Since traditionally one settles down with a ghost story or two on Christmas Eve, I decided to embark on reading about a real-life ghost hunt that began with the Fox sisters launching 'modern spiritualism' in Up-State New York in the 1840s and whose first phase was concluded in the first decade of the twentieth century with the death of the principal psychial investigators. In the interim, they had founded the Society for Psychical Research (and its American equivalent).
Blum, herself, admits, in an afterword, both to having not a 'psychic' bone in her body, never having had any kind of anomalous experience, and, in writing the book, moved from a skeptical position to a more open-minded one. There may just be more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our (materialist) philosophies.
It is a well-arranged, artfully paced, and broadly judicious telling of the remarkable men (and one woman) who formed the backbone of the psychic investigators, their principal subjects (many, interestingly, women), and their scientific detractors. Their attempt was to navigate through on the one hand science, mostly dedicated to a materialist view of the world, and on the other religion that saw only the 'occult' or ' mere spiritualism' that was either, at best, useless, and worst devilish. If this was not difficult enough, spiritualism itself contained both the true believer for which everything counted as evidence and showmanship that included a wide degree of conjuring and simply cheating.
Often both the investigators themselves, and you the reader, wonder why bother? After all, it was not as if the investigators did not have alternative careers and prestigious 'day jobs'. William James was consecutively a professor of physiology, psychology, and then philosophy at Harvard. Sir William Crookes a distinguished physicist (and once President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science) even the classicist, F.H. Myers, was an Inspector of Schools and accomplished writer of poetry.
So, what drove them?
First was hearing Matthew Arnold's receding sea of faith and being troubled by it. Science was an excellent way of exploring the means of the world but did not convey the meaning and value of the world. If traditional faith was departing, what would replace it?
Second, many of the researchers were antagonized by sciences reach, its exclusionary purchase on the world, its unwillingness to entertain, in humility, what might not be known. It's inherent 'tidiness' that, for James at least, really did not capture the wonderful complexity and messiness of actual experience. Blum though fair to the scientific skeptics does illustrate an abiding difficulty that skepticism often means merely a refusal to consider the evidence (because it cannot possibly be 'true') rather than actually scrutinize for why it cannot be 'true'. Indeed, time and again, the true skeptics were the investigators themselves.
Third, many were touched by the death of loved ones and wondered: 'Did they survive?' An all too human question and motivation.
What Blum does show is both the thoroughness with which the investigators approached their task (such thoroughness that you often feel sorry for their 'subjects') and that Myers was probably right that 95% of what was presented to them was, when not simply fraud, was either wishful thinking, conjecture or simply impossible to verify. Yet the 5% that remained was tantalizing, difficult to explain within any materialist paradigm; and, inviting of ongoing investigation whether it was Mrs. Piper's ability to fathom secrets from her sitters she could not possibly know, or Eusapia Palladino's curtain waving ability or the complex findings of the Cross-correspondence study apparently launched by some of the investigators themselves after their death through the appropriate mediums!
Meanwhile, at a recent event, I attended, F.H. Myers had been featured and his monumental, 'Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death' that emerged from the above research, was seen as a neglected but real contribution to the knowledge of the paranormal and the subliminal and the potential for human evolution that they might portend. Given their ability to demonstrate that the mind is not simply a by-product of the brain, that consciousness may be a structuring reality of the cosmos, rather than merely an epiphenomenon, and that we may enjoy a collective, communal connection through that consciousness that transcends our simple embodiment, Myers thought that by now this new paradigm would have done away with both materialist notions of science and dogmatic religion. which, as we can see, has not happened.
Such that one of the fruits of reading this book was to better understand why they did not get better cultural traction. The very tentativeness of their explorations as regard underlying theory, their resolute empiricism, virtuous as it was, at the same time undermined their success. What their 'opponents' had was a metaphysics (acknowledged in the case of religion, usually unacknowledged in the case of materialist science) and possibly their unwillingness to be boldly speculative (even if ultimately wrong) held back their progress (even if, paradoxically it strengthened the credibility of their results).
Ultimately paradigms shift not simply around evidence but around ends, we are (even if often unwittingly) teleological beings, seeking meaning. The investigators dogged pursuance of the facts flew in the face of the desire to know the so what and to what end. We may not want to reach too ready conclusions but current researchers may want to experiment after some hypotheses too if this extraordinary journey into the super-normal is going to seep more deeply into the marrow of the culture of things.
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