Gordon McLauchlan: Moral mischief for the gullible

Watching the Prime television programme Beyond the other night, with its inept, oleaginous medium James van Praagh (or is it Aargh!), I wondered what had happened to common sense since those days when it was illegal for people to pretend they were in touch with the next world, or could foretell the future.

Okay, I'm not in favour of going back to prohibition, but those laws did reflect a solid bourgeois sense of reality.

I remember my mother and some of her friends visiting the homes of mediums and fortune-tellers. They couldn't legally pay for the services of these folk but would drop five shillings on the sideboard on the way out.

Along with my father I used to resent this until my mother said with a grin one night, "It's cheaper than the circus." My father retorted with, "But dearer than the pictures." I realised that for my mother it was entertainment at a time when you pretty well had to make your own.

Like when a school friend and I went to a British Israelites church service in Lower Hutt one boring Sunday night and sensed immediately the place was spiritually corrupt. We went back several times to see which of us could most convincingly "speak in tongues" and time when to flake out in the arms of a catcher. When they realised we were taking the mickey they got some big brothers to mind us, and we decided to cut and run.

Before you suggest we had no right to make fun of other people's beliefs, let me tell you a sequel: the hierarchy of the congregation - to dignify it with such a term - refused to allow medical treatment for the sick among their pastoral sheep.

One young person almost died in agony before the police intervened; but the leader, Brother Frank, was sprung by a newspaper seeking medical help for a serious health problem. He was a conman.

Watching Beyond and listening carefully to this guy pretending to contact "the other side", I was reminded of Tom Paine in The Age of Reason: "Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief that mental lying has produced in society."

You don't have to be very balanced and smart to realise that van Aargh! is no more in touch with the spirits of the dead than I am with the wildlife of Mars. And compared with mediums I have known, he's not really very good at it as he holds some gullible woman's hand and tells her in a quavering voice, his head bobbing with synthetic emotion, "Your grandmother loves you, she loves you," and the woman weeps and the crowd of suckers claps and cheers.

It would take a small team of professional ghostbusters no time at all to show him for the fraud he is. Indeed, no medium who has been scrutinised has ever survived it.

So let's not try to ban creeps like van Praagh but let's ask the programme executives of Prime to consider the morality of playing around with the confusion and the credulity of grieving people.

Do television executives ever say, "This is infidelity of the unkindest sort. We shouldn't play this programme"? Or do they simply acknowledge that it scores high ratings and nothing else matters.

Sincere and legitimate artists in all media attract critical reviews, yet this prime-time stuff can, in some media, go unappraised.

But if van Aargh! knows what he's doing, the hapless news readers at TV3 don't seem to when they smile through such blatantly absurd figures as: "Experts say up to 20 per cent of people break their New Year resolutions." And later in the same bulletin on Wednesday night: "Research suggests that [didn't catch it] per cent want to be better people." (Imagine utterly insufferable people who wouldn't want to be better.)

It says something of the tone of modern society that science is scathingly attacked (often quite rightly) when some few of them attempt work of dubious morality, but so-called New Age philosophy and phoney spiritualism carry on with impunity.

In this Christian age we are surrounded by sorcerers and shamans and especially nympholepsy, with practitioners so grossly insincere they would have had a hard time among the pagans.

In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote: "I learnt not to be absorbed in trivial pursuits; to be sceptical of wizards and wonder-workers with their tales of spells, exorcisms and the like."

I'd say that Roman Emperor would laugh at the goings on of James van Aargh! and at the casuistry of stories in Investigate if we suggested to him that civilisation has advanced much in the past 1900 years.

He might look back even further back into "darkest" heathenism and consider the intellectual tone set by Socrates and explicated by Plato and laugh even louder at our pretensions.

Footnote: The Government deserves praise for its policy over Iraq, as expressed by Foreign Minister Phil Goff. No bravado or protestations of virtue, just a simple declaration that we will give humanitarian aid.

And Goff would know that the Americans in their present chauvinistic mood don't count as friends anyone who doesn't follow their cheerleaders.