COSMIC HERETICS: Part 4 :

by Alfred de Grazia

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE FOIBLES OF HERETICS

For his first half-dozen years on Naxos, Deg stayed in a town apartment the Venetians had built in the 13th Century; then he moved out to his stone house on the isolated promontory of Stylida. In these places, much of the Quantavolution series was written. Deg's permanent encampment at Stylida was of marbled stone and primitively equipped, not a cabin, neither a villa. Antiques jostled useful junk on the marble tables and shelves. He pounded nails into the walls and from them everything dangled. Empty plastic bags were stuffed behind shelves for further use, empty bottles were hoarded. String, cord and rope in odd lengths were saved and hung up. From this frugal perch sloping upwards, he contemplated the serene seascape before him and the battling cats of the world beyond, not excepting the heretics.

Saving rope reminded him of Frank Knight, exemplar of the laissez-faire Chicago School of Economics who, in his office at the University of Chicago used to store the string he too saved. According to an eyewitness, he was mounting a train for the East one day when he called out to his waving family, pointing, "There, get that piece of string!" His highly regarded economics, thought Deg, were nicely encompassable by Homo Schizo theory.

Knight's colleague, the very liberal U. S. Senator Paul Douglas was dining in Manhattan, another time with Robert Merriam, Assistant to President Eisenhower, and with Deg, and Douglas told of a Republican Senator who had ridiculed the incessant internecine fighting among the Democrats; "like a bunch of alley-cats" they were. Whereupon Paul had risen to add, "That may be true, but what in the end is the result -- many more cats!" And while they were laughing, the waiter handed the distinguished-looking elderly gentleman the bill and they had to laugh more as the Scot, Quaker, economist, and statesman, and foe of loose spending, winced, grumbled, and paid.

The cosmic heretics, bereft of resources, collected pieces of string to build bold systems Coming out of nowhere, and without structure or discipline, they fought like alley-cats. Rebuffed by the world of the press and science, they often became morose.

Deg might as well have gone on to talk of the generalized "germ" of schizotypus, which suffuses human nature and finds a great many ways of emerging in disease, now specific, now general. It may be no coincidence that in this decade two reciprocal kinds of slogan clashed with each other in the mind of society, the one aimed at pandemic expressing of paranoia, the other at fighting off paranoia, so that everyone was "unavailable" and "by appointment only," and "fill out the form" while people were telling one another "reach out and touch someone." Highly special acts of terrorism increased around the world as highly general public opinion surveys showed the public to be regarding every group of leaders and every special group as untrustworthy, including their own national and world leaders.

"The most despicable of all ways of suppression is denying to me the originality and correctness of my predictions." So said Velikovsky at a philosophical panel at Notre Dame on November 2, 1974. He was directing himself at the moment to Professor Michael Friedlander. Friedlander had announced, "One of the things I'm not going to do is to attempt to defend the foolish, and intemperate, and venomous statements that have been made by scientists over the last 25 years." He proceeded then to incite Velikovsky's outburst (which one might also call "foolish, intemperate, and venomous") by addressing himself to V. 's astronomical scenario of the Venus encounter with Earth.

In rebuttal, V. pointed to the details of his own early claims: that Venus was incandescent in historical times; that the planet had to be very hot to carry the gaseous hydrocarbon clouds that he believed to be there; and that he had declared the first announced temperatures of 600 degrees to have been too low, and in fact they were.

What constitutes a prediction gives grounds for incessant quarreling and namecalling. Deg was convinced that scores of his own prognostications in sociology, economics, and politics could be culled from his own books and shown to have been realized. For instance, he had predicted at one time that the achievement of equal population districts (" one man -- one vote"), so stoutly advocated by the cities of America, would result in heavier political weight for the cities' chief frustration, their own suburbs. He was not surprised nor did he put in a claim when the prediction was fulfilled. He never got around to predicating when the world would end, but, should it end, he could in the thereafter cite some highly probable estimates.

I did not know when Velikovsky got onto the claims and predictions "kick." I am guessing that the famous letter by Bargmann and Motz got him going. It was the first nice thing ever said about him in a scientific journal. The letter was V.'s idea and he provided much of the contents. It asserted that V. had suggested radio noises were emanating from Jupiter and were discoverable; they were discovered serendipitously by Burke and Franklin over a year later. Further, in 1950, V. said that the surface of Venus must be very hot, and, sure enough, by 1961 the heat had been discovered by reliable instruments. Practically nothing was said of the method employed to arrive at these advance claims. But so guilty are scientists in the matter of "claims" and "priorities" that V. profited greatly from his cryptic and general utterances. And, no doubt, had he been guiding NASA research, these items would have been systematically uncovered.

The practice of advancing priorities is childish and the idea of proving a general cosmogony by a race of claims is ludicrous. There can be no crucial test or event. Even if Venus were to slip its moorings and drift toward Earth tomorrow, the historical scenario would not be proven. If the cosmogony is accepted for working purposes, the prediction (or test) will have meaning; if the cosmogony is not accepted, the prediction cannot be stated. This is shown by the resilient way in which the great heat of Venus has been claimed as a greenhouse effect by Sagan and others. A member of the audience at the Notre-Dame panel made the most fitting remarks:

It would certainly be appropriate, within every scientific work and in a discussion of it, to confess its weakness, to argue its null-hypotheses. We are bound to do a poor job of attacking ourselves. And, of course, disputation may overburden issues to the harm of clear presentation of the theses. Nevertheless, Deg, in writing Chaos and Creation, was anxious enough about excessive positive argumentation to give over a chapter to the Devil's Advocate. In one sense, the cosmic heretics in the Velikovsky case were a conservative group, asking for law and order in science, demanding even that the letter of the law be followed, all the more because their substantive ideas -- erratic planets, forceful electricity in space, short geological time, etc.-- were deemed untrue. In fact, like the typical heretical group in politics or religion, they had logically to deny that the word "heretic" could apply to themselves; for theirs was the truth. To those who like myself believe that science enjoys only hypothetical and useful "truths," a scientific heresy is logically impossible. Heresy is an excrescence of authorities.

Heretics typically are intolerant of other heretics, if only to hold together their highly vulnerable and unruly group within a miasma of ideas. We find a push-pull phenomenon occurring: the heretics are pushed out of conventional science and attract or pull in the religious, the occult, of ESP, "Ancient Astronauts," UFO's and astrology, the eccentric, and the revolutionary types. All of his provides a hustle and bustle on the fringes of science. All scientists are normally neurotic about their fringes. Only the wisest (read "self-aware and self-knowing") and self-loving of them could understand and sympathize with what they saw going on.

Onetime, in the fall of 1976, far from the scene of action, Deg heard distant sounds of strife and the name called out of his old friend, Professor Paul Kurtz, a pragmatist philosopher and Editor of the Humanist magazine. Besides many pleasant hours working together, Deg remembered how Kurtz had let him introduce a scatological remark into an article of this well-mannered publication. He wrote Kurtz a tender of good offices, suggesting attention ought to be given to neo-catastrophism, and sending a privately printed essay on Homo Sapiens Schizotypicalis.

Kurtz replied (in confidence, for he was a careful keeper of the peace) explaining that the fracas had generated out of a single sentence against Velikovsky in an article by Sprague de Camp, a detested figure among Velikovsky's cult. Kurtz said that even if he had wished to do so, he could not censor de Camp. He was startled by the vehement and even menacing letters that he received arising first from publishing the De Camp article and then from a possibly garbled quotation of him in the Washington Post. At the same time, Kurtz acknowledges, "The followers of Velikovsky claim that he was unfairly treated by Shapley, etc. -- with which I fully agree, I remember full well your justifiable concern." He was, he said, open-minded, aware of general disbelief in V.'s theories, but not conversant with them, or with Deg's for that matter, and he wanted to know Deg's theory of evolution: "Your thesis is most creatively provocative. My major question is what does it do to the theory of evolution?"

Deg told V. of Kurtz's letter, V. spoke to Greenberg, and Greenberg fired off a letter to Deg, wondering how he had come to be in touch with Kurtz, and retelling the story as he saw it: "Kurtz may be your friend, but we are certainly not enemies." Deg could only wonder once more at how Greenberg could turn any situation into a personal threat and from this into an aggression.

The Humanist did publish an article by V., defending himself strongly against the then current voices of his opponents. Possibly the pressure of anger unjustified impelled The Humanist to give V. his say; after all, isn't the lesson of democratic politics that a group needs anger, not justice, to make its point?

V. was lucky enough to have a few opponents who made a hobby of him. They kept an eye on the news about him and cast enough aspersions his way to maintain his more diligent supporters in fine fettle. In keeping with the history of ostracized movements, nearly all of the heretics worked part-time at the job. Most were poor, although they did not reveal their poverty like oldentimes Parisian bohemians. They were, too, mostly unreliable, partly because of their busyness and hand-to-mouth existence, and because they were not under the lash of the dollar, but also because they were often afflicted with intense inner struggles. I would quote Nietzsche regarding them, "It takes a chaos within oneself to give birth to a shooting star." "That's it, they're crazy," one might say, which is a fraudulent pretense of those who are crazy-normals.

Astronomy professor George O. Abell of U. C. L. A. writing in the Skeptical Inquirer says that the followers of V. " are actually following somebody who may be a bit crazy. For isn't there something psychotic about a person who claims that he alone in a field with which he is unfamiliar, can fathom the pure truth, while hundreds of thousands of specialists with lifetimes of experience behind them are muddling about in the darkness? And doesn't the popular acceptance of such a scientific-religious hero suggest a problem, or at least some kind of an unfilled need, on the part of the follower?"

V. had been called a charlatan but there was nothing to it. Deg asked himself, how could anyone use the word? And that they used it as others use curses and obscenities. At most, on occasion and like most men, he believed suspiciously hard in ideas that were not so firm, but none, thought Deg, in this sense had never written a thoroughly honest book and none ever could, by the very limits of language, for language is fundamentally a compendium of psychic tricks, played upon oneself and others, fraudulent in a sense.

But now, I think, reflecting upon the heretics, that fraud is a remote cousin of pretension. To lay claim to something is a human necessity. Yet whoever has any claims must be a fraud. To say "I am alive!" is a pretense and a fraud, a boastful claim to what after all is a delusion about nature, a question begged. We are all such frauds.

There is something else, too, another kind of subtle fraud, a fraud in the too delicate sense of being wronged, and this V. had. One who feels that he had been defrauded is a fraud, as, for instance, in criminology, many victims of fraud are engaged in attempted fraud to begin with, making money out of nothing, etc.... And then, persuading others that one has been defrauded, is also a fraud. At such persuasive tactics, V. was a master.

He could persuade by overpowering belief and documentation that he had been defrauded on a grand scale. He could persuade the most pathetically defrauded people that he had been defrauded more than they, and the defrauded turned their purses of energy and sympathy over to him. For he had converted his defrauding into the collective conscience, and was collecting retribution and returns on his defrauding because his supporters neglected their own suits in order to pursue his suit but received no more than abstract justice.

It was as if all the gas company's customers thought they were cheated and put all their energies into the case of one them, making the case a landmark, but the favorable decision on behalf of the test case resulted only in the vindication and compensation of that person, while the rest could not afford to sue, and the gas company hardly changed its practices.

Now the time had come for Deg to print Chaos and Creation. It was 1980. An outsider, innocent of the sociology of heretical groups, would expect the publication of Chaos and Creation to be welcomed. The field would open up further. Fresh material would offer itself for discussion. The implications of the work of V. would be extended. New possibilities would be manifest. There might even be some personal congratulations in order, for no one had yet produced any considerable work in the format of a book that could be readily assimilated to most of what the readers of Kronos were versed in and attentive to. Not at all. When the book was in page proofs, it induced the dormant strain in relations between the directors of Kronos and Deg to rupture into hostilities. The occasion for the hostilities came, as if often does in human relations, whether personal or international, out of a situation promising well. Executive Editor of Kronos Sizemore and Deg were meeting weekly out of friendship. They ate, drank, walked and talked together for hours on end. Sizemore was enthusiastic about Deg's manuscript of Moses, and had also been reading Chaos and Creation as the proofs arrived from India.

At the time, Deg and Aim had largely abandoned Manhattan and were living in a tiny apartment in Princeton, writing their books, and spending as little money as possible in order to pay for the production of Chaos and Creation in Bombay. When Warner came to visit, they would huddle their sizable frames together amicably amidst piles of books and papers for a while, until Ami would retreat to the second room to write upon the kitchen table between the sink and the small bed.

The Indian production was nightmarish. A thick file of correspondence attests to the pains engendered by cultural and physical distance. A perfect book was out of question. The work was being set in hot type, linotype, which, unlike the word processors of today, lets new errors creep in as rapidly as old mistakes are expunged. For weeks a strike of Indian paper mills stopped supplies to the printer. The quality of the paper, never good, worried Deg, too. The poor Indians were trying to conserve their old machines and paper and ink and Deg could not tell from the proofs whether fonts were broken or the paper was refusing the bad ink, and, worse, whether the final printing impression would be uniform on the pages. The book was loaded with proper names of extreme diversity, with illustrations, and with hundreds of citations, three most common sources of typographical, printing, and formatting mistakes. Deg had known the same printers from a decade before; they had printed Kalos: What is to be done with our World and Kalotics; he had been to their shop; he liked the several owners and workers. But it was a different world, of different standards, and to convert it acceptably to American tastes, while keeping costs down and work within hailing distance of the schedule, was continually frustrating.

Warner, believing Deg would be pleased (and no doubt he would have been pleased) to see some portion of the work printed, sent (without Deg's knowledge) a photocopy of the page proofs to Greenberg, then in Florida, and spoke to Greenberg about the progress of the work in the course of their frequent telephone conversations. Greenberg was enraged by errors still in the proofs, or so the issue was presented to Deg by Warner. Deg, already upset by the defects and by the report, asked Greenberg on the phone to be specific about the work being "full of errors." When the letter came, the little that was added to the mistakes transmitted by telephone was rushed off to India for correction. There were mistakes so slight as a compositor's misspelling of Greenberg's name in a footnote crediting him with contributions to quantavolution (his name being mistakenly mispelled by the compositor as "Queenberg," for instance, in itself sufficient cause for paranoiac fury), and a wrong middle initial for Earl R. Milton, who received 'Earl S. ', a complimentary psychological mistake tying him to a dear old professor of Deg, Earl S. Johnson, the same to whom The Divine Succession is dedicated.

He goes on to list various, mostly brief, articles, and certain contributors to Kronos that were not in Deg's bibliography (the longest and most complete that had ever appeared on catastrophism and Quantavolution), concluding "What you have done is downright insulting and I find it hard to believe that it wasn't deliberate."

Deg was surprised at the rapidity with which the situation deteriorated. Sizemore, father, organizer, producer, financier, executive editor and trouble-shooter for Kronos let Deg understand that a selection from the book would not be printed and that the book would not be reviewed. Deg scoffed at this: how could it not be reviewed? Whose magazine was it? It would be a mockery of the pretenses of Kronos magazine, both substantive and libertarian, to suppress its mention. Warner unhappily suggested that the book need not be reviewed in Kronos. Deg insisted that. Warner do something about the matter, to no avail. Their warm friendship abruptly froze.

Many months later, the book arrives from India. A review copy was sent to Greenberg. Other copies were sold respondents from an announcement by way of the mails. One day in April of 1982, Deg received a letter from Stephen Franklin, whom he did not know. [I find that they exchanged letters many years before.]

Franklin was referring to a letter from Leroy Ellenberger, who had been promoted from a free-lance gadfly on V.'s opponents to Executive Secretary of Kronos. The letter was written on Kronos letterhead with a Glassboro State College address, and did not oblige Franklin's request for Deg's address. The letter follows:

Deg called Franklin, received authorization to use his name when raising the issue, and with malice afterthought, sent a letter to the President of the College, reproaching him for letting the College be a party to damaging slander through people who were pretending to connected with the School. Official action and an apology were asked. Expectedly, there came no reply, but Sizemore was aggrieved by the step, calling it ridiculous and a charade.

Meanwhile, Deg chose out of the "staff" of Kronos several individuals whom he knew personally. He wrote to ask them their attitude in regard to not reviewing his work. All replied sympathetically; still not one found the issue serious enough to deliver an ultimatum to Kronos, not Frederick Juenemann, not Cardona, not Lynn Rose.

Rose aroused Deg's ire for postulating an enmity between Greenberg and Deg which did not exist, and evaded the issue of Ellenberger. (Deg liked ornery characters like Greenberg more than suave types like Rose.) He wished to hurl at Rose a statement in Kronos made by V. against Storer of the AAAS panel: "One who maintains 'neutrality' between a gross offender and the victim of the offense does not give an objective account of the realities; the account is biased in favor of the offender."

Even Earl Milton who was so close a friend and collaborator did not take up a strong position. Irving Wolfe at University of Montreal replied that Chaos and Creation should be reviewed and said that he would tell Greenberg so. Greenberg held firm, something he was good at doing; some of the heat was turned against Ellenberger, as if his letter had been a willful rash act, and a decline in his fortunes began, partly accounting for his retirement to his original home base in St. Louis. But Deg regarded Ellenberger and even Sizemore as toys of Greenberg in this instance. Toys for what? For psychiatric play-therapy, he insisted.

Many months later, as three of the "Staff" and friends including Deg sprawled about a sunny dock and swam in the August waters of Lake Kashagawigamog near Halliburton, Ontario, they talked of the affair and all seemed to agree (no vote being taken) that Lew Greenberg was acting the dog in the manger, that he acted so habitually, that Ellenberger was irresponsible, that the book should be reviewed, that Deg should cool down his reactor, and that Kronos would collapse if Greenberg resigned, as he frequently threatened to do. And if Kronos collapsed, where would its 2000 readers go, and where would its score of writers go to publish their articles? Dwardu Cordona, a writer and editor of hard opinion but essentially sweet character, asserted he would bring up the matter with Greenberg again. Deg was noncommittal. Later on, he did receive a letter of Cardona from Vancouver mentioning, inter alia, that he talked to Greenberg, who was still without remorse, and even still angry.

The past could not be recaptured, despite the restoration of a distant relationship, and the major issue remained (the refusal to review Chaos and Creation). Sizemore sent a note of condolences when Deg's mother died and then another note apologizing for addressing the first note to "Albert" instead of "Alfred." Deg had not noticed the mistake or, more properly, had noticed it and thought nothing of it. Now he apprehended that the printers' errors, which misspelled Greenberg's name in one place, etc., and the personal slips that made Earl R. into Earl S., and so on, might be compared with changing the name of Alfred to Albert, this involving a close friend of many years. Poor Sizemore, thought Deg, caught up in an object lesson; I should have thrown the fit of rage he expected.

Sizemore was at this time enormously busy. He had four major occupations, beginning with his professorship in philosophy and theology for one. Secondly, he was, as I said before, a creative artist who had put aside his larger skills to create a singular commodity, friezes in wood, copying in detail great (or lesser) paintings. And these he carried around to sell at fairs on certain weekends, and while sitting by his works he read books and articles and newspapers by the bag-load. Then he entered upon the national Amway corporation, and began to build a network of clients and customers to purchase a wide range of consumer goods; this entailed meeting upon meeting; much of the vast energy that had gone into advancing and promoting Velikovsky was moving into a truly American promotional enterprise -- part crass materialist, part ideological fervor, a hybrid of love-thy-neighbor and get-rich-quick. Deg would not join him; he regretted the diversion of the intelligent energies that had placed Sizemore among the top dozen of no more than a few score active promoters of quantavolution in the world.

Yet he understood the figure of the missionary-capitalist, for he was reminded of the time he studied the leading caucasian families of Hawaii, who had emerged from their work at Christian conversion owning a good part of the land, commerce, and industry of the Islands. He believed, unlike others, that Sizemore and his wife, who had never before plunged into an enterprise with him, might well make a fortune. Max Weber, Richard Tawney, Edward Shils, Sebastian de Grazia, Benjamin Nelson and their brethren of economic sociology would instantly recognize the puritan-capitalist nexus in Amway and in Warner Sizemore.

Nor, meanwhile, excepting his break with Deg, did Sizemore neglect his primary responsibilities in quantavolution. He still was the mainstay of Greenberg (and I do believe that Sizemore, were he to strike it rich, would generously fund Kronos and set up seminars, publish books, and promote the general development of the field); he still visited and helped Elisheva; he kept up with the field. He aided friends in need, as he did Sigmund Kardas, first when Kardas moved his house, and then when Kardas was nearly killed crashing into a wrong-turning trailer truck one midnight on the highway near Bordentown.

In October, 1982, upon returning from Greece, Deg was still needling Sizemore:

The letter aroused Sizemore to stiffer opposition. He railed at Deg for trying to separate KRONOS from its Glassboro State College letterhead, and advanced two propositions. This first was that "factual errors" in Chaos and Creation (which apparently he had not discovered in his intensive and enthusiastic reading of the manuscript and page proofs over a period of months) made its mention in the pages of KRONOS impossible: "it would be difficult with such errors as would reflect upon our integrity." Second he rejected any analogy between the treatment which the reviewing media had meted out to Velikovsky and that which was rendered Deg by KRONOS, adding that V. had "not once in forty years of correspondence with his opponents" resorted to "invective or scorn." This is close to the literal truth, just as the fact that General Eisenhower never killed an enemy soldier.

Such ruptures of relations among heretics are common. In this instance the main material effect was to suppress attention to Deg's book for three years among a key audience for works on quantavolution, represented by Kronos magazine. By the end of 1983 Greenberg was intimating an interest in advertising and reviewing Deg's books. [Again he renigged.]

I have come near to demonstrating that grand principles of morals and science can equally well be extracted from the dross of existence or flare out of imperial trumpets. The phenomenon of "self-destruct" is ever threatening in new movements of all kinds. Yet another phenomenon here deserves mention before passing on to other matters. It has to do with energetics, or more simply laziness. And I am fortunate for having spoken so much of Sizemore for he exemplifies the non-lazy, the antithesis of the phenomenon of limited energetics or laziness. The phenomenon has also to do with the motives of the persons in fringe movements, with what they want to get out of their belonging and in fact do get.

The cosmic heretics were fond of reciting the litany, Velikovsky in the lead, that if his new ideas were to be admitted to scientific discussion, the textbooks of most disciplines would have to be revised. Astronomers would have to correct their own lamentable errors, and also they would have to study electricity, geologists astronomy, anthropologists geology, historians mythology, and so on. At the same time, a number of cosmic heretics were solely Velikovsky buffs: they were incompetent and unfamiliar with other quantavolutionists. Some had never had, nor now wished to have, an education broader than that afforded by Worlds in Collision. They derived their political, moral, and intellectual sustenance from a couple of books and a man. They were housed in this comfortable concrete defensive pill-box from which they would sporadically fire and venture forth on forays and to scavenge.

To this type of person, the threat of Chaos and Creation was as real as a full-scale attack upon Worlds in Collision. To read another thick book? And more to come? A hobby would have to become a chore. Horrid possibilities in religion, geochronology, and human development had to be confronted. Much reading was required. A "snap-course," with its slogans, became suddenly a curriculum.

The format and style of the new book was itself a threat; it read well, but was organized like a text-book. The several hundred readers of its first year found even a chapter in it devoted to negative criticism. The chapter, called "The Devil's Advocate," was written by Deg under his dropped middle name of Joseph and an English translation of "Grazia" into "Grace" for the cognomen. He felt that a full self-critique, carried as he went along, would have been useful but would have doubled the size of the book. So he did his best to demolish his work in a single chapter.

That he succeeded with some is evidenced by an editor of Athenaeum Press who, in rejecting the manuscript, claimed to be persuaded by Professor Grace, and by a review in the newsletter of the Canadian Society for Interdisciplinary Studies, whose author wrote that much of what he had to say was well put by Joseph Grace. Deg did not like subterfuge and had foreseen that a reader who liked or disagreed with the chapter would soon enough catch on to the dodge. Still, Elisheva read it and was amazed by its being there and asked Deg who the writer was. That caused a laugh. And Leroy Ellenberger himself, even after hearing the explanation, was so suspicious and perplexed that he wrote to Deg to confirm that the writer was not a professor at Glassboro State College. Deg noted with interest that Leroy, who would not let the readers of Kronos hear of the book, was reading it, presumably having wrapped it in a plain cover after receiving the gift from Deg.

On January 17, 1982, Brian Moore is telling Deg about the difficulties the British Society is having with its publications and asking him to come and share a platform with Dr. Don Robins who is to speak on isotopic anomalies in radiochronometry. The Society would also like a talk on the past ten years since Deg published The Velikovsky Affair.

Deg notes to himself on the margin of Moore's letter. "Shall I send letter to Lew on this with copies to Kronos board?"

He does not do so. Instead, he calls Professor Hewsen, and later replies to Moore:

Greenberg and Ellenberger manage next to enrage Peter James, who has a sweet disposition but a sharp tongue. He resigns from Kronos' editorial board with a vengeance, and later in London tells Deg, yes, certainly, if you want to publish my letter of resignation, do so.

But this is only part of the letter which I suppose might be summed up in the words of St. Paul to the Phillipians (1: 15): "Of course, some of them preach Christ because they are jealous and quarrelsome, but others preach him with all good will."

The explosive discourse among the heretics, we have seen, is often as vituperative as the salvos of heretics against the outside world. It is also more personal and intensely felt. There were times when Deg felt that Greenberg's tiny clique of Kronos was trying to make a sort of Trotsky out of him for advocating world revolution rather than "revolution in Russia" as Stalin would have it. He was consoled to know that the invectives and diatribes were the lot of other heretics and conventional figures venturing into the line of fire. Nor was he without blame; so that he could not but remind himself of the saying, "He who lives by the sword dies by the sword." Or "he who lives by the pen is poisoned by the pen."

By contrast with the heretics, the conventional scientists were most gentle among themselves on the subject of the heretics. It was almost unprecedented when once Robert Jastrow mentioned in print a serious statistical misapprehension of Carl Sagan in an attack on Velikovsky; Sagan defended himself vociferously. I do not mean to say that the conventionals are more fair or decent; they are nicer and more polite, and must go to print under institutional barriers against vehement expression. The heretic cries havoc and unleashes the dogs of war, and is often too distraught to tell friend from foe.

If all of this seems trivial, that is because the word "trivial" for a dispute is defined by contrast with horrible and bloody conflict. Or, I think, it is all trivial, even when there is horror and bloodshed. Examine the horror and bloodshed of history. Is it not very often over the trivial -- a sentence of Marx, an oath to the King, a remark "against the people," a failure to salute the flag, the greasing of bullets with pork fat, these and a myriad of like trivia -- which manage to bathe mankind in bloodshed and keep people in terror much of the time.

One can never tell from a virulent heretical letter or a smooth conventional reasoned critique whether, were the author possessed of the power, he would not exercise violent sanctions. The men and women who run affairs -- in all spheres of life -- are very often like the infant whose rages, so ludicrous, would be regarded with the gravest concern and even panic if abracadabra suddenly the infant sprang up adult and armed.

But that is the point of keeping the peace at nearly any cost: if people are kept from destroying themselves and each other, sooner or later they will be happy that they failed in their wishes. They will recognize that their aims are foolish, trivial, misguided, and mistaken, or that they would have been themselves erased, or that their enemies had agreed in principle with them, or that they and their enemies, alone or together, might find a better resolution of their mutual problem.

What has been shown here is that the establishment has violated most rules of logic and fair play in literary and scientific intercourse, but, further, I have shown that the heretics, in dealing with the outer world and among themselves, have also violated most rules of logic and fair play in their literary and scientific intercourse.

What then can be concluded as a matter of principle? Call down a plague upon both their houses? Go in search of honest men like Diogenes forever carrying a lantern to illuminate any rare finds? Favor the weak against the strong, the heretic against the conventional establishment? Continue to expose such illogical and unjust conduct wherever and whenever it appears? Psychoanalyze, especially in the sense of self-analysis, everybody including ourselves? Reform the scientific reception system by institutional inventions to bring about a rule a law, emplaced as part and parcel of the rules of scientific method?

The questions answer themselves. Each implies a herculean task. Yet each implies a remedy of value. The answer to each and all of these questions is a resounding "Yes!" All must be done, no matter that each in itself is, if not impossible, exceedingly difficult, In Homo Schizo I and II, Deg put forward a persuasive, if apparently pessimistic, analysis of human nature. Homo Schizo is incurable, imperfectible, by nature. He can only be modified, constrained, trained, and controlled within limits. But within these limits stand at the one extreme the most horrible conduct and at the other extreme the most charming, endearing, and harmless conduct. The main trouble in the latter case is human unreliability.

Meanwhile, work was beginning on The Cosmic Heretics and I wrote Carl Sagan in 1981 asking for a meeting in the line of reporting first-hand something of Sagan's ideas about Velikovsky and about himself. A reply came, dated 9 November, 1981:

I had indeed known of the aforesaid chapter, which had already appeared in at least three different publications and which had been mauled and dissected to the point of uselessness, Brian Moore's SISR review being perhaps the most nicely done of the valid commentaries upon the book. Perhaps a rebirth would come with the baptism of being "totally immersed in science" that would impel him to drive his own Cosmos TV series off the airwaves. Or to withdraw his book, The Dragons of Eden, from circulation, of which N. J. Macintosh wrote in Nature (27 April 1978): "It is inaccurate, full of fanciful and unilluminating analogies, infuriatingly unsystematic, and skims hither and yon over the surface of the subject, unerringly concentrating on the superficial and misleading... profoundly unscientific."

Sagan was the latter-day Harlow Shapley for many a heretic, though Deg could never quite tell why. Sagan had denounced Velikovsky's suppression, criticized his work publicly, and at worst was slipshod and sophomoric. On Deg's last visit among the English heretics in 1983, and amid some chortling, Deg was told of one Michael "Mike" Saunders, a true-believing Englishman, who was representing interests in the never-never lands of the Gulf States sheikhdoms, and was ringing people up with "great" schemes, one of which was to win over Sagan by setting up for him a professorial Chair for Interdisciplinary Studies at Cornell University, counting upon him to sing a new song of solar space. After Deg stopped laughing, he opined that such things had happened before (see, e. g. the Morton Prince case, that is described in the next chapter), but that star professors are much too clever and ornery nowadays. Like the time when a large donation to the Psychology Department for the purpose of pursing telepathic research was accepted by Stanford University but diverted to other uses, perhaps to construct bigger and better mazes for running rats. Apropos, unlike rats, professor avoid any mazes built for them and devise their own crooked ways. And some are quite principled, need I say?