The late James Randi often described a skeptic’s work as “shoveling water uphill”: frustration mitigated by only partial successes.
Right now, Amardeo Sarma, who leads the German skeptics—Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften (GWUP)—is enjoying one of those successful moments reading the results of a nationwide poll GWUP recently commissioned.
The poll itself was a near replication of an earlier one conducted in 2001 by Lutheran magazine Chrismon, a monthly supplement to Die Zeit. The new poll repeats the original poll’s questions about belief in the efficacy of alternative medicine, UFOs, and a few other elements using a larger sample and the same polling organization, Kantar. In 2001, 76 percent favored therapies such as Ayurveda, Bach flower, and homeopathy; today, belief is down to 33 percent. As for dowsing and Germany’s pet favorite, earth rays, 66 percent believed then, and 43 percent do now—and only 21 percent believe in the fourteen to twenty-nine age group. What hasn’t changed much: twenty years ago, 56 percent were afraid of radiation from mobile phones, power lines, and so on; today, those fears center on 5G development. Belief in UFOs has dropped from 19 percent to 6 percent, and clairvoyance from 56 percent to 42 percent. Belief in telekinesis is down to 9 percent, and only 7 percent believe in seances.
Of course Sarma, like any skeptic, hopes that these changes, particularly the news that only 35 percent support extending medicine with alternative therapies, are because his group has done good work.
GWUP started around the same time as Britain’s The Skeptic, part of a late 1980s push by CSICOP, now CSI, to create local and national skeptical organizations. From the beginning, I envied them. They seemed much better organized, their Skeptiker magazine looked much more professional, and their membership grew quickly under the leadership of Amardeo Sarma, a research manager at NEC. Within a year, they were running small conferences and spawning local groups of their own.
“I think a number of factors helped in the beginning,” Sarma says, citing support and encouragement from prominent U.S. skeptics such as James Randi, a good team, and their early start publishing their magazine. But, he adds, “if you look at Europe, [Italy’s] CICAP was even more successful, with more grassroots support and broader appeal.”
As elsewhere in the world, 1980s skepticism in Germany focused
primarily on the paranormal; unlike many places, they adopted
an early focus on alternative medicine, led by the first
President of the German skeptics and Professor at the
Institute of Forensic Medicine in the
Philipps-Universität Marburg Irmgard Oepen.
“At the time, it was seen as so fringe in the U.S. that it would never cross the ocean,” Sarma says. Homeopathy, however, was an exception. It was a big issue in both the U.K., where the Royal Family supported it, and in Germany, home to much of its manufacturing. Sarma believes it was important for GWUP to continue covering alt-med, particularly homeopathy, despite the tedium of spending decades on the same, unchanging issue.
“It’s been a big nuisance in Germany for a long time, and I think the result is we’ve turned the tables.” The skeptics’ success in this area, he says, means that now “Homeopaths see us as much bigger than we actually are and think we have infiltrated government departments and are making decisions against them.” Die Linke, a left-wing political party, has begun campaigning to drop homeopathy’s exemption from efficacy trials, which also extends to herbal treatments and anthroposophic medicine. “That exemption has been in effect since the end of the 1970s,” Sarma says. “This is the first party to come out against it.” Even before the poll results, he could see the tide turning. “This is one place that the skeptical movement had impact in Germany, because of keeping on and not giving up.”
Like everywhere, though, Germany is now facing the rise of conspiracy theories, which GWUP is considering as the subject of a future poll. Sarma’s list sounds familiar, even though he describes it as “Things we never thought it was possible that there would be people seriously talking about”—such as claims that the moon landing was faked, 9/11 was an inside job, chemtrails are a danger, and the earth is flat. The pandemic has added many more: Bill Gates, chips in vaccines, and 5G fears are active enough to have filled a whole Skeptiker issue. Germany also has a loud anti-lockdown minority (“qwerdenker”) who are convinced the entire pandemic is a hoax.
GWUP, like other European skeptical groups, has so far been able to avoid tackling matters of faith. “There are a few rabid atheists who say we are not consistent because we don’t fight against religion, but we’ve consistently said that other organizations do that work and we don’t want to duplicate. We do take on religious claims if they can be tested and accessed from a scientific point of view.”
Sarma believes future priorities must include considering the consequences of “believing in the wrong things.” As he wrote for SI in 2018, the future of skepticism requires a broader approach than just being right (and perhaps feeling smug about it). “Who is suffering from these beliefs that vaccinations don’t work and are going to kill everybody?” he asks. Instead of just critiquing fringe therapies, he believes we must defend science-based medicine against attacks. “It’s really creating a lot of damage. We have to be more active in future.”