Beyond Coincidence Page 5
Comets and other natural phenomena were obvious augurs; not cosmic coincidences these, but harbingers of specific events on Earth, usually disasters. The fall of Jerusalem, the death of Julius Caesar, and the defeat of the English by William the Conqueror were all said to have been augured by comets. King Harold’s defeat was mapped out by Halley’s comet. It came around again in 1986, presaging what evil this time? The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger? The assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme? The invasion of the United States by Crocodile Dundee?
It’s unusual to make such associations today, yet a minority of people still do. It’s not hard to find clairvoyant sites on the Internet asserting cast-iron connections between historical events and comet appearances that preceded them. The astronomer Carl Sagan, who waged a war against “baloney and pseudoscience,” said that since human history is intrinsically unhappy, “any comet at any time, viewed from anywhere on Earth is assured of some tragedy for which it can be held accountable.”
In the time of Sophocles, such things as comets seemed more authoritative, and the oracle was recognized as providing an insight into the Fates’ deliberations, a sort of advance preview of your life. Just how dangerous reliance on such a system could be is demonstrated in many stories of the Delphic oracle, in particular that of poor Oedipus who, if we believe that his fate was preordained, as Sophocles appears to have done, was doomed before he was even born. It wasn’t enough that each tragedy Oedipus had to endure had been written in the stars, it was also pointed out to him before it happened by well-wishing clairvoyants! Wriggle though he and his family might to escape their fate, nothing they did could prevent the predictions from acting themselves out. In fact it was the very act of wriggling, also foreseen by the cunning immortals, that set in motion the events that had been predicted.
To a modern skeptic, Oedipus’s tale is nothing to do with fate; it’s all about coincidence. It’s just very, very bad luck. Coincidences do tend to cluster—any statistician will tell you that—and Oedipus had the misfortune to be the point where all the bad luck congregated that particular eon.
Oedipus’s story is as predictable as an episode of The OC and almost as depressing. His father, King Laius of Thebes, was told by the oracle that the boy would grow up to murder his father and marry his mother.
It was an unusually unequivocal response from the Pythia, the Delphic priestess who, in mystic trances, garbled the prophecies. Normally the Pythia’s pronouncements took the form of riddles that lent themselves to more than one interpretation, a common enough play of clairvoyants, astrologers, and psychics both then and now (the blanket prediction enables them to say “I told you so” whatever the outcome). When King Croesus of Lydia was contemplating making war with Persia in 550 BC, he sent emissaries to the Pythia with lavish gifts of gold and silver, three hundred cattle and a gold bowl weighing a quarter of a ton. They were told, “You will destroy a great empire.” Pleased with the prediction, Croesus attacked Persia and destroyed a great empire—his own.
There was no such leeway for interpretation in King Laius’s oracle. No matter what slant he tried to put on it, the future was already pretty bad. Laius tried to sidestep fate by instructing that the baby should be left on the slopes of Mount Cithaeron to die. The baby was saved by a shepherd and taken to Corinth, where by an incredible coincidence it was noticed and adopted by the childless Corinthian king, Polybus. Oedipus grew into a golden child, but he, too, consulted the oracle, which glibly repeated that he would kill his father and marry his mother.
Believing Polybus to be his father, Oedipus left Corinth at once for Thebes. On the way he met his real father at a crossroads, fell into an argument with him, and, in one of the few road rage incidents recorded in the ancient texts, killed him. All that remained was for him to marry his mother, Jocasta, and, wouldn’t you know it, by a bizarre combination of fluke circumstances this duly came to pass.
So far so bad. But it gets worse—Oedipus and his mother eventually found out the awful truth. Jocasta hanged herself, and Oedipus, not bearing to look on the unhappiness he had caused, took pins out of her clothes and gouged his eyes out with them. Oedipus must have wished he had lived in a more scientific age, though according to the logic of the story he wouldn’t have been able to escape his tragic moira even then. In a sense, the fact that he tried to skip his destiny marked him as a “modern man” before his time, with heretical delusions of self-determination. Sophocles thought Oedipus was wrong to try to resist what the deities had decreed, though by their rules neither rebellion nor submission would have affected its occurrence. The uncompromising and inhuman insistence of the ancients that chance utterances of oracles and coincidental alignments of omens could define events yet to happen damned the fictional Oedipus as a loser. Not even time travel to a skeptical future could have prevented him from murdering his father and marrying his mother.
His story had been around a long time even when Sophocles got hold of it. Interestingly, one of the reasons the writer may have chosen it was to reassert the values and worldview represented by the old gods in the face of new modes of thinking that were being developed in some of the Greek city democracies. Here and there groups of philosophers were rejecting old superstition-based beliefs and beginning to assert rational theories of existence based on empirical evidence—formulating, had they known it, the basis of the modern scientific method.
It was to be a long time before science would take over as the principal means of examining natural phenomena. Until it did history was to provide numerous examples of how dangerous superstition could be as a means of interpreting the world. Perhaps the most tragic is the Aztec Empire of Central America. In 1519, when the ambitious Spanish adventurer Hernando Cortés landed near modern Veracruz and burned his ships, effectively cutting off his tiny army’s escape route, the Aztecs controlled a civilization of millions of souls that was extraordinarily sophisticated by the standards of its day. In some obvious ways it lagged behind Europe, yet it had advanced mathematics, astronomy, and agriculture, it controlled five hundred vassal states, had an efficient social organization and raised cities that rivalled in size, architecture, and organization anything Europe had to offer. Yet this empire was destroyed by around five hundred Spanish soldiers, its population murdered and enslaved, its monuments and culture trashed, because of its failure to see a coincidence for a coincidence.
Cortés didn’t know his luck when he set out for Mexico, but the year happened to coincide with a period in the Aztec calendar when the god Quetzalcoatl was predicted to return over the sea from exile in the west. Quetzalcoatl was a serpent god who took other forms. He was depicted in ancient paintings of his return as fair skinned, with what looked like a beard—much the same form, in fact, as Cortés and his soldiers.
Like all the saddest stories, the Aztec downfall had been signaled some years before, by a comet. Moctezuma Xocoyotl, the last emperor of the Aztecs and a former priest, watched the comet with foreboding from his palace roof. It was the first of many other omens of impending disaster in the years following: temple fires, floods, lightning strikes, and the rumored sighting of many-headed people walking the streets.
The Aztecs had built their empire in barely one hundred years. It’s a wonder it lasted so long, for Aztec society was predicated on particularly neurotic forms of superstition. Its large priestly bureaucracy (there were five thousand priests in the capital, Tenochtitlan, alone) was so powerful it dominated all aspects of life. Religious intolerance was not an unusual phenomenon in the sixteenth century; but few gods were as vicious and jealous as the Aztec gods. Chief among them was Huitzilopochtli, God of War. In return for providing the world with sunlight, Huitzilopochtli required the fuel of human blood. Each year, in order to pay for their daylight, which in other cultures comes free, the Aztecs had to dash the still beating hearts (the gods’ preferred serving suggestion) of many thousands of men onto Huitzilopochtli’s altar. As the Aztec Empire became larger, Huitzilopochtli
, whose desires were interpreted by the paranoid and neurotic priestly elite, demanded more and more human sacrifices, thousands at a time. The victims were mostly prisoners taken in war, but as there were never enough of these, the Aztecs stage-managed special wars with their vassal states that were nothing at all to do with territory or counterinsurgency or killing enemies. They were called “Flowery Wars” and were arranged like football matches; their purpose—to obtain large numbers of prisoners for use as sacrificial fodder to nourish the Aztecs’ gods. As well as the obvious human cost, this practice sowed widespread resentment throughout the empire.
Cortés was cruel and brave and a brilliant opportunist, ever alert to his enemy’s weaknesses, but he was also so reckless it’s a wonder he and his men didn’t die within a few weeks of landing on Aztec soil. Few military expeditions have been embarked upon with such inferior manpower and resources, at so remote a distance from sources of supply, and with so little tactical logic. Historians have made much of the debilitating effect on the Aztec fighting men of Spanish cavalry, Toledo steel swords and firearms, but in fact the Spaniards possessed only fifteen horses and early-sixteenth-century firearms were notoriously unreliable. However deadly that Toledo steel, the Aztecs were fearless and fierce, and were fighting on their home turf. Most importantly, they were numerous. At any point, had they chosen to decisively engage their enemy, they could have triumphed by sheer weight of numbers. But the Aztecs didn’t fight in any concerted way until it was too late. Cortés’s most important weapon turned out to be luck: the luck of the Devil.
While Cortés pushed resolutely ahead, Moctezuma was paralyzed with indecision, terrified by the possibility that the Spaniard was an incarnation of the returning deity Quetzalcoatl. Cortés, quick to realize how the coincidence could be exploited to his advantage, negotiated alliances with the tribes that had been so cruelly exploited by the Aztecs—the Tlaxcalans, Cempoalans, and others—in exchange for promises he later failed to honor. Then his ragtag army marched on the Aztec lake city capital Tenochtitlan, a city that, with a population of three hundred thousand, was larger than any in Europe at the time. When he arrived, Moctezuma, still indecisive, invited him and his soldiers into the city as his guests, and later into the royal palace itself (Moctezuma’s palace guard alone was larger in numbers than the entire Spanish expedition), where the ungrateful Spaniards arrested him.
There were other factors, including a devastating smallpox epidemic brought by the Europeans, yet there’s no escaping the conclusion that Moctezuma and his empire were brought down by tricks of the imagination; by superstition and the value it attributes to random signs, portents, and things that go bump in space.
On the face of it modern society would appear to have moved away from such destructive superstition. Rational scientific analysis is the modern means of measuring and interpreting cosmic debris. In fact in 1996 a newly discovered asteroid was named Skepticus in honor of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (which publishes the magazine The Skeptical Inquirer) and a second rock after CSICOP’s founder Paul Kurtz.
Yet only a year after that ceremony, when the comet Hale-Bopp appeared in the night skies in 1997, thirty-nine members of a religious mission called Heaven’s Gate cleaned their communal house at Rancho Santa Fe, California, donned identical black running shoes and tracksuits bearing comet swoosh badges and “AWAY TEAM” patches, attached identification to themselves, dosed each other with a cocktail of apple sauce, vodka, and phenobarbital, placed plastic bags over their heads and lay patiently on their beds to die. In videos they made before their suicide they recorded their belief that the comet was the marker they had awaited for so long and that they were ready to shed their “containers” and leave the planet in a spacecraft sent by beings in the “level above humans.” No use telling them it was all just coincidence.
Commenting on the tragedy, University of Southern California professor of religion Robert S. Ellwood said, “These people come from a nineties kind of culture, with all its hardware and world views, but they have hewed to the traditional apocalyptic scenario: that radical changes are imminent and foretold by signs in the heavens.”
In a society that reckons itself to be founded on rational scientific notions, 17 percent of Americans claim they have seen a ghost, 10 percent say they have communicated with the devil, and four million claim to have been abducted by aliens. Evidence that the paranormal is not only alive and well, but doing big business, can be easily found in the astrology columns in every magazine, in the psychic consultation ads in newspapers, in the popularity of creationism (which holds that the Earth was made in seven days), in the hiring by big business of consultants in dowsing and feng shui.… Skeptical Americans were shocked in 1986 when a Philadelphia jury awarded more than $900,000 in damages to a woman who claimed her psychic powers had been damaged during a CAT scan at a University Medical School. Her complaint was supported by the “expert” testimony of a doctor.
Our obstinate attraction to paranormal explanations is explained by psychologist Susan Blackmore as a natural tendency to try to understand the world by making connections between things such as dreams and events, or star formations and our love lives. Coincidences are ready-made connections; all that remains is for us to label them prophetic.
Psychologists call the attempt to link random events with our own thought processes the “illusion of control.” Dr. Blackmore gives a simple example that we have all experienced—willing traffic lights to change as we approach them. If the lights do change we get a pleasant lift, but people often report such coincidental events as evidence of psychokinesis, or mind over matter. In other words, physical objects have somehow reordered themselves in accordance with a thought in someone’s mind. Investigations have revealed that people who report such powers routinely ignore those occasions when the lights do not change, if they notice them at all.
“We like to think we can control the world around us by observing coincidences between our own actions and the things that happen,” says Dr. Blackmore. “Belief in psychic events may be an illusion of causality.”
Psychics respond to such criticisms by asserting that human intuition is a greater force than science allows, yet altogether too subtle and idiosyncratic to be subjected to the empirical tests that science demands. “We are more powerful than we know,” says Craig Hamilton Parker, who describes himself as a psychic. “In my work as a medium I have found the spiritual state of people influences the world around them. We can change events with the power of thought. Mind can influence matter. With training we can make our own world and the whole world better.”
He says there is no such thing as chance, merely human will. “Coincidences are nothing of the sort, just our awareness that the outer world is actually an inner world. Coincidences synchronize the inner and the outer worlds.”
Is this correct? Science surely has an answer to that question.
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IT’S A SMALL UNIVERSE—COINCIDENCE AND SCIENCE
Science writer Arthur Koestler called coincidences “puns of destiny.” The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli thought they were “the visible traces of untraceable principles.” Both men believed a mysterious and seemingly magical force was at work in the universe imposing order on the chaos of human life. This powerfully evocative idea violently jars with the skepticism of classical science. If there is any truth in the idea, which emerged with a vengeance in the philosophical/scientific debate of the 1950s (“the paranormal equivalent of a nuclear explosion,” said one reviewer of Pauli and of Carl Jung’s treatise, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle), then all kinds of phenomena previously damned as mere coincidence, such as telepathy and precognition, represent themselves for serious reassessment. To many rational minds the idea of meaningful coincidence is still out there with the divining rods and the ectoplasm cowboys and not a subject for serious research; nevertheless the idea that there might be a link between psyche and matter has a
ttracted some pretty powerful minds.
There is no shortage of anecdotal accounts of people with unusually powerful telepathic abilities. The anthropologist Laurens van der Post claimed that the Bushmen of the Kalahari knew when a fellow hunter had made a kill fifty miles away. He said these hunters took it for granted that their families waiting for them at the village would know if and when they were coming back with a deer.
How do we assess such a story? It hasn’t been rigorously tested, certainly, but is it true? It could be a delusion on the part of the Bushmen, or a false notion on the part of the reporter. Rupert Sheldrake, who employs the Bushmen story to illustrate his theories about telepathy, thinks it is reliable. “These are survival skills,” he says, “and they were probably common to all humans in primitive societies.” As a scientist with a Cambridge University Ph.D. in biochemistry, Sheldrake is unusual in these opinions. He makes a point of studying subjects such as telepathy, which other scientists dismiss as coincidence, saying he finds them more challenging. “Though [intuitive abilities] have ceased to be important to people in modern society they remain in most of us in vestigial form.” He says that the least intuitive people, ironically, are white male academics. “Mothers and children are intuitive, and businessmen, who work with partially known factors and uncertainty—it’s an essential part of capitalism.”