Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Pseudoscience (False Alarm! part viii)

Episode Date: July 24, 2018

 As the border between border science and science dissolves we continue our examination of two other time periods when science tried to account for both the real and the unreal. In the 1800’s, so much new technology was revolutionizing the world… why not the ability to talk to the dead? And in the 1930s Hitler championed World Ice Theory as an alternative to the Jewish science of Albert Einstein. Plus ToE’s Chris on Operation Paperclip! 2018 is not the first time truth, fiction and lies have merged together. In the 1850s people turned to the the dead for answers. In the 1930’s, Hitler and the Nazis tried to remake the world using magic and pseudoscience. In phase two of False Alarm! we’re going to bounce between the second half of the 19th century, the interwar years and the present to find out if we are doomed for a repeat?  

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Pseudoscience. The greatest Nazi scientist was also the greatest liar. That is what one of the American officials who was in charge of interrogating Wernher von Braun, said after he surrendered on May 2nd, 1945. So he wasn't captured by the Allies? No, he turned himself in. As the leader of the V-2 rocket team, he was confident that Ike would guarantee his future. Ike, as in President Eisenhower. Ike. Yeah. When members of the 44th Division Counterintelligence Corps began interrogating Von Braun, he demanded to see Ike.

When you look at the photos the press took that morning, Von Braun is all smiles. You can see that he knows he's going to get away with it. With what? The big lie about the V2 rocket and the slave. In April 1945, a couple of weeks before von Braun turned himself in, a unit of American soldiers in the 104th Infantry Division, known as the Timberwolves, entered the tunnels called the Middlework at a town called Nordhausen. This is where the V V2 rockets were built. Nothing they'd experienced in the war prepared them for what they found there. Hundreds of corpses stretched across the floors of the tunnels. And then there were the men who were still alive, emaciated, covered with bruises and sores.

Too weak to even stand. One of the war crimes investigators said that it was a fabric of moans and whimpers of delirium and outright madness. This is what they were told by the survivors. They worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, putting together the V-weisy, pneumonia, tuberculosis, phlegmasia from beatings, ammonia burns to the lungs, and some by being crushed from the weight of the rocket parts they were forced to carry. Humans and machine parts went into the tunnels. Rockets and corpses came out. War crimes investigators determined that approximately half

of the 60,000 slaves were worked to death at Nordhausen. But how was it that Wernher von Braun was able to say that he had no idea about the slave labor? I mean, surely there was evidence that he knew. Of course he knew. And of course there was evidence. But on July 6th, 1945, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and that's all of the top U.S. military leadership, approved a classified memorandum with the subject heading Exploitation of German Specialists in Science and Technology in the United States.

Certain German specialists, the memo stated, quote, could be utilized to increase our war-making capacity against Japan and aid our post-war military research. So in the interest of winning the war, we were willing to put Nazi war criminals to work in American science labs? No, not officially. The memo also stated that, quote, no known or alleged war criminals could be brought to the United States. Okay, but then how does Wernher von Braun make it to the U.S.? Operation Paperclip.

This was the code name for the program we created to turn Nazi war criminals into German specialists. We brought over Nazi bureaucrats, businessmen, accountants, lawyers, and the scientists, and none of them had to account for their past. We supplied the cover-up, and we supplied the lies. The mid to late 1800s brought ever more new inventions. Electric lights, safety pins, dynamite, rubber bands, anesthetic, concrete, elevators, typewriters, the telephone, the internal combustion engine, the modern bicycle, chewing gum, bullets. Why not also a way to talk to the dead? After the Civil War began, nearly every family in the nation was in mourning.

People wanted to hear that their dead relatives were not truly gone. They craved the chance to say to the departed, I love you, I miss you, or goodbye. By April 1854, rapamania, as it was called by critics, had swept the nation. The pushback against the rapping craze matched its supporters' enthusiasm. Two members of the U.S. Senate, General James Shields of Illinois and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, presented a petition from the 15,000 Americans demanding a commission to study spiritualist phenomena like rapping. The discussion about whose job it was to look into the matter was

lively. Someone said it should be the post office because of the prospect of a, quote, spiritual telegraph between this world and the next. In New York City, the Fox women stayed at Barnum's Hotel, a major destination on the Bowery and Maiden Lane, owned by a cousin of P.T. Barnum, the great showman. The sisters held regular seances in Barnum's hotel parlor. They also spent two weeks as houseguests of Horace Greeley, the New York Tribune's editor. He invited over friends and introduced them to Maggie, Kate, and Leah, telling everyone that at last here was proof of the afterlife and verification that

death was not the end. In 1872, as Greeley lay dying, he would speak of the girls. Quote, tell the Fox family I bless them. I have been made happy through them. They have prepared me for this hour. A panel, including some of New York's most respected men, visited the girls, grilling them and trying to catch them in lies. They passed muster and charmed their examiners, clearing the path for success in the city's highest echelons of society. In New York, Leah allowed her sisters little free time, causing them to resent her more and more by the day.

She had the girls presiding over groups of 30, three times a day, at 10 a.m., 5 p.m., and 8 p.m., charging each person $1. They were pulling in $90 a day, the equivalent of about $1,600 now. The spirits sometimes delivered inspirational messages, spelled out laboriously by the guests, listing letters and the ghost rapping to signal to stop there. An abolitionist, for example, heard the spirits rap out this message. Spiritualism will work miracles in the cause of reform.

The money was coming in, but competition was growing. Others around the country, and especially in New York, were claiming to be mediums and adding effects. Furniture floating through the air, messages magically written in foreign languages, and music played by unseen orchestras. Kate did the most work to expand her craft. She learned how to do automatic writing and spiritualist drawing, as well as materialization, the mysterious creation of matter like ectoplasm.

There were hoaxes everywhere, but believers insisted that though some bad actors may prey on the gullible, the spirits undeniably had spoken to the Fox girls. They were too young, too uneducated, and too innocent, the logic went, to have tricked so many learned people. The girls occasionally attended other medium seances and were shocked by what they saw. One summoned a young female ghost, naked except for gauze-like wrappings. Other times, things happened in the dark that made the young girls confused and scared. Maggie was appalled by these sexually charged events. No wonder men suspected her of being a prostitute, she thought. Plenty of mediums seemed to be just that. That's another installment from writer Ada Calhoun's essay on the Fox sisters, taking us back to the latter half of the 19th century,

when a movement called spiritualism grabbed hold of the American imagination. Now, as Ada told us in the last episode, the Fox sisters emerged from western New York, a region known as a burned-over district. A great religious fever, the second awakening, had swept through this area with such intensity, it had consumed everything in its wake. So, after 1850, a traveling preacher or guru in search of new converts would have made sure to skip this part of the country, because there was no one left to light up. The whole area was burnt. So, how then did spiritualism manage to rise out of the ashes of the second awakening and become such a powerful cultural force?

Science You see, as the number of mediums like the Fox sisters who claimed they could speak with the dead grew, a number of prestigious scientists saw an opening to test and probe the realm of the supernatural. For them, spiritualism was an opportunity to scientifically prove the existence of life after death. And while most of these tests would in fact end up exposing the very mediums they were probing as frauds, many scientists, like the Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James, came to believe it was their duty to look through the portal spiritualism opened up. As an empiricist, James accepted there were no facts to be found that proved anything about the

afterlife, but he was not willing to accept a hierarchy of method that prized skepticism over belief. He was convinced there was a third way. James writes about this third way in his most famous essay, The Will to Believe. And while this essay is mostly read and taught as an intellectual man's defense of religious belief, we can also read it as a defense of his psychic research, and his insistence that a true scientific method could be used to study things yet explained. The Supernatural I cannot carry with me the irreversibly negative bias of the rigorously scientific mind,

with its presumption as to what the true order of nature ought to be, he wrote. Thousands of sensitive organizations in the United States today live as steadily in the light of otherworldly experiences and are as indifferent to modern science as if they lived in Bohemia in the 12th century. They are indifferent to science because science is so callously indifferent to their experiences. William James was convinced science lacked the capacity to recognize credible supernatural phenomena, and he worried that biased researchers were ignoring a natural kind of fact of which we do not yet know the full extent. In his essay on psychical research, James explained exactly what the rigorously scientific

mind was doing wrong. If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are. It is enough if you prove one single crow to be white. William James refused to close himself off to the possibility that there might be an afterlife. And he devoted a good chunk of his life to the search for that single white crow. And then he died. But that's not the end of the story.

According to Dr. Gary Schwartz of the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health at the University of Arizona, William James is still at it. Recent double-blinded mediumship tests suggest William James is still on his quest to address the question of the survival of consciousness after physical death. Only now, he's working from the other side. And scientific integrity, plus the pursuit of truth, Dr. Schwartz says, requires us being open to this important theoretical and empirical possibility. One of the Nazis' most important scientific doctrines was world ice theory. It's invented only in the 1890s. It doesn't have some kind of medieval history behind it.

And it's invented by an Austrian who's just a little older than Hitler, this Horbiger guy, Hans Horbiger, who wakes up in a fever dream. He saw a bunch of moons of ice or planets full of ice, suns made of ice, all colliding. And for him, that's kind of the Big Bang. These shards of ice all colliding. And for him, that's kind of the big bang. These shards of ice created new moons and new planets. And it explains the ice age and it explains how the solar system looks and it's why everything's so cold. Of course, that's just because it's far from the sun, but not for him. And he writes this down, but he's not really a scientist. So he finds another amateur astronomer, a guy named Philip Fout, in the early 1900s, and they write a book called Glacial Cosmogeny,

which is how, basically, it's this comprehensive view of both the solar system and the Earth through world ice theory. When glacial cosmology was released in 1912, a reviewer noted how one could replace ice with olive oil, and the theory would be no less plausible. But still, in the 20s, Horbinger's book took off, especially with a bunch of folks who would later constitute the core of the Nazi leadership. It ties into all these racial theories. There's an affinity they see between this kind of Austrian idea of how science works. You know, the fact that there were ice ages with

frost giants and Aryans are immune to the cold and all this, and their ideas about Nordic mythology, occultism, because a lot of the occult doctrines believe in root races that were superior mystically and physically that had been corrupted by racial miscegenation or floods. And so this peculiar cocktail of world ice theory and race theory and Nazism in the 30s becomes official. Himmler, through his research institute, says, you know what? I want world ice theory to be the official doctrine of the Third Reich. Hitler and other Nazis championed world ice theory as an alternative to the Jewish science of Albert Einstein. But world ice theory had troubles competing with the theory of relativity.

Hitler took the rejection in stride. Men, he wrote, just don't want to know. Hitler supposedly in private conversation says things like, you know, I've read this world ice here. I think that's the most convincing explanation for the events we see in the Bible. Supposedly he also, as a throwaway statement, thinks, well, his soldiers will be fine in the Eastern Front if it gets to be very cold, because German Aryans have a Nordic blood and world ice theory shows that they're more immune to cold than others. Hitler's stubborn attachment to this ridiculous idea helps us understand how the Nazi scientific method differs from, well, the scientific scientific method.

How are Jews some kind of super subhuman race, totally different from anyone who's been part of the same populations or demographic for a thousand years? It makes no empirical sense. The Jews are these kind of terrible evil beings who are clearly related to other Slavic and Germanic people, the Ashkenazi Jews at least. And yet they somehow see Tibetans and the Japanese as Aryans. It makes no sense. They don't want to establish clear empirical criteria like a liberal scientific regime would attempt to do. They don't ever really want to establish clear empirical criteria for anything. That's not how fascism works, certainly not Nazism. Because once you have clear empirical criteria, you can

question claims that are being made that are contradictory. For Eric Kurlander, it's important we not lose sight of this fact. In Nazi science, there was room for both world ice theory and the V2 rocket program. This doesn't let science off the hook, but it does challenge the dominant narrative about science and its place in the Nazi supernatural imaginary. Science gone awry, Darwinism gone awry, which is one of the conventional explanations for what Nazism is, right? Nazism is applied biology. Hitler likes to make that quote. It really doesn't give us the full picture because it's not based on science. As bad and as problematic as science can be, it's based on border science. It's based on faith-based, almost religious ideas about race and space. They just use the science as window dressing, right?

To justify or mask the absurdity of their project. An idea that seems completely fantastical gets dressed up in scientific form and then invoked as a justification for expansion into the East. Ethnic cleansing, eugenics. You know, I probably should have asked you this at the beginning, Eric, but this phrase you keep using, border science, is that just another word for pseudoscience, or am I missing something? In my field, it's now seen as patronizing to dismiss anyone's beliefs, however, you know, questionably might seem as pseudo. So I use border science partly for that reason.

I also use it, though, is it is an authentic space at that time and today where people are trying to experiment, whether it's new age or, you know, homeopathic medicine, where otherwise educated people are saying maybe there is something to this. So I'm trying not to be reflexively condescending or dismissive of it, but simply say that it does open a path to more glaring rejections of rationality, which can be dangerous. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Pseudoscience. This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway. And it featured Eric Kurlander, Ada Calhoun, and TOE's special correspondent, Chris. Visit the homepage at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com Thank you. sounds. Good stuff. If you're enjoying False Alarm, tell a friend about it, or just blast

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