London, 1870s and 1880s
The spiritualist salons of Victorian London were one of the more concentrated expressions of a pattern I have watched in various forms across five centuries: the wealthy consuming illusions at the cost of ignoring realities that were not comfortable to engage with directly.
I attended several of these salons. I was in the room when the medium produced her performances and when the wealthy and educated people in the room chose to believe what they saw. The cholera was in the streets below. The child labor was in the factories a mile away. The sewers were not yet adequate to the city’s population. These were solvable problems. They required money, political will, and the willingness to look at uncomfortable facts rather than comfortable fictions.
The séance chambers required money and the willingness to look at comfortable fictions rather than uncomfortable facts. The exchange was, I thought at the time, very specifically a choice: not an innocent error but a preference, held against the weight of available evidence, for the ghost over the child in the street.
I do not think the Victorians were uniquely hypocritical. I think they were expressing a preference that appears in every civilization I have observed: the preference for the transcendent over the immediate, for the spiritual performance over the material obligation, for the ghost over the fact. The feast of ghosts continues in different rooms with different props. The hunger it feeds, and the hunger it allows the feeders to ignore, remain essentially the same.