The Delusions of Elites

I am reading David Jahet's The Witch of Lime Street: Seance, Seduction,  and Houdini in the Spirit World.  It presents a disturbing picture of  Spiritualism, the belief that we could communicate with the dead in the optimistically named Summerland through seances became generally accepted.   It was not just the Edwardian equivalent of blue-haired cat ladies, but many respectable opinion makers such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  Newspapers gave some credence to these claims as well.

Once an idea becomes respectable,  it can sway people who might otherwise have more sense.  The parallels to the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) religion should be obvious.  Spiritualism was a replacement for a Christian belief in an afterlife and was thus only slightly out of step with acceptable beliefs.  This parallels how AGW is only slightly out of step with actual science.

Several years back, I wrote a rebuttal of Pamela Haag's The Gunning of America.  At one point in the book, the author, a Yale Ph.D., seems to have accepted that along with frauds, there were "'white' mediums," actual communicators with the Spirit World who Sarah Winchester used to communicate with her late husband and child.  She went on to describe the values of the Spiritualists as not far removed from the average reader of the New York Times!  I would like to consider that an insult but Haag is certainly more in tune with that class than I am.