This is in part one of those diaries justified by the poll attached to it. I'm really interested in the answer: do you believe in ghosts?
You probably never expected to be asked that question here, which is part of what makes it such an interesting question this All Hallows Eve. If you check popular culture, you'll find ghosts everywhere, in sentimental garb both heavy duty (Mitch Albom, "The Ghost Whisperer") and medium ("Medium"), or in garb terrifying (no cites necessary); you'll also find "Ghost Hunters" on basic cable (one of my daughters is addicted to it) claiming the mantle of scientific inquiry. But it's not part of polite rational discussion, despite that equally unscientific notions such as religious beliefs are treated with pointed respect by most of us. There is a deep disjuncture between the rational and political movements who likely consider the question in my title embarrassing and what I suspect is the wide majority of the population who consider ghosts conceivable. Why can't we talk about these sorts of things with others whose opinions we respect? (Perhaps we're about to find out.)
I find the concept of "ghosts" terrifying not because I am afraid of being bitten, haunted, killed, or such by one, but because the most plausible depiction of ghosts, as the persisting spirits of the dead, suggests a horrifying cosmology, a "locked-in syndrome" run rampant. Look at it from the ghost's perspective: "I have to stay down here, where I don't want to be, for how long?" No wonder they're pissed off. Next to the fable of eternal hellfire for unbelievers or the insufficiently devout, which portrays God as literally being worse than Hitler to the Pol Pot power, the notion that human spirits are posted eternally on the prowl is pretty much the worst indictment of God I can imagine.
I don't mind lounging on the Heavenly Couch for centuries checking in periodically to see whether the Cubs ever win the World Series, but inflicting my ectoplasmic spleen on innocent others like some sort of demented and elaborate mousetrap? No thanks. I'll moulder in my grave instead, thanks. If there are ghosts, I hope that they're like those in the last act of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, hanging around watching the world only until they lost track of the characters and inevitably lose interest.
I find interesting that while the belief in ghosts would seem, in my mind at least, to imply some belief in God (at least God as a diffuse cosmic power capable of splitting off, preserving, and deploying human spirits outside of the physical laws that we've been privileged to learn), some people manage both to be atheistic and to believe in ghosts. (My mother was like this. She was essentially an atheist, but one who believed in the Evil Eye and in offending the ancestors. Perhaps I should not say more about her, just in case she was right.)
Religious belief seems to facilitate belief in ghosts, though. My wife, if pressed, would probably admit to belief in ghosts, based on some harrowing stories I've heard her tell about life in a Philippine village, where Weird Things Happened. (She knows how to propitiate a ghost, too. Call the "quack doctor" -- they actually call them that, there, and it's not an insult -- to diagnose the problem and then give the ghost an offering of food. This, she says, has made at least one apparition disappear. If your daughter were sick and seeing a baleful ghost in a tree, would you feed it to satisfy it and make it go away?)
That last question is key: the issue is perhaps less what we believe than what we are prepared, in extremis, not to disbelieve. I have no affirmative belief in ghosts (or necessarily in paranormal phenomena more broadly, although I have had some weird, though seemingly benign, things happen to be on a few occasions that I seriously cannot explain), but that doesn't seem to me to be the test of my belief: the test is whether I reject the evidence of my own senses if it tells me that a ghost is nearby. If I do, then I am a true rationalist -- and possibly a fool.
Consider this: if I wrote a diary entitled "Do you believe in vampires?" or "Do you believe in werewolves?" or "Do you believe in zombies (other than in the 'returning banned users' context)?", you would (quite rightly, in my opinion), think that I was just yanking your chain. But there is something different about the question "Do you believe in ghosts?" Perhaps it is because it is more general, rather than talking about specific flavors of beasties but perhaps because it speaks to a more atavistic concern: the continuing presence of the dead in our lives. This harkens back to our animistic, ancestor-worshiping roots, etched deeply in old sections of our brain. The question of belief in ghosts -- equally absurd as asking about vampires and werewolves if they are all impossible -- somehow seems less absurd than the others. Why is that?
I recognize that this diary (if anyone reads it at all, posted as it will be shortly after the stroke of midnight Pacific Time) is likely to garner a loudly hostile reaction from the rationalists among us (among whom I mostly, but not entirely, count myself.) How can I even raise such a topic, such an affront to scientific thinking, let alone inviting people to express their own possibly benighted views? Part of it, again, is mere curiosity to see where people stand. But that's not all of it. Part of it is because I like a nice dollop of humility with my rationalism.
Shakespeare said it best, I think, in his best play -- in anyone ever's best play, in my opinion -- which was as much as anything else a ghost story. The brilliant first act of Hamlet asks what the rational person does when confronted with the perception of a ghost, violating even the less-developed scientific thinking of the day. Once Hamlet, who was more or less a graduate student, ruminates on the sight he has seen, his comment to his friend Horatio was that "There are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." In other words, even though it can't be, it's possible. Later Hamlet -- brilliantly, to my taste -- wonders if the ghost of his beloved father (which is urging him to commit murder) is truly a ghost at all, but rather the manifestation of a more socially acceptable supernatural being: the Devil.
The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me
Isn't it strange that that interpretation of what Hamlet has seen is somehow more acceptable than what it appears he has seen? By the way, we never actually learn that Hamlet's supposition here is wrong. Think about it, could the Devil have done a better job of wreaking havoc and bringing carnage to the court of Elsinore than did its murdered king? Methinks that Hamlet Senior got some bad advice somewhere.
So on the question of ghosts, I remain mostly a rationalist, but one who does believe that our philosophy may not have dreamt all there is to know about heaven and earth. I will, cautiously and tentatively, not believe in ghosts, but I will not denigrate, with an air of superiority and a tone of sarcasm, those who do. (And I will be neither surprised nor distressed if a majority of the site cops to at least some belief that they might exist, although I would be distressed to see people here buy into the vampire mythology.) Mostly, I'm interested in hearing to see what others have to say -- and with that, I bid you good eeeevening (thwip-thwip-thwip)....