Into the Woods

The day before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, there were stories in the media about an effort in the Scottish Parliament to pardon the thousands of witches who were burned at the stake in Scotland between between 1563 and 1736.

Earlier this year, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, had given a speech in which she said the victims were “accused and killed because they were poor, different, vulnerable or in many cases just because they were women.”

There are some interesting — and I think revealing — elements in the history of witch executions in Scotland. For one, there is evidence that Scotland executed five times as many witches per capita as other parts of Europe. For two, most of the witch-burnings occurred in the Lowlands of Scotland, not in the Highlands. Why might that be?

King James VI of Scotland (1566-1625) considered himself an expert on witchcraft. He wrote a book, Daemonologie. According to Wikipedia, “James personally supervised the torture of women accused of being witches.” Thus it was largely James VI who stirred up the witchcraft hysteria in Scotland. (James VI of Scotland later became James I of England. It is for this monster of a man for whom the King James translation of the Bible is named. They never tell the whole story in church.)

It was in the Lowlands of Scotland (Edinburgh and to the south of Edinburgh) where English-speaking Anglo-Saxons were concentrated, along with — of course — the influence of the church. But the Scottish Highlands remained largely pagan and Gaelic, and thus “witches” were respected — and needed — in the Highlands as wisewomen, herbalists, and healers.

This is yet another example of the moral differences between pagans and the people of the church. Because of the church’s claim to a patent on the moral high ground — one of the greatest frauds of Western civilization — the abiding superior wisdom of the pagans sometimes takes centuries to be acknowledged, which is why the Scottish Parliament is taking up the issue of witchcraft in the year 2022.

Even worse, though, than the church’s lack of moral wisdom — still with us today no less than in 1566 — is its eagerness for persecution and domination, even to the point of genocide. In the past I have written often about early Christianity’s genocides against the pagans of Europe. Canada today, and to a lesser degree the United States, is dealing with the church-state collusion and cruelty toward Native American children in the boarding schools that attempted to strip the children of their native culture — cultural genocide. Many children died in those schools. The Christian religion, like Islam, is a proselytizing religion that believes it has a mandate from God for domination of the world and of everyone in it. There is much we still don’t know about what Christian missionaries have done to powerless poor people all over the world.

There is a straight line, centuries long, from James VI of Scotland to the morally defective church people of today, especially those who are able to acquire and wield the power of the state in the service of their religion. Their purpose, still, is punishment and domination — for example, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett of the U.S. Supreme Court. Anyone who has seen the hatred and depravity flashing in the eyes of Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, or the almost soulless emptiness and stuntedness in the eyes of Amy Coney Barrett, can see that a concern for the unborn is not what motivates them. It is their lust for domination that motivates them. Or, to use Nicola Sturgeon’s words, their hatred for the poor, the different, and the vulnerable.

Much has changed over the centuries as the arc of justice moves on. To say that we don’t burn witches anymore is one of the ways we shed light on the idea of the arc of justice. But the minds of morally defective church people have not changed. They are authoritarians, and they continue to crave the legal right to be the cause of domination and punishment in whatever form they can get it. Donald Trump — their King Donald — emboldened them, empowered them, and let them loose. They are on our backs again. As always, women, children, and anyone who is different will pay most heavily. It remains to be seen how long it will take to throw them off our backs, especially given that the U.S. Constitution is so easily weaponized to block human progress.

My claim here is radical, but I believe it to be true. My claim is that authoritarians are not merely benignly different, with different views about what is good and what is wrong. My claim is that they are morally defective, and that they do vast harm and cause great misery in whatever century they live. They fight against the arc of justice because, in a just world, their lust for domination and persecution is thwarted.

Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Darrin M. McMahon. Oxford University Press, 2001. 262 pages.

Merely reading about the violent history of France is enough to get a case of PTSD. France, already damaged by the Protestant Reformation of the 16th Century, lurched from monarchy to revolution and then back again to monarchy. Though most of us are at least somewhat familiar with that history, what most of is did not know is that it was one long culture war, the very same culture war that we are still fighting today.

This culture war was between the Enlightenment — which then was new — and the mortal enemies of the Enlightenment, people on the right who have been with us since the Enlightenment’s beginnings. On the left was a new humanist philosophy that made no claim to being a divine revelation. Its roots were in reason. It was a European project, but this book limits itself to France, where the chief luminaries of the Enlightenment were men such as Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau.

Who were these mortal enemies of the Enlightenment? That can be answered accurately with a few words: the church and the authoritarian elite, but mostly the church. Most of the anti-philosophes, as this book calls them, were abbots and theologians. They saw Enlightenment philosophy as an evil conspiracy out to put an end to royalty and religion. In their minds, royalty and religion were the only forces capable of holding a society together. In France, their anti-Enlightenment evidence for this was the Reign of Terror after the 1789 revolution. These anti-philosophes were organized, and they produced a blizzard of books, tracts, and pamphlets to try to counteract the writings of the Enlightenment philosophes.

This old culture war, which raged white-hot from before the Revolution until the beginning of the Third Republic in 1870, was remarkably similar to the culture war through which we are living today. We could call it MFGA — Make France Great Again:

“…[T]he effort [was] to cleanse France of all trace of the Enlightenment and of the Revolution and to invest its inhabitants with a spiritual piety more intense than the eighteenth century had ever known. On the surface, this was a journey to the mythic past. But in truth the world that the men and women of the far Right aimed to create was not that of the ancien regime, the former regime. The world to which they hoped to return existed only in their minds.”

This book is above all a history of France, and McMahon has little to say about parallels with the present, which are obvious. He has little to say about the rest of Europe. I would venture to say that Britain handled the Enlightenment far better than France for two reasons: Henry VIII had conveniently gotten rid of the Catholic Church centuries before; and England’s royalty was more humane than France’s. McMahon does write, though, in describing how the enemies of the Enlightenment demonized their enemies: “Bequeathing an image of its enemy that long outlived it, the French Counter-Enlightenment, too, passed on a structure of opposition and a set of recurrent themes that would resurface in right-wing thought even to the present day.”

In America, the Enlightenment provided the basis for a new government and a new Constitution. But there were those in high places who hated the Enlightenment. McMahon mentions the Reverend Timothy Dwight, president of Yale from 1795 to 1817, who preached a sermon “in which he denounced the orchestrated plot, hatched by Voltaire, Frederick II, the Encyclopedists, and the Society of the Illuminati to destroy the Christian religion and the French monarchy.” That’s a conspiracy theory — from the president of Yale! According to Wikipedia, “Dwight was the leader of the evangelical New Divinity faction of Congregationalism — a group closely identified with Connecticut’s emerging commercial elite.”

Is there a traceable paper trail from then to now? I would say no. Rather, it’s that authoritarians and religionists never change. Their thought was just as ossified in the 18th Century as it is today. McMahon does mention, in his notes, a book from 1991 that I will read next: The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, which deals with how conservative forces have tried to prevent progress. McMahon also mentions the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), whom I first encountered during my student days and who is now back on my reading list.

McMahon quotes Whitehead: “The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.” Why that is so is easy enough to see. Those who abhor the ideas of reason, equality, and democracy will fight like hell against progress. They are baffled by how anyone could possibly want a world ruled by anyone other than preachers and kings.