Firstly I’d like to explain something about the shape of this talk…
Unlike some of the previous distinguished guests that have stood here, I’m coming very much from the point of view of the layman…a lot of the evidence will be anecdotal, many coming from my own experiences as a musician working within the “counter culture”, (more on what that is actually is later). And as an enthusiastic consumer of countercultural ideas- especially in the arts.
So… I’ll be talking about what I perceive as problems and contradictions in the counterculture as regards science and reason, and hopefully end on a positive note by suggesting a few examples of activity which is going someway to redress the balance.
What do I mean by “The Counter Culture”?
For the purposes of this talk Counter Culture refers to activities within the arts (music, writing etc) that work outside of (and sometimes against) the mainstream. In a lot, but by no means all cases there is an implied political perspective- which usually is left wing. I’m talking about the music, which doesn’t feature in the charts, the theatre that doesn’t appear at the National, and the books that aren’t read on Radio 4. I’m talking about a culture which, probably correctly, rejects or argues against the consumerist, capitalist world. In the 60’s, these people would probably have been called hippies, although as the hippies grew up became parents and grandparents, and their children became punks, went to raves etc a specific notion of the counter culture has become impossible. But, on the whole it still represents a largely positive and reasonably intellectual part of the population in the west.
OK- a couple of examples of the sort of counter cultural activity I’m thinking about- and why they worry me-
Resonance FM, the London based radio station I’ve done some programmes for started in 2002 as a deliberate alternative to mainstream- there were no adverts, no regular news slots, travel reports and hit records that you would hear- instead the station broadcast Radio Art- experimental sounds, field recordings, experimental music and talk radio that you wouldn’t hear anywhere else. In almost all respects the station was a reaction to mainstream radio, be it Radio 4 or Kiss FM, BBC or commercial. The station has been a success, getting an enormous amount of publicity- all positive, considering the small reach of the station (a few miles from the transmitter at the top of Guy’s Hospital). After one year of broadcasting we did a poll amongst listeners to find out what the most popular show was- the winner by some distance was a programme called “Headroom- Theatre of the Mind”. This programme is described as “the UK’s only full time alternative information talk show”, it’s presented by an earnest American called Rob Simone- who has been described as “The Art Bell of the UK”- a description that may have set a few alarm bells ringing here. Yes, The Headroom is a UFO show- two hours every week. Sometimes the show spreads out into other areas (pyramidology for example), but it is firmly rooted in a belief that we are continually being visited by aliens- and for two hours no dissenting voice is heard. The show, for me, was summed up by a breathtaking question from Rob Simone to one of his guests: - “so…of the 19 different species we know are visiting earth, what proportion of them are reptilian?”. David Icke and a representative of the Raelians have both been on the show -they can’t both be right!.
His guests are often paranoid, convinced of conspiracies and tapped phones. Indeed the paranoia is at the heart of the show- the protagonists are counter cultural heroes because their right to free speech is being curtailed - They are lone voices standing up to a repressive state. On one occasion Rob spoke to a leading light of the Countryside Alliance- the bloke came on ranting about Blair, comparing the UK to Bosnia, - but Simone was only interested in the fact that his phone was tapped and that he had a theory that the recent foot and mouth epidemic had been personally created by Cherie Blair.
All laughable nonsense- but also worrying- why was this programme so popular?
It’s amusing at first- but I soon found the earnestness of the presenter, and the deathly- slow delivery grating, and eventually the whole programme infuriating in it’s unquestioning eagerness for “alternative information”.
When I talked to my saner friends about the show they expressed amusement at my annoyance with it. “It’s not doing any harm…”
To add to my irritation nearly every newspaper that wrote about Resonance mentioned the “UFO show”- something I, as a fellow broadcaster (and a skeptic), had no desire to be identified with.
Another example I’d like to use comes from the magazine “The Wire” a magazine which over 20 years has gone from a magazine covering modern jazz to a journal covering all kinds of left field music. A group which has become one of the most championed in the paper is the duo, Coil, originally a splinter outfit from the group Psychic TV. The duo is treated with the utmost seriousness in the magazine by a number of writers. In a recent interview the group discussed their long held interest in the occult. Here they describe to a Wire journalist (David Keenan) how their music comes to them via transmissions from spiritual entities- "That's why we're finding it difficult to do another album because we're not sure if they're still broadcasting. Someone else said these are entities being channelled by you and I had to say yes because it really did feel like that for like a week something opened up above us and poured into us. We were constantly inspired and then it finished transmission. . . we felt it finish. Hopefully we can open the channels again..." This possibly the best excuse I’ve ever heard for not producing a new album! …Of course rock musicians and the occult is nothing new, Jimmy Page in Led Zeppelin was famously obsessed with Aleister Crowley…but that was in the early seventies, surely we’ve all grown up a bit since then?… Coil and Wire magazine are both considered part of the musical intelligentsia and yet the interviewer accepts this pompous nonsense unquestioningly. What should have been treated with little more than a contemptuous smirk has grown into something the writer terms The English Occult Underground, which is really little more than a bunch of over-educated goths, indulged by journalists.
So why does the Counter Culture embrace the weird and improvable so enthusiastically? I think it comes from a combination of the appeal of the outsider, a certain snobbery and a good old-fashioned sense of “fair play”.
I’ll deal with these in turn.
1- The appeal of the outsider.
This is fairly self explanatory- The counter culture is about “being against”. This can be the musician working outside the mainstream, an unconventional novelist like William Burroughs (who as well as being a great writer was up for almost any half-baked fad going and something of a touchstone for the counterculture and the paranormal an superscience), and of course the scientist who has discovered something extraordinarily important but is being silenced by government/fellow scientists etc. Wilhelm Reich was a classic example of this- his early work definitely had some worth, but his later work on orgones and cloudbusters, coupled with his rampant paranoia, made him an ideal icon for the counter culture. Indeed, his championing by the likes of the singer Kate Bush (who wrote a song about Cloudbusting) have almost made his loonier stuff mainstream!
The distrust of institutions, the lone hero against “the state” are mainstays of the counterculture, and if that means supporting palpably ridiculous ideas, even provably incorrect ideas- so be it. The little voice in the crowd deserves to be heard.
2-Snobbery- Part of the appeal of the counter culture is it’s superiority over the rest of the population. By becoming part of it you join a club which has better music taste, reads better books and where you know what’s really going on in politics. It’s in this environment that the concept of “The Alternative” comes into play. Go to any counter cultural event (say a music festival) and “the alternative” is everywhere- alternative music, alternative comedy and especially alternative medicine/therapy. It’s here that The Headroom’s idea of “alternative information” comes into play. What does “alternative information” mean- in the case of The Headroom it’s any nonsense at all about alien visitation apart from the fact that it’s all extremely unlikely. By placing the adjective “alternative” in front of it, the word “information” is completely devalued.
Some here might argue that “alternative” in front of “medicine” does the same thing, and those that hear the sort of sounds I make in a concert might say the same about “alternative music”. Whatever- for me to state that I am in fact not here, but a hologram projected from planet Zog is “alternative information”, it’s also not true.
The counterculture has a strong belief that it is right- whether on politics (where I’m in broad agreement) or in more floaty spiritual matters, where it collides with science.
3-The sense of fair play- This to me is the most shocking way that the counter culture refuses skepticism. I have discussed skepticism with many of my friends within the counter culture (mainly music) and whether I’m arguing against the existence of God, alien abductions, or life after death I find myself coming up against what I can only describe as a sense of fair play. Somehow to win arguments against the paranormal by using logic isn’t fair, in fact to argue against it at all, is unfair. I sense a kind of embarrassment that I’m even discussing this at all. It’s as if I’ve unknowingly strayed into using racist or sexist language, or started giggling at a funeral. Even though there’s absolutely nothing remotely un-PC about attacking the paranormal or the superstitious it seems to be perceived as if it was. Everybody should be allowed to believe whatever they want to believe, and I shouldn’t be attacking them for it- o so the thinking goes. Furthermore my arguments have only the same value as theirs as it’s only an expression of my opinion. By using facts, logic or Occam's Razor I’m cheating and being unfair…
No one’s actually said that, but that’s the feeling I get.
This is without even going into post-modernism- where it would appear that all there are are subjective narratives of equal value. . I know next to nothing about post-modernism, but I look forward to someone demolishing it here.
OK, if I could sum up the problem, as I see it. We have a large body of young and increasingly not so young people who are intelligent, reasonably well read (if we ignore Lord of the Rings), certainly open to ideas and very very concerned about the world. These people are not Daily Mail readers, they are exactly the sort of people we should be talking to. Yet we’re treated as some kind of reactionary know-alls for the kind of reasons I’ve spoken about. However if we look again at the three ways the counterculture embraces the paranormal, superscience and superstition I can see ways that the rationalist can fit in.
If we take the idea of the “appeal of the outsider”, let’s take James Randi. There are times when James Randi, with all his indignation and bluster seems to be exactly the lone voice in the crowd- whether he’s taking on a baying crowd of clairvoyants and their victims/supporters on British Television, or battling the Big Business of superscience on his website. When I see one of his books nestling all by itself amongst the David Ickes and Bible Codes in the “Mind Spirit Soul” section of Waterstones, I don’t see an ultraconformist, I see the battling rebel. Similarly Richard Dawkins, with his spiky persona and cultured demeanour, being attacked by the pious for his assaults on a religion. He should be a hero to the counterculture- a man who not only loves nature, but also admires it- and he even married one of Doctor Who’s assistants! On a recent survey of the British public something like 80% said they believed that the death of Diana in Paris was not an accident. This means that the minority of us believe that her death was an unfortunate accident, while the vast majority of the public are conspiracy theorists who believe it to be an extraordinarily elaborate murder. So now who are the outsiders battling against the conformist majority? We need to point out that “alternative medicine” is just as much a big business as “orthodox medicine”- look at the racks of "Barefoot Doctor" products in Boots, with fewer of the safeguards.
As to what I rather unkindly refer to as the “snobbishness” I perceive in the counterculture; the perceived superiority of thought and higher purposes?
Well, I’m sure we can be as snobbish and intellectually superior as anybody. However maybe we can sell our debunking as “alternative information” – at least the word “information” will be being used correctly, and it’s certainly an alternative to flim-flam. We need to appeal to these people, and if that means using a few of the huckster’s tricks then so be it. We need to point out the illogicality of rejecting “orthodox” religion only to embrace something equally superstitious. We need to rubbish the dreadful and clichéd concept of the “God Shaped Hole”, or at least stuff it with rationality.
Probably the most difficult element to tackle is the one I’ve termed the sense of fair play. We need to point out the difference between attacking something on a moral level and attacking it on a logical level, that to attack something because it doesn’t work logically is not moral judgement.
There’s plenty of stuff we can attack purely on a moral level- not least the amount of money that people are making out of superscience and superstition.
I’m fairly sure that there are a lot of rationalists in the counterculture- and there’s a good chance that there’s a few here tonight, and I think that we need to be a bit visible. We should have a rationalist caravan at Glastonbury where we had out leaflets debunking the “healers” and “astrologists”, they’re not going to sue us are they?
Finally a few things to cheer us up- I thought Blur and Damien Hurst’s involvement with the Beagle 2 project showed a remarkle amount of savvy on the part of Colin Pillinger-
At least one member of Radiohead (arguably the most influencial rock group in the counter culture) reads the Skeptic.
And finally Christian Fundamentalists are becoming increasingly worried about the Generation X’ers (another branch of the Counter Culture) which they consider to have been "bred on skepticism and cynicism".
Let’s just ditch the cynicism.
