Charlatans, swindlers, and claimants of all manner of psychic abilities are as natural to the American landscape as the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi River, and Old Faithful — and perhaps as permanent despite the earnest efforts of James Randi.
The Toronto-born stage magician, who died on Oct. 20 at age 92, conjured a high-profile second career as a sort of on-call inquisitor of all things paranormal or fishy. Operating outside the groves of academe, Randi’s preferred platform was television, especially The Tonight Show. Randi provided behind-the-scenes support to Johnny Carson in calling into question the telepathy-guided spoon-bending abilities of Uri Geller and, later, sat in the guest’s chair to unveil proudly the results of an investigation that challenged the heaven-sent diagnostic abilities of televangelist Peter Popoff. Perhaps such lamentable figures were low-hanging fruit, but Randi plucked them with aplomb.
At the height of his fame as an expert skeptic, Randi sometimes seemed to be standing at the ready each time a would-be speaker-to-the-dead had garnered even the faintest of followings. Fans of the old Larry King Live show on CNN will recall Randi’s spirited confrontation with psychic Rosemary Altea. “Tonight! She believes she has psychic powers. He says — prove it!” King barked at the start of an hourlong program, reminding one of a more innocent era in which politics and viruses did not dominate basic cable. But he also showed the danger of turning skepticism into its own kind of fanaticism, a deeply religious anti-religion.
Randi, who adopted the moniker “The Amazing Randi” during his stage career, pursued his second act after encountering gullible members of his audience who told of various scam artists they had seen on TV. “It showed me that people were actually falling for fakers out there — people who were lying to them and telling them that they had supernatural powers,” Randi said in a 2015 interview with Skeptical Inquirer magazine. “I found that there was a major racket going on there, a swindle.” He differentiated innocent magic-making with actual swindling, reflecting in another interview: “Magical thinking is a slippery slope. Sometimes, it’s harmless enough, but other times, it’s quite dangerous.”
Randi’s prosecutorial disposition, familiarity with the tools and techniques of tricksters (raise your hand if you learned the term “cold reading” from Randi’s TV appearances), and Gandalf-like appearance made him the ideal foil for those he sought to disprove and discredit. Starting in 1996, he oversaw the James Randi Educational Foundation, which dangled a payment of $1 million if an applicant could show evidence of genuine paranormal gifts. No one ever did. Confident in his own position, Randi seemed to delight when late psychic Sylvia Browne first acquiesced to the challenge but then indefinitely deferred her actual participation — leading Randi to post website updates tracking Browne’s tardiness.
Of course, it is eminently possible to call into question the contentions and motivations of the likes of Browne without impugning religious belief itself, but Randi was a full-blown adherent of a more general kind of materialism, lowering himself to penning an essay with the regrettably hysterical title: Why I Deny Religion, How Silly and Fantastic It Is, and Why I’m a Dedicated and Vociferous Bright. Surely Randi came by his convictions sincerely, but wasn’t it enough for one lifetime of skepticism to demonstrate how silly and fantastic the manipulation of spoons is? Sometimes, Randi veered into the territory of a harping professional atheist.
Yet Randi arguably paved the way for future generations of TV talking heads who seek to appeal to reason, facts, and what is now termed “the science.” We see Randi’s influence each time Anderson Cooper calls on Dr. Sanjay Gupta, as well as in the popularity of programs devoted to debunking matters, temporal or otherwise, including MythBusters and Penn & Teller: Bullshit! But the current wave of finger-wagging fact-checkers lack their predecessor’s bearded gravitas and showman’s panache.
By all appearances, Randi went to his death sure of the absence of proof of eternal life, but if the skeptic was roused on the other side, it would be nice to think that God greeted him, as Woody Allen once said of himself, as the loyal opposition.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
