Straight to the point

Towards the end of September 1915, the eminent physicist Oliver Lodge heard from his son Raymond, who had gone to fight in Flanders that spring. His situation was “difficult”, but “he has got so many kind friends helping him. He didn’t think when he waked up first that he was going to be happy, but now he is, and he says he is going to be happier. He knows that as soon as he is a little more ready he has got a great deal of work to do.”

Just two weeks earlier, Raymond had been struck by a German shell while he was building trenches near Ypres. A fellow officer wrote to Oliver that “he had seen your son in a dug-out, with a man watching him. He was then quite unconscious though still breathing with difficulty. I could see it was all over with him. He was still just alive when I went away.” Within half an hour he was dead. Another officer sent him a description of the cemetery in which he had been buried that very evening.

This solemn correspondence marked a beginning rather than an end. After the “first shock of bereavement”, the whole Lodge family had soon developed a “perception of his continued usefulness”. They visited spiritualist mediums who passed on to them Raymond’s utterances from another world. Raymond: Or Life and Death (1916), the book in which Oliver collected these happenings, went through 12 editions in three years. It was both a symptom and an intended vindication of a startling social phenomenon. Although people in Britain and the United States had experimented in contacting the spirit world for more than half a century, the First World War caused a dramatic spike in the practice of spiritualism, as mourners flocked to get in touch with their dead ones.

Raymond makes for affecting but also timely reading today, when Artificial Intelligence is likewise promising to resurrect the dead — for a fee. A number of tech start-ups, such as HereAfter AI and Séance AI, are marketing chatbots that use the digital records of a deceased relative to speak in their voice. Another company, South Korea’s DeepBrain AI, creates video avatars that capture a relative’s mannerisms and voice. A chat window might seem a very different and perhaps more rational place to meet the dead than a “sitting” with a medium. Yet it is worth reflecting on their similarities.

Spiritualists share with the makers of griefbots a conviction that people live in — and live on — in their words. It is true that paranormal happenings were common in sittings. Raymond once spun a table so violently that he broke flowerpots. But Oliver considered the best evidence for his survival to be what he said. At first, he was terse, dropping in references to poems or the initials of friends into his chat with mediums. In time, he became voluble. Yes, he had a body where he now was, a place called “Summer”, which was “such a solid place, I have not got over it yet. It is so wonderfully real.” No, he didn’t understand how it all worked, but he lived in a brick house there and you could get a whisky and soda. A friend of his had successfully requested a cigar.

How could these words convince as well as console? Like a good LLM engineer, Oliver assembled as big a textual corpus as possible. Before readers of Raymond met its posthumous hero, they ploughed through his letters from the Western Front. These beige epistles represented the war as “most like a long picnic in all sorts of places with a sort of constraint and uneasiness in the air”. Their anxious jauntiness echoed the fragmentary reports from “Summer” and so supported Lodge’s broader claim that “personality persists” after death. There is no real breach of continuity between the dead and the living and so “methods of intercommunion across what has seemed to be a gulf can be set going in response to the urgent demand of affection”.

The clients of spiritualists resemble customers for griefbots in another way too: they were building an after-world on their own democratic terms. Although, to the embarrassment of the churches, most still considered themselves Christians, they instinctively reached for technological and scientific rather than theological concepts to sketch out the afterlife. Lodge criticised the Christian churches for making the belief in immortality depend on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, when it would be better to explore the ability of all personalities to survive the body’s death. As a physicist, Lodge was used to charting the invisible forcefields of energy that lay behind the phenomenal world. He championed new terms to make the strange familiar: spirits used telepathy to inhabit the minds of mediums or telekinesis to rap on a table. He likened the chatter between spirits and their mediums to a modern form of magic: the working of a telephone exchange.

Someone who opts to use a griefbot today is of course simulating immortality, rather than believing in it. Yet many of those drawn to spiritualism in the early 20th century were not particularly credulous. Rather than silencing their scepticism, they used it to heighten and refine their experiences. Like many leading intellectuals of his day, Lodge belonged to the Society of Psychical Research (SPR). The members of this ghostbusting think tank sought evidence of personal immortality that could satisfy the robust standards they applied to their study of the natural and human sciences. They took a grim delight in exposing deceit or unwitting collusion on the part of spiritualist mediums, concluding time and again that phenomena they accepted could happen had not happened on this occasion.

The Lodges approached mediums with just this “healthy scepticism”, withholding their identities from them when they could and trying to vet themselves for wishful thinking. Raymond printed the desolate message his mother Mary had scribbled on a scrap of paper in September 1915: “I want to know if you are happy, and that you yourself are really talking to me and no sham.” Like the SPR’s researchers, they often had cause to reflect that spotting shams is hard when you are dealing with people, rather than machines. Truth in a “sitting” was not a hard fact, but a social production, which developed in conversation with mediums. As feminist historians have long pointed out, it was the mediums, generally women, who were often of uncertain education and vague or shady status, who were in charge once the blinds were drawn and the gas turned down.

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These difficulties encouraged Lodge to take a suggestive rather than a dogmatic tone. Raymond was not saying that all of the words of “Raymond” were real, but rather asking: what would it mean to live as if they were true? The “as if” it conjured up was arguably richer and more therapeutic than that which Artificial Intelligence can promise us today. A griefbot promises to assuage our grief by leading us into a private cell of nostalgia. Although our best times with a person are already past, the magic of technology can keep them going by simulating what they might say in a given situation today.

By contrast, Raymond’s survival was supposed to guarantee the future, rather than a perpetual past. Oliver would have been disappointed if his son remained forever the same: he wanted him to continue to learn and to grow. Early 20th century spiritualists belonged to what now seems an archaic, dwindling tribe: inveterate optimists. Even the First World War could not dent Lodge’s confidence that a “magnificent era” still awaited the “whole human race”. In the dark days of 1915, he put out a pamphlet anticipating the dividends of peace. Neutrality and disarmament would be the keystones of international order. Social reforms would enshrine the “pleasure and dignity of labour” and curb the ugly excesses of consumerism: there must be no return, for instance, to the pre-war habit of allowing “whisky advertisements” along the Thames. Although such changes would require extensive state intervention, they would only work if people became “harmonious”, deepening and perfecting their natures.

Raymond led the way. He wanted to assure people that his world was a place of “rational life” and higher education, much like the red brick universities he had attended and where his father worked. He went to lectures to prepare for a higher sphere. He read books that had not yet been written in the library. He waited for our world to rise to his level. His excitement contrasts with the artificially generated spirits of today, who share with those who survive them an inability to imagine a better future.

“I want to study things here a lot,” Raymond told Oliver: “Don’t think it selfish, or that I want to be away from you all. I have still got you, because I feel you so close, closer even. I wouldn’t come back, I wouldn’t for anything that anyone could give me.”

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