> "It started with the loss of religious faith in the 19th century and peaked in the late 1930s, a period of dislocating social change and mass bereavement following one war, with another seemingly imminent."
It is hard to overstate this point. From our relatively comfortable vantage point, it can be hard to fully appreciate the deep psychological impact that the unprecedented loss of life must have had on so many for so long. Eveyone knew someone who had been killed, and even the tiniest villages have war memorials to those lost (there isn't a single "thankful village"[0] at all in Scotland for example). Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes and later "spiritualistic study" fame, even said in a 1930 filmed interview that "it was only in the time of war that all these splendid young fellows were disappearing from our view and the whole world was saying what has become of them... have they dissipated into nothing ... it was only at that time that I realised the overpowering importance to the human race of knowing more about this matter"[1].
Also war related, there's an interesting story about the last person to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. It was during the Second World War, in 1944. She was actually prosecuted under section 4 of the Act which covered fraudulent "spiritual" activity[2].
The school my son went to in Edinburgh has a large war memorial in the middle of the playground in front of their imposing main building - 70 names on it from WW1 and WW2.
I'm reminded of the book by John Steinbeck - Once There Was A War. It takes the reader through some of his war-time experiences in WWII while he was in Great Britain.
In one passage he relates the story of passing along a lane late at night on his way home or back to base and seeing a cozy cottage warmly lit beside the road. It looked homey but he didn't remember seeing it before and when he revisited it during daytime there was nothing there so he asked around and discovered that indeed there had been a cozy cottage at that location where an old lady lived. It had been destroyed by a bomb which killed the old lady and consequently, it no longer existed.
I probably butchered that tale so if anyone else read that book feel free to correct me. That book and Catch-22 were a couple of my favorites growing up. Excellent writers both of them.
This sounds very interesting, along the lines of the spiritualist mania of the late Victorians. If you want to read of a more disturbing and widespread version of this sort of thing, check out Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudon. Chilling!
It smacks a little of "Well, we don't know how vaginas work, the only thing we know is they're powerful and mysterious and a little bit scary." That kind of superstitious ignorance is surprisingly big, but then I got to "he learned that several of the things she reported were outright premeditated fraud, but he wouldn't dismiss the other parts of her claim." Clearly not a guy used to meticulous reasoning.
We laugh at people of the past who believed stupid things, yet here we are in 2020 with so many believers of flat earth, pizza gate, vaccine dangers, and pandemic hoaxes. A hundred years from now it will be no different, but at least we'll finally have flying cars.
Bought a small cozy place in Wales a few years back. Whenever I visited, I would often experience the usual - cupboard doors flapping open or shut for no reason, cold bursts of air, lights flickering, you get it. I'm sure one could explain it perhaps with an environmental variable such as the temperature or wind or the levelling of the foundations. My female friends would actually experience these occurrences with more intensity compared to my male friends, along with regular nightmares (again, which could be explained by certain physiological or environmental factors). When I looked up the house' history, turns out one of the earlier inhabitants was a woman who died prematurely after her fiancé, a British Raj veteran, died in India (which is where I'm from, maybe this is important). Couple all of that and you've got yourself a nice ghost myth.
I ended up selling the place later to a retiree couple, who haven't faced any issues/ were too old to sense them/ were used to this stuff.
It is interesting to analyse this in lieu of metaphysics of Kant and later, Schoepenhauer. I won't say I master the subject addressed by these philosophers. Far from it, I only scratched the surface and am just an amateur of the art.
But regarding the world within itself, or the world outside of human perception, there might not even be distiction between things we perceive so clearly as things in themselves, like the river bed and water, or air and trees.
All we perceive is a byproduct of experience and natural preconception of concepts like time and space. It doesn't mean, however, that what we perceive is false. It serves a orientation purpose and helps us guide ourselves in this world towards maximizing quality.
In this respect, paranormal activities might well be explained by outside phonomena. But just as separating what we normally perceive from what they really are has no practical purpose for us as humans (such is human experience, it imbues everything with human perception), observing such activities under the pure branch of rational observation misses entirely the point.
It doesn't really matter if those ghosts were real. Its effects were real not only in your psyche but also in the world (it evoked emotions in you that led you to selling the house). In this particular human aspect, they were subjectively quite real.
Agree wholeheartedly on all points, bar one. I sold the house as an opportunist looking at a rational profitable outcome, rather than based on an irrational fear of paranormal manifestations. On the contrary, I did enjoy having the "ghost" messing around, even if it was a bit freaky at the start.
It's especially disconcerting when the scientific side in the debate is quick to dismiss the paranormal side as irrational. For one, we have seen a similar debate in the past (classical vs quantum physics) and look how that debate turned out. Scientifically oriented people like Dawkins or Tyson who dismiss the opinions of the other side with a wave of the hand are largely damaging the entire process of scientific thought.
I want my ray gun. I went through all the trouble to live until the future and I’ve yet to see a single ray gun. Roomba isn’t much of a robot maid. My robot car gets all pissy if my hands aren’t at 9 and 3. Nobody said anything about there being no Mexican pizza in the future, hope time is cyclical.
The future will be no different if people continue to believe or dismiss theories without first confronting the arguments and evidence that validates or invalidates them (in a healthy marketplace of ideas).
I never subscribed to flat earth theory, but did I learn about it and read the subsequent material confronting it? Yes.
It wasn't a waste of time because it served as a valuable mental exercise that helped me improve my discernment.
Discernment is the precise thing I need to avoid being taken in by false ideologies or beliefs. I can't obtain discernment by excluding everything that doesn't already fit my preconceived notions or the carefully crafted consensus of echo chambers.
Maybe while researching something I discover that there is some truth to it or that there are valid reasons why people believe what they do. Perhaps the final conclusion is not supported by evidence, but some of the evidence supporting it is in-fact very compelling. Then, I can come to my own conclusion and be better informed without subscribing to the theory (in whole or in part).
But what do you do now that conspiracy theories are generated and popularized faster than you can possibly debunk? You kind of have to accept that you can't look at them all, and in that case do you live in a state of not knowing, even when there's an obvious assumption about a lot of them?
This is what journalism is supposed to do. You're right, as an individual I don't have the time or resources to spend 100 hours researching 10 different theories (for 1000 hours). But, 10 different journalists can each spend 100 hours researching something and provide me with boil-down reporting which might take me all of 100 minutes to consume.
Journalism has completely failed and the majority of so-called journalists no longer do actual journalism (instead doing op-eds or opinion editorials). The problem with op-eds is there is no expectation of objectivity, they are filled with bias and quite often material omissions. In the U.S. specifically, the nightly news and newspapers used to be majority journalism and minority op-eds, say 80/20 or 90/10. That has completely flipped and journalism accounts for a very small minority of what passes as "news" (now majority op-eds). If you don't believe me, go read some newspapers from the late 19th century or early 20th century and compare the quality of reporting with what we have today.
The mainstream news outlets, and even many of the alternative ones, have abdicated their responsibility to inform the public. The natural and inevitable consequence of this are two-fold:
1) There is a generational gap, as is the case currently, where the level of propaganda and misinformation is off the charts with seemingly few voices pushing back against it.
2) There is an incredible vacuum which will eventually be filled entirely by citizen journalists and alternative media sources.
It is hard to overstate this point. From our relatively comfortable vantage point, it can be hard to fully appreciate the deep psychological impact that the unprecedented loss of life must have had on so many for so long. Eveyone knew someone who had been killed, and even the tiniest villages have war memorials to those lost (there isn't a single "thankful village"[0] at all in Scotland for example). Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes and later "spiritualistic study" fame, even said in a 1930 filmed interview that "it was only in the time of war that all these splendid young fellows were disappearing from our view and the whole world was saying what has become of them... have they dissipated into nothing ... it was only at that time that I realised the overpowering importance to the human race of knowing more about this matter"[1].
Also war related, there's an interesting story about the last person to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. It was during the Second World War, in 1944. She was actually prosecuted under section 4 of the Act which covered fraudulent "spiritual" activity[2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thankful_Villages
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWjgt9PzYEM
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Duncan