Afterthought

By ALAN BRIEN

pROFESSOR J. B. S. H ALDANE once entered his living room and discovered himself already there in his favourite chair. Secure in his scien- tific atheism, he grumpily muttered 'indigestion' and sat down upon the phantom. As far as I know—and Things may be different in India— the defeated doppelganger never had the nerve to re-appear. I often wonder how secure my own sceptical rationalism would be if brought face to face with visitors from the invisible world.

It's true that late at night in .an empty house I begin to find excuses for leaving a trail of lights between the door and the bed. I sleep on my back, blame all noises on the cat and rarely reach out for the cigarettes without remembering the story of the man who woke suddenly, dying for a smoke, and felt the matches pressed into his hand. These fears of the dark strengthen, rather than weaken, my disbelief in the super- natural. If, I tell myself (summoning up vanity to drive out cowardice), someone as enlightened, logical and tough-minded as I am can grow un- easy because the sun has sunk, is it surprising that those who want to see ghosts should be able to see them at will?

In my younger days, I used to toughen myself against the infection of superstition by ritual gestures of defiance. At the age of eight, I tore several pages out of the Bible to prove to my Salvation Army grandfather that this was simply h book like any other book. I remember now the, look in' his eyes as we both waited for some sign from above which would save my soul. Emboldened by this success, I dared God to strike me dead in a thunderstorm a year or two later and felt that I had scored some kind of ambiguous victory when it turned out that a feeble bolt had scorched a Baptist tin chapel not far away. At fifteen, I used to take midnight strolls in the cemetery, pausing occasionally to light a Woodbine beside a crumbling Gothic tomb, modelled apparently on the House of Usher, while my heart banged and struggled like a bat in a net.

Has there ever been a tyranny so absolute, a society so selfish, a torture so obscene, a lie so blatant, a sadism so naked or a masochism so perverted, that some Churches at some time have not been able to justify its existence? Martyrdom is no test of truth. Selfless and sincere, fools have died for emperors, commissars, dictators, gurus and charlatans with equal bravery. It could even be argued that belief in an after-life encourages rather than discourages tolerance in this life.

In the early years of the Church, miracles were an everyday occurrence. The laws of Nature were continually repealed for the most minor easement of saintly discomfort. Pious youths rose from the dead, holy women walked on water, sepulchres travelled through the air and statues wept in the wake of the Fathers. From the vantage point of 1,500 years later, not all these achievements are now given equal credence in official hagiography. No one at all believes in the pagan miracles—though some of the healing cures of the Roman Emperors rest on first-hand eye-witness evidence which is not available for the events of the New Testament. The difference between religious faith in supernatural manifes- tations and scientific belief in natural phenomena lies in the strictness of the tests applied. An experiment in the efficacy of divine intervention is not invalidated by a million failures. The less

often it works, the more authentic it must be— by definition.

Scientists themselves are not immune from self-deception by wish-fulfilment. Many a dis- covery has been postponed from generation' to generation because the investigators did not wish to recognise an inexplicable and therefore awk- ward result. And many an impossible finding has been duplicated in laboratory after laboratory because it suited the prejudice or the vanity of the discoverers—as in the famous case of the mythical N-rays which bamboozled scientific conferences in France in 1903. If science had been a religion, with Professor Blondlot as its Pope. the N-ray would now be dogma in the universities and hospitals of the world.

A map of Europe could be drawn with a blob of paint for each Christian miracle, it would be observed that they cluster most thickly around the Mediterranean thinning out to the North and West of Europe and almost disappearing in North America and the Far East. A graph

would also show a steep decline in miracles from mass production around AD 100 to occasional

rare manufacture since 1900. The miracle today is underground and unofficial. It is now strictly utilitarian and separate from its theology. It is a trade secret of cancer quacks, faith healers, ESP experimenters, flying-saucer fanatics, spiritu- alists and clairvoyants. Invariably, it operates to tell you what you want to know and confirm what you always believed.

The number of suffering invalids who have been told they will be dead in a week, or of §orrowing relatives who learn that their loved one is happy to be beyond their clutches, must be small. The green men in hovercraft never do ask to be taken to our leader, but spout a

stream, of illiterate gibberish ideally suited to the brain power of the gullible crank who spots

them landing. I have been astonished to discover how seriously clairvoyance is taken among theatre people. Even some of the most tough and hard-bitten of our young social-realist directors swear by a little woman in Croydon. One of them even cites as proof of her accuracy that after she told him he would have three flops in a row, he somehow managed to make her words come true. A powerful West End manager is

said to pick the opening date of each new play only after seeking advice from his little woman in Ealing. And almost every play which passes through Brighton sends a delegation from the cast to yet another little woman.

The object of superstition is to make sense out of a meaningless world, to placate, or at least anticipate the intentions of, primitive powers who rule by arbitrary decree.. Among uneducated and simple-minded people, it is an assurance that every day will not be like the day before. Among educated and talented people, it seems to be an attempt to ensure that life can have some regu- larity and routine. It appears to be especially attractive to actors, impresarios and directors whose self-love will not let them admit that there might be perfectly rational and explicable reasons why their play should not succeed. It also im- presses gamblers—masochists to a man—who secretly prefer their world to lack any logic. And it also seems to obsess homosexuals who suffer from guilts they hate to analyse and are continually subject to unexpected threats of blackmail or exposure. I cannot honestly see much difference betWeen any of the grades of superstition—from the old widow who asks the fortune-teller for a tip for the Derby to the old general who asks the bishop to pray for victory —it is always the easy short-cut through a complex problem.