Accounts of hauntings are accounts of people’s inner lives manifesting.
Some panic or fall apart, some ignore hauntings, and some play or communicate with the spookiness, learning to live with it.
All hauntings test people’s reactions, responses, and coping abilities. How they deal with anomalies reveals a lot about them.
How science deals with anomalies is particularly revealing, as we’ll see.
Religion primes people to fear.
Philosophy offers tools to let people adjust and adapt.
Science sneers, scoffs, and calls people who cite anomalies crazy. Science fears what journalist Steve Volk, in his book Fringe*ology, called “paranormal taint”. Spooky cooties, in short. Not only won’t scientists look into the paranormal, they tell you to do so, even to take the supernatural seriously in their private lives, draws attack from the guardians of orthodoxy. It is a swarming as vicious, bigoted, and on-topic as those visited upon any straying Republican or Scientologist.
This stance against open-minded investigation of certain topics is rooted in the sharp swerve toward atheistic materialism caused by some members of Enlightenment thinking. They had to become hostile toward religion in response to religion’s war against rational inquiry, public education, and general literacy. Anything smacking of mysticism was anathema to Enlightenment ideals, these men insisted. They would not tolerate a hint of religious sanctity, let along vague haunt stories.
We are worse now except for a brave few. Jack Kasher comes to mind, at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is Professor Emeritus of Physics but has, in retirement, come out strongly for scientific investigation of UFOs. Thus is is labeled a crank and given venues only on the proliferation of fringe topic documentaries clogging the various Discovery, History, and Science Channels on cable, which is a rapacious feeder on anything that fills time slots.
This gap between science’s stance and people’s experience makes it seem that science is arrogant, a new priesthood. That destroys the Enlightenment ideals the orthodoxy claims to defend.
Everything’s the opposite, as Yoko Ono once quipped.
Charles Fort called those facts discarded and disregarded by science The Damned. As a writer and artist, I count myself among the damned of society, too. We are outsiders kept from participation by our refusal to capitulate to society’s strictly-enforced norms. We do not surrender to society’s orthodoxies.
Questions, not answers.
Science orthodoxy often labels anomalies “science fiction.” The term is used as a pejorative to indicate schlock 1950s-style Hollywood nonsense, senseless and ignorable. Poor science fiction, always hated, never loved. It began life being equated to pornography and was considered approximately as corruptive to young minds. Yes, how dare they learn imagination, questions, and long views?
Science fiction asks questions such as What If? It does this regardless of topic and sometimes embraces the damned to tell a better story. This galls the scientists, many of whom insist they are open-minded as they tell us how stupid, gullible, and uncritical we are by asking questions about fringe topics. This is doublethink.
Scientists gladly dedicate lives to pursuing slivers of human knowledge. They proudly demonstrate obsession as a virtue. They also blithely ignore the experiences of a large percentage of the human populace throughout history, dismissing a class of inquiry as a waste of time, effort, and money.
Oh money, where is they sting?
What they fear is peer ridicule and loss of respect, the basis of status. E. O. Wilson has status. Scientists the world over admire his dedication to studying bugs.
Had he quipped in a positive tone about ghosts, UFOs, space aliens, or pre-historical civilizations — anything labeled paranormal — he would have instantly lost status, as if one expression of attitude that includes human experience and curiosity about certain things negates decades of careful, admirable work.
If you doubt this can happen, consider Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. She had this happen. Her work On Death and Dying caused a sensation and revolutionized health care for the terminal, and our society’s views on the end of life. Her work was based on years of observation, discussion, and compassion on death wards. She became a respected authority on thanatology, helped found the hospice movement, and changed medicine’s stance toward the terminally ill.
Her positive introduction to Raymond Moody, MD’s book Life After Life, in which he discussed the experiences reported by resuscitated people whose bodies had been declared clinically dead, as well as reports from those near death. Kübler-Ross had long been familiar with such stories and had nearly included a chapter at the end of her book On Death and Dying. A friend talked her into omitting it, knowing it would bring a firestorm of opprobrium upon her. He was right, and it descended after Moody’s book became a sensation.
It destroyed her career and, arguably, her. She was called a sad case, insane, and worse, and sank into chronic depression and despair. She fell victim to a con artist for a while, too, which only worsened her reputation.
She’d crossed the orthodoxy Rubicon. Her fate was sealed. Her work was negated by an attitude of openness toward a taboo topic her many patients had trusted her with, a human experience many of us may also have, toward or at or perhaps after the end.
Categorical thinking defines bigotry. Science is supposed to fight against this precise thing by asking questions that interrogate reality.
If hauntings are accounts of inner lives manifesting, and if science refuses to deal with them, then science turns its back on human experience. Indeed, a common attitude among physicists toward social sciences is contempt. They disregard anything but physics as secondary or worse, call them soft, and scoff at them bearing the mantle of science at all.
Standing on certainty presumes answers are confirmed. Asking questions affirms a progressive process. Science is a method, not a goal.
Recently there was a flurry of books and articles from eminent scientists declaring all major scientific questions definitively answered. All that remains is the scut work of arranging the details neatly.
Such assertions have happened in every scientific epoch and often herald a cusp bringing great change and a shift of attitude. From Newton to Einstein to Hawking is one such chain of changes. The claim that everything is now done, or known at least in large strokes, is common and akin to cries that the world is ending.
Someone once said, A fact marks the spot where someone stopped thinking.
Doomsaying and last calls marks the spot where imagination failed.
And since the world is scheduled to end in December 2012, this year, none of this has time to matter, right?
See you in January 2013.
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