This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 5, Issue 4, from 1991.
If you want to madden a medium, harass a homeopath or anger an astrologer just mutter the magical incantation ‘James Randi’. Although his name is not yet a household one in the UK, his investigations and exposures of quackery, pseudoscience and paranormal flimflam give his name similar popularity in psychic circles to that of matadors amongst the animal rights community.
Randi is soon, however, to be a familiar face to millions of television watchers all over the UK when the six-part mini-series James Randi: Psychic Investigator begins on ITV on 17 July. In this series, Randi challenges individuals who claim to have paranormal abilities to demonstrate their powers in front of the cameras and a live studio audience. It is probably giving away no great secret to reveal that the series is unlikely to cause the discerning viewer to queue for treatment at his local psychic surgery or to consult an astrologer before choosing a marital partner.
Randi, who as the ‘Amazing Randi’ had a long career as a magician and escapologist, also has the musical distinction of being the man who cut off the head of rock musician Alice Cooper with a magician’s guillotine. Nowadays, however, he uses exposure rather than execution, the scientific method rather than sleight of hand, to further the aims implicit in his adopted role of writer and psychic investigator – a career change which was greatly helped in 1986 by a $270,000 grant from the prestigious MacArthur Foundation.
In March of this year, Randi spent several weeks in Manchester at the studios of Granada television both filming his mini-series and writing a new book which is to be published in Britain as the series is broadcast. Despite a hectic schedule which left him visibly exhausted (off the set) by the time the sixth episode was in the can, Randi kindly agreed to talk to The Skeptic about his life and his work.
I began by asking him about his childhood and his early influences:
‘I was born in Canada a long time ago, and by the time I was 12 I saw a performance by the magician Harry Blackstone Senior and that inspired me enough that I got curious about conjuring and how people fool themselves and how they are deceived by other people, and I got very interested in it – interested enough that I took up the conjuring trade. I did magic for years – I didn’t tell my mother, she thought I was selling narcotics but I didn’t want to embarrass her. Seriously, my family didn’t take it very kindly – they wanted me to be a telephone company executive but I wasn’t quite cut out for that type of work – and up until the day he died I don’t think my father ever forgave me for going on stage. But it has been very satisfactory for me and has returned me a good living over the years – although I have never gotten rich, I have always supported myself and paid my bills. But about 10 or 12 years ago, I began to slowly get out of the straight performing mode and began to get requests for my lecture without the magic show that went with it.
‘I guess it began gradually when word got out at my college shows that I also had some opinions on the paranormal and would be willing to talk to perhaps a psychology class on the subject. Eventually I started to get requests to lecture, not just to individual classes, but to the whole school body and I found that I could pack the necessary materials for my lecture into a single attaché case rather than the large van which the equipment for my magic show required. And frankly I began to get a great deal of personal satisfaction out of doing the lectures rather than the magic shows. The shows were entertaining and I hoped that along the way the college audience would learn to consider things a little more carefully. My lectures too are meant to be entertaining – and I still generally do some conjuring demonstrations to illustrate how easily we can be fooled – but now I’m specifically trying to inform my audience as well and that’s an important function.’
Although Randi makes no attack on people’s personal beliefs – only on the unscrupulous exploitation of those beliefs – his investigations inevitably bring him into conflict with people’s belief systems. This is a general hazard implicit in a skeptical world view in that, for instance, the exposure of the Turin shroud as a forgery or a Christian faith healer as a fraud may be perceived by believers as an attack on their religion. Randi was, in fact, himself brought up within the Christian faith and was gently encouraged, as a child, to go to church. He was even, for a brief period, an Anglican altar boy but he never took religion terribly seriously and never saw a necessity for supernatural forces to explain the world he saw around him:
‘I can’t prove a negative but I don’t see enough evidence to convince me that gods exist Although I don’t have a dogmatic disbelief I guess I would define myself as an atheist rather than an agnostic because when you have lived 62 years, as I have, and never seen anything which required the assumption of a deity or the supernatural, it pretty well forces you to the conclusion that it’s all mythology. But I have to acknowledge that it’s interesting mythology and that it perhaps has its use in a society. Having said that, I think I would prefer to live in a culture in which people don’t have to lean on the supernatural in order to bring themselves solace. I don’t think it’s any harder to face a world in which you know, one day, you will cease to exist. I’ve published seven books with three more in the pipeline and that’s my immortality and I’m satisfied with it’.
Religious belief, of course, is a personal matter which is not the concern of Randi or any other skeptic but faith healing, particularly in the context of a major religion, is a topic about which Randi has strong views:
‘I’m afraid that faith healing when carried out by a minister of a major religion is particularly dangerous because people may conclude that as the man doesn’t make any money from it he is somehow more likely to be genuine. They seem to feel that money is the only possible motive for people’s actions. But of course a priest may practice healing – simply because it gives him enormous power. I’m not saying this in a negative fashion – I’m not saying a priest would do it in order to show his contact with divinity – rather that perhaps it gives him status in his community. My concern is whether or not it helps the people who believe they are being helped by it and I don’t think that it does. I think it leads them to a magical form of thinking which can be extremely dangerous if not fatal.’
‘Now, I accept that someone suffering from a complaint which has a psychosomatic component to it may feel that he has been helped by the faith-healer but you have to look ahead. What happens if that person now gets some sort of a cancerous condition which needs surgical and/or chemical attention – what does he do? He says “Hey it worked for my asthma, it worked for my migraine, now it will also cure the cancer because God can cure any of these things.” Of course my question is why would God give him the cancer in the first place? Is God some sort of capricious being who plays with you like a pair of dice? Does he say “Yea, I think I’ll flip this one a tumour – that will be fun to watch”. I find it so incredible that anyone can believe this kind of nonsense but the world is made of all different kinds of people with different kinds of beliefs.’
Despite his strong views, however, even if Randi were President for a day he would not wish to introduce legislation to ban all faith healers. Rather than someone who wishes to impose his views on others he sees himself primarily as an educator:
‘In a position of power and influence, I would seek only to use my power to educate people. I’m just a man walking down the street who sees someone being hit by a car and knocked into the street. I’m neither a lawyer nor a medical person but I can summon appropriate help – I drag the person out of the way of the traffic and I make sure that medical assistance is summoned and perhaps legal assistance as well – but that’s the most I can do. If that person then wants to crawl back into the traffic to get run over a second time, I may even go after him a second time and drag him out of the traffic. But if he gets angry with me and says “I would rather be run over, thank you” I’ll say “That’s your choice” and walk on my way but not without at least attempting to summon legitimate assistance for the person. That’s essentially what I’m doing, I see these people being ‘run down’, I go over and pick them up and say “You’ve been run down by forces beyond your ability to control them and I want to arm you so that you can control them and understand them in the future.” But if they say, “Sorry I don’t want to know about it,” then I simply leave them and go on my way.
‘I wouldn’t want to use legislation to prevent people feeling the way they want to feel and doing what they want to do as long as it doesn’t harm other people. I think people should have the right to be stupid if they want to be because in among all that range of things that I class as ‘stupid’ there may be lurking a new discovery.’
There is however, at least one exception to Randi’s unwillingness to use legislation to limit stupidity and irrationality and that is in specific areas of faith-healing where harm may undoubtedly be done:
‘I find it incredible that, here in Britain, you have no laws whatever against even the most extreme forms of faith-healing. I’m not talking now about healers who wave their hands over your body and put you in tune with the Cosmic Frequency. No, I’m talking about healers – who practise in this country – who poke things up the noses of their patients, and worse still, make real incisions in people’s bodies without antisepsis. They can do this quite freely and there is nothing to prevent them from doing so. This to me is a shocking situation and I would say to people in the UK that you should be in touch with your MP to see whether something can be done about it.
‘I really am not, in general, in favour of legislation but there has to be some limitation on the extent to which people can assault you physically and do some of these really horrendous things – particularly today when these people can be vectors of very serious communicable diseases that in many cases are fatal. I just hope that somebody doesn’t have to die at the hands of one of these so-called healers before an MP somewhere in the country decides there are enough complaints and attempts to introduce legislation to do something about it. Perhaps an important message to British skeptics is to encourage them to make their angry feelings on this subject known to members of parliament.’
Although Randi is not (and never claims to be) a scientist he did work many years ago as a research technician at the University of Toronto. He is extremely interested in science and the scientific method and is accustomed to working in close collaboration with leading scientists in some of his investigations:
‘I have a healthy interest in science but I have always said to my audiences, during my lectures: “I appear before you without any academic credentials whatsoever, which gives me a certain freedom to say things that academics dare not say because they have someone to be accountable to in the morning. I have to account to no-one except my own conscience.’
Despite the fact that he has a healthy respect for science in general and certain scientists in particular, Randi is not always in awe of a person because he has the letters ‘PhD’ after his name (I made no comment about my own academic qualifications at this stage of our conversation):
‘I have a theory about PhDs: I suspect that when the doctorates are handed out there is a secret chemical in the degree certificate that is absorbed into the skin. The chemical goes directly to the brain where it paralyses specific parts of the speech centre. This part of the brain controls two sentences only and those sentences are: “I was wrong” and “I don’t know”, because I ‘ve never heard a PhD ever give either of those answers. Now, it’s possible that I’m wrong and that the speech centre can handle these sentences perfectly well, but I have a feeling that the person with the PhD would just go “beedeee beedee beedee bee” when they tried to pronounce the words.
‘Joking apart, I have interacted very well with scientists over the years and can claim as good personal friends people like lsaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Murray Gell-Mann and the late Richard Feynman – whom I miss greatly. They have generally appreciated my efforts and have lent me their valuable advice over the years. They are pretty heady company to keep and I always feel a little awed when I’m in their presence. Of course, I have neither their accomplishments nor their reputation. I have a relatively minor reputation but nonetheless, though my spectrum is very narrow, I think it can be very strong and I think that the skeptical movement should also keep its spectrum fairly narrow.’
On the theme of breadth of interest, Randi feels that CSICOP, the main skeptical organisation in the US, with which he has been intimately connected for many years (until his recent resignation because of legal problems with Uri Geller) has, in some instances, overextended itself. Surprisingly he feels that the evolution versus creationism battle – which is still being fought in schools in some states in the US – is one in which CSICOP should not be involved:
‘I think the evolution/creationism debate is really a religious matter – naturally it’s a scientific matter too but I wouldn’t put it in the same bag as the paranormal and I think you can stretch yourself a little thin’.
Although Randi himself has no time for the creationist arguments, unlike many skeptics, he would be prepared to allow the proponents of creationism equal time in schools, at least as far as debate and discussion are concerned:
‘I think they should get equal time in schools, but the people that oppose them and represent the rational aspect of the argument should be very well chosen. I myself will not attempt to confront a creationist because I’m not trained in that direction. I don’t understand enough about biology and evolutionary theory to be able to argue from a point of strength and I think this is true of many skeptics.
‘However, when I talk of equal time I don’t mean that creationism should be taught in schools on an equal basis with evolution – it is not a science and should not be taught but it should be debated. I think that frequent debates should take place. Some of the creationists do a good job of representing their cause but most of it is just blather. Their arguments often only consist of unsubstantiated claims but nonetheless I think that the people who oppose them must be well trained. I’m happy to leave that to people like Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould in the United States who do a marvellous job of handling it.
‘As far as the remit of the skeptical movement is concerned, my personal preference is that CSICOP certainly comment on it from time to time but I think that, in the main, it is better for us to stay out of it because there are other things that require our attention. I guess I could be argued out of that view but I’ve always felt that it is better for me to keep my spectrum relatively narrow. I’m not going to spread myself too thin by arguing Santa Claus, squaring the circle and Fermat’s last theorem. I think we spin our wheels doing that sort of thing, other people can handle it much better.’
In the areas in which he does operate, Randi’s knowledge and experience are second to none but there was one classic case where (unlike the person with the PhD) he was able to say clearly ‘I was wrong’:
‘This wasn’t a paranormal subject at all. It was just highly unusual and began a few years ago when Time magazine called me to ask if I had seen an article in the New York Times that morning concerning a gentleman who claimed to be able to ‘read’ the surface of vinyl records. That is, he could look at the surface of an LP recording and tell you the name of the composer and which piece of music it was. At the time I didn’t realise that it was limited to classical composers from Beethoven to the present – no avant garde composers and so on – which limited the field a great deal. Anyway, I was asked by the journalist what I thought of it and I said that it was clearly possible as the information is on the surface of the LP but very improbable but I’d look into it. Of course by the end of the day he had demonstrated to my entire satisfaction that he could do it – although there was nothing whatever paranormal about his ability’ .
Having been ‘wrong’ once does he think it likely that one day someone will successfully demonstrate a paranormal ability and thus be entitled to the $10,000 cheque which he has been carrying around in his pocket for the last 25 years – and what would be his reaction be if this were to occur?
‘Oh, this would be a very exciting moment in my life and worth every cent of my $10,000, believe me. I am certainly prepared for a genuine demonstration of paranormal abilities – but I think that it is extremely unlikely. Put it this way; I have been sitting by the chimney for 35 years now and all my evidence tells me that Santa Claus is unlikely to appear on Christmas Eve (or any other day of the year). On the other hand should a fat man in a red suit come down my chimney on December 24, by golly, I’ll give him my list and tell him that I have been a very good boy!’
Whether St Nicholas would accept that James Randi, atheist, skeptic – and the only man in the world to have the profession ‘charlatan’ on his American Express card – had behaved himself for the previous 12 months is a matter about which even the credulous might be skeptical.
