wouldn’t have struck me as “dying young.” Rather, because his best-known and most enduring creations came to be twisted around in ways that undercut and even mocked what he poured his heart into pursuing.
In the 1970s, Truzzi was among the founders of a society called CSICOP, the “Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.” The organization is still going strong, albeit under a shortened name; but Truzzi found himself obliged to part from it within a few years of its founding. He wanted a real “Committee for Scientific Investigation,” by which he understood dispassionate and open-minded. For him, paranormal claims were not a “tidal wave of irrationalism” (as the other CSICOP-ers liked to think of them) but something that deserved serious and respectful evaluation. The others, including the distinguished science and mathematics writer Martin Gardner, wanted a debunking committee.
Truzzi began a correspondence with Gardner, older than he by more than twenty years, in 1970. Their exchanges, voluminous at their height, broke off acrimoniously in 1984. They resumed the following year, in the cooled-off manner of intimates who’ve found they have irreconcilable differences but also common interests, and that it’s to the advantage of both to be polite. The letters are now collected and published, in an edition that’s easy to criticize–misprints abound, and the all-important index is badly incomplete–but has done what it set out to. Namely, to give us all a window into these two extraordinary intellects, and watch them square off over what you do with “pseudo-sciences” that might be tomorrow’s science a-borning.
The letters are repetitious, sometimes maddeningly so. Editor Dana Richards, however, did exactly right not to trim the repetitions: they are part of the story. Two figures crop up over and over. One is Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979), the richly talented and wildly eccentric thinker whose conjured-up visions of interplanetary collisions challenged conventional astronomy and conventional history in equal measure. The other is Michel Gauquelin (1928-1991), the French psychologist who discovered in the 1950s what seemed to be a significant statistical correlation between a person’s athletic ability and the position of the planet Mars relative to the horizon at the time of that person’s birth.
Which, any respectable astronomer will tell you, ought not to happen.
Gauquelin wasn’t defending astrology in any usual sense. Indeed, as both Gardner and Truzzi repeatedly point out, Gauquelin’s Mars correlations don’t fit in with the schema of traditional astrology, and in fact undercut it. But it was hailed by astrologers as a vindication, not because (as Gardner suggests at one point) they were too dumb to understand its implications, but because it lent empirical support to astrology’s most fundamental notion: preposterous as it seems in our post-Copernican world, the positions of stars and planets in the sky as seen from Earth do have some mysterious, as yet indefinable way of influencing human life.
So how should scientific thinkers respond to people like Gauquelin and Velikovsky? Hoot them down? Or treat them as colleagues, however deluded or mistaken, who deserve either respectful refutation or–since scientists are busy people who can’t give their attention to everything that crops up–a gentle silence? On this issue, Gardner is quite clear:
“The creationist and the astrologer, from my perspective, should be laughed at, and hit over the head with bladders and abusive rhetoric–not treated the way one school of linguistics treats a rival school. Believers are never unconverted by rational argument. They are affected by ridicule, especially if they are young.” (p. 61)
Does your gorge rise, at the thought of using hoots and jeers to control vulnerable young people, so they don’t dare express opinions contrary to the ones you think true? Mine does, and it doesn’t matter that I have no use for either creationism or astrology. This is simply not the way you treat people. Truzzi would agree with me on this point. “Please note,” he wrote soon afterward (p. 81), “I do not say that such wild theorists [as Velikovsky] must be confronted, they can be simply ignored. But once confronted, I think the arguments against them be rigorous and without character attacks.”
Ah, but is this the way science advances? Gardner says no, and his arguments are at least worth considering. Truzzi insists that today’s “pseudo-science” may in retrospect come to seem “proto-science,” toppling current scientific paradigms to make room for better ones. And yes, Gardner agrees, there are scientific heresies that may turn out to be the new paradigms, whose proponents are probably wrong but deserve respectful refutation. But not Velikovsky, not Gauquelin. Not J. Allen Hynek and his UFO nonsense. These merit nothing but the bladders and the mockery.
Around and around he and Truzzi go, repeating the same arguments over and over, until eventually Gardner wearies of it. Let’s just acknowledge, he proposes, that we can’t convince each other and let it all drop. But Truzzi won’t let it drop. He’s driven, somewhat maniacally I can’t help feeling, to come to some sort of consensus with the older man. Their letters go on for pages, must have consumed heaven knows how many hours of the writers’ time and lives. Truzzi wants Gardner to write for his publication Zetetic Scholar, in which he provides a forum for precisely those unorthodoxies that Gardner believes to be worthless; arguments pro or con or in between, Truzzi doesn’t care which. All that matters is that they be given fair discussion.
This, for Gardner, is what makes Zetetic Scholar a “frivolous” publication, with which he wants nothing to do. Look, Marcello, he says: if you want to lay the groundwork for future scientific paradigms, why not write about the “fringe” ideas that are genuinely scientific? He reels off one example after another. But what is it that attracts you to these “cranks” and “crackpots”? What drives you to give them attention they don’t have the smallest legitimate claim to?
And so the discussion veers off repeatedly into what constitutes a “crank” or a “crackpot,” and whether “crank” (unlike “crackpot”) may not in fact designate a virtue, something like stubborn persistence. From my perspective, the discussion is both useless–obviously both are terms of abuse, which I hate to see used–and also revealing, in that it delineates the split between the two men.
Which grows testier as the years pass, and consensus remains as elusive as ever.
“In the final analysis,” Truzzi writes late in the correspondence, “our differences may be moral ones” (p. 337). He doesn’t say what he means by this, but I think I can guess at it. Do you believe the saying of the ancient Jewish sage Ben Azzai, which I used as an epigraph for this post, that no one ought to be despised and nothing deemed impossible? Which Gardner presumably would dismiss as nonsense. He agrees with H. L. Mencken, he tells Truzzi, that “one horse laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms.” It most definitely is–if your goal is to silence and humiliate your opponent. Most of us who’ve been on the receiving end of the horse laugh carry the scars of this devastating weapon the rest of our lives.
Gardner’s invocation of Mencken certainly got under Truzzi’s skin, as it’s gotten under mine. He alludes to it at the end of what he intended to be his final letter to Gardner: “I have always sought to present arguments and evidence rather than horselaughs.” For the advancement of science? (Truzzi would surely say so.) Or out of respect for human dignity?
There’s a revealing exchange early in the correspondence. Gardner tells of receiving in the mail “a bulky manuscript from a man who said he had been working on relativity theory for 20 years and found that it was all wrong. … He wanted me to read his mss and help him get it published. He added that he had previously sent it to [George] Gamow. Gamow had the gall to return it unread, with a curt note saying he had no time to read it and please don’t write him about it. The man was distressed by this prejudgment. … I repeated Gamow’s prejudgment. I returned the mss with a curt note saying I had no time to read it” (pp. 114-115). He’s quite proud of himself and that “curt note.”
Truzzi isn’t so sure. “I get crazy manuscripts for comment myself just as you do. I normally return these with a courteous comment indicating that my time is limited and though their idea may have merit, I simply must assign consideration of that idea too low a priority for my limited time.” As for Gardner’s “curt note,” Truzzi understands this to mean “‘brief to the point of rudeness.’ I simply see no good reason for any rudeness in this case at all” (p. 118).
To which I imagine Gardner replying: stupid people ought to be taught not to waste the time of their betters. And who’s to say he’s wrong? (Rabbi Ben Azzai? He’s been dead these 1900 years.) If anything, the sequel has proven him right. The supposedly paradigm-changing “discoveries” of Gauquelin and Velikovsky have gone nowhere. How many readers of this blog have ever heard of Gauquelin and his “Mars Effect,” which couldn’t be refuted but couldn’t be reproduced either? And, unless I’m much mistaken, the memory of Immanuel Velikovsky is fading fast.
And Truzzi died at 67, obscure except to UFOlogist types like me, while Gardner lived to 95 in fame and honor. Perhaps there’s a lesson here–horse-laughing at others is good for you?–perhaps not. Get the book; read their correspondence. Decide for yourself.
by David Halperin
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Ever since the quantum experiments, reductionist materialism has increasingly become an out-dated point of view, yet to be fully revised to include the conscious observer. These days, it would seem that a very open mind would be the best approach to all new ideas.
Amen, Mr. Covington! Yet new ideas are all but unlimited, and our time very severely limited. How do we keep our minds open without draining our time?
I wonder how many under 50 know of H.L. Mencken today ?
And what is truly odd is that Gardner remained a believer in God ?
A real horse laugh is due for CSICOP’s “scientific investigations”.
Bottom line I think it was nothing but a group of bullies then
and even more so now.
Yet there is good stuff on their website–Joe Nickell’s article on the Flatwoods monster, for example. I agree with Truzzi: they serve a useful function. Only they ought not to claim to be detached and unbiased.
On Gardner’s belief in God: to my astonishment, there’s no trace of it in his exchanges with Truzzi. Where he mentions religion, he seems contemptuous of it. (And both worry about the implications of the devout Jimmy Carter winning the presidency in 1976.)
I will have to pass on this book, though I was a long-time reader and enjoyer of Gardner’s book reviews, essays, and annotations. I wonder if he found a sort of objective purity and divinity in the mysterious workings of mathematics that could not be found in the messy human activities — rife with politics and ambition (along with real wonder and compassion) — called “science” and “religion”.
I think Gardner considered himself a deist of sorts who eschewed organized religion. Once humans started defining religion to work according to rules and logic like science, he found another target to debunk.
To debunk in favor of what, though? Just to make mistaken people look foolish? Did Gardner have a higher purpose?
I’m mystified as to why Truzzi kept on over the years — what did he hope to accomplish? If he had a reason, he probably dared not reveal for fear of being horselaughed in the face by Gardner.
For some reason, talking of Gardner and what to spend time on, this quote from William Hazlitt sprang to mind: “Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.”
And what do you make of Gardner’s admiration for G.K. Chesterton?