Readers of Stuart Vyse’s engaging, enlightening, and fair-minded Behavior & Belief columns in Skeptical Inquirer magazine and at Skeptical Inquirer Online won’t be surprised that his Superstition: A Very Short Introduction makes another significant contribution to promoting skeptical inquiry.
The book is part of Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introductions series of more than 600 books, each intended to be both a stimulating, accessible starting point for readers to approach a new subject and a gateway toward more in-depth study. This book succeeds in furthering the Very Short Introductions mission. I especially liked Vyse’s chapter on the psychology of superstition, but he also provides a scholarly overview of the history and ongoing societal impact of superstition.
I recommend that instructors of critical thinking courses consider Vyse’s book for assigned reading, especially because Very Short Introductions are available online through many university libraries. I also recommend it for independent learners interested in pursuing serious study related to skeptical inquiry. The book ends with recommendations for further reading related to each of its six chapters plus a list of dictionaries and encyclopedias of superstitions.
Although the book is clear, insightful, and illuminating, I was disappointed that it doesn’t begin by defining its subject and doesn’t ever provide an adequate definition to enable readers to reliably distinguish superstition from non-superstition. Other books about superstition also have this shortcoming. Only one of the six other books about superstition in my home library defines the term, but its definition is nebulous.
An unambiguous, useful definition is provided in How to Think about Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age, Fourth Edition by Theodore Schick Jr. and Lewis Vaughn: “A superstition is a belief that an action or situation can have an effect on something even though there is no logical relation between the two.” Almost all examples of superstition in Vyse’s book (including curses, bloodletting, lucky/unlucky numbers, black cats, walking under ladders, breaking a mirror, spilling salt, four-leaf clovers, crossing fingers, knocking on wood, horseshoes, evil eye, astrology, tarot card reading, homeopathy, and feng shui) fit this definition. Nevertheless, he writes on page 1: “The concept of superstition has been with us for millennia and yet today it has no agreed upon meaning.”
Without a useful definition to delimit the book’s content, Vyse includes in his final chapter, “The Future of Superstition,” a paragraph about people who don’t endorse the scientific consensus that global warming is caused by human activities. While I’m convinced that those people are wrong, I think their belief is out of place in his book. Denialism is not the same as superstition.
Vyse’s first chapter addresses the origins of superstition with an exploration of the activities of shamans, magi, sorcerers, and prophets in ancient civilizations. Vyse then tells the fascinating story of how superstition came to mean bad religion. The Greek word deisidaimonia had the positive meaning in the fourth century BCE of being “scrupulous in religious” matters, but a century later, it came to mean being excessive and reflecting misplaced fear of the gods. It was translated into Latin as superstitio, meaning excessive awe and fear of the gods. Vyse explains that while belief in the reality and pervasive influence of gods was the establishment belief in the time of Plutarch, superstitio was regarded as even worse than atheism. Superstitio took on the meaning of being anti-Roman and was applicable to the religious beliefs of people the Romans conquered. Its meaning evolved to “bad religion.”
As Christianity gained popularity, superstition came to be applied by Christians to pagan belief, common luck-enhancing practices that remain common today, incantations, prohibited types of sacrifices, prohibited forms of worship, weather magic, demonic magic, love spells, sorcery, astrology, witchcraft, and other practices deemed heretical. Vyse provides an interesting narrative of European history up through the Middle Ages and Renaissance describing evolving views within Christianity toward superstitions and Christianity’s often brutal, superstition-driven responses toward heresies. He notes that Catholicism developed its own superstitious rituals, some of which were adopted by Protestants. He also discusses what are sometimes called Wars of Reformation and Counter-Reformation between Catholics and Protestants in Europe.
Vyse refers to the Enlightenment as a time of secularization of superstition and transformation of superstition’s meaning to “bad science”: unscientific beliefs that defied reason. He describes nineteenth-century superstitious spiritualism practices that thrived despite the growing dominance of scientific thinking. They included the Fox sisters supposedly communicating with the dead, Ouija board use, seances, Swedenborgian spiritualism, mesmerism, and Shakerism. He notes how spiritualism continued to be popular into the 1920s, and remnants of it re-emerged in the 1970s as the New Age movement. Skeptical Inquirer readers are familiar with its contemporary manifestations.
Vyse attempts to clarify his “bad science” standard by describing what superstition is not. He gives the example of the 1994 book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt as an example of “not using superstition in a way that is useful to us” and objects to using “the word as a brickbat at any unsupported idea.” It seems to me that Gross and Levitt’s use of superstition fits Vyse’s definition, and Vyse is making an unnecessary post hoc exception. I also disagree with his point that it’s unfair to consider the beliefs of a pre-scientific culture superstitious.
Nevertheless, I agree with him that religion and paranormal beliefs in general should not be considered superstitions even though some individual activities in religion or related to paranormal beliefs are superstitious. And I also agree with him that superstitions will always be with us.