The Paranormal vs. the Paranoid
Excerpt from Hilary Mantel’s review of the Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained in the Jan 24 London Review of Books.
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“…If you hang around the anomalous long enough, you see that most people within its range have an unexpressed but quite sophisticated sense of ambiguity. They go to a ‘psychic fair’ in a spirit of temporary suspension of disbelief: it is as if they had picked up a novel. For a limited time, events unfold around them as a powerful second reality … Two hours pass; they close the book or rise from their seat, they shut down that other world, run out into the high street and go looking for a pizza.
“In Britain, where mainstream religion is dwindling into a mix of apathy and superstition, alternative views are not part of the counter-culture but part of popular culture …
“We are only in the market for fun-size beliefs, unlike the US, where the aggressive fundamentalist irrationality of evangelical Christianity moves real money around, affects how children are educated, and darkens believers’ perceptions of other cultures.
“On the whole, we have the better part:
“Superstition is easier to accommodate in the body politic than religion. It is less divisive: no one ever went to war about what you should chant when you see a magpie, or was burned at the stake for denying the reality of the Loch Ness Monster.â€