Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
I think it comes from the fact that I try my hardest to treat people kindly and fairly, so I make the mistaken assumption that most other people act the same way. This is a strategy that works well until it doesn't. Because while there are lots of good people out there, there are a significant number who simply aren't.
The subset of these malefactors I run into the most often are scammers. Being a struggling author, I get daily emails from people who are trying to take my two-digit monthly royalty statement and convert it into a one-digit monthly royalty statement via fake offers for promotion and marketing. The whole enterprise is evil -- preying on the hopes and dreams of a hard-working creative to enrich their own bank accounts while giving nothing of value in return.
Simply put, these people are parasites. The tapeworms of the publishing industry.
I generally just delete emails from scammers, but I have to admit that my friend, the awesome writer Andrew Butters, has an inspired approach:
Scammer: Hello Mr. Author Andrew Butters.
Andrew: No.
So it's fortunate that a great many of them aren't all that good at it. The majority of the scam promotion emails I get have a slick, glib feel that my wife thinks (and I agree) comes from having fed my Amazon book blurbs into an AI program, but this hasn't stopped them from sometimes accidentally blundering and giving away the game. I got not one, but two emails targeting my novel Lock & Key that started out exactly the same way:
Darren Ault shoots a bullet, humanity vanishes, and suddenly Vikings, cults, and a foul-mouthed librarian of timelines are all part of the mix—Lock & Key reads like a full-blown temporal rollercoaster. Yet your reviews are far fewer than the epic adventures inside. Your mix of humor, mind-bending time travel, and irreverent sci-fi is exactly the type of story that clicks with this group. Want to see what happens when 2,000+ readers dive in and leave verified reviews that could boost your book across the sci-fi/fantasy world?
Never mind that on page one, we find out that Darren was the victim, not the shooter, and the entire fucking story is working out why he wasn't killed when he was shot point-blank in the head.
I also had one regarding my novella Convection that read like a book report written by someone who hadn't actually read the book, but is a real master at using florid language:
I just reviewed Convection, and it’s an atmospheric, slow-burn survival thriller that delivers on multiple fronts, natural disaster suspense, psychological tension, and a creeping sense of dread. The Bayou Vista Apartments setting is brilliantly claustrophobic: a handful of strangers trapped together while a Category 5 hurricane pounds the Louisiana coast, each bringing their own secrets to the storm. Your pacing turns the hurricane into both a physical and emotional pressure cooker, while the ensemble cast dynamics keep the tension sharp and unpredictable.
Well, thank you for all that, but once again, there's nothing there you couldn't have learned from the book blurb. At least, unlike the Lock & Key scams, you didn't miss the whole damn point of the story.
I do get a laugh out of the ones who can't even make the scam sound authentic. I have had emails start out "Hello Bonnet," which strikes me as a little abrupt if you're trying to hook me in to giving you money. I had another tell me how much they'd enjoyed my book If Only You Knew, which isn't even close to any of my book titles. And just last week I had one that began, I shit you not, "Hello Anastasia."
But none of these came as close to catching me flat-footed as the exchange I recently had with someone who claimed to be the award-winning author Ottessa Moshfegh, which started out with a nice (and not at all fulsome or overdone) comment about how she'd seen my Facebook author page and thought my books sounded interesting.
To my own credit, my first thought was to wonder why an author of Ottessa Moshfegh's stature would be hanging around on the Facebook author page of a relative unknown like myself, but... well, the algorithm is weird, and I do often see pages for people I've never heard of. And the other peculiar thing is that I don't promote my books much on Facebook (hell, I don't promote my books much period, but that's another matter). But there was something about her initial email that was so low-key and casual that it took me off my guard.
So we had an email exchange that was courteous and friendly, asking about stuff like what my inspirations were and which of my books would be the best to start with. I asked her the same thing, and got thoughtful responses that sounded entirely authentic.
Then, in an informal, almost offhand way, she asked me how I was doing with marketing. That was the point I definitely got that old by-the-pricking-of-my-thumbs feeling. I responded that it was the part of the job I hated the most, because I kind of suck at self-promotion. She came back with a heartfelt, "We all feel that way!"... but she knew a good publicist, and if I was interested she could put us in touch.
Aha. There it is.
Fortunately, the real Ottessa Moshfegh has a Substack with "contact me" information (linked above), so I decided to do a little reality check. I sent her an email saying that I'd had a nice exchange with someone who claimed to be her, and if it really was her then cool beans, but if not I thought she should know she had an impersonator. A day later, she wrote back.
It was not her. And she was pissed.
Not at me, of course. In fact, she apologized to me (not that it was in any way her fault), and thanked me for letting her know. The real Ottessa seems like a class act, and it double sucks that a scammer would impersonate her, and use her name, reputation, and cachet to try to bilk a starving (well, figuratively speaking, anyhow) author like myself.
The upshot is that Pseudottessa buggered off and I haven't heard from her since. But if she happens to be reading this, here's a message from me and from real Ottessa:
Go to hell.
So I may be trusting, but I'm learning. I might get fooled for a little while, but it's never long enough that I'm even tempted to give them money. Part of this is that I'm a world-class skinflint, but it's also that I've had enough experience with people in the publishing world who make extravagant promises and then deliver fuck-all that I've gotten wary.
I'm still generally an optimist about people; I think on the whole it's better than being a cynic. My dad used to say "I'd rather be an optimist who is wrong than a pessimist who is right," and I think that's spot-on. But it's also made me hate scammers even more, because they take advantage of people's naïveté and trust, and that's just an ugly thing to do.
So be on the lookout for these guys. Especially with the help of AI, they're getting pretty fancy about it, and it's easy to see how the unwary might be taken in. Not all of them are as stupid as the guy who thought my name was Anastasia. And mark my words, as we get better at recognizing them, they'll find other, better tricks to pull.
Evolution in the Kingdom of Scamalot. Which is kind of a scary thought.
I can't tell you how many times I've had to utter that sentence. Regular readers of Skeptophilia know why; I have a peculiar disability called prosopagnosia, or "face blindness." I have a nearly complete inability to recognize faces, even of people I've known for some time.
Well, that's not exactly true. I recognize people differently than other people do. I remember the people I know as lists of features. I know my wife has curly brown hair and freckles and an infectious smile, but I honestly have no mental image of her. I can't picture my own face, although -- like with my wife -- I could list some of my features.
That system doesn't have a high success rate, however, and a lot of the time I have no idea who the people around me are, especially in a place where there are few clues from context. I have pretty serious social anxiety, and my condition makes it worse, having put me in the following actual situations:
introducing myself twice to the same person at a party
getting a big, enthusiastic hug and an "it's been so long!" from someone in our local gym, and never figuring out who I was talking to
having two of my students switch seats and not realizing it for three weeks, until finally they 'fessed up
going to see a movie, and not knowing until the credits rolled that the main characters were played by Kenneth Branagh, Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi, Michelle Pfeiffer, Daisy Ridley, and Johnny Depp
countless incidents of my fishing for clues ("so, how's your, um... spouse, parents, kids, pets, job..."), sometimes fruitlessly
My anxiety has made me really good at paying attention to, and recalling, other cues like voice, manner of dress, posture, walk, hair style, and so on. But when one or more of those change -- such as with the student I had one year who cut her hair really short during the summer, and whom I didn't recognize when she showed up in one of my classes on the first day of school the following year -- it doesn't always work.
One up side to the whole thing is that I do get asked some funny questions. One student asked me if when I looked at people, their faces were invisible. Another asked me if when I look in the bathroom mirror in the morning, I don't know that's me. (It's a pretty shrewd guess that it is me, since there's generally no one else in there at the time.)
But at least it's not as bad as the dumb questions that my former students who are identical triplets sometimes get. One of them was once asked by a friend how she kept track of which triplet she was.
No, I'm not kidding. Neither, apparently, was the person who asked the question.
In any case, all of this comes up because of some research that came out in the journal Cortex that tried to parse what's happening (or what's not happening) in the brains of people like me. Some level of prosopagnosia affects about one person in fifty; some of them lose their facial recognition ability because of a stroke or other damage to the fusiform gyrus, the part of the brain that seems to be a dedicated face-memory module. Others, like me, were born this way. Interestingly, a lot of people who have lifelong prosopagnosia take a while to figure it out; for years, I just thought I was unobservant, forgetful, or a little daft. (All three of those might be true as well, of course.) It was only after I had enough embarrassing incidents occur, and -- most importantly -- saw an eye-opening piece about face blindness by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes, that I realized what was going on.
In any case, the paper in Cortex looked at trying to figure out why people who are face-blind often do just fine on visual perception tests, then fail utterly when it comes to remembering photographs of faces. The researchers specifically tried to parse whether the difference was coming from an inability to connect context cues to the face you're seeing (e.g., looking at someone and thinking, "She's the woman who was behind the counter at the library last week") versus simple familiarity (the more nebulous and context-free feeling of "I've seen that person before"). They showed each test subject (some of whom weren't face-blind) a series of 120 faces, then a second series of 60 faces where some of them were new and some of them were in the previous series. The researchers were not only looking for whether the subjects could correctly pick out the old faces, but how confident they were in their answers -- the surmise being that low confidence on correct answers was an indicator of relying on familiarity rather than context memory.
The prosopagnosics in the test group not only were bad at identifying which faces were old and which ones they'd seen before; but their confidence was really low, even on the ones they got right. Normally-sighted people showed a great deal more certainty in their answers. What occurs to me, though, is that knowing they're face-blind would skew the results, in that we prosopagnosics are always doubtful we're recalling correctly. So these data could be a result of living with the condition, not some kind of underlying mechanism at work. I almost never greet someone first, because even if I think I might know them, I'm never certain. A lot of people think I'm aloof because of this, but the reality is that I honestly don't know which of the people I'm seeing are friends and which are total strangers.
One thing about the researchers' conclusion does ring true, however. The subconscious "feeling of familiarity" is definitely involved. My experience of face blindness isn't that I feel like I'm surrounded by strangers; it's more that everyone looks vaguely familiar. The problem is, that feeling is no stronger when I see a close friend than when I see someone I've never met before, so the intensity of that sense -- what apparently most people rely on -- doesn't help me.
So that's the view of the world through the eyes of someone who more often than not doesn't know who he's looking at. Fortunately for me, (1) at this point in my life I'm unembarrassed by my condition, and (2) most of the people in my little village know I'm face-blind and will say, "Hi, Gordon, it's Steve..." when they walk up, and spare me the awkwardness of fishing for clues. (Nota bene: This only works if it actually is Steve. Otherwise it would be even more awkward.) But hopefully some good will come from this research, because face blindness is kind of a pain in the ass.
"Our results underscore that prosopagnosia is a far more complex disorder that is driven by more than deficits in visual perception," said study first author Anna Stumps, a researcher in the Boston Attention Learning Laboratory at VA Boston. "This finding can help inform the design of new training approaches for people with face blindness."
You've undoubtedly heard British philosopher Thomas Hobbes's famous quote that in the past, our forebears' lives were "nasty, poor, brutish, and short." That's certainly true in my ancestors' case, given that just about all of them were poverty-stricken French and Scottish peasants who uprooted and came over to North America because they thought for some reason it would be lots better to be poverty-stricken peasants over here.
I've had at least some inkling about how difficult life was back then since my history classes in college, but it was always in a purely academic way. While my parents weren't wealthy by any stretch, we never wanted for food on the table, and any struggles they had paying the bills were well hidden and not talked about. As an adult, I went through a long period in my life when I was the sole member of the family with a paying job, and it was scary to think that if I'd lost it, we would have been screwed; but I never really was in any danger of that. As long as I kept showing up to school every day and teaching my classes with a reasonable level of competence, I could count on being able to pay the mortgage.
Hundreds of years ago, though, that simply wasn't true for the vast majority of humanity. I think what really brought home to me the precarious existence most people led was when I read the book The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History by Brian Fagan (which I highly recommend). For most of human history, people have literally been one bad harvest season from starvation and one sudden epidemic from being wiped out en masse. All it took was a single prolonged drought, early frost, or extended period of cool, rainy weather spoiling the crops, and people had nothing to fall back on.
No wonder so many of them were superstitious. It's easy to put your faith in magical thinking when your lives hinge on a set of conditions you don't understand, and couldn't control even if you did.
What is striking, though, is how insulated the leaders of countries have always felt from the effects of all of this -- often to the extent of ignoring them completely. There's an argument to be made that it was a series of weather-related poor harvests that lit the tinder box in the French Revolution (and many of the leaders didn't find out their mistake until they were being led to the guillotine). But to take a less well-known example, let's look at a paper that came out last week in the journal Science Advances about a different civilization, the fascinating Classical Mayan culture, which lasted over six hundred years -- from about 250 to 900 C. E. -- completely dominating the Yucatán Peninsula in southern Mexico and northern Central America before collapsing with astonishing speed. Cities were abandoned to the jungle, the elaborate building and carving stopped entirely, and the entire region went largely silent until the rise of the city of Mayapan in the twelfth century.
Scientists from the University of Cambridge did a study of the chemical composition of the oxygen isotope ratios in the limestone deposited on stalagmites in caves in the northern Yucatán, which can be read in layers like tree rings. Oxygen isotope ratios are a good proxy for rainfall; oxygen-18:oxygen-16 ratios tend to drop during the rainy season, so an overall low 18:16 ratio is a strong signal of drought.
And what the scientists found was that during the time between 871 C.E. and 1021 C.E. there was a severe thirteen-year drought, and three shorter (five to six year) droughts. Water supplies dried up, crops failed, trade stopped, and the inevitable happened -- the common people blamed their leaders. Violent revolution ensued, and in the end, a civilization that had dominated the region for centuries collapsed completely.
Just last week they announced plans to deliberately destroy the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, one of our chief climate monitoring satellites. Not because it's malfunctioning; it's working fine. Not because it costs lots of money; it's already paid for.
No, the reason they want to destroy the satellite is the same as the reason they stopped keeping track of new COVID cases during the height of the pandemic. If you don't measure something, you can pretend it's not happening.
Destroying the OCO won't stop the effects of anthropogenic climate change, of course. It'll just prevent us from seeing them coming.
So I may have misspoken at the beginning, in leading you to believe that our ancestors were any different from us with regards to the fragility of our existence -- and the tendency to fall back on unscientific thinking. But let us hope that the ignorance and greed of our current elected officials won't return us to another era of nasty, poor, brutish, and short lives, where the risk of starvation was never far away.
This time, though, if it happens it won't be an unfortunate result of living in a world we don't understand. It will be a self-inflicted wound caused by trusting power-hungry people who know perfectly well what they are doing, but value short-term expediency over the long-term habitability of the planet.
If I had to pick my favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the clear winner would be "The Inner Light." Some classic episodes like "Darmok," "Frames of Mind," "Yesterday's Enterprise," "The Offspring," "Cause and Effect," "Remember Me," "Time's Arrow," "The Chase," and "Best of Both Worlds" would be some stiff competition, but "The Inner Light" not only has a beautiful story, but a deep, heartwrenching bittersweetness, made even more poignant by a tour-de-force performance by Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
If you've not seen it, the plot revolves around the Enterprise encountering a huge space station of some kind, of apparent antiquity, and in the course of examining it, it zaps Captain Picard and renders him unconscious. What his crew doesn't know is that it's dropped him into a dream where he's not a spaceship captain but an ordinary guy named Kamin, who has a wife and children and a job as a scientist trying to figure out what to do about the effect of his planet's sun, which has increased in intensity and is threatening devastating drought and famine.
As Kamin, he lives for forty years, watching his children grow up, living through the grief of his wife's death and the death of a dear friend, and ultimately grows old without ever finding a solution to his planet's dire circumstances. All the while, the real Captain Picard is being subjected to ongoing interventions by Dr. Crusher to determine what's keeping him unconscious, and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to bring him out of it. In the end, which makes me ugly cry every damn time I watch it, Kamin lives to watch the launch of an archive of his race's combined knowledge, realizing that the sun's increase in intensity is leading up to a nova that will destroy the planet, and that their civilization is doomed. It is, in fact, the same archive that the Enterprise happened upon, and which captured Picard's consciousness, so that someone at least would understand what the civilization was like before it was wiped out tens of thousands of years earlier.
"Live now," Kamin says to his daughter, Maribol. "Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again."
And with that, Picard awakens, to find he has accumulated four decades of memories in the space of about a half-hour, an experience that leaves a permanent mark not only on his mind, but his heart.
*brief pause to stop bawling into my handkerchief*
I was immediately reminded of "The Inner Light" by a paper I stumbled across in Nature Astronomy, called, "Alkali Metals in White Dwarf Atmospheres as Tracers of Ancient Planetary Crusts." This study, led by astrophysicist Mark Hollands of the University of Warwick, did spectroscopic analysis of the light from four white dwarf stars, which are the remnants of stellar cores left behind when Sun-like stars go nova as their hydrogen fuel runs out at the end of their lives. In the process, they vaporize any planets that were in orbit around them, and the dust and debris from those planets accretes into the white dwarf's atmosphere, where it's detectable by its specific spectral lines.
In other words: the four white dwarfs in the study had rocky, Earth-like planets at some point in their past.
"In one case, we are looking at planet formation around a star that was formed in the Galactic halo, 11-12.5 billion years ago, hence it must be one of the oldest planetary systems known so far," said study co-author Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay, in an interview in Science Daily. "Another of these systems formed around a short-lived star that was initially more than four times the mass of the Sun, a record-breaking discovery delivering important constraints on how fast planets can form around their host stars."
This brings up a few considerations, one of which has to do with the number of Earth-like planets out there. (Nota bene: by "Earth-like" I'm not referring to temperature and surface conditions, but simply that they're relatively small, with a rocky crust and a metallic core. Whether they have Earth-like conditions is another consideration entirely, which has to do with the host star's intrinsic luminosity and the distance at which the planet revolves around it.) In the famous Drake equation, which is a way to come up with an estimate of the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe, one of the big unknowns until recently was how many stars hosted Earth-like planets; in the last fifteen years, we've come to understand that the answer seems to be "most of them." Planets are the rule, not the exception, and as we've become better and better at detecting exoplanets, we find them pretty much everywhere we look.
When I read the Hollands et al. paper, I immediately began wondering what the planets around the white dwarfs had been like before they got flash-fried as their suns went nova. Did they harbor life? It's possible, although considering that these started out as larger stars than our Sun, they had shorter lives and therefore less time for life to form, much less to develop into a complex and intelligent civilization. And, of course, at this point there's no way to tell. Any living thing on one of those planets is long since vaporized along with most of the planet it resided on, lost forever to the ongoing evolution of the cosmos.
If that's not gloomy enough, it bears mention that this is the Earth's ultimate fate, as well. It's not anything to worry about (not that worry would help in any case) -- this eventuality is billions of years in the future. But once the Sun exhausts its supply of hydrogen, it will balloon out into a red giant, engulfing the inner three planets and possibly Mars as well, then blow off its outer atmosphere (that explosion is the "nova" part), leaving its exposed core as a white dwarf, slowly cooling as it radiates its heat out into space.
Whether by that time we'll have decided to send our collective knowledge out into space as an interstellar archive, I don't know. In a way, we already have, albeit on a smaller scale than Kamin's people did; Voyager 2 carries the famous "golden record" that contains information about humanity, our scientific knowledge, and recordings of human voices, languages, and music, there to be decoded by any technological civilization that stumbles upon it. (It's a little mind-boggling to realize that in the 48 years since Voyager 2 was launched, it has traveled about 20,000,000,000 kilometers, so is well outside the perimeter of the Solar System; and that sounds impressive until you realize that's only 16.6 light hours away, and the nearest star is 4.3 light years from us.)
So anyhow, those are my elegiac thoughts on this August morning. Dead planets, dying stars, and the remnants of lost civilizations. Sorry to be a downer. If all this makes you feel low, watch "The Inner Light" and have yourself a good cry. It'll make you feel better.
I remember reacting with honest bafflement when Barack Obama was running for his first term as president in 2008, and one of the criticisms levied against him was that he was part of the "academic elite."
I mean, don't you want your elected leaders to be smarter than you are? I sure do. I know I'm not smart enough to run an entire country. Hell, I'm not smart enough to be mayor of my village, much less responsible for anything grander. But strangely, that doesn't seem to be the way a lot of people think. My first inkling that I was in the minority for wanting the president to be brilliant was when George W. Bush was running during the lead-up to the 2000 election, and I heard people say they were voting for him because he was "one of the common folk" and "someone you could sit down and have a beer with."
Never mind that in Bush's case, he was born into money, and his folksy aw-shucks demeanor was a sham; it worked. He got elected (twice). "Vote for Dubya, At Least He Won't Make You Feel Intellectually Inferior" apparently was a viable campaign slogan.
The result of this attitude, of course, is that we end up with leaders who are grossly incompetent. Some of them are genuine lunatics. And shockingly, for once I'm not talking about Donald Trump here.
Eric Burlison is a member of the House of Representatives from Missouri. He made a name for himself in 2013 by taking a copy of a gun control bill and using it for target practice at a gun range, then posting a video of the event. Prior to the Biden/Trump debate in 2019, he informed people in outraged tones that Biden was going to be "jacked up" -- on Mountain Dew. Last year he was one of 26 Representatives -- all Republican -- who voted against a resolution condemning white supremacy. He has repeatedly claimed that the January 6 riots weren't incited by Trump, whom Burlison idolizes, but by the FBI, as part of a plot to discredit Dear Leader.
So far, none of this is outside the norm for the GOP these days. But just a few days ago, Burlison showed that he'd set up permanent residence in CrazyTown with a claim that has a long history, but that I'd dearly hoped had gone the way of the dodo.
Burlison thinks that the Nephilim are real, and that the Smithsonian Institute has bones of giant humanoids from North America (fossils that are evidence of the truth of Genesis 6:4, "There were giants in the Earth in those days"), but is covering it up.
For those of you who are neither (1) biblical scholars nor (2) people who frequent the dark corners of Woo-Woo Conspiracy World, the Nephilim are a race of big powerful dudes mentioned in a handful of places in the Bible, and who were supposedly the offspring of humans and fallen angels. And when I say they were big, I mean abso-fucking-lutely enormous. In Numbers 13:32-33, we read, "And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim; and we were in our own sight verily as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight."
I mean, I'm pretty much of average height and build, but even so it'd take someone mighty tall to make me feel verily as a grasshopper.
A couple of archaeologists in Brazil excavating some Nephilim bones, or possibly a clever use of PhotoShop
Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall that way back in 2015 I wrote about a guy named Steven Quayle, who did a series of YouTube videos about how not only were there giant bones in the Smithsonian, but there was a program being run by the Evil Deep State to use Nephilim DNA to create a race of giant super-soldiers. So that'd be pretty fucking scary, except for the fact that to believe it, you'd have to have the IQ of a bowl of pudding.
Which brings me back to Eric Burlison, who is all in on the idea of the Nephilim. He's so convinced that "giants are real" (direct quote) that he was asked to speak at a conference of true believers called "NephCon 2025," which I swear I am not making up.
And one of the things he promised to do, in his keynote speech at NephCon, was to launch an investigation into the Smithsonian and their nefarious coverup of enormous humanoid bones that came from the descendants of fallen angels.
Your tax dollars at work.
Oh, and I haven't yet mentioned that Burlison is a prominent member of the House Oversight Committee, the main investigative panel in Congress. Because having a member of one of the most powerful committees in our government giving the impression that he thinks Lost in Space is a scientific documentary isn't scary at all.
Every new thing that comes out of the current administration prompts me to think that we are truly in the most idiotic timeline possible. Then along comes another elected official who does or says something even more idiotic. It brings to mind the quip by Albert Einstein, "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
There's probably nothing much that can be done about Burlison; he's pretty well entrenched as the Republican representative from one of the deepest red regions of the country. In that part of Missouri, a hard-boiled egg could run against a qualified Democrat, and people would vote for the egg as long as there was an "R" after its name. So I'm afraid we're stuck with him. At least if he's wasting his time searching for giant bones in storerooms in basement of the Smithsonian, he'll have less time to work toward taking away civil rights from people who are the wrong color, religion, or sexuality, which seems to be the other favorite occupation of the GOP lately.
How people like Burlison get elected has always been a mystery to me, but I'm beginning to think that it's not a fluke, but a systemic problem with the way a great many Americans think. It all brings to mind the rather terrifying quote from French lawyer and diplomat Joseph de Maistre; "Every country gets the government it deserves."
Have you ever heard of Mrs. Tottenham, of 54 Berners Street, Westminster, London, England?
I'm guessing probably not. At least I hadn't, until a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about why she's memorable. Well, not her in and of herself, exactly; but what happened to the poor woman, through no fault of her own.
Mrs. Tottenham is described as a "wealthy woman of good social standing" who lived in one of the better parts of Greater London, and seems to have mostly led an ordinary life until the morning of November 27, 1810. She was awakened at five in the morning by a knock on the door. Hastily donning her dressing gown, she answered it, and was met by a chimney sweep who said he'd "been sent for." No sooner had she dismissed him, saying she'd done no such thing, than she was alarmed to see several other chimney sweeps approaching, followed in quick succession by a dozen different coal wagons, the drivers of each claiming that they'd been told to deliver coal to that address that morning.
But that was only the beginning.
At seven, the bakers started arriving. One of them carried an elaborate wedding cake. The bakers were followed by bootmakers. After that, according to The London Times, there followed "upholsterers' goods in cart-loads, pianofortes, linen, jewellery [sic] and every other description of furniture, [that] were lodged as near as possible to the door of No. 54, with anxious tradespeople and a laughing mob. With each new wave of arrivals, the crowd around the property grew, as many stayed to watch who would be the next to arrive... Police summoned to the scene arrived to find six stout men bearing an organ, surrounded by wine-porters with permits, barbers with wigs, mantua-makers with band-boxes, [and] opticians with the various articles of their trade."
As the day progressed, she was accosted by forty butchers and forty fishmongers, each bringing a delivery of their respective viands, and pastry chefs with an estimated 2,500 raspberry tarts. The police attempted to put a stop to it by blocking off both ends of the street, but people simply climbed over the barriers, saying they had their jobs to do. In the mid-afternoon the chairmen of the Bank of England and the East India Company arrived, and shortly afterward the Duke of Gloucester, the last-mentioned of which was told that he'd been summoned to the deathbed of an obscure relative.
At five in the afternoon, about fifty women showed up, saying that they'd been informed there was an opening for domestic servants. But the real pièce de resistance came at six, when an undertaker arrived bearing a coffin -- made to Mrs. Tottenham's measurements.
The hilarity -- for everyone but poor Mrs. Tottenham -- kept up until after dark, when the crowds finally dispersed, and the disappointed and pissed off merchants et al. gave up and went home.
A drawing of the Berners Street hoax by William Heath (1810) [Image is in the Public Domain]
The entire day, from a rented room across the street, there was a young man watching. His name was Theodore Edward Hook. Hook was the scion of minor nobility, and had been a brilliant (and precocious) student at Oxford University, matriculating at the age of sixteen. He was a talented writer and musician, and in fact published his first novel when he was a teenager.
He was also a wicked practical joker.
He had made a bet -- the winner received one guinea -- that he could turn any address in London into the most talked-about spot in the world. Working with two accomplices (who have never been identified, but one was alleged to be "a famous actress") he sent out between one and four thousand letters and postcards in the weeks preceding November 27. The instructions differed, of course, but most of the recipients were given a specific time to arrive. A bevy of dance instructors were told that Mrs. Tottenham was looking for lessons in the art for her daughter. Some estate salesmen were informed that she required assistance in selling some property. The two aforementioned chairmen were sent sinister notes that there had been allegations of fraud against an (unnamed) employee, and they should come to that address to hear "information that would be to their benefit."
Once Hook saw that his prank had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, he got a little scared and decided it would be prudent to absent himself from town for a while, so he spent several weeks in the countryside with friends. And sure enough, a search for the perpetrator(s) was undertaken, and significant rewards offered -- to no avail.
But it's an interesting thing about the psychology of people like Hook; they can't bear thinking that no one will ever find out how astonishingly clever they are. (There have been murder mysteries predicated on this theme, my favorite of which is the brilliantly-crafted And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, which I first read at age twelve with the result of being hooked on mysteries for life.) Hook knew he was suspected of having had something to do with the Berners Street hoax, but no one could prove it, so all too quickly the furor died down.
Exactly what an egotist like Hook didn't want. So...
... he admitted it.
It was in his semi-autobiographical novel Gilbert Gurney, and spoken by the eponymous main character, but still, it's about as close to a confession as you can get:
[T]here's nothing like fun – what else made the effect in Berner's Street? I am the man – I did it... copy the joke, and it ceases to be one; – any fool can imitate an example once set – but for originality of thought and design, I do think that was perfect.
Gilbert Gurney wasn't published until 1836. There was no statute of limitations in England in the early nineteenth century, but after twenty-six years, the justice system didn't seem to think it was worth the trouble to go after Hook. And interestingly, there was at least one allegation that he was laying claim to something he hadn't done. Hook died in 1841 (of the effects of "dissipation"), and afterward his friend Nancy Matthews said that the prank wasn't Hook's doing, but had been perpetrated by "a young gentleman, now one of the most rigid churchmen in the kingdom."
Most people, though, think that Matthews was trying to cover up for the lousy reputation of the Dearly Departed, and that Hook really was the guilty party. Why he had targeted the unfortunate Mrs. Tottenham is unknown; some think he had a grudge against her for some reason, others that she was simply wealthy, a little uptight... and there was a room for rent across the street from where she lived.
I find it interesting to consider what would impel someone to do something like this. It's funny, yes -- I have to admit laughing several times while reading the account -- but good heavens, consider the poor merchants and tradespeople who brought thousands of items thinking they were going to make some sales, and were turned away without so much as a ha'penny. I'd have been pissed. And Hook is damn lucky he wasn't caught; he'd likely have ended up in prison, and sued for everything he had to pay all the people whose services he'd fraudulently requested.
I've been the victim of practical jokes myself -- probably everyone has -- and there are ones that were genuinely good-hearted, like the students who put a huge wooden replica of the black obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey in my classroom on the last day of school, and arranged for the principal to play the theme music over the loudspeakers as soon as I walked in the door. (I have never before or since been awake and so convinced I was dreaming.) But practical jokes often contain a streak of cruelty, or (like Berners Street) at least a touch of "I don't give a damn whom I inconvenience." "I was just joking" has been used way too many times to cover up for real harm done. (It's why in general I loathe April Fool's Day.)
Anyhow, that's the story of one of the most elaborate pranks ever staged. And I have to admit he planned the whole thing to a fare-thee-well. Mrs. Tottenham came out none the worse for wear, and apparently told the story to uproarious laughter at cocktail parties for the rest of her life. Me, though -- I'd much prefer having other stories to tell to my friends, so if any of you get any clever ideas, please don't. For one thing, my three dogs would freak right the hell out. For another, I have recently moved to an uncharted island off the coast of Mozambique, so you couldn't find me anyhow.
I've been interested for years in how religions get started.
There are a handful that come about from the work of a single person; Joseph Smith with the Church of Latter-Day Saints, L. Ron Hubbard's creation of Scientology, and Mary Baker Eddy's launching of the Christian Science movement come to mind. But I'm much more curious about ones that arise more organically, from a groundswell of belief that ends up sort of taking on a life of its own.
Of course, none of this happens in vacuo. Belief systems always arise because of a combination of social conditions and prior beliefs. Previous religious traditions are often combined, rearranged, jiggered around, and have new components added, resulting in something sufficiently different to what came before to warrant classification as a new religion. In fact, this is so common that the anthropologists have a name for it; syncretism.
The name translates to Our Lady of Holy Death, and the deity is a female figure that is a personification of death. But it's not a belief system that reveres death; Santa Muerte is considered a protector figure, listening to and granting the prayers of devotees, and the association with death is that she guarantees to the faithful a peaceful transition to a pleasant afterlife. Her depiction, though, isn't exactly reassuring:
[Image is in the Public Domain]
The Church of Santa Muerte got its start in Mexico, and does share with my previous examples the fact that its meteoric rise popularity is largely due to the efforts of one person, Enriquita Romero, who founded a shrine to the goddess in Mexico City in 2001. But the roots of the religion go back to at least the mid-twentieth century, when a belief system arose that took parts of Roman Catholicism and melded them with Indigenous beliefs, particularly the worship of the Aztec goddess of death Mictēcacihuātl, who played a similar role in pre-colonization Mexico.
You're probably wondering if the worship of Santa Muerte is more or less the same as the rituals associated with the Day of the Dead, given the similarity in the imagery. The answer is that there is some overlap, but it's far from complete. The Day of the Dead, celebrated on November 1 or 2 (it varies in different areas), is a thoroughly Catholicized practice that involves praying for the departed, decorating their graves, and going to Mass in the hopes that the devotions will improve the deceased family and friends' lot in the afterlife. While Santa Muerte has some Christian symbolism incorporated into it, it is a religion of its own that has in fact been roundly condemned by both the Catholics and the evangelical Protestants. Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, said, "It’s not religion just because it’s dressed up like religion; it’s a blasphemy against religion." The Archbishop of Santa Fe, New Mexico, John Wester, told his flock outright that you can't be a Catholic and at the same time worship the Skeletal Lady. Pope Francis himself visited Mexico in 2016, and on his first day there repudiated Santa Muerte as "blasphemous and satanic... a symbol of narco-culture."
The last objection has some merit. As a movement that was underground for a long time (in fact, the Mexican government has gone so far as to bulldoze shrines and places of worship), it has become associated with people on the fringes of society -- the poor, the homeless, prostitutes, and people involved in the narcotics trade. Interestingly enough, it's also become a haven for LGBTQ+ people; Santa Muerte herself is seen by many queer people in Mexico and Central America as their particular protector, who will intercede for them in matters of safety, prosperity, and love. It's apparently become quite common for practitioners of Santa Muerte to officiate at same-sex weddings.
Its influence is spreading fast. Andrew Chesnut, a historian who studies religion, has said that it is the single fastest-growing new religion in the world. There are now places of worship in New York City, Chicago, Houston, San Antonio, Tucson, and elsewhere, and even a temple built on a piece of ultra-expensive real estate on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood.
Honestly, I can understand the appeal. When life is uncertain -- which it is now, for about a hundred different reasons -- putting your trust in a deity who champions the weak and powerless, protects the poor and oppressed, and (should death occur) makes the transition to the afterlife easy, has got to be attractive. Anthropologist Lois Ann Lorentzen writes, "The subversive Santa Muerte, favored by undocumented migrants, including LGBTQ migrants, provides solace and protection against both church and state, while also reflecting their liminal, precarious lives." Writer Carlos Garma calls it a "cult of crisis."
Myself, I'm not religious, but my attitude toward religion -- particularly this sort, which (unlike other religions I will refrain from naming) doesn't bludgeon its way into political power and then demand that everyone believe likewise, or else -- can be characterized as, "Whatever gets you through the day." I've landed on a set of beliefs that (most of the time) helps me to make sense of the universe and keeps me putting one foot in front of the other. Who am I to criticize how someone else squares that circle?
I used to be a great deal more militant about atheism, but I've come to recognize that (like everything) religion is complex. My real beef is with religions that aren't content just to do their thing, but desire to compel universal compliance. (And often create a fake persecution complex on the part of the true believers, because people who feel embattled and frightened will be much quicker to strike out in anger -- and are easier for the leaders to control.) I'll fight like hell against religions that try to force adherence, or who muscle their way into public schools, which amounts to the same thing -- but otherwise? Eh, I've got no problem with you. Maybe I've tempered with age, or maybe I've just come to realize that "pick your battles" is one of the most important principles for a happy life.
So I'm more interested than repelled by Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte. If it gives you solace, and doesn't impel you to try to force me to believe, I'm happy you're happy. It's a hard old world, and we need all the help we can get, wherever it comes from.
