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recognised the absurdity of this position, and appointed a committee to look into the claims of Spiritualism.The committee sat for three years, and finally concluded that the claims of Spiritualism were probably true, and that, in any case, there is nothing in the idea of communication with the dead that contradicts Christian doctrine.Embarrassed by this report, the Church decided to drop it into a drawer, where it remained for another forty years, until its publication in 1979.
    The problem remains: why is it that CSICOP and the Church of England can both take up the same uncompromising position on the paranormal?On one level, the answer is obvious.Coping with this complex material world requires a down-to-earth attitude, and the most successful copers will be the down-to-earth materialists.We all want to be successful copers, therefore we are all inclined to be impatient with anyone who seems to live in a world of ideals and abstractions.We all agree that ideals and abstractions are important for the progress of humanity; but we would like to keep them at bay until they have proved their worth.Shaw’s Andrew Undershaft remarks: ‘That is what is wrong with the world at present.It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it won’t scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions.What’s the result?In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankrupcy every year.’
    In 1962, Thomas S.Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions set out to investigate this reluctance to scrap old prejudices.He points out that when scientists have accepted a theory as satisfactory, they are deeply unwilling to admit that there might be anything wrong with it.They ignore small contradictions, but get furious if the contradictory facts grow larger.They are unaware that there is anything wrong about this reaction; they feel that it is the natural attitude of a reasonable man in the face of time-wasting absurdities.New ‘paradigms’ are always seen as time-wasting absurdities.
    All this is as natural as the urge to self-preservation; in fact, it is a part of the urge to self-preservation.William James made the same point in an essay called ‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings’.Cart-horses used to be blinkered to stop them from shying in the traffic; human beings need blinkers to keep them relaxed and sane.Kuhn tells a story of an experiment using playing cards, in which some of the cards were deliberate ‘freaks’—black hearts and red spades.Subjects were asked to call out the suits as the cards were shown to them.When the ‘freak’ card was shown only for a moment, nobody noticed anything wrong.But if the exposure was slightly longer, they became puzzled and upset; they knew there was something wrong, but didn’t know what it was.Some suffered ‘acute personal distress’.When they fathomed what was wrong, the distress was replaced by relief.But a few failed to spot the deliberate mistake, and suffered an increasing build-up of anxiety.According to Kuhn, the demand to introduce new factors into our belief systems causes the same distress and anxiety—and encounters the same resistance.
    What we are talking about, of course, is preconceptions.What is a preconception?It is a kind of mental map that enables you to find your way around, and saves you a great deal of trouble and anxiety—and no anxiety is worse than the anxiety of not knowing where you are and where you are going.Once we have gone to the trouble of acquiring a map, we are naturally anxious not to have to alter it.Small changes are not too difficult to accept.But large changes produce a sensation like the ground quaking under your feet.
    The psychologist Abraham Maslow described an experiment that takes this argument a stage further.The subjects this time were baby pigs.The most timid pigs wanted to stay close to