The funniest and most frightening of these cases was a letter from something calling itself the Religious Experience Research Unit at Manchester College, Oxford, director Sir Alister Hardy, FRS. The writer, who was not Sir Alister, said that he and his colleagues were collecting examples of outlandish coincidences and the like, asked for further details of my ‘experience’, and added that so far nobody known to him had come across ‘such a striking and remarkable nexus of events as you describe’. I hope not. There was another good bit about my having been (on one view of the matter) in two places at once; that was comparatively straightforward, the man said, an obvious case of ‘bi-location’. You could not wish for a finer example of the popular habit of thinking that giving something a Latin name goes a fair part of the way towards explaining it. ‘Mummy, there’s a monk floating in the air – how does he do it?’ ‘It’s called levitation, dear.’ ‘Oh, I see.’
I was tempted to string this fellow along, but compassion or laziness intervened. Eventually, I believe, the Religious Experience Research Unit or its scribes published a compendium of striking and remarkable nexuses of events. If I have the right book in mind, it received a great deal of respectful attention. In one way, this is not at all surprising. All sorts of people are uncomfortable in a universe where there seems to be nothing supernatural, nothing beyond this life, no undiscovered forces, no God. I sympathize; I find it none too cosy myself; but I do wish there were a little less eager, cruising credulity about. I wish too, quite vainly, that such people, other people too, would face a little more squarely what is entailed by believing, or believing in, something.
Science-fiction fans among many will remember how, one night in 1938, Orson Welles put out an adaptation of his near-namesake’s War of the Worlds over a New York radio station. It was cleverly done as a succession of supposed news broadcasts and, near the end, supposedly genuine commentators described the invaders from Mars horrifically battering their way into the city. According to the story, thousands of listeners panicked, fled along the streets, besieged bus terminals, drove off into the countryside. This showed credulity all right, stupidity too – ‘news’ of that sort would not be going out on just one channel, etc. But it also showed a certain consistency. If, for whatever inadequate reason, you really believe the Martians are coming, then you are behaving logically and appropriately by trying to run away, you are following out the consequences of your belief.
Nobody, as far as I know, panicked or drove to Cornwall as a result of my broadcast. But those who said they thought the story was true, or might be true, responded illogically and inappropriately. Consider: if you saw a man restoring to life another clinically certified as dead beyond the possibility of error (and that would be less extraordinary than what I described over the air), the appropriate response would surely not be, ‘How very interesting. I might telephone that chap in a day or two and see if I can find out a bit more about it.’ No; if you telephoned anyone it would be the Archbishop of Canterbury, you would fly to the Vatican, approach the worker of the miracle and say, ‘Master, I will sell all that I have and follow you.’ Those reactions to my broadcast constitute one more small piece of evidence that, when it comes to any debatable question of this sort, from the existence of ghosts to the value of palmistry, the line between belief and disbelief is becoming blurred. Is astrology true or false? Many would say that there was something in it, many more than take the slightest practical notice of its advice. Do you believe the flat-Earth theory? Yes and no. That way madness lies.
I have seen it said that the first three stories here are parts of an unfinished or discarded novel, and that ‘Moral Fibre’ comes from a draft of my novel That Uncertain Feeling. Neither is true.
Kingsley Amis
Dear Illusion Page 55