extract from a letter I sent some time ago
When you were considering the possibility of supporting our work some years ago, and your representative Lord X met our trustee the Hon. Charles Strutt, I was told by Charles Strutt that he was talking a bit about his family's involvement in psychical research and was asked by Lord X whether all academics without exception were in favour of research in this field. I suppose Charles Strutt replied, 'No, not all. But there were some who were.'
In an area so emotionally loaded as this, I am afraid that the exchange of socially acceptable rationalisations is not a way to arrive at what is really the case. All academics without exception, and the psychological forces of modern society as a whole, are against us. The psychological forces against us are those that are destroying Western civilisation, and it is difficult to talk about this because a highly fictitious view of what is going on is universally accepted.The Strutts were among the aristocratic families which, since the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, had devoted considerable time and analytical effort, not to mention the expense of employing mediums and private detectives, to what was ostensibly research aimed at proving survival.
This was, and remains, something of a red herring. Because my colleagues and I are prepared to work on, for example, out-of-the-body experiences, we are widely supposed to have spiritualistic beliefs.
In reality, however, tribal/communistic psychology has little against people communing with their deceased ancestors. The work of the SPR was getting close to far more dangerous issues which opened up (or might open up) possibilities for the extension of individual control over the environment. The work of the SPR on Cross-Correspondences from 1900 to 1930 provided persuasive evidence for extra-sensory perception, or the acquisition of information by means independent of sensory channels.
Even more dangerously, two Lords Rayleigh (family name Strutt, as I expect you know), also physicists at Cambridge, were interested in psychokinesis (movement of physical objects at variance with the known laws of physics) and the case for continuing research on this phenomenon would, in normal circumstances, be regarded as more than adequate.
However, anything that increases individual independence is seen as dangerous, and there therefore set in the tremendous communistic/materialistic social and cultural revolution, replacing the aristocracy and middle-class intellectuals, who had enough freedom to work on such things, with ersatz universities within which no research which presents any threat to the ideology can be done.
The leading academics involved in the field of ‘psychical research’ before 1945 (mostly at Cambridge) had been working to establish its acceptance. The tide turned against them, but one or two loopholes remained. That is why I was able to do a B.Litt on a somewhat risky area (nothing to do with mediumship or spiritualism) at Oxford financed by a Research Studentship from Trinity College, Cambridge. But after that my way was blocked.
There is much more which could be said, but I will leave it at this for the time being, if I may.