Abstract
‘Mass Observation’ is a social research project that was begun in 1937 and has encouraged people to record their views at greater length than what is captured by other surveys of social attitudes. The original project ended in the 1960s, but it was relaunched in 1981 from the University of Sussex, collecting people’s thoughts on a variety of topics in response to questionnaires that were sent to them, referred to as ‘directives’. The material that Hinton uses in this book was generated by a 1996 directive asking volunteers to write about their attitudes to the supernatural, understood in a broad sense, and how those attitudes relate to their other beliefs, including any religious beliefs they might have. What emerges is a fascinating picture of a complexity that is missed by the idea of a simple religious/non-religious divide.
The respondents, Hinton says, fell into three main groups: Christians; believers in non-religious notions of spirituality; and atheists and agnostics. Their thoughts do not, however, slot easily into those three categories. ‘For many of these people,’ he says, ‘religious belief or its absence was fraught with ambiguity, ambivalence, uncertainty, longing or, in some cases, guilt,’ and ‘opinion polls are unlikely to register such complexities’ (p. 11).
Attitudes to death and mortality, for instance, cut across the divides between those three groups, and ‘beliefs about the existence or non-existence of the supernatural were less important than orientations towards the meaning of life’ (p. 50). Sensations of the presence of dead relatives were experienced by people who had no belief in life after death, but for whom it expressed the importance of the family as a way of dealing with loss. Several non-believers found significance in the idea of being part of the continuing natural world, an all-encompassing cosmic order.
Views of the relation between religion and science present a similarly complex picture, with some religious believers as resolute in their rejection of ‘superstition’ as non-believers, others willing to set reason aside if the science appeared to conflict with their beliefs, and some of the unbelievers ‘equally conflicted, disappointed that science could offer no answers to life’s deeper mysteries’ (p. 68).
‘Transcendent’ experiences of awe and wonder were important both for believers and for non-believers, often as responses to the natural world and the countryside, and often also to literature, art and music, including religious music, which could be as powerfully experienced by atheists as by believers. For a number of the mass observers, out-of-body or near-death experiences had been significant in their lives, without necessarily being understood in religious terms.
As interesting as the material itself is the conclusion to which Hinton is led. As he says, he is concerned not just to report it but to enter into dialogue with it. Coming to it as a convinced atheist, he was increasingly drawn to the view that what matters is not so much the truth or falsity of beliefs as the exercise of the human imagination to find intimations of meaning in a life. His aim, he says, ‘has been to bring divergent ways of finding meaning in human life into dialogue with one another’ (p. 140).