Science in its beginnings was due to men who were in love with the world. They perceived the beauty of the stars and the sea, of the winds and the mountains. Because they loved them their thoughts dwelt upon them, and they wished to understand them more intimately than a mere outward contemplation made possible. “The world,” said Heraclitus, “is an ever-living fire, with measures kindling and measures going out.” Heraclitus and the other Ionian philosophers, from whom came the first impulse to scientific knowledge, felt the strange beauty of the world almost like a madness in the blood. They were men of Titanic passionate intellect, and from the intensity of their intellectual passion the whole movement of the modern world has sprung.
…When I come to die I shall not feel that I have lived in vain. I have seen the earth turn red at evening, the dew sparkling in the morning, and the snow shining under a frosty sun; I have smelt rain after drought, and have heard the stormy Atlantic beat upon the granite shores of Cromwell.
…Knowing and feeling are equally essential ingredients both in the life of the individual and in that of the community. Knowledge, if it is wide and intimate, brings with it a realization of distant times and places, an awareness that the individual is not omnipotent or all-important, and a perspective in which values are seen more clearly than by those to whom a distant view is impossible. Even more important than knowledge is the life of the emotions. A world without delight and without affection is a world destitute of value.
…[W]hen we recognize some emotional vulnerability regarding a claim, that is exactly where we have to make the firmest efforts at skeptical scrutiny. That is where we can be had.
…[One letter I received] said that as an inveterate skeptic I have closed my mind to the truth. Most notably I have ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand years old. Well, I haven’t ignored it; I considered the purported evidence and then rejected it. There is a difference, and this is a difference, we might say, between prejudice and postjudice. Prejudice is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts. Postjudice is making a judgment afterwards. Prejudice is terrible, in the sense that you commit injustices and you make serious mistakes. Postjudice is not terrible. You can’t be perfect of course; you may make mistakes also. But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have examined the evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged.
…If science were explained to the average person in a way that is accessible and exciting, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But there is a kind of Gresham’s Law by which in popular culture the bad science drives out the good. And for this I think we have to blame, first, the scientific community ourselves for not doing a better job of popularizing science, and second, the media, which are in this respect almost uniformly dreadful. Every newspaper in America has a daily astrology column. How many have even a weekly astronomy column? And I believe it is also the fault of the educational system. We do not teach how to think. This is a very serious failure that may even, in a world rigged with 60,000 nuclear weapons, compromise the human future.
I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.
I [have] argued that the modern denial of the dark side of human nature — the doctrine of the Noble Savage — was a reaction against the romantic militarism, hydraulic theories of aggression, and glorification of struggle and strife that had been popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Scientists and scholars who question the modern doctrine have been accused of justifying violence and have been subjected to vilification, blood libel, and physical assault. The Noble Savage myth appears to be another instance of an antiviolence movement leaving a cultural legacy of propriety and taboo.
…[In his book, Evil, Roy] Baumeister was moved to study the commonsense understanding of evil when he noticed that the people who perpetrate destructive acts, from everyday peccadilloes to serial murders and genocides, never think they are doing anything wrong. How can there be so much evil in the world with so few evil people doing it?
…Baumeister and his collaborators Arlene Stillwell and Sara Wotman couldn’t very well get people to commit atrocities in the lab, but they reasoned that everyday life has its share of smaller hurts that they could put under the microscope. They asked people to describe one incident in which someone angered them, and one incident in which they angered someone. The order of the two questions was randomly flipped from one participant to the next, and they were separated by a busywork task so the participants wouldn’t answer them in quick succession. Most people get angry at least once a week, and nearly everyone gets angry at least once a month, so there was no shortage of material. Both perpetrators and victims recounted plenty of lies, broken promises, violated rules and obligations, betrayed secrets, unfair acts, and conflicts over money.
But that was all that the perpetrators and victims agreed on. The psychologists pored over the narratives and coded features such as the time span of the events, the culpability of each side, the perpetrator’s motive, and the aftermath of the harm. If one were to weave a composite out of their tallies, they might look something like this:
The Perpetrator’s Narrative: The story begins with the harmful act. At the time I had good reasons for doing it. Perhaps I was responding to an immediate provocation. Or I was just reacting to the situation in a way that any reasonable person would. I had a perfect right to do what I did, and it’s unfair to blame me for it. The harm was minor, and easily repaired, and I apologized. It’s time to get over it, put it behind us, let bygones be bygones. The Victim’s Narrative: The story begins long before the harmful act, which was just the latest incident in a long history of mistreatment. The perpetrator’s actions were incoherent, senseless, incomprehensible. Either that or he was an abnormal sadist, motivated only by a desire to see me suffer, though I was completely innocent. The harm he did is grievous and irreparable, with effects that will last forever. None of us should ever forget it.
They can’t both be right — or more to the point, neither of them can be right all of the time, since the same participants provided a story in which they were the victim and a story in which they were the perpetrator. Something in human psychology distorts our interpretation and memory of harmful events.
This raises an obvious question. Does our inner perpetrator whitewash our crimes in a campaign to exonerate ourselves? Or does our inner victim nurse our grievances in a campaign to claim the world’s sympathy? Since the psychologists were not flies on the wall at the time of the actual incidents, they had no way of knowing whose retrospective accounts should be trusted.
In an ingenious follow-up, Stillwell and Baumeister controlled the event by writing an ambiguous story in which one college roommate offers to help another with some coursework but reneges for a number of reasons, which leads the student to receive a low grade for the course, change his or her major, and switch to another university. The participants (students themselves) simply had to read the story and then retell it as accurately as possible in the first person, half of them taking the perspective of the perpetrator and half the perspective of the victim. A third group was asked to retell the story in the third person; the details they provided or omitted serve as a baseline for ordinary distortions of human memory that are unaffected by self-serving biases. The psychologists coded the narratives for missing or embellished details that would make either the perpetrator or the victim look better.
The answer to the question “Who should we believe?” turned out to be: neither. Compared to the benchmark of the story itself, and to the recall of the disinterested third-person narrators, both victims and perpetrators distorted the stories to the same extent but in opposite directions, each omitting or embellishing details in a way that made the actions of their character look more reasonable and the other’s less reasonable. Remarkably, nothing was at stake in the exercise. Not only had the participants not taken part in the events, but they were not asked to sympathize with the character or to justify anyone’s behavior, just to read and remember the story from a first-person perspective. That was all it took to recruit their cognitive processes to the cause of self-serving propaganda.
…The Moralization Gap is a part of a larger phenomenon called self-serving biases. People try to look good. “Good” can mean effective, potent, desirable, and competent, or it can mean virtuous, honest, generous, and altruistic. The drive to present the self in a positive light was one of the major findings of 20th-century social psychology…Among the signature phenomena are cognitive dissonance, in which people change their evaluation of something they have been manipulated into doing to preserve the impression that they are in control of their actions, and the Lake Wobegon Effect (named after Garrison Keillor’s fictitious town in which all the children are above average), in which a majority of people rate themselves above average in every desirable talent or trait.
…The problem with trying to convey an exaggerated impression of kindness and skill is that other people are bound to develop the ability to see through it, setting in motion a psychological arms race between better liars and better lie detection…[Robert] Trivers ventured that natural selection may have favored a degree of self-deception…[Thus meaning,] We lie to ourselves so that we’re more believable when we lie to others. At the same time, an unconscious part of the mind registers the truth about our abilities so that we don’t get too far out of touch with reality. Trivers credits George Orwell with an earlier formulation of the idea: “The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.”
Self-deception is an exotic theory, because it makes the paradoxical claim that something called “the self” can be both deceiver and deceived. It’s easy enough to show that people are liable to self-serving biases, like a butcher’s scale that has been miscalibrated in the butcher’s favor. But it’s not so easy to show that people are liable to self-deception, the psychological equivalent of the dual books kept by shady businesses in which a public ledger is made available to prying eyes and a private ledger with the correct information is used to run he business.
A pair of social psychologists, Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno, have devised an ingenious experiment that catches people in the act of true, dual-book self-deception. They asked the participants to cooperate with them in planning and evaluating a study in which half of them would get a pleasant and easy task, namely looking through photographs for ten minutes, and half would get a tedious and difficult one, namely solving math problems for forty-five minutes. They told the participants that they were being run in pairs, but that the experimenters had not yet settled on the best way to decide who got which task. So they allowed each participant to choose one of two methods to decide who would get the pleasant task and who would get the unpleasant one. The participants could just choose the easy task for themselves, or they could use a random number generator to decide who got which. Human selfishness being what it is, almost everyone kept the pleasant task for themselves. Later they were given an anonymous questionnaire to evaluate the experiment which unobtrusively slipped in a question about whether the participants thought that their decision had been fair. Human hypocrisy being what it is, most of them said it was. Then the experimenters described the selfish choice to another group of participants and asked them how fairly the selfish subject acted. Not surprisingly, they didn’t think it was fair at all. The difference between the way people judge other people’s behavior and the way they judge their own behavior is a classic instance of a self-serving bias.
But now comes the key question. Did the self-servers really, deep down, believe that they were acting fairly? Or did the conscious spin doctor in their brains just say that, while the unconscious reality-checker registered the truth? To find out, the psychologists tied up the conscious mind by forcing a group of participants to keep seven digits in memory while they evaluated the experiment, including the judgment about whether they (or others) had acted fairly. With the conscious mind distracted, the terrible truth came out: the participants judged themselves as harshly as they judged other people. This vindicates Trivers’s theory that the truth was in there all along.
…Though acknowledging a compromising truth about ourselves is among our most painful experiences…it is, at least in principle, possible. It may take ridicule, it may take argument, it may take time, it may take being distracted, but people have the means to recognize that they are not always in the right. Still, we shouldn’t deceive ourselves about self-deception. In the absence of these puncturings, the overwhelming tendency is for people to misjudge the harmful acts they have perpetrated or experienced.
“The moral landscape” — a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks correspond to the heights of potential well-being and whose valleys represent the deepest possible suffering. Different ways of thinking and behaving — different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc. — will translate into movements across this landscape and, therefore, into different degrees of human flourishing. I’m not suggesting that we will necessarily discover one right answer to every moral question or a single best way for human beings to live. Some questions may admit of many answers, each more or less equivalent. However, the existence of multiple peaks on the moral landscape does not make them any less real or worthy of discovery. Nor would it make the difference between being on a peak and being stuck deep in a valley any less clear or consequential.
To see that multiple answers to moral questions need not pose a problem for us, consider how we currently think about food: no one would argue that there must be one right food to eat. And yet there is still an objective difference between healthy food and poison. There are exceptions — some people will die if they eat peanuts, for instance — but we can account for those within the context of a rational discussion about chemistry, biology, and human health. The world’s profusion of foods never tempts us to say that there are no facts to be known about human nutrition or that all culinary styles must be equally healthy in principle.
…
Morality could be a lot like chess: there are surely principles that generally apply, but they might admit of important exceptions. If you want to play good chess, a principle like “Don’t lose your Queen” is almost always worth following. But it admits of exceptions: sometimes sacrificing your Queen is a brilliant thing to do; occasionally, it is the only thing you can do. It remains a fact, however, that from any position in a game of chess there will be a range of objectively good moves and objectively bad ones.
“We are accustomed, in our own day, to protests against the empire of machinery and eloquent yearnings for a return to a simpler day. In all this there is nothing new. Lao-Tze, who preceded Confucius and lived (if he lived at all) in the sixth century B.C., is just as eloquent as Ruskin on the subject of the destruction of ancient beauty by modern mechanical inventions. Roads and bridges and boats filled him with horror because they were unnatural. He speaks of music as modern high-brows speak of the cinema. He finds the hurry of modern life fatal to the contemplative outlook. When he could bear it no longer he left China, and disappeared among the Western barbarians. He believed that men should live according to nature — a view which is continually recurring throughout the ages, though always with a different connotation. Rousseau also believed in the return to nature, but no longer objected to roads and bridges and boats. It was Courts and late hours and the sophisticated pleasures of the rich that roused his ire. The sort of man that seemed to him an unspoiled child of nature would have seemed to Lao-Tze incredibly different from those that he calls ‘the pure men of old.’ Lao-Tze objects to the taming of horses, and to the arts of the potter and carpenter; to Rousseau the carpenter would seem the very epitome of honest toil. ‘Return to nature’ means, in practice, return to those conditions to which the writer in question was accustomed in his youth. Return to nature, if it were taken seriously, would involve the death by starvation of some 90 per cent of the population of civilized countries. Industrialism as it exists at the present day undoubtedly has grave difficulties, but they are not to be cured by a return to the past, any more than were the difficulties from which China suffered in the time of Lao-Tze, or France in the time of Rousseau.
Science as knowledge advanced very rapidly throughout the whole of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it was not until near the end of the eighteenth century that it began to affect the technique of production. There was less change in methods of work from Ancient Egypt to 1750 than there has been from 1750 to the present day. Certain fundamental advances had been slowly acquired: speech, fire, writing, agriculture, the domestication of animals, the working of metals, gunpowder, printing, and the art of governing a large empire from a centre, though this last could not attain anything like its present perfection before the invention of the telegraph and steam locomotion. Each of these advances, because it came slowly, was fitted in, without too much difficulty, to the framework of traditional life, and men were at no point conscious of a revolution in their daily habits. Almost all the things that an adult man wished to speak about had been familiar to him as a child, and to his father and grandfather before him. This had, undoubtedly, certain good effects which have become lost through the rapid technical progress of modern times. The poet could speak of contemporary life in words that had become rich through long usage, and full of colour through the embedded emotions of past ages. Nowadays he must either ignore contemporary life or fill his poems with words that are stark and harsh. It is possible, in poetry, to write a letter, but difficult to speak over the telephone; it is possible to listen to Lydian airs, but not to the radio; it is possible to ride like the wind upon a fiery steed, but difficult, in any known metre, to go much faster than the wind in an automobile. The poem may wish for wings to fly to his love, but feels rather foolish in doing so when he remembers that he could order an aeroplane at Croydon.
…The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition. The experimental habit of mind is a difficult one for most people to maintain; indeed, the science of one generation has already become the tradition of the next, and there are still wide fields, notably that of religion, into which the experimental spirit has hardly penetrated at all. Nevertheless it is this spirit which is characteristic of modern times as contrasted with all earlier ages, and it is because of this spirit that the power of man in relation to his environment has become, during the last hundred and fifty years, so immeasurably greater than it was in the civilization of the past.”
“Are we to infer from [accepting the hypothesis that the world began at some definite, though unknown, date] that the world was made by a Creator? Certainly not, if we are to adhere to the canons of valid scientific inference. There is no reason whatever why the universe should not have begun spontaneously, except that it seems odd that it should do so; but there is no law of nature to the effect that things which seem odd to us must not happen. To infer a Creator is to infer a cause, and causal inferences are only admissible in science when they proceed from observed causal laws. Creation out of nothing is an occurrence which has not been observed. There is, therefore, no better reason to suppose that the world was caused by a Creator than to suppose that it was uncaused; either equally contradicts the causal laws that we can observe.
…The purely intellectual argument on this point may be put in a nutshell: is the Creator amenable to the laws of physics or is He not? If He is not, He cannot be inferred from physical phenomena, since no physical causal law can lead to Him; if He is, we shall have to apply the second law of thermodynamics to Him and suppose that He also had to be created at some remote period. But in that case He has lost His raison d’être.”
“Suppose you live in a place that has a constant chance of being struck by lightning at any time throughout the year. Suppose that the strikes are random: every day the chance of a strike is the same, and the rate works out to one strike a month. Your house is hit by lightning today, Monday. What is the most likely day for the next bolt to strike your house?
The answer is ‘tomorrow,’ Tuesday. That probability, to be sure, is not very high; let’s approximate it at 0.03 (about once a month). Now think about the chance that the next strike will be the day after tomorrow, Wednesday. For that to happen, two things have to take place. First lightning has to strike on Wednesday, a probability of 0.03. Second, lightning can’t have struck on Tuesday, or else Tuesday would have been the day of the next strike, not Wednesday. To calculate that probability, you have to multiply the chance that lightning will not strike on Tuesday (0.97, or 1 minus 0.03) by the chance that lightning will strike on Wednesday (0.03), which is 0.0291, a bit lower than Tuesday’s chances. What about Thursday? For that to be the day, lightning can’t have struck on Tuesday (0.97) or on Wednesday either (0.97) but it must strike on Thursday, so the chances are 0.97 x 0.97 x 0.03, which is 0.0282. What about Friday? It’s 0.97 x 0.97 x 0.97 x 0.03, 0.274 [sic]. With each day, the odds go down (0.0300…0.0291…0.0282…0.0274), because for a given day to be the next day that lightning strikes, all the previous days have to have been strike-free, and the more of these days there are, the lower the chances are that the streak will continue. To be exact, the probability goes down exponentially, accelerating at an accelerating rate. The chance that the next strike will be thirty days from today is 0.97 ^ 29 x 0.03, barely more than 1 percent.
Almost no one gets this right. I gave the question to a hundred Internet users, with the word next italicized so they couldn’t miss it. Sixty-seven picked the option ‘every day has the same chance.’ But that answer, though intuitively compelling, is wrong. If every day were equally likely to be the next one, then a day a thousand years from now would be just as likely as a day a month from now. That would mean that the house would be just as likely to go a thousand years without a strike as to suffer one next month. Of the remaining respondents, nineteen thought that the most likely day was a month from today. Only five of the hundred correctly guessed ‘tomorrow.’
Lightning strikes are an example of what statisticians call a Poisson process (pronounced pwah-sonh), named after the 19th-century mathematician and physicist Siméon-Denis Poisson. In a Poisson process, events occur continuously, randomly, and independently of one another. Every instant the lord of the sky, Jupiter, rolls the dice, and if the land snake eyes he hurls a thunderbolt. The next instant he rolls them again, with no memory of what happened the moment before. For reasons we have just seen, in a Poisson process the intervals between events are distributed exponentially: there are lots of short intervals and fewer and fewer of them as they get longer and longer. That implies that events that occur at random will seem to come in clusters, because it would take a nonrandom process to space them out.
The human mind has great difficulty appreciating this law of probability. When I was a graduate student, I worked in an auditory perception lab. In one experiment listeners had to press a key as quickly as possible every time they heard a beep. The beeps were timed at random, that is, according to a Poisson process. The listeners, graduate students themselves, knew this, but as soon as the experiment began they would run out of the booth and say, ‘Your random event generator is broken. The beeps are coming in bursts. They sound like this: “beepbeepbeepbeepbeep…beep…beepbeep…beepitybeepity-beepbeepbeep.”’ They didn’t appreciate that that’s what randomness sounds like.
This cognitive illusion was first noted in 1968 by the mathematician William Feller in his classic textbook on probability: ‘To the untrained eye, randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster.’ Here are a [couple] examples of the cluster illusion.
…The gambler’s fallacy. Many high rollers lose their fortunes because of the gambler’s fallacy: the belief that after a run of similar outcomes in a game of chance (red numbers in a roulette wheel, sevens in a game of dice), the next spin or toss is bound to go the other way. Tversky and Kahnemann showed that people think that genuine sequences of coin flips (like TTHHTHTTTT) are fixed, because they have more long runs of heads or of tails than their intuitions allow, and they think that sequences that were jiggered to avoid long runs (like HTHTTHTHHT) are fair.
…Constellations. My favorite example was discovered by biologist Stephen Jay Gould when he toured the famous glowworm caves in Waitomo, New Zealand. The worms’ pinpricks of light on the dark ceiling made the grotto look like a planetarium, but with one difference: there were no constellations. Gould deduced the reason. Glowworms are gluttonous and will eat anything that comes within snatching distance, so each worm gives the others a wide berth when it stakes out a patch of ceiling. As a result, they are more evenly spaced than stars, which from our vantage point are randomly spattered across the sky. Yet it is the stars that seem to fall into shapes, including the ram, bull, twins, and so on, that for millennia have served as portents to pattern-hungry brains. Gould’s colleague, the physicist Ed Purcell, confirmed Gould’s intuition by programming a computer to generate two arrays of random dots. The virtual stars were plonked on the page with no constraints. The virtual worms were given a random tiny patch around them in which no other worm could intrude. They are shown in [the picture above]; you can probably guess which is which. The one on the left, with the clumps, strands, voids, and filaments (and perhaps, depending on your obsessions, animals, nudes, or Virgin Marys) is the array that was plotted at random, like stars. The one on the right, which seems to be haphazard, is the array whose positions were nudged apart, like glowworms.”
“When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man. Every careful measurement in science is always given with the probable error, which is a technical term, conveying a precise meaning. It means: that amount of error which is just as likely to be greater than the actual error as to be less. It is characteristic of those matters in which something is known with exceptional accuracy that, in them, every observer admits that he is likely to be wrong, and knows about how much wrong he is likely to be. In matters where the truth is not ascertainable, no one admits that there is the slightest possibility of even the minutest error in his opinions. Who ever heard of a theologian prefacing his creed, or a politician concluding his speeches, with a statement as to the probable error in his opinions? It is an odd fact that subjective certainty is inversely proportional to objective certainty. The less reason a man has to suppose himself in the right, the more vehemently he asserts that there is no doubt whatever that he is exactly right. It is a practice of theologians to laugh at science because it changes. ‘Look at us,’ they say. ‘What we asserted at the Council of Nicea we still assert; whereas what the scientists asserted only two or three years ago is already forgotten and antiquated.’ Men who speak in this way have not grasped the great idea of successive approximations. No man who has the scientific temper asserts that what is now believed in science is exactly right; he asserts that it is a stage on the road towards the exact truth. When a change occurs in science, as, for example, from Newton’s law of gravitation to Einstein’s, what had been done is not overthrown, but is replaced by something slightly more accurate. Suppose you measured yourself with a rough apparatus, and came to the conclusion that you were 6ft. tall: you would not suppose, if you were wise, that your height was exactly 6 ft., but rather that your height was (say) between 5 ft. 11 in. and 6 ft. 1 in.; and if a very careful measurement showed that your height was (within a tenth of an inch) 5 ft. 11 9/10 in. you would not consider that that had overthrown the previous result. The previous result was that your height was about six feet , and this remains true. The case with the changes in science is precisely analogous.”
“Scientific method, simple as it is in essence, has been acquired only with great difficulty, and is still employed only by a minority, who themselves confine its employment to a minority of the questions upon which they have opinions. If you number among your acquaintances some eminent man of science, accustomed to the minutest quantitative precision in his experiments and the most abstruse skill in his inference from them, you will be able to make him the subject of a little experiment which is likely to be by no means unilluminating. If you tackle him on party politics, theology, income tax, house-agents, the bumptiousness of the working-classes and other topics of a like nature, you are pretty sure, before long, to provoke an explosion, and to hear him expressing wholly untested opinions with a dogmatism which he would never display in regard to the well-founded results of his laboratory experiments.
As this illustration shows, the scientific attitude is in some degree unnatural to man; the majority of our opinions are wish-fulfilments, like dreams in the Freudian theory. The mind of the most rational among us may be compared to a stormy ocean of passionate convictions based upon desire, upon which float perilously a few tiny boats carrying a cargo of scientifically tested beliefs.
…It is not, however, the lapses of scientific men that concern us when we are trying to describe [the] scientific method. A scientific opinion is one which there is some reason to believe true; an unscientific opinion is one which is held for some reason other than its probable truth.
…[Galileo’s] predecessors had known how the world was created, what was man’s destiny, the deepest mysteries of metaphysics, and the hidden principles governing the behaviour of bodies. Throughout the moral and material universe nothing was mysterious to them, nothing hidden, nothing incapable of exposition in orderly syllogism. Compared with all this wealth, what was left to the followers of Galileo? – a law of falling bodies, the theory of the pendulum, and Kepler’s ellipses. Can it be wondered at that the learned cried out at such a destruction of their hard-won wealth? As the rising sun scatters the multitude of stars, so Galileo’s few proved truths banished the scintillating firmament of medieval certainties.
Socrates had said that he was wiser than his contemporaries because he alone knew that he knew nothing. This was a rhetorical device. Galileo could have said with truth that he knew something, but knew he knew little, while his Aristotelian contemporaries knew nothing, but thought they knew much. Knowledge, as opposed to fantasies of wish-fulfillment, is difficult to come by. A little contact with real knowledge makes fantasies less acceptable.”
“Witch hunts are always vulnerable to common sense. Objectively speaking, it is impossible for a woman to fly on a broomstick or to turn a man into a cat, and these facts are not too hard to demonstrate if enough people are allowed to compare notes and question popular beliefs. Throughout the Middle Ages there were scattered clerics and politicians who pointed out the obvious, namely that there is no such thing as a witch, and so persecuting someone for witchcraft was a moral abomination. (Unfortunately, some of these skeptics ended up in the torture chambers themselves.) These voices became more prominent during the Age of Reason, and included influential writers such as Erasmus, Montaigne, and Hobbes.
Some officials became infected with the scientific spirit and tested the witchcraft hypothesis for themselves. A Milanese judge killed his mule, accused his servant of committing the misdeed, and had him subjected to torture, whereupon the man confessed to the crime; he even refused to recant on the gallows for fear of being tortured again. (Today this experiment would not be approved by committees for the protection of human subjects in research.) The judge then abolished the use of torture in his court. The writer Daniel Mannix recounts another demonstration:
‘The Duke of Brunswick in Germany was so shocked by the methods used by Inquisitors in his duchy that he asked two famous Jesuit scholars to supervise the hearings. After a careful study the Jesuits told the Duke, “The Inquisitors are doing their duty. They are arresting only people who have been implicated by the confession of other witches.”
“Come with me to the torture chamber,” suggested the Duke. The priests followed him to where a wretched woman was being stretched on the rack. “Let me question her,” suggested the Duke. “Now woman, you are a confessed witch. I suspect these two men of being warlocks. What do you say? Another turn of the rack, executioners.”
“No, no!” screamed the woman. “You are quite right. I have often seen them at the Sabbat. They can turn themselves into goats, wolves, and other animals.”
“What else do you know about them?” demanded the Duke.
“Several witches have had children by them. One woman even had eight children whom these men fathered. The children had heads like toads and legs like spiders.”
The Duke turned to the astonished Jesuits. “Shall I put you to the torture until you confess, my friends?”‘
One of the Jesuits, Father Friedrich Spee, was so impressed that he wrote a book in 1631 that has been credited with ending witchcraft accusations in much of Germany. The persecution of witches began to subside during the 17th century, when several European states abolished it. The year 1716 was the last time a woman was hanged as a witch in England, and 1749 was the last year a woman was burned as a witch anywhere in Europe.
In most of the world, institutionalized superstitious killing, whether in human sacrifice, blood libel, or witch persecution, has succumbed to two pressures. One is intellectual: the realization that some events, even those with profound personal significance, must be attributed to impersonal physical forces and raw chance rather than the designs of other conscious beings. A great principle of moral advancement, on a par with ‘Love thy neighbor’ and ‘All men are created equal,’ is the one on the bumper sticker: ‘Shit happens.’ The other pressure is harder to explain but just as forceful: an increased valuation of human life and happiness.”
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