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 Dr.
Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic Magazine and author
of the bestseller Why People Believe Weird Things, isn't
just skeptical about pseudoscience, junk history, and the paranormal.
He's apparently also skeptical about government, since he's a libertarian.
Shermer made his political beliefs clear in the November 2004 issue
of Reason magazine. While discussing who he planned to support
in the presidential election, Shermer said, "I'm a libertarian"
-- albeit one who planned to vote for Democrat John Kerry because
"Bush's foreign policy is making the world more dangerous and
more precarious..." (In 2000, Shermer said he voted for Libertarian
Harry Browne.)
In a previous magazine article (Cosmik Debris Magazine, September
2001), Shermer qualified his libertarianism slightly. While discussing
how to encourage people to be less gullible about unprovable claims,
he said, "I'm kind of a libertarian anyway, and I don't want
to go to my local Congressman and demand that he start prohibiting
psychics."
However, Shermer's track record suggests he's more than "kind
of" libertarian. In his 2004 book, The Science of Good and
Evil, Shermer identified a series of principles that he said
served as the foundation of morality in human societies. One of them
was the "Liberty Principle," which states "...that
it is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone
else's liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone
else's loss of liberty." In that same book, Shermer wrote: "Humans
deserve life, liberty, and happiness, not because God said so but
because we are human. Period." And a final piece of evidence:
In Reason magazine (November 2004), he said his favorite
president is Thomas Jefferson because "he was a champion of liberty."
Shermer is a champion of "the application of science to any and
all ideas, no sacred cows allowed." As founding publisher of
Skeptic Magazine (a "quarterly journal dedicated to
rational thinking") and director of the Skeptics Society, he
has spent his career debunking "weird and extraordinary claims"
-- including the paranormal, ESP, creationism, communication with
the dead, Holocaust deniers, UFOs, cults, conspiracy theories, and
junk science. He's also willing to "walk the walk" for his
skeptical beliefs. On the Bill Nye the Science Guy show on
PBS, Shermer safely walked across a bank of blazing, 800-degree coals
to prove that such a feat didn't require supernatural intervention.
Shermer is the author of The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense
Meets Nonsense (2001); Denying History (2000), How
We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God (1999),
and Why People Believe Weird Things (1997). He is a monthly
columnist for Scientific American and was the co-host of
the 13-hour series, Exploring the Unknown (2000), on Fox
Television. Shermer has appeared on Dateline, 20/20, Unsolved
Mysteries, The Charlie Rose Show, and Oprah. He has
a Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate School.
--
Bill Winter
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