ANOTHER VOICE
Gung-ho, gung-ho, it's off to war we go
AUBERON WAUGH
Perhaps not, but I feel this fact, if true, reflects more on Mr Randi's notion of proof than on a dowser's skills. I am not sure how I would set about proving that corn rings exist, beyond saying to Mr Randi: 'Here they are; look at them.' Does the evidence of the eyes constitute scien- tific proof, or must their existence be proved by other scientific measurements which may well not apply to them? The fact remains that until 35 years ago practi- cally every well ever sunk in the counties of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall (and poss- ibly further afield, for all I know) was sited by a dowser with his twig of hazel or willow. A well under my own house is 80 feet deep, dug through rock in about 1680. Are we to believe that people in those days were prepared to expend the enormous resources involved in digging an 80-foot hole in the ground without the certainty of finding water? If the empirical evidence of 10,000 or so wells still in use in the county of Somerset is not sufficient proof for Mr Randi, then I suggest the fault lies in his own system, not that of the dowsers.
Scepticism is a wonderful thing, and I suspect it has seldom been more needed than it is today, but I do not think it is nowadays most usefully applied to such ancient objects of scepticism as religious miracles, ghosts and the paranormal or supernatural. It is best applied nowadays to the enormous flood of statistical, scien- tific and sociological information pouring out of government offices, surveys, opin- ion polls, pressure groups and lobbies, agitating for more government money. There are days when practically every item in the newspapers or on television can be apportioned to one of these sources.
Two conspicuous examples of this tendency occur in the same issue as carried Oliver Gillie's exciting report about a revival of 'scepticism'.
Page 11 (`Living') of the Independent for Monday 13 August is almost entirely de- voted to a celebration of National Condom Week — an event not much celebrated elsewhere, perhaps, but clearly an impor- tant event in the Independent's year. A headline across the whole of the top of the page promised to explain 'Why condoms still have an image problem' — they do not work very well as contraceptives ergo nor as prophylactics. So far so good. Some healthy scepticism there. But it then goes on to repeat uncritically a piece of informa- tion which had already appeared in several newspapers a week before:
The World Health Organisation predicts that three million women worldwide will die of Aids in the Nineties. It has become the leading cause of death for women between 20 and 40 in major cities in the US, Western Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.
A useful discipline in reading any item of news nowadays is to identify the source and ask yourself which side its bread is buttered on. Would the World Health Organisation profit more from an alarmist view of the Aids threat, or from an unjustifiably complacent view? We have no means of contradicting its prediction of three million female deaths, since the data are not available and would, in any case, come from the same source. Personally, I am prepared to believe anything I am told about sub-Saharan Africa and the United States, whose health-obsessed, litigious, mentally unbalanced population may well be doomed by Aids as well. But of exactly which Western European cities is it true that Aids is the commonest form of death among women in the 20-40 age group? Our own Aids capital is Edinburgh, where the figure for Aids deaths among women is minuscule, and the figure for Aids deaths among women who are not heroin addicts is practically non-existent.
I suspect that this piece of information, plainly calculated to raise the Aids scare among ordinary, heterosexual non-addicts, is quite simply not true. If so, I feel we may safely discount the prediction of three million female deaths — even the informa- tion about sub-Saharan Africa and the United States. Three days earlier the Gov- ernment's Chief Medical Officer, Sir Donald Acheson, announced that the offi- cial government figure for Aids, derived from notifications received by the Govern- ment's Communicable Disease Surveill- ance Centre, were much too low. I wonder why. He was supported by Dr Patrick Dixon, director of the charitable Aids Care Foundation and Training. Once again, I wonder why. Yet we tend to treat all information from these respectable and official sources as if it was established fact.
The same considerations apply to nearly all the current affairs issues of the day from the 'greenhouse effect' to child abuse. Not much was made of the fact that police, having spent, I suspect, a couple of million pounds chasing the silly story of the bogus Bottom Inspectors, have now admitted it was a case of mass hysteria. Three months ago I sneered at a story that 55,000 human babies were being specially bred every year in the United States for the table of Satanists, who tortured and buggered their victims before eating them. On 12 August the Independent on Sunday, having investi- gated the matter, agreed that there was not a shred of evidence to show that a single baby had been so treated by Satanists, and revealed that the story was being put around by fundamentalist Christians.
That is an extreme example, but the universal credulity, the absence of intelli- gent scepticism, have more alarming man- ifestations. We are told we have a solemn duty to interfere militarily in an Arab squabble, bolstering one odious Middle Eastern regime against another, because our essential energy supply demands it. Elsewhere, we are told that we have 150 days' reserve supply of oil, and that Britain will be self-sufficient in oil for the next 25 years. No critical analysis is brought to bear on these contradictory claims, in the pathetic belief that a gung-ho posture in the Gulf will somehow win Mrs Thatcher the next election. Intelligent people have a duty to apply their scepticism to current affairs, or we will find we all end up being eaten by Mr Kelvin Mackenzie.
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