When Prophecy Fails
Irregex Doomsday Edition
Books:
Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter: When Prophecy Fails (1956)
Over the last few years, I've been making an effort to read various "classic" texts in the social sciences—specifically, works that are frequently cited or mentioned which are rarely read closely outside of their fields. When Prophecy Fails seemed to fit the bill and I already owned a copy, so I read it last week. I wasn't prepared for how truly weird this book would be.
It asks why believers often become more committed to religious sects rather than less when their prophecies fail. It starts conventionally enough, with a survey of historical millenarian movements and their failed predictions. Festinger and his coauthors provide brief accounts of groups like the Millerites and Sabbateans, examining how their followers responded when prophecies failed to materialize. The problem with studying such historical movements, they argue, is that historical records simply don't typically provide reliable data about how believers actually process and respond to prophetic failure.
Festinger and his coauthors "solved" this methodological impasse through an unusual approach: they hired several undergraduate confederates and, with them, infiltrated a nascent UFO religion. This group was led by a Chicago woman who claimed to be receiving instructions from aliens from planet Clarion called "The Guardians." Through automatic writing, she conveyed their message that a great flood would destroy much of North America on December 21, 1954. The researchers and their assistants joined the group's meetings, took detailed notes, and watched as the prediction's deadline approached and passed.
This isn't a book that can or should be read on its own terms. It is dated and methodologically unsound. No institutional review board today would approve its research design. If you believe in a certain ideal of social science, the participant observers certainly "contaminated" the study's data. The claims are thinly supported. In sum, it's a mess.
But it's also mesmerizing. The book’s real appeal lies in how deeply weird everyone is. In one memorable scene, the group gathered in a freezing Chicago backyard overnight, shivering as they removed all metal objects from their clothes—zippers, buttons, buckles, jewelry, shoe nails, bra clasps—believing any metal objects might be dangerous during space travel. The group of believers stood for hours in the bitter cold, some doing calisthenics to stay warm, waiting for a spaceship that would never come. Like Paul Thomas Anderson's film The Master, it dramatizes something about the desperate, lonely, sometimes ludicrously credulous landscape of postwar American spirituality.
It also captures one of those recurrent moments when scientific language and technological artifacts become vessels for spiritual enchantment. The book's believers drift through the edges of 1950s culture—shuffling between flying saucer clubs, theosophical lectures, Edgar Cayce Foundation meetings, and Scientology auditing sessions—searching for meaning at the fuzzy boundaries between mysticism and scientific rationality. What emerges, if you’ll forgive my circuitous phrasing, is Max Weber's allegedly disenchanted world desperately trying to re-enchant itself with the very instruments of its own disenchantment. It’s a recurring theme in the history of science, whether we’re talking about spirit phones, e-meters, or Roko's basilisk.
Selections from around the web:
- Ben Tarnoff: What is Privacy For?
- Yaku Fernandez-Landa: The Nobel of Influence in Economics or Why Theories Fail
- Nicole Douglas-Morris: London Bridge Is Falling Down — A Children’s Rhyme With a Mysterious Past
- Steven Sinofsky: Automating Processes with Software is HARD