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Controversy is a bigger attraction
than the evidence
IT isn't a terribly interesting animal, the okapi. A forest-dwelling
antelope that looks like it could use a few weeks on the Atkins,
it's only notable accomplishment is an ability to lick behind
its own ears with a tongue which would make Mick Jagger jealous.
But 104 years ago, the okapi was very interesting indeed,
because it was Unknown To Science. The pigmy tribesmen of
Congo's dark interior told stories of it; white hunters emerged
from the jungle telling fabulous stories of a creature with
a giraffe's neck and a zebra's legs; unscrupulous traders
sold okapi hides for bagfuls of gold, to the younger sons
of noble families who were mortified to discover they had
invested their fortunes in a hoax skin cobbled together from
monkey furs.
And then in 1901, the High Commissioner of Uganda, Sir Harry
Johnston, managed to buy a real okapi pelt. The British Museum
promptly declared it to be a new species of zebra, and all
the romance went out of the okapi legend.
As it happens, the okapi isn't a zebra, though a zookeeper
once told me that his female okapis were forever being chatted
up by the zoo's short-sighted zebra buck: ''He probably just
thinks, 'Nice bum, shame about the face'.''
That's what happens when you stop being controversial. Legends
feed on controversy but, like vampires, those legends turn
to dust when light shines on them directly.
As a boy, I knew my classmates would become contemptuous
of my powers if they saw too much of them. I loved to send
their watches spinning backwards and break their housekeys,
but I pretended to be reticent.
If people started to say, ''Bent spoon? Seen that a million
times!'' then my talent would seem commonplace. I remembered
that rule when the US military was urging me to get involved
with its psychic Cold War project, codenamed Stargate. I caused
a sensation by bending a tiny silver wire.
The alloy was meant to be indestructible, developed for avionics
to retain a 'metal memory' of the shape it was supposed to
be. And I'd bent it. One of the scientists, Dr Eldon Byrd,
was agog with excitement.
''This is proof,'' he insisted, ''proof that you're a psychic
and not a conjuror. This wire isn't like a tea-spoon: no one
could bend it by sleight of hand.''
Eldon wanted me to imprint my fingerprint in a fine plate
of the alloy. I don't know whether I could have done that,
and I certainly wasn't about to try. Success would have ruined
everything.
''I don't want proof,'' I told him. ''I want controversy.
No one will come to see my shows if they can read about the
scientific proof in a magazine. It's vital that I force people
to make up their own minds about me - they have to see what
I can do for themselves.''
My decision wasn't popular with the CIA's chiefs. But I know
I made the right decision, because eventually Communism ceased
to be controversial and the Cold War died, taking Project
Stargate with it.
My career, on the other hand, has bounced from one controversy
to the next, from the frozen hands of Big Ben to a plateful
of slugs and grubs, and I can promise you that I'm not ready
yet to embrace blandness.
Controversy works in every field, even academia. A professor
with an outrageous theory is going to stir up many more headlines
than a professor with a sensible, mundane idea.
Australian Peter Singer, the grandson of Holocaust victims
who is Princeton's Professor for Human Values, has an expert
touch with controversy. He launched the Animal Liberation
movement in the mid-Seventies with the outrageous declaration
that human beings had no more intrinsic worth than other mammals,
and that the slaughter of a sheep or a cow was a murder as
heinous as the killing of a man or woman.
In fact, the professor added deadpan, the killing of a gorilla
or a chimpanzee was a worse crime than the murder of a human
toddler, because two-year-old children don't really know who
they are or what life's all about.
''The life of a new-born,'' he wrote in Practical Ethics,
''is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog or a chimpanzee.''
Like most vegetarians, I believe that life is sacred, but
I'm hardly so uncritical that I see farmyard animals as my
moral equals. And while I hate to see apes in a zoo, I don't
fall into the trap of thinking that a human child, with all
its capacity to love and to inspire love, is a commodity to
be weighed like a sack of bananas.
Peter Singer is an atheist, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham
who claims to believe that the highest value any object or
theory can have is its usefulness.
He is a Utilitarian, but he is also a Jew - a non-believing
Jew, but a man born into a Jewish family whose ancestors practised
our religion and followed our culture for hundreds of generations.
And the professor has inherited that most Jewish and most
useful of virtues: chutzpah. He is a paragon of chutzpah,
an giant, an epitome.
Professor Singer has another book out. Its premise, sadly,
isn't all that controversial: he argues that the Bush administration
is unpleasant to the point of being evil. There are many thousands
of Iraqi families who won't find much to argue about in that
concept.
So the professor has fallen back on some of his older controversies
to create publicity. Here's one I stirred up earlier, he seems
to say . . . like the idea that abortion should be permitted
up to 28 days after the birth.
That strikes me as the kind of deal you get with Marks and
Spencer: if you don't like what you've bought, or you go off
it, you can get rid of it.
Singer's ideas are puerile and tasteless, but I have to salute
his style. I've got no idea what he's doing at Princeton:
he could have made a fortune in advertising.
Email
him at uri@urigeller.com
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