The Black Box
By BRIAN INGLIS 'THERE are two issues in this 'Black Box' affair, 1 and they ought to be kept apart. Is the Box —and the whole technique—bogus? And is there potentially a science (art?) of radionics?
The judge was sceptical about the equipment— 'the evidence strongly suggests that the camera is completely bogus and that the images are fakes' —and anybody who reads the evidence may be forgiven for going still further and pronouncing not only the camera but the whole apparatus spurious. Although I have never seen a Black Box, nor to my knowledge met anybody who has been treated with it, there are some things which, to use Burke's description, have the com- plexion of fraud; this is surely one of them. But the fact that a new treatment breaks all the canons of caution and common sense does not necessarily mean that it is fraudulent; or that there is no sense in it. The classic parallel is Franz Mesmer. As Dr. William Thomson puts it in The Searching Mind in Medicine*:
For all purposes, what Mesmer practised was hypnotism but he was not prepared to be judged by his results. He had to try and explain how they were produced, and when he was intro- duced by Father Hell to the magnet he enun- ciated his theory of 'animal magnetism' based upon his belief in astrology. In brief, this was that the magnet induced a subtle fluid, 'animal magnetism,' to enter the body of the patient and thereby restore him to that correct rela- tionship with the astral bodies upon which perfect health was dependent.
Mesmerism, or hypnotism, is still only imper- fectly understood, but its value in treatment is now—nearly two centuries later after it was first `discredited'—generally admitted. What was wrong, Dr. Thomson suggests, was not the pro- cedure but the attempt to rationalise it in occult terms.
The same tendency can be observed in faith healing. There are some individuals who have healing powers and who frankly admit that they do not know how or why; but they are un- common. Most healers adopt some special pro- cedure, ranging from the straightforward 'laying on of hands' traditional to the Church to weird performances such as 'operations' on the patient's `astral body,' in which the healer puts himself into a trance and then goes through the exact motions of a surgeon operating—for whatever the complaint may be—a few inches above the patients' bodies. And often these 'operations' work, in the sense that the patients' symptoms disappear, though whether this is because of the healer's power, or the patients' faith, or—as doctors usually argue—because the symptoms are functional or hysterical, cannot easily be ascer- tained.
The complexion of fraud, therefore, is not enough in itself to discredit a treatment. It clung to Pasteur's work for some time; what could sound more bogus than a theory that disease was caused by billions of invisible germs! And still more, of course, it clung to Freud's— now that the unconscious mind and repressions and the rest of Freud's basic ideas are widely accepted it is hard to recall the incredulous rage * Museum Press, 21s. which greeted his early findings, which were dismissed as grotesque and obscene.
Looked at objectively, radionics—even if the Black Box were shown to be nonsense—still looks a worth-while subject for research. There is nothing inherently absurd in the idea that people's health may be affected, for better or worse, by transmissions or emanations whose nature we do not understand, but which for the purpose of analogy can be tentatively likened to radio waves. Believers in radionics compare the Black Box to a form of radar or Asdic, which receives 'echoes' from a patient in his absence; for all we know this may be just as wild a guess as Mesmer's, but it is reasonable to sur- mise that a human mind is capable of transmitting impulses on a wavelength, as yet undiscovered, to other minds. If so, this would help to explain a great many mysterious phe- nomena; hypnotism being one of them, tele- pathy another. It would also assist in accounting for some manifestations which have been thought of—and feared—as supernatural, in- cluding witchcraft and witch-doctoring. In the reaction against the torturing and burning of innocent women as witches, we have been con- verted to a belief that all witches were innocent —or, at least, that the guilty ones only thought they had occult power. But there is a great deal of evidence to show that they possessed—or were possessed by—powers outside their control, lead- ing to manifestations such as those which Aldous Huxley described in The Devils of Loudun.
If such research is to be conducted, how can the public be protected from fraud? The easy answer appears to be that the test should be not whether the treatment appears bogus, but whether it is done with intent to deceive. Alas! This is not easy, after all. Was Pecksniff a fraud—in the sense of knowing he was a hypocrite? Dickens never quite made up his mind, pre- sumably because he recognised the Pecksniff in himself; as he was later to admit, the worst swindlers are not the people who are aware of what they are doing but the self-swindlers: the men who pass themselves counterfeit coin.
All of us have this capacity to deceive our- selves, especially when there is money to be made out of it; and, the type of mind which likes to dabble in the arcane is particularly disposed to self-delusion. The most spiritually involved of men, the leaders of revivalist movements, seem to have a remarkable knack of attracting revenue; they may claim to be above mercenary considera- tions, even to the extent of being unable to keep accounts, but they rarely seem at a loss for hotel expenses. Yet it would be hard to pin a false pretences charge even on those who are most irritating in their presumption of intimacy with God; to disentangle self-awareness from self-deception remains beyond human skill. The test of intent is unwise not simply because intent is hard to prove, but because the most dangerous men can be those who believe most passionately in their powers or in their mission. It is the effects, not the aims, of a treatment that should be the law's concern.
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