The Ghost Lab:
How Bigfoot Hunters, Mediums, and Alien Enthusiasts Are Wrecking Science
by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling (PublicAffairs)
Joseph Priestley was an influential natural philosopher, credited with the discovery of oxygen. In 1791, Priestley’s house, library, and laboratory were destroyed in a riot. This book frames the destruction of property this as a backlash by the hoi polloi against their own advocate, who supported the idea of popular science, something that was so offensive to the locals that they made to kill him. The book gets the story wrong.
This is a book about the belief in the supernatural and its influence in the contemporary U.S.. Supernatural here deserves a footnote. I am tempted to refer to it as The Full Melnitz. It allows for ghosts, spirits, Atlantis, whatever. One of the more memorable stories in the book is the author trying to find where the line was for something too credulous.
The book is a study of where belief has gone. The thesis is that there has been a loss in institutional credibility throughout the United States. This is not a loss in belief. The same amount of belief is present, it has shifted into the paranormal.
The austere public institutions then end up in a vicious cycle, where doubt in them leads to lowered funding, which leads to institutional ineffectiveness, which leads to more doubt and so on. Alternately, it leads to the institutions switching over their missions to the bits that do attract popular attention, often degrading the mission of the institution.
The core narrative is that of the Kitt Research Institute (KRI), a New Hampshire organization, and the biography of its members. KRI is dedicated to the study of the paranormal. It aims towards a more scientific methodology, or at least reflects a consciousness of when something is unprovable versus unproven.
The book is the story of KRI though more the people involved in it. This is exemplary journalism. The author affords his subjects enough humanity to make even the incredulous moments full of more pathos than bathos. While the author is present and will interject himself and his personal stories, there are no winks to the audience. The subjects bring plenty of their own petards on which to be hoisted, but the writing is to the limit of reverent of them and what they feel.
The human drama, which will be familiar to anyone who has worked with a small non-profit, is captivating to the point of distracting, but that is also sort of the point. The personal is the political. The beliefs, interactions, and soap opera are core to their story, in that they consistently overlap with the supernatural. The sole complaint is that the author, sometimes, likes to psychoanalyze and will shoot off some highly personal and vaguely irresponsible interpretation of the person’s motivations. I suppose that most of the subjects signed off on the book, but it is the sort of pathologizing that I would condone doing to a subject, and is of limited utility.
I love it; the remainder of the book is irredeemable to the point of harmful.
It is difficult to reduce to a singular problem, but I think that the root is that the book commits the sin of affirming a position by offering a refutation. The book presupposes a capital S-Science that stands opposed to the paranormal. This is inaccurate historically; this is also inaccurate contemporaneously. Or maybe there is some awareness: when the author references historical scientists supporting the scientific method, he chooses Galileo and Kelpler, not Newton. Or, well, Priestley. It is also wrong rhetorically. It cedes the field by conceding the framing of the argument. Yes, there are people who make such a triumphalist claim. But does straw man vs straw man get us anywhere?
The author uses institution as a term of art. The examples are mostly universities, with hospitals mentioned. The justice system is abstracted, with one close example that may stand less than it seems. Religion, to my count, has a single mention, amounting to an assertion that the war between religion and science has produced these paranormal believers in the generically spiritual. Institution here is a sort of Enlightenment-based, New Deal-y, civil society and small-l liberal sort of thing.
So, to the extent that the overlap in these institutions and more esoteric beliefs is not mentioned, the counter-institutions are wholly absent. Having just read Little Bosses Everywhere, the significance of something like the MLM is critical to this picture. The significance of think tanks, and moral majority politics is important. There is no observation of the vast overlap in how all this Paranormal is built to fit within the confines of Protestant Christianity.
The thesis is standing on a whale, fishing for minnows. The book takes that leftie critique of right and Neo-Liberal thought where people are the salvation or damnation, not systems, but then blames it on the softest possible of targets, the sort of feel-good spiritualism that, to me, feels pretty inconsequential.
It is remarkable that the book focuses on this sort of bland paranormal followers, earnest and lovely and wonderful, as opposed to, say, whatever Alex Jones is currently on about. There is a pipeline between the evil and the paranormal, not in an occult way, but in a way scratching at a lot of these beliefs turns up racist and anti-Semitic origins, with contemporary fascists quite aware of the recruitment potential. Mind you, the practitioners here are blameless, excluding that one guy (who would be, contra the book, that one guy regardless of his context), but if you want to start allowing this sort of thing as a solution – and to its credit the book does offer a solution – you need something that weeds out racists.
Back to Priestly. He is an odd choice to invoke for a few reasons. While he discovered oxygen, he is as famous for his refusal to follow the facts of where his discovery led (to modern chemistry theory), to the extent that he dispute the function of experimentation in science. He represented one of those Enlightenment synthesizers, out to merge rationality and religion.
Awkwardly, his house got burnt down for his anti-institutional positions. He was a threat to people who supported Crown and Church because he was okay with non-Anglicans having institutional power. The riot, sometimes named after Priestly, came about because the pro-Enlightenment folks supported outsiders having a way in, and people did not like that, because they supported the status quo but also because they had wholly erroneous beliefs about what sort of foreign influences were at work through these people who believed differently. It is not comparable, and to the extent that it is comparable, it is the opposite lesson.
Thanks to the author, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, for writing the book, and to the publisher, PublicAffairs, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 