The Metropolis

Review: The Amaz!ng Meeting - what happens when Cory Doctorow, Stephen Fry, Alan Moore, and the Amazing Randi play host to 1000 of their closest friends

Alan Hindle | Thursday 21 October, 2010 13:20

For over forty years, the Amazing Randi James, has been a conjuror, paranormalist investigator and the bane of Uri Geller. Battling snake oil merchants, sweaty faith healers, chatty mediums, and other congenial predators of the innocent and willfully ignorant, the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) has famously offered a million dollars to anyone providing a verifiable supernatural event. Nobody has ever come even close to claiming it.

At the end of this article I shall attempt to win that prize.

The Amaz!ng Meeting, an attempt by JREF to bring together sceptics for an entertaining exchange of ideas, has been held annually in Las Vegas since 2003. The second London version was recently staged at the Hilton Metropole Hotel. Organised for JREF by Tracy King, managing director of February Marketing, TAM brought together a dazzling array of speakers to discuss loose variations on a topic- What is scepticism and how can we use it to save the society we believe in?

The staggering wealth of intellectual goodies spilled at delegates’s feet made it seem like Santa Claus had delivered a bog roll-length wish list of guest speakers. Of course, nobody there believed in Santa Claus or Christmas, but we did have James Randi. We just needed a red suit.

A brief and incomplete recount of the conventions highlights would include the superb and hilarious MC’ing of Richard Wiseman, the fascinating tour of the weirder corners of the universe by Marcus Chown, Cory Doctorow discussing the madness of a proposal for a copyright firewall in the UK, an interview with Lost Girls graphic novel artist Melinda Gebbie, and Richard Dawkins. There was a light ripple of confusion in the applause following Dawkins’s statement that Christianity was the armour needed in our battle against the most evil religion of today, Islam. What he meant, I think, is that the actions of extremist Muslims – stonings, suicide bombings, attacks on free speech and “honour killing” of young women perceived by men as somehow besmirching their good name – are wrong and should be stopped, regardless of cultural relativity. Atheism had a frequent mention at the talks. While being a sceptic and humanist doesn’t necessarily preclude being religious, it is awfully hard to view the universe clearly if you think, at the heart of it all, there is a benevolent but bloodthirsty deity who created the world 6000 years ago in order to punish the vast majority of his children for not being narrowminded enough. A moral atheism was continually espoused, that we should be good to each other because it is right to do so, not because a lightning bolt took divine dictation on a couple slabs of rock three millennia ago.

Tim Minchin, an Australian comic and ginger cross between Kurt Cobain and Captain Jack Sparrow was a revelation for me. His hilarious and surprisingly tuneful video (produced also by Tracy King) for his beat poem Storm is below. I’ve seen and reviewed many beatbox and performance poets over the years, so it was very nice to finally find one I enjoyed.

Minchin interviewed Stephen Fry in a video made for the conference. They discussed the need to counter the public’s view of arrogant science and scientists, and the Daily Mail’s fixation on Fry as a secular antipope for signing a protest letter against taxpayers paying for Benedict XVI’s pontiffing around Britain in a bulletproof Hillman Husky. I had hopes, when I first heard Fry couldn’t attend in person, that he would appear in a live-video feed. The image of Fry’s rambling head floating above us, flames belching from pipes beside the screen, while a small dog we would be instructed to pay no attention to tugged at a curtain… Well, it appealed to me. However, watching the Wizard of Oz gently sparring with a slightly awe-struck Captain Sparrow was fun, too.

Also fun: Alan Moore’s voice burbling like congealed thunder across the room as he read a poem about his hometown; Sue Blackmore’s lifelong evolution from desperate believer in psychic phenomena to punky debunker; Simon Singh’s heroic legal battle against chiropractors suing him for pointing out they can’t actually cure cancer through bone massage; and fifteen year old Rhys Morgan winning the JREF’s Grassroots award for exposing the distributors of Miracle Mineral Solution (bleach) for claiming it cured, amongst other things, Crone’s Disease, which Morgan has. The panel discussion on New Media, ably guided by American blogger and podist, Rebecca Watson, finally succeeded in turning me on to Twitter, even though I don’t have a phone that tweets.

Before I continue, having witnessed on stage Watson, Gia Milinovich, Karen James, Kate Russell, Blackmore, Gebbie, King, Iszi Lawrence, and having spent two days chatting with folks at the conference, the best argument I can think of for bothering to save the Earth is that there are an awful lot of brilliant, hot, godless women on it.

So, what is Scepticism and how can we use it to save the society we (by whom I mean sceptics and those who actually care about its people rather than its institutions of money, authority and power) believe in?

The go-to definition of scepticism is the use of common sense, employing empirical evidence, against the immediately convenient but ultimately harmful delusions perpetuated by charlatans and the exclusively self-interested.

Optimism is a powerful drug, and human beings are hope junkies. Perhaps at some point in our evolution it served a useful purpose to lay our necks in the open jaws of wolves, even after the ravaged bodies of everybody else in the village have put forward a reasonable argument not to do so. Perhaps, our ancestor told him/herself, this wolf will turn out to actually be a benevolent pixie who’ll reward my faith with a pot of gold and a nice sandwich perfectly balanced between cheesiness and pickledom. The fact that everybody else is dead only proves this will be the case, because SOMEBODY has to win that magic free lunch eventually…

The best defense against having your neck chewed by wild animals is to not to let them. However, that’s more difficult that it sounds. We have evolved to need to be part of a herd but want to be individuals, to need comfort and security but want thrills and danger. Silver-tongued devils know how to ply weaknesses and make them seem strengths to their victims. Come lay your tender throat across my teeth and I’ll tell you a sweet, sweet story…

Human beings are not rational. We are irrational animals. A thin veneer of rationality coats the maelstrom of subconscious madness tumbling round our heads at night and during the day that makes us seem orderly. Being reasonable, showing “common sense”, is actually an effort. It takes work. When Uri Geller bends a spoon or John Edward has your dead granny ask for your credit card details, it’s easier to be compliantly amazed than to ponder seriously what is really happening. The problem for Amazing Randi is that even as he demonstrates the chicanery of the charlatans, it takes mental energy on behalf of his audience to counter the lies they have already become warm and fuzzy with. There is the story of the time that Randi demonstrated Geller’s deviousness and a university professor accused him of cheating by using his psychic powers to pretend that bending spoons is a cheap trick.

Why do people meekly accept conditions that are not only of no benefit but actually harm them? Why do the poor let the rich walk all over them? Optimism. The Great American Dream dictates that if I don’t rock the boat then someday, by hard work and miracles, I will be rich, too. In Britain it’s the opposite, possible a leftover from WWII. In the UK what appears to fire people’s imaginations is the idea that if I am austere today I can be less austere tomorrow. Extraordinary cuts now mean I will not have to face greater cuts in the future. Assuming the rich and the corporations, having used the leverage of this depression to gain an even larger percentage of the country’s net worth, are willing to give some of this back when the economy is stronger, this might be true. If, however, they decide to just keep the money and then demand more then the budget available to everybody else must continue to be reduced, so big cuts now don’t mean small cuts later, they mean smaller big cuts. Or bigger small cuts. Or bigger big or smaller small – but cuts all the same.

Despite the fact the economic meltdown came about because the banks, stock brokers and credit card companies inflated an imaginary financial system beyond believability, we are told the problem is actually about debt. Currency is an abstraction, the notion that things have intrinsic, fixed value that can be attached to bits of paper, numbers on a screen, or lumps of shiny yellow metal. There is now more money in the world than there are things to value. If people had any sense they’d value things which kept them warm in winter and our currency would be based on squirrel pelts.

I would argue that a great swath of flimflammery is currently being dragged across Britain’s collective eyeballs. Using reassuringly tough language, as though they truly are coming to grips with the problem, the Condems claim a massive public bloodletting is the cure. The poor and vulnerable, apparently, will be helped by the same policies various Friedmanesque rightwing thinktanks, Ronald Reagan, Mags Thatcher, Bush, and Augusto Pinochet advocated That the general population seems willing to accept this is a feat of paranormal magic that will earn me a million dollars from James Randi.

The parameters of my experiment can be set by Randi anyway he likes. My thesis is this:

That humans beings will accept personal/familial/social harm no matter how logically it is proven not to be to their benefit simply because they hope it will inevitably make them rich is nothing short of magic. Unless they can be encouraged to think otherwise. In a way, the biggest obstacle to me getting JREF’s jackpot is JREF.

Education, through such organisations as the JREF, and grassroots gatherings like Sceptics in the Pub and The Amaz!ng Meeting, can provide the tools we need to cut through any tissue of whoppers. We do need to want to pick up those tools, though. This is what makes things like The Amaz!ng Day so vital and important. It is FUN to be sceptical, and the people involved are funny, passionate, rigorous and dedicated.

In the meantime, though, I’ll take my million, thanks. Rather than a cheque or bag of ingots, though, I take payment in squirrel skins and wool, please. Ta very much.

To find out more, go to www.randi.org,, skeptic.org.uk/pub,, richarddawkins.net,, poddelusion.co.uk,, skepchick.org/blog,, scienceblogs.com/pharyngula…

---