149 - In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture

In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture
By R. Laurence Moore
New York, Oxford University Press, 1977. 310 pp. $12.50.

The widespread interest in parapsychological phenomena during the past two decades often has been regarded as yet another manifestation of a "counter-cultural" fad-not so bizarre as witchcraft, so respected as Zen Buddhism, but just as alien to the mainstream of American thought. R. Laurence Moore's In Search of White Crows places parapsychology in historical context which shows precisely where it is located: namely, in a tradition of research into "supernormal" phenomena that dates back to nineteenth-century spiritualism with its mediums, seances, and conversations with departed spirits. Moore, Associate Professor of American history at Cornell, brings a broad cultural perspective to bear on the central figures and organizations which supported spiritualism and parapsychology. His discussions of each historical segment are necessarily brief, but well chosen to illustrate his general picture of these movements.

The real contribution of Moore's book, however, is not his chronicle as such-others, more complete, are available and duly recommended in Moore's bibliography-but his demonstration that spiritualism and parapsychology are linked through their mutual tension with the mainstream of American science. Theirs was not the familiar fundamentalist conflict with science which revolved around the issue of the literal truth of the Bible. Spiritualism and parapsychology dealt with a more "fundamental" issue: whether the prevailing scientific world-picture is adequate to understand certain areas of human experience-communications received in trance, ESP, telepathy, and the like.

Spiritualists and parapsychologists accepted the fact that scientific method and empirical observation provide our best paths to truth, but they criticized science insofar as it implied a mechanistic materialism, and they accused scientists of narrowmindedness in ignoring considerable bodies of empirical evidence. Much of the work of leading figures in both movements concentrated on verifying "supernormal" phenomena. As Moore observes, however, they failed to develop adequate explanatory frameworks which might have provided an entry into "real" science.

Further, because of spiritualists' connections with popular mediums who turned out to be frauds or because of careless experimental procedures in the twentieth century, they could not convince the larger scientific community that there was even a genuine body of data to be investigated. Thus the spiritualists and parapsychologists, from Andrew Jackson Davis to the famous J. B. Rhine of Duke University, found

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themselves part of a marginal movement-scientific by their self-definition but not accepted in the larger community of researchers.

The personal interests of many of the people involved, especially in nineteenth-century spiritualism, led the movement toward religion. Yet they were marginally religious as well, criticized by the mainstream church, diffuse in belief and doctrine, and not organized enough to be a successful religious movement. Moore provides us with a picture of the life patterns of several important figures, shows the connection between spiritualism and changes in women's roles in the nineteenth century, and discusses how spiritualism and parapsychology became conflated with mysticism and occultism. Thus he demonstrates the connection with religion and culture at large.

But all these factors, from nineteenth-century social change to the youth culture of the 1960s, swamped the attempts of serious researchers to build an empirical and experimental science. In short, these movements were caught in the middle-between faith in science and criticism of it, and between their quasi-religious desire to explore a "something more" in the cosmos and their frequent rejections of traditional understandings of God and Christianity. These tensions emerge in different ways in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but remain characteristic of the entire history of both spiritualism and parapsychology.

Moore's study is a fascinating glimpse into the history of a marginal intellectual tradition. The chief problem with his book is its diffuseness, especially in Part I on spiritualism. Moore discusses this movement in relation to social reform and women's roles, Christian orthodoxy, and other currents of ideas (for example, transcendentalism), and provides vignettes of spiritualists. The diverse issues here make it difficult to discern a central argument through these chapters, but this may be partly a result of the material itself. The spiritualist movement was so diverse in membership, impact, and relation to other aspects of American culture that a unified description is impossible. But an overview at the end of Part I would have been helpful.

Part II is a clear explication of the history of parapsychology, but the larger cultural context is sketched very sparsely because Moore deals almost exclusively with the narrower community of researchers. This might be confusing. For instance, what happened to all the movements which we usually associate with spiritualism, like mysticism, theosophy, and other forms of supernaturalism? But one of Moore's central points is that the trajectory from spiritualism to parapsychology is unique because of its empiricist approach.

What the book tells us, by its very form, is that the multifaceted wanderings of spiritualism in the nineteenth century boiled down to the interests of a few dedicated researchers in the twentieth century, until the new cultural explosion of the 1960s. This is a valuable perspective on spiritualism, though not the only possible one. It highlights some important issues in modern culture: what is acceptable as scientific and

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rational, and what difficulties are encountered by those who challenge prevailing definitions.

Moore offers no solution to the problems raised by spiritualism and parapsychology. He does offer a satisfying plurality (à la William James) of explanations-sociological, psychological, and cultural-on their behalf. Yet he does not explain them away. He seems sympathetic to their search for ways of dealing intellectually with inexplicable phenomena and to their failure to gain scientific respectability.

In Search of White Crows leaves us as puzzled as ever by "supernormal" phenomena, but much more sensitive to the diversity of these marginal traditions too often lumped together as "counter-cultural" religious fads. Spiritualism and parapsychology each have their own history, linked in interesting ways to each other and to their culture. Reflection on the issues they raise about science, religion, and culture should lead us to a clearer view of the alternative movements in contemporary American culture.

Sandra S. Sizer
San Diego State University
San Diego, California