Michael D. Gordin. The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
“Like other scientists with an interest in UFOs, [J. Allen] Hynek was denied a voice in most of his profession’s publications yet ridiculed for presenting his work outside of them.”
–Brenda Denzler, The Lure of the Edge
It’s the kind of catch-22 that will drive any UFOlogist around the bend. We struggle to be scientific; we’re sneered at as practitioners of a “pseudoscience,” in part because we don’t publish our work in the scientific journals that would automatically reject us if we tried. Of course we’d never use a term like “pseudoscientist” of ourselves. No one ever does.
This is the point that’s made, in typically sprightly style, at the beginning of Michael D. Gordin’s marvelous book on Immanuel Velikovsky and the reception (or non-reception) of his ideas. “No one in the history of the world has ever self-identified as a pseudoscientist. There is no person who wakes up in the morning and thinks to himself, ‘I’ll just head into my pseudolaboratory and perform some pseudoexperiments to try to confirm my pseudotheories with pseudofacts.'”
So then: who is a “pseudoscientist”? Gordin never answers the question and, in the end, denies that it’s answerable: “‘Pseudoscience’ is an empty category, a term of abuse” (page 206). But if that’s all there is to it, he need not have written his book in the first place. On the contrary, the very struggle to demarcate–a key term for Gordin–the (bad) pseudoscience from the science that’s real (and therefore good) is a vital exercise for scientists wanting to understand themselves, as well as for outsiders like me, who value science without venerating it. The questions that can’t be answered, as I used to teach my students, are often the ones most worth asking.
Karl Popper, and after him Thomas Kuhn, tried to solve the “demarcation problem” philosophically. For Popper, the essential marker of true science was falsifiability: you made predictions designed to be proven wrong, and if they survived your best efforts at disproof, you could provisionally claim scientific truth. (By this standard, Freudian psychoanalysis was no science but a mythic system–which, if I recall Popper correctly, didn’t necessarily mean it was false. Myths often were the first enunciations of truths afterward confirmed by science.) Gordin discards both their solutions. His path to exploring the “pseudoscience” question is not to philosophize about it but to tell a story that lays its dynamics bare.
And what a story it is.
I blogged two weeks ago about Velikovsky and his 1950 blockbuster Worlds in Collision. I didn’t mention that, even before the book appeared, it so outraged the accredited scientific community that they threatened a boycott of its publisher (Macmillan) to keep it from appearing, at least under the imprint of Macmillan’s science list. (Macmillan knuckled under, transferring the contract to Doubleday.)
This was the first battle of the Velikovsky wars–the “grand collision,” Gordin calls it–and perhaps the most dramatic. The battles continued to rage, though, until Velikovsky’s death in 1979, after which they not only ceased but faded with remarkable speed from the cultural memory. (An example of the “collective amnesia” about which Velikovsky wrote?) What were the wars about? Responsible scientists defending the public interest against a silver-tongued charlatan? Or narrow-minded, self-interested inquisitors out to silence a latter-day Galileo?
Gordin is too honest an historian, too fine a storyteller, to plump for either of these partisan formulations. To judge from the blurbs on the back of the paperback edition, most of the reviewers have seen him as standing within the ramparts of “accepted” science, talking about what’s wrong with those on the outside. “Make no mistake,” one of them tells us–it always raises my hackles when somebody tells me to “make no mistake”–“Gordin’s sympathies are not with the occult,” Velikovsky apparently being the reviewer’s notion of an occultist. For this reviewer, Gordin’s is a tale of “experts” vs. “quacks.” But if that was what Gordin wanted to write, he sure fooled me.
On the contrary: Gordin shows his sympathy and admiration for Velikovsky from beginning to end. How can you not admire such a man–for his brilliance, his courage, his independence, his quixotic and very likely fatal insistence on thinking every problem through on his own, from its foundation up? (On page 66, in one of his most profound observations, Gordin defines “the hallmarks of Velikovskian reasoning” as the search for “a hidden commonality behind diverse texts from different cultures.”) The scientists who so bitterly opposed him come across as neither villains nor heroes, but as human beings bounded and conditioned by their particular historical moment.
As Gordin demonstrates, the early post-War years were a heady but also anxious time to be a scientist in America. Scientists had emerged from the War with a prestige and authority, and a claim on public attention and government support, previously unknown. With this new status came responsibility, and they had a particularly appalling example before their eyes of responsibility abused. This was the Soviet geneticist Trofim Lysenko, universally judged an incompetent charlatan, yet installed by Stalin’s favor as arbiter of “revolutionary” science in the USSR.
Did they see Velikovsky as Lysenko redux? Was the ensuing controversy, with its verbal violence and book boycotts, a replay of the Lysenko wars of a few years earlier? Not exactly. Nobody was really afraid of Velikovsky being installed as a knuckleheaded commissar of science, hiring and firing at his whims. The scientists knew that couldn’t happen here. Yet the shadow of Lysenko hung ominously over them; Velikovsky’s enthusiastic reception by the popular press and the book-buying public naturally made them nervous. It wasn’t just envy or prejudice. When the status of science is high, the stakes involved in who’s a “real” scientist are high as well.
Gordin’s story is populated with a rich cast of characters, from the illustrious Einstein–Velikovsky’s friend, not quite his admirer–on down. J.B. Rhine of the Duke parapsychology laboratory is here, tentatively proposing to Velikovsky an alliance of the outcast. So is Erich von Däniken, as well as a few names that will ring bells for UFOlogists. Though from time to time Velikovsky might grudgingly allow for the possibility of “ancient astronauts” a la von Däniken, he had no use for UFOs as present-day space visitors. Yet UFOlogy’s enemies were sometimes his as well.
Harvard astrophysicist Donald H. Menzel, the foremost scientific UFO debunker of the 1950s and 60s, was a particularly vehement opponent of Velikovsky, denouncing him as “one of the greatest Cranks of modern times” and, as late as 1975, “gloating” over the demise of the pro-Velikovsky journal Pensée. (“Gloating” is Gordin’s word; may I infer from it something of Gordin’s sympathies?) Edward Condon, who in the late 1960s would head the University of Colorado UFO project that UFOlogists would denounce (with good reason) as a biased hatchet job, was also anti-Velikovsky but in a more moderate key. Reviewing Worlds in Collision in 1950 for the New Republic, he dismissed the book but would not call it a “hoax.”
(And a bit of information that’s not in Gordin: When in 1963 the American Behavioral Scientist put out an issue in support of Velikovsky, one of the dignitaries encouraging its publication was Vice Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, first director of the CIA–who in 1957 had joined the Board of Governors of NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena.)
So what are we to think of Velikovsky, and with him all the would-be Galileos putting themselves on the line for their unorthodox visions of reality? Gordin quotes Isaac Asimov: “For every Galileo who was right there were a thousand crackpots who were wrong”; and although I might wonder where Asimov gets his numbers from, the notion that true genius is a rare commodity makes good intuitive sense. Take the “thousand” seriously, and you give yourself an endless hole into which to pour your time. Mock or ignore them, and you violate the human spirit. You spurn the ancient injunction to “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).
The dilemma, like that of defining “pseudoscience,” is insoluble. Gordin writes (p. 208):
“At this point, you might very well be asking: This is all well and good, but what should be done about pseudoscience? That is a good question, but like most good questions, it does not possess a satisfying answer. We see various doctrines, propounded at different times, each of which has a different degree of offensiveness to separate individuals or groups within the scientific community. … If we want to have a science, we need to accept that there will be doctrines on the fringe fighting for acceptance (and some of them may very well be correct).”
Yes. “Some of them may very well be correct.” This need not call us to any action but to a humane and tolerant inaction: not to mock, not to sneer, not to sling epithets like “crank” or “crackpot.”
It’s the least we can do for Velikovsky, the least we can do for his kindred spirits, within UFOlogy and without. The least we can do for all who, rightly or wrongly, choose the path of thinking for themselves.
by David Halperin
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Great post. Thanks!!