The Diabolical Delusion of Religion

One of the few plays that I re-read on a regular basis is The Crucible by Arthur Miller, a dramatic retelling of the story of the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. It has only been recently, however, that one aspect of the story has caught my attention, the question of how much the girls who were making the accusations actually believed in what they were doing, or if they were conscious of their actions the whole time. It’s not an insignificant question, and it seems to me to be at the heart of the whole matter. I was compelled to write about it through a circuitous set of circumstances beginning with Mortimer Adler’s impressive two volume Syntopicon. It was there that I ran across a reference to an 1893 essay by Barrett Wendell entitled “Were the Salem Witches Guiltless?” Despite the intriguing title, however, the essay itself seems to confuse the behavior of the girls with those who were arrested and hung. And while he focuses much of his attention on the duplicity of the girls, they were not the ones accused of being witches. Finally, Wendell’s references in the essay led me to the seminal work on the subject, Salem Witchcraft, by Charles W. Upham, as well as familiarizing me with Upham’s own indictment of Cotton Mather in fanning the flames of the hysteria for his own ends.

In his narrative remarks on his own play, Arthur Miller makes this statement about the writing of the Puritans during the early colonial period: “No one can really know what their lives were like. They had no novelists--and would not have permitted anyone to read a novel if one were handy. Their creed forbade anything resembling ‘vain enjoyment.’” It’s a fascinating commentary on what writers of fiction bring to the intellectual understanding of the people of their time. Writers of histories and diaries obviously have ulterior motives in the way that they portray their own thinking and that of others of their day. Novelists, on the other hand, have no such concerns, and can therefore attempt to render the thoughts and feelings of those living in their time as accurately as possible. And while Miller’s manipulated account of the trials is certainly far removed from that time, it is nevertheless instructive to look at the way that he accounts for the girls’ behavior. His nominal villain, Abigail Williams, is not representative because of her background and motive. Her parents were killed in front of her as a child, giving her sociopathic tendencies in Miller’s eyes, and her desire to become John Proctor’s wife accounts for her eagerness to accuse his wife of witchcraft. His representative character of the rest of the girls comes in the form of the Proctor’s maidservant, Mary Warren.

In actuality, it was Mary Warren who was one of the first of the girls to cry out against others, but for our purposes here that doesn’t matter. In Miller’s play she is shy and friendless, only watching as the girls participated in the black slave Tituba’s spiritualisms. When it is discovered what they are doing she immediately wants to confess. But it’s only later in the second act that we see what happens to her when she’s caught up in the behavior of the rest of the girls. Fully aware in the beginning of the process that there is no witchcraft, and that the girls are only faking their torment to get out of trouble, how does she come to believe it herself? The answer comes in her description of the trial to the Proctors. She talks of the examination of one of the beggar women they have initially accused--someone the villagers would have been glad to see hounded from their midst:

          When she come into the court I say to myself, I must not accuse this woman, for she sleep in
          ditches, and so very old and poor. But then--then she sit there, denying and denying, and I feel
          a misty coldness climbin’ up my back, and the skin on my skull begin to creep, and I feel a clamp
          around my neck and I cannot breathe air; and then--entranced--I hear a voice, a screamin’ voice,
          and it were my voice . . .

This is a phenomenon that is very clear to us today, one in which the behavior of groups influences that of the individual. It’s been well documented in works as early as Charles Mackay’s 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, and in the case of young girls as recently as Beatlemania in the middle of the last century. But there needs to be a more specific explanation to account for her behavior than one as general as a “popular delusion” or frenzy over a pop music group. After all, people were going to be killed on her say so, which calls for a much deeper psychological rationale.

The simplest explanation for this is the incredible guilt that Mary would have felt at knowing she was sending innocent women to the gallows. Given the overwhelming negative emotions she was experiencing, her brain simply made the decision to give her actual physical symptoms in order to better rationalize what she was doing. The case for this can be made from the earliest novel to deal with the delusions of Puritanism at the time, Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown, published in 1798. In the novel the title character, Theodore Wieland, is a Puritan who suffers under the same paradox as the rest of those of his religion: only the elect, whom God has chosen before they were born, will go to heaven. Given this belief, how is a Puritan to justify the extremities of their self-denial when it may never result in their reaching heaven? Wieland expresses it this way: “It is needless to say that God is the object of my supreme passion. I have cherished, in his presence, a single and upright heart. I have thirsted for the knowledge of his will. I have burnt with ardour to approve my faith and my obedience. My days have been spent in searching for the revelation of that will; but my days have been mournful because my search failed.” Like Mary Warren in The Crucible, Wieland’s mind was forced to make a decision to solve his problem. The solution in this case was a vision of an angel that told him to sacrifice his wife and children to assure his place in the afterlife. And far from being horrified at murdering his entire family, he was instead overjoyed. “I thank thee, my father, for thy bounty; that thou didst not ask a less sacrifice than this; that thou placedst me in a condition to testify my submission to thy will! What have I withheld which it was thy pleasure to exact? Now may I, with dauntless and erect eye, claim my reward, since I have given thee the treasure of my soul.”

As can be seen in both the behavior of Wieland and Marry Warren, it was the pressures of Puritanism itself that led to their delusions. After all, the belief in divine revelation in the case of Wieland, or diabolical spiritualism in the case of Marry Warren, was part and parcel of the religious beliefs of their day. Barrett Wendell, in his essay, puts it this way:

          Whoever would understand the society from which sprang the witches and the witch-judges of 1692
          must never forget the grim creed which, declaring that no man could be saved but by the special
          grace of God, and that the only test of salvation was ability to exert the will in accordance with His,
          bred in the devout, and in whoever was affected by their counsels, an habitual introspection, and an
          habitual straining for mystical intercourse with the spiritual world.

One of the unfortunate circumstances in a literal reading of the Bible is the assurance that Satan and his demons are every bit as real as God and his angels. And if one then allows for the intervention of God into the lives of ordinary people, one must also allow for a similar intervention by the devil. Charles Upham then concluded that, “Living in the constant contemplation of such things, their minds became inflamed and bewildered.” It was Upham’s contention that the girls were acting at the behest of the adults in the village, either on their direct request or by inference as the children heard what the adults wanted and acted on it. In the forward to Dover’s abridged version of Upham’s book, Bryan F. Le Beau gives this summary of Upham’s thoughts about the girls:

          He guessed that at the start they may have sought “notoriety,” simply to cause “mischief by creating
          a sensation and excitement in their neighborhood,” or at worst “to wreak their vengeance upon one
          or two individuals who had offended them.” They soon became “intoxicated by the terrible success
          of their imposture,” however, “and were swept along by the frenzy they had occasioned.”

Upham’s suggestion that the girls were regularly consorting with Tituba and were therefore familiar with incantations, fortune telling, and telekinesis is somewhat specious, as almost nothing is known about the black slave from Barbados. But it’s this aspect of the story that Wendell latches upon to make his case that the participants in the witch trials were far from guiltless. And this is something that Miller himself expresses as well, no doubt having read the same source material as Wendell. “I have no doubt that people were communing with, and even worshiping, the Devil in Salem . . . One certain evidence of this is the confession of Tituba, the slave of Reverend Parris, and another is the behavior of the children, who were known to have indulged in sorceries with her.” But where Wendell, like Miller, has gone wrong in taking for a fact Upham’s assertions that the girls dabbled frequently with witchcraft, he does manage some insightful comments about the idea of self-hypnosis to explain their behavior.

The first half of Wendell’s essay is actually a personal account of his own dealings with spiritualists, and a sound debunking of all their practices. Nevertheless, he does concede that while the bulk of these practices are performed by con artists, there are a number of practitioners who believe in their own delusions, primarily through self-hypnosis. “It is only in recent times, I believe, that careful study of the still mysterious and dangerous phenomena of hypnotism has tended to show that it depends far more on the subject than on the operator, and that a good subject, by careful concentration of attention, can hypnotize himself. That the bewitched sufferers at Salem often hypnotized themselves is highly probable.” But where Wendell yet again goes awry is in his conclusion that someone must have trained the girls to hypnotize themselves, which would not have been necessary. As has been shown earlier, the immersion into the spiritual world from birth would have been all that was needed for a child’s young, imaginative mind to have created sense amid the disorder of their world by convincing themselves of the reality of witches. The opening scene in the romanticized version of the trials by author Maria Nation in the film Salem Witch Trials, shows what the girls actually see in their self hypnotized state that would naturally, as it did to Marry Warren, reinforce the reality of their delusions.

In the end, despite the intriguing title of his essay, Wendell’s conclusion is the same as Upham’s, that the perpetrators of evil in the witch trials were those doing the accusing, that, “in all probability those really guilty of the nameless crime I have tried to indicate were, in my opinion, not so often the witches as the bewitched.” But what is so fascinating is that the core of Wendell’s argument seems to be about the very nature of spiritual belief itself. If an otherwise rational person does believe in the intercession of a spiritual god in the material realm, then why wouldn’t they believe in the interference of a devil in the very same way?

          I remind you how curiously some of the educated minds of our own time are recurring to kinds
          of mysticism that have so long seemed purely superstitious; how much more credible witchcraft
          is than it used to be, now that we see these honest, intelligent mystics all about us. For only
          change the impulse of these very people from the pure one it generally is, to the base one that
          was held to actuate the witches, and you have at your very firesides not a few examples of what
          witches were.

All of which brings me to the very same delusions infecting our world today. Historians, especially Americans, want to look at the Salem witch trials as an aberration, the unfortunate confluence of religious fanaticism and societal isolation in the absence of civil law that allowed innocent people to be killed in the name of protecting a people and their way of life. But the mistakes of history, as George Santayana famously pointed out, are destined to repeat themselves if they are not learned from. In President Obama’s most recent State of the Union address he talked about the protecting our way of life from Islamic terrorism.

          [They] pose a direct threat to our people, because in today’s world, even a handful of terrorists who
          place no value on human life, including their own, can do a lot of damage. They use the Internet to
          poison the minds of individuals inside our country. Their actions undermine and destabilize our allies.
          We have to take them out.

But the real problem in our country that he failed to mention is that this is just as accurate a description of radical Christians as it is of radical Muslims. The delusion of an afterlife that causes radical Islamic terrorists in the Middle East to “place no value on human life” is the same delusion of heaven that causes radical Christians in Idaho and Eastern Oregon to place no value on the life of Muslims. It’s the same delusion that makes Christian candidates for president want to turn the Middle East into a parking lot. In the words of our President, “When politicians insult Muslims, whether abroad or our fellow citizens, when a mosque is vandalized, or a kid is called names, that doesn’t make us safer. That’s not telling it like it is. It’s just wrong.” But that is also the very same fear and hatred of the “other” that manifested itself in Salem over three hundred years ago.

What Americans in this country fail to understand, especially Christians, is the way in which their fanatical behaviors and beliefs are identical to the Muslim extremists that they fear. What Christian America--and by that I mean all Americans who agree with their Christian brethren whether they imbibe in the religion or not--seems to want is another set of hangings, another purge of people who believe in something different, while failing to recognize the basic fact that there is no difference. The infantile diabolism we see in the Islamic terrorist view of us as the “Great Satan” is exactly the same as we have about them. The real tragedy is that both sides are acting on those religious delusions and making the entire world suffer in the process. Dragging religion into politics has been the downfall of our culture since the very beginning, but it’s our ignorance of what we are actually doing that is the real culprit now. In The Crucible, Arthur Miller put it this way: “Our difficulty in believing the--for want of a better word--political inspiration of the Devil is due in great part to the fact that he is called up and damned not only by our social antagonists but by our own side, whatever it may be.” In Salem it was little girls whose own imaginations, spurred on by religious indoctrination and made real by self-hypnosis, were to blame. What’s our excuse?

The Great Books: Still a Great Idea for This Time

This is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time, but not for the reason that the author intended. A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books is something of an attempt by author Alex Beam to poke fun at the 1950s door-to-door sales phenomenon known as The Great Books of Western Civilization published by the Encyclopedia Britannica. When I was growing up, my dad had a set of The Great Books that had come with a custom bookcase that held all 54 volumes of the first edition from 1952. Our family wasn’t religious, and while we did have a huge family bible in the house, these books seemed like a holy shrine to the intellect. And they were incredibly daunting. The towering names in philosophy and science, history and literature, in beautifully clothbound hardback editions were, as Beam calls them, “icons of unreadability--32,000 pages of tiny, double-column, eye-straining type.” But the fact that I was too frightened to try to read them didn’t damage their mystique in any way, and I always knew that a lifetime of learning was as near as those two small shelves. Forty years and three college degrees later I finally felt brave enough to delve between the covers, but I also wanted to know a little about the history of the project first, and that’s what led me to this book.

The book is essentially the story of the creators of the series, Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins, two of the most dissimilar intellectuals one could hope to find. What brought them together, however, was just that: their intellectuality. But long before these two came together, there were already lists of essential books that had been assembled by personalities as diverse as Frederic William Farrar the Dean of Canterbury in 1898, philosopher Auguste Comte, member of Parliament John Lubbock, novelist Wilkie Collins, and Charles Eliot the president of Harvard who was responsible for the first set of great books called the Harvard Classics. But the real champion of this kind of return to a classical education was the great John Erskine, a professor at Columbia University, who saw that classic literature had become lost among the language departments who refused to allow them to be taught in English translations. He was able to institute an honors program at the college that taught the great books to the likes of Lionel Trilling and Mortimer Adler, both of whom went on to teach the course themselves. Hutchins, on the other hand, had gone to Yale on scholarship and claimed to have learned nothing at the institution, but through his own studies eventually became dean of the Yale Law School by the time he was thirty.

What I like best about the book is the way in which Beam attempts to paint the two as throwbacks to an era already gone by, but in doing so he inadvertently demonstrates why their belief in a classical education--and its attendant teaching methods--was not only the answer for education in their day, but the solution for the educational woes that plague public education in our day. There’s a delightful anecdote about Hutchinson hiring a new law professor who would eventually go on to become a Supreme Court justice. William O. Douglas immediately brought a no nonsense approach to his teaching that offended the children of the wealthy who attended his classes.

          I said I though it was time they learned that when they stood before a court or a jury, they
          would be judged by their perception and fidelity to the law, not by their ancestors. “It’s fine
          with me if you fire me,” I said.

          “Don’t be silly. I’m merely passing the complaint on to you,” Hutchins told me.

          “I’m inclined to bear down even harder on the spoiled brats.”

          “That would be revolutionary and wonderful.”

In our current public school system, where children have been seized by an unearned sense of entitlement--much of which has been caused by public school itself--this is exactly the type of wonderfully revolutionary teaching that is needed to allow genuine learning to happen.

But the most damning indictment of current public school practices comes from Hutchins himself, who clearly understood the distinction between knowledge and thinking. “Facts are the core of an anti-intellectual curriculum,” he stated in several speeches he made in the 1930s, “facts do not solve problems.” And that is, in fact, the problem with public schools today. What students are being taught in schools are facts; they are not being taught how to think. Students today are sheep, being led into classrooms that are no more intellectually rigorous than their gym classes, and then led back out again where many of them attend college and the same thing happens all over again. When I was in the last year of my undergraduate work I can remember sitting in quiz sections with thirty kids and only two of us were able to engage the graduate student about the novels we had read for the class. And that was twenty years ago. In reading the work of professors like Mark Edmundson, Joseph Epstein and Michael Roth, things have not changed for the better. And with the profusion of intellect impeding implements like video games, cell phones, and social media, the situation is only getting worse as teachers, without thinking skills themselves, increasingly populate our public education classrooms and threaten to bring down the entire educational system with them.

As I once wrote years ago in my own book on education, what students need today is the same thing they’ve needed since the time of the ancient Greeks: communication. They need teachers to question them, probe their minds, contradict them, make them prove what they believe, and confront them with their own ignorance. It’s called the Socratic Method and again, Hutchins understood how vitally important this is for learning, and not just for the students.

          If he uses the great books as the material read and discussed, even the ordinary teacher (if
          he properly regards himself as a student of the great books along with his students) can
          perform the Socratic function and service--can ask questions which are genuinely questions
          in his own mind, because he is still himself a learner in the presence of the great books.

But this will never happen today, certainly not in public schools, because public school teachers today are far too interested in facts, information, and “right” answers. This was also something Hutchins faced in his day, and one point he considered mandating that all of his professors take the great books seminar. “Outside of the Humanities Division, I doubt that three quarters of our faculty members have ever read a single great book.” At least those professors were scholars of something, unlike the glorified daycare workers who claim to be scholars in our public school system today. In far too many classrooms in this country there are students who are smarter than their teachers, and teachers who are utterly unable to answer one of the most often asked questions put to them: “What’s the point of all this?”

When Hutchins implemented his own honors course in the great books at Chicago University, where he had recently become president, he taught it himself along with Adler. His teaching methods clearly began with what he had learned from William Douglas. A former student said of the course, “Never were egos so quickly deflated.” Another student added, “The methods they used often taught you most . . . about standing up to Hutchins and Adler, about challenging them and fundamentally pleasing them by doing it with gusto and verve.” And from yet another alumnus of the course, “What we gained was knowledge that we would never have gained ourselves. These are writers we never would have learned about in a million years.” But the accelerated pace of the course--110 readings in two years--came under fire from a number of critics, not the least of which was the dean of educational philosophy himself, John Dewey. The argument then, as it is today, was between depth and breadth in learning. In a criticism of Erskine’s course a decade earlier, one of the faculty stated, “I firmly believe that it is better that a man should get to know ten authors well in his last two years in college, than that he should learn the names of the eighty-four men presented to him on this list.” It is a criticism that is not without some validity. Where Hutchins’ course was able to succeed, however, was in the exclusionary nature of his course. With only twenty students offered enrollment he was rightly able to counter arguments against breadth by stating that, “our students are bright.”

Hutchins’ move to Chicago had already been preceded by attempts to reform undergraduate studies at the school, and when he arrived he made even further changes. Classes would now be year long, the way they were in public schools, and there would be no requirement to attend lectures or seminars. Courses would be pass-fail, and instead of written exams students would be tested orally by professors outside of the university. Interestingly, freshman attendance in classes actually rose instead of declining. A Time article about Hutchins’ new plan exclaimed, “Given a chance to proceed under their own steam, students have found that learning is exciting. They pile into extra lecture sections just for the fun of it.” Essentially what was being tested at the end of these courses was the students’ ability to become smarter, more intelligent, in a word, wise. “Wisdom is knowledge of principles and causes,” Hutchins wrote. “The aim of higher education is wisdom.”

Through a circuitous set of circumstances, Chicago University wound up owning a third of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s publishing, and because of the dearth of published versions of the great books available in stores they decided to print their own set of these works. Arguments in the selection committee over literature and philosophy were no surprise. But what was interesting was in the selection of scientific works. Science historian George Sarton had this to say about the committee’s choices: “Newton’s achievement and personality are immortal; his book is dead except from the archaeological point of view. It is all right to study English in Shakespeare; it is all wrong to study astronomy in Newton.” Conceptually, this can be extended even further, as Carl Jung once commented in a letter about a different subject. “Mathematics is not a function of intelligence or logic. It is an asinine prejudice that mathematics has anything to do with the training of the mind.” The reality, however, is quite different. Recent studies in the science of neural pathways demonstrate that any intellectual study, even of arcane science, or non-language mathematics, can increase the brain’s ability to use more of its capacity than by ignoring those subjects. So while Hutchins was embarrassed for along time afterward about the inclusion of science in the Great Books, time and science itself have proven his instincts correct.

Finally, Beam weighs in on the Syntopicon, the vast index of ideas that Hutchins insisted on including with the set. Granted, it never became the household reference work that the editor had envisioned, but neither is it anywhere near as useless as Beam contends. For one thing, the essays that accompany each of the 102 great ideas are fascinating in and of themselves. The only issue with the index is that the user would have to have access to the actual set of Great Books rather than being able to reference the individual works by some uniform measure like paragraphs or line numbers as is commonly used in Shakespeare’s plays. One thing Beam does rightly praise is the first volume in the set, Hutchins’ essay on The Great Conversation, an essay which is as accurate about today’s educational crisis as it was in his day: “The products of American high schools are illiterate; and a degree from a famous college or university is no guarantee that the graduate is in any better case.” And his contention that it is only through a lifetime of self-education that this country will produce “effective citizenship in a democracy” that we see the effects today of the lack of that kind of intellectual achievement. His partner, Adler, was no less accurate about the difficulty achieving their intellectual vision as he was about the college climate today: “We were moving against the tide, not with it. This country was pragmatic . . . the whole talk was about how does higher education pay off in jobs and money. We really had ideals and aspirations for education that were thoroughly against the American grain.”

The biggest misunderstanding about the Great Books is that they represent some kind of fundamentalist idea of perfection that people should aspire to. This is a misconception promoted by the likes of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom. But this could not be further from the intentions of both Hutchins and Adler. At the very least, it’s un-Socratic. The goal of learning to think is not to ingest information indiscriminately, it is to question, to weigh one’s own thoughts against the great ideas of history. Adler put it this way: “They indoctrinate their students with the ‘truth’ they find, in the [Great B]ooks . . . But when I teach them, I want to understand the errors.” That, in short, is what the Great Books idea was all about, and those who see it as a pedantic exercise in truth seeking are missing the point, and simultaneously demonstrating their own lack of intellect. John Erskine’s creed was even simpler: “I hoped merely to teach how to read.” Beam’s book is incredibly enjoyable, and even more so when one sees the truth behind the slights. In the end, the irreverence can’t hide the fact that education in this country is suffering from the very ills that Hutchins and Adler were attempting to arrest. In that, Beam seems to have missed the point. But as a book of history it is very well researched and engagingly written, and as a fan of the Great Books, A Great Idea at the Time comes highly recommended.