`A Sort of Addiction'

I know a woman, raised a Roman Catholic, who exulted two years ago while Pope John Paul II was dying. She was torn between wanting him to be dead and wanting him to go on living and suffering, thus further fueling her histrionic rage and glee. This is a woman blind to nuance and moral shading. Her world is a simple place, where allies and enemies are easily identified, the latter far outnumber the former, and there are no insurgents in civilian clothes. Without knowing it she is a neo-Manichean, but her professed religion is astrology.

Within minutes of meeting her almost 10 years ago, she asked my “sign” and proffered, unsolicited, a capsule review of my character and fate. (I can’t remember a thing she said.) Like a true sectarian, she reviles many of her co-religionists, especially those who swear by the daily horoscope in the newspaper with its cookie-cutter prognostications and advice. She is not stupid but she is blind to her true selves, revels in the impulse of the moment and uses her intelligence vulgarly. Spinoza would have deemed her a slave.

It’s another philosopher, however, who made me think again about this woman. But for the vehemence and tedium of her rants, William James probably could have mustered more tolerance than I can, and accepted her monstrous inconsistency as merely human, further evidence of the fiercely human will to believe. I’ve been rereading The Selected Letters of William James, the selection edited by Elizabeth Hardwick in 1960, and dabbling in several volumes of the grand 12-volume Correspondence of William James, published by the University of Virginia Press. I’ll quote a passage from Hardwick’s introduction, though I don’t care for the smug tone of the first sentence:

“Religion: sometimes an embarrassment to James’s reasonable admirers. His nuts and cranks, his mediums and table-tappers, his faith healers and receivers of communications from the dead – all are greeted by James with the purest, melting latitudinarianism, a nearly disreputable amiability, a broadness of tolerance and fascination like that of a priest at a jam session….Religion, on the other hand, was a sort of addiction for James, and all of his personality is caught up in it, his unique ambivalence, his longing, as Oliver Wendell Holmes says, `for a chasm from which might appear a phenomenon without phenomenal antecedents.’”

I consider myself a “reasonable admirer” of James but his interest in religion causes me no embarrassment, though his credulity regarding spiritualism and the other bunkum outlined by Hardwick does. For James, the essence of such beliefs was immortality – for him, the great calmative. When his beloved sister Alice was dying, he wrote her:

“When that which is you passes out of the body, I am sure that there will be an explosion of liberated force and life till then eclipsed and kept down. I can hardly imagine your transition without a great oscillation of both `worlds’ as they regain their new equilibrium after the change! Everyone will feel the shock, but you yourself will be more surprised than anybody else.”

Only a sociopath would challenge these words. They are loving and brave, and probably comforted William more than Alice. In 1884, the American Chapter of the Society for Psychical Research was organized, and James remained a member until his death in 1910 (and perhaps beyond). This is where I part company with William James, where sympathetic imagination fails me. I recognize the deep attraction such beliefs hold for many, but they leave me cold. What I do appreciate in the “psychical” James is the delight he took in debunking frauds. He wrote that he “spent the most hideously inept psychical night, in Charleston, over a much-praised female medium who fraudulently played on the guitar. A plague take all white-livered, anaemic, flaccid, weak-voiced Yankee frauds. Give me a full-blooded red-lipped villain like dear old D. – when shall I look upon her like?”

I’m not familiar with James’s assessment of astrology, but he believed in testing every belief by life, against life. By that standard, in the case of the woman I described above, a belief in the influence of the planets and stars on human beings is an appalling failure.




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