Spiritualists on TV

There's been a bit of discussion about Sunday's Channel 4 documentary by Richard Alwyn about a Spiritualist church, while I was in a tent in a field in Norfolk (see the post before this, 'So not farewell after all'). I've caught up with the film now (thanks to The Major for the link), and here are my thoughts, for what they're worth.

I liked the programme, and thought it was a pretty fair view. Alwyn seemed genuinely struck by the accurate information a medium gave him about his grandfather - also the fact that the medium was rather surprisingly a doctor, an educated man of science - and the success of a 20-minute healing session that fixed the back pain he had endured for years, and which he remains free from four months later.

However commentators are struck by Alwyn's failure to acknowledge the paranormality of what he experienced. Actually that didn't at all surprise me. It would have been a very different sort of programme if he'd shown any instant personal commitment. At the end of the programme he did suggest that once these things are better understood, they would come to seem normal. 

In these sorts of cases it's not what people say, but the way they say it, that counts. There have been a few books on paranormal subjects recently where the writers implied that they weren't personally convinced while showing a depth of interest and sympathy that rather belies it (eg. Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters, Barbara Weisberg's Talking to the Dead). But considering how controversial the subject is, that's what they have to do if they are going to retain credibility with their audience.

Also, I agree with Paul that there's a natural defence mechanism here. I think of it as a sort of psychological gag reflex. We reject experiences that seem to have no rational basis; we call that 'healthy scepticism'. It takes time for these things to sink in, to rearrange the furniture in our heads, to create a new worldview.

I remember having early experiences of this kind, to which I paid little or no attention at the time. They were just curiosities. But they stayed with me, and when I began reading about psychical research, they started to have resonance. It may take ten or twenty years, but my guess is that Alwyn will one day join the many of us who have come to recognise the validity of these sorts of experiences, and place them in a meaningful context.  

I think it would help bridge the gulf between sceptics and believers if we understood this psychological process a bit better. It wasn't hard to guess what the sceptical reactions should be: the folk at JREF were upset at the idea of a doctor acting as a medium in his surgery - he should stick to handing out pills - and one made a rather pedestrian stab at revealing cold reading by the doctor. But my take on this is that people are describing stuff that happens to them, not just acting out beliefs or performing parts.

This is terribly difficult for sceptics to grasp, particularly those who follow James Randi: they are so obsessed with the idea of conscious deceit they can't see what more open minded people would see - and which the film did a good job of showing - that whether they like it or not, some people actually are subject to meaningful hallucinations or other uncanny experiences, and in some cases learn that they have a practical benefit. The whole point about the surgery incident, as the doctor described it, was that his vision of the patient's father, and his ability to describe him to her, cured her of her depression and enabled her to stop taking pills. How is that wrong? Isn't it something we need to understand better?

Comments

[Matt]

"But considering how controversial the subject is, that's what they have to do if they are going to retain credibility with their audience."

My impression is that this controversiality has gone up a notch in the last decade, amongst the educated elites. It's hard to even raise questions about paranormal phenomena amongst educated circles without seeming a nut. My impression is that peer pressure has a lot to do with this. Even if the evidence is personally convincing to someone, they're not going to admit this if all their colleagues and friends are not convinced. I've experienced this myself, many times.