As Far As We Can Get

	Book review on Life beyond death. What should we expect? by David Fontana Reviewed by Lance St John Butler, 2009 published in Network Review No 101
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In the matter of Life After Death I think we have got as far as we are going to get under present circumstances, and David Fontana's book, coming on the heels of his own Is There an Afterlife? (and Anthony Peake's Is There Life after Death?) demonstrates pretty much where that is.

Since the 1840s and the advent of modern spiritualism, and a fortiori since the founding of the various Psychical Research bodies in the 1880s and 90s, a fairly coherent picture has built up of the possibility and possible nature of survival. We have mediumistic and 'channelled' evidence, NDE accounts, Death-bed Visions, After-Death Communications, the reincarnation material and Instrumental Transcommunication. Some parts of this seemed to loom large in the earlier period, other parts had to wait for developments which came later in the 20^th century such as dedicated scholarly research (Ian Stevenson's studies of reincarnation), or technological advances (improved resuscitation techniques in hospitals for more NDEs).

These bodies of evidence have become steadily more voluminous but the overall picture we have of the afterlife has not greatly changed. Communications from 'the other side' have neither become laughably old-fashioned, thin and dubious (there is new material coming in all the time after all) but nor have they become gleamingly modern and solidly convincing to all observers. They have been in a more-or-less steady state. The result of this is that Fontana is able to range freely over 150 years of evidence and research, quoting William James and the Scole Report for instance, separated as they are by a good century, almost in the same breath.

That's fine - indeed, that is simply how it is - but it is a little odd. How many other fields of research show that kind of consistency, or should one say stasis? In Survival Studies there is new evidence and new material, and there are new ways of gathering that evidence and material, but the arguments between sceptics and those who think there is something real being investigated stand almost exactly where they did. One side can point to paranormal phenomena of a convincing kind, the other side can either ignore them (parapsychology not being part of mainstream serious discourse) or propose alternative explanations which, although often rather sketchy, will satisfy most sceptics.

Fontana takes us through some of the material with a focus on what life after death might actually be like. It seems to be a thought-world in which, for instance, on the lower levels, we seem to have bodies, but in which, as we ascend, we learn that they are only thought bodies or a species of illusion. His emphasis is both on what is suggested by the evidence (gleaned from good mediums, convincing NDEs and children) and what has been the opinion of religious thinkers over the centuries - so St Isaac the Syrian and Severus of Ravenna rub shoulders with Erlundur Haraldsson and Kenneth Ring , and we get the Bardo Thodol alongside Helen Wambach and Tom Harrison. I think this eclecticism is justified among the open-minded but I fear it will cut little ice with those whose noses are already hard; the good logic of arguments based for instance on evidence that is unknown to anybody present at a séance, or unknown to a reincarnation claimant before he has made his claim, might stagger the sceptic, but the quotation of sayings from St Luke probably only dubiously attributable to Jesus will not.

So Fontana is perhaps, and perhaps deliberately, preaching to the converted. After all, he is probably the best-informed expert on survival in the country if not on the planet and he is in the strange position of being engaged in a field that, while it produces a lot of evidence, might not refer to anything at all. This book will send those seeking more information to many good sources but it will send those who are unconvinced back into their corners still growling.

It is worth asking why Survival Studies (in spite of recent developments in certain universities in the UK and US I think I have invented those capitals) should be in this strange static position where it has grown in size for so many decades without moving on at the level of paradigm or convincingness. I think the answer, interestingly, tends to support the notion that there is something in it all. If there were nothing in the theory of Survival, as for instance there was nothing in Phrenology, then, like Phrenology, it would have died a quiet death. The fact that it has not been dispatched by the mainstream intellectual consensus is significant. On the other hand the fact that it has such difficulty in operating as a convincing discourse is attributable to a particular quality in the evidence. To give only one aspect of this peculiarity: science demands the replicability of results and it may just be that dead people communicate accurately one day, falsely the next and not at all the third. NDEs are hard to repeat at will or in the laboratory.

Perhaps, then, we need to move to a different logical paradigm altogether here, one in which the vague (for much of Fontana's book is about the vague, the temporary, the illusory as they are manifested both here and on the other side) must be allowed its place. After all, 'strict' science of the 19^th-century kind is not the only show in town. The poststructuralist attack on certainty, for instance, is not a Gallic conspiracy against Anglo-Saxon pragmatic realism; it is the most profoundly radical philosophy since Plato. We may need to learn to think differently, with less 'certainty', and in that different thinking notions of 'otherness' or 'death' or 'life' are already under heavy fire.

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