Spooks or No Spooks?
… that is the question.
There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labour of thinking
Sir Joshua Reynolds
Even the longest journey, the Chinese say, begins with the first step. So it would make sense to start this journey with my first glimmering of intellectual frustration.
When I was thirteen or so, Dad read The Daily Telegraph and on Sunday, The Observer. All very boring. But my Auntie Ida, who lived nearby, read the much more interesting Tit-Bits and Reveille. Occasionally these chatty little mags would find space among the pin-up girls and horoscopes for stories like ‘Lady in Red Crinoline Startles Courting Couple’, or ‘Plates Flew Round the Room, Says Vicar’. I read them as I would read anything else, and was puzzled: why hadn’t Science put a stop to all this nonsense, if it was nonsense? After all, a visitation from some sort of parallel reality, crinolined or not, is a very big deal, wouldn’t you say? And how can plates fly round a room of their own volition, as witnessed by a respectable vicar? Even at thirteen, I knew Big Stuff when I saw it. Why didn’t The Observer send in a hit squad of top investigators? ‘All nonsense’, presumably.
§ Throughout this book I make unusual uses of initial capitals. Sometimes I refer to ‘science’ and at other times to ‘Science’. I use the former when referring to ‘science’ as a discipline, as in: ‘Man’s pursuit of science has been a story of gradual accumulation, punctuated by moments of insight’. I use the latter when referring to the broad consensus of opinion of the scientific community, as in: ‘We are assured by Science that there is no purpose in or to the universe.’ Please note that this does not mean that every single scientist holds this view or any other that I make in generality. I use ‘religion’ and ‘Religion’ similarly.
Occasionally I will capitalise other words in order to make similar distinctions. I hope this aids clarity.
I knew that ghosts and poltergeists had been reported from every society I’d ever heard of, and for hundreds of years. Were all these people fools or liars, as Science seems to think? More importantly, I knew two people who ran a pub in Shropshire, who told me about a ghost they regularly saw passing outside the kitchen window, then walking through a wall and disappearing. They had tried several times to speak to this hunched-up old lady in black but she paid them no attention, and continued to walk into and through the brick wall. These were rational people, and good observers (he had been a Battle of Britain pilot). They did not ‘drink’. And they were not teasing me. Kids are good at spotting that sort of thing. Well I was, anyway.
I mentioned this ghost to a couple of friends, who took the mickey. I also mentioned it to our biology teacher, who was more scathing.
Why was everyone so negative, I wondered? And so emotionally abusive? Why did nobody seem to think that this was a mystery that needed looking into in a spirit of calm and proper scientific enquiry?
I read a couple of books from the library. There were dozens of reports, well-attested by reliable people, of strange sightings in numerous English castles, pubs and airfields. Hampton Court and the Drury Lane theatre are consistently reported as being haunted. So why did there seem to be some sort of global conspiracy of denial? After all, it could not be a question of ‘belief’, even though the usual question thrown at me was ‘You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?’ Surely, it was a matter of fact, one way or the other? Either ghosts did exist, or they did not. Belief didn’t come into it. So why the wall of silence; and why the derision?
Adolescence soon posed other and more immediate problems for me
§ Girls and exams, since you ask; edited details upon application.
and I let the questions fade into the background. It was clear that the science teachers and the school chaplains had nothing to say to each other, and were not interested in debating their differences for the benefit of the students, either. Each party was happily marooned on its own little island. I only once dared to raise my perplexity at this and was repaid with scorn by the science teacher, and waffle by the priest, so I gave up. Sarcasm and dogma had beaten me.
This was my first experience of the negating power of dogma, in the form of the unquestionable and thus ‘watertight’ dogma of theology. (And, I faintly wondered, was ‘scientific’ sarcasm a convenient disguise for another form of dogma?)
After turning down an offer to train as a nuclear engineer, I squeaked into university and squeaked out again with a modest degree in Slavonic Studies. The course did not greatly engage me, and I was always a little bothered by ‘What is the point of all this? Why do I or any other sane person need to study the philology of Proto-Indo-European, as possibly spoken several centuries BCE, or even the relatively spanking new Old Church Slavonic?’
But I did enjoy university, and met my future wife there, so I had no complaints, apart from a vague feeling that there must be something more to life than learning more and more about less and less, which is what academia seemed to be about.
Two of the most powerful memories I have of those three years are of paranormal experiences. Should we call ‘hypnosis’ paranormal? I do, but if you don’t, that’s OK. It doesn’t matter.
§ Paranormal: Beyond the range of normal experience or current scientific explanation.
Hypnosis is known to work, but nobody knows how, or ‘why’ (which is why I classify it as ‘paranormal’).
§ ‘How?’ and ‘Why?’…the great divide. Science claims that it is not concerned with the ‘Why?’ of things, merely the ‘How?’. This is because current Science thinks there is no ‘Why?’ to be answered. It’s all chance.**
I joined the university’s Society for Psychical Research and went to a demonstration of hypnosis one evening. The hypnotist was a surgeon of mature years who used hypnosis as part of his patient recovery system. He told his audience of a hundred or so of how he had hypnotically removed all the pain from an airman who had lost a leg crash-landing a Lancaster bomber during the war. When he next visited the patient he asked how the leg was feeling. ‘Fine,’ he replied, and punched his stump. This started the bleeding again. ‘The “moral” of this’, the surgeon said, ‘is that I now never take away all the pain. Just ‘enough’.’
This intrigued me powerfully: that the Mind, and somebody else’s Mind at that, could control pain partially or absolutely, at will.
The other powerful memory is of exploring the Ouija phenomenon until it scared me witless and I (a firm sceptic of both religion and, until very recently, the Ouija phenomenon) spent the night with a postcard of El Greco’s Crucifixion close to my head, too frightened to go to sleep.
After graduating, I drifted into the family trade of teaching. You didn’t need a qualification in those days, so I taught myself how to teach. I enjoyed it, and was impressed with the openness of the kids’ minds. They asked questions, which was refreshing. They weren’t all that interested in Old Church Slavonic either, which was also refreshing.
I joined the national Society for Psychical Research and carried out a mass testing of the school for latent clairvoyance, using a pack of Zener cards, in conjunction with Professor Beloff of Edinburgh University.
§ A pack of Zener cards contains five each of the following cards:
The odds on guessing a symbol correctly are a neat one in five. You can have a lot of fun with a home-made pack. (Picture thanks to Murderati)
The results were inconclusive, as they often are. But there were occasional flickers that intrigued me and led me on. My Ouija experiences** had convinced me that there were big secrets here, but again, I was puzzled by the lack of interest most people showed.
Then came the 1970’s, domesticity, and parenthood, and little time for investigating life’s deeper mysteries. I still found religion incomprehensible, especially as each sect seemed to hate its rivals even more than other religions, or indeed outright atheists.
§ This infighting followed the emigrants to America, where the Congregationalist majority repressed the Baptists, Anglicans, and Quakers. Four Quakers were actually executed. So much for fleeing from the tyranny of The Church.
One thing that bothered me was why anyone would want to impose his own religious views upon somebody else, as per the Crusades, the Inquisitions, and the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. More recently we have seen Islamic examples.
And why was it that, despite all the intolerance and slaughter that Religion has brought to the world, people still took it seriously, in their billions? Might dogma be relevant here? How?**
§ Here meaning ‘Big Religion’: ie, organised, monolithic, and political.
Every society I’d heard of had a transcendental or paranormal element to it, and many of these societies were spectacular achievers in other fields. The Indians, for example, developed arithmetic and maths while we in the West were still developing the pointed stick. The Egyptians built huge complex granite structures inside the pyramids, apparently using copper tools. Both of these societies were very heavily religious. And I knew that Isaac Newton, often called the greatest scientist of all time, was a religious obsessive.
All this was a puzzle that I knew I needed to address for my own peace of mind one day. If rubbish, why rubbish? If not rubbish, why not?
I joined the Labour Party in a safe Conservative constituency, and it gradually dawned upon me that some of the people in the Party were of a sectarian persuasion very like people in religious groups. The traditional Labourites and the Militant Tendency were at daggers drawn and the International Socialists couldn’t get on with the International Marxist Group. Some people put more effort into doing down another internal sect than into trying to reduce the Tory majority from 30,000 to something more manageable. This tendency towards splitting will surface again later.**
The enduring popularity of religion remained a mystery to me. Those ancient societies could not be written off as all fools or liars. That would be an unreasonable arrogance. And there must be some commonality deep down somewhere.
Or maybe there actually was no commonality: just daydreams and mental confections? Sugar pies in the skies? I needed to know.
The 1980’s saw our family move from a happy Nottingham suburb, to trying to set up an organic smallholding from scratch, in West Wales. The idea was to put our Green money where our mouth was and to become reasonably self-sufficient, while growing garlic as a cash crop to pay for phone bills and petrol.
This level of change was both exhilarating and stressful. The exhilaration was fun, but the stress eventually caught up with me and I was hauled up to bed: ‘We’ve run every test and you haven’t got brucellosis, Weil’s disease, liver failure or a bad heart: it’s got to be M.E.’, the doctor said, just three years into our new life. It was devastating. For the whole of the winter and following spring I slept for most of the day, had lurid dreams, stank of vinegar, and was as weak as… somebody completely wrecked by M.E.
§ M.E.: ‘Myalgic Encephalitis’. Also Myalgic Encephalopathy, Post-Viral Fatigue Syndrome, yuppie flu, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Everything collapses: intellect, emotions, will, and, above all, the body. Some people have a terrible and painful time of it. I was just totally exhausted.
I couldn’t work, but the land still needed ploughing, or at least rotavating; crops needed sowing and planting; lambs needed birthing; and Daisy the cow still needed milking twice a day. And of course, our two children needed tending to. Anne worked miracles, every day for six months.
I was no good on the farm, but surely there must be something I could do?
Well… on a good day, I could read.
Darwin’s ‘Creator’
It may be conceit, but I believe the subject may interest the public
Charles Darwin
In a letter to his publisher, asking if he would be interested in publishing On the Origin of Species.
I started with a couple of pop ghost books, but they were too vague and sensational and contained photographs that were too easily fakeable; and none of them had any ideas on what ghosts really were. Then a friend lent me Mysteries by Colin Wilson. I’d read The Outsider, and knew CW for a thoughtful and responsible writer…