Review : Religion And The Decline Of Magic (IV)

If you're just joining, I've been summarising Keith Thomas' incredible 1971 thesis Religion And The Decline of Magic. In part one I looked at the differences between religion and magic and the beneficial effects of magical thinking. Part two examined how magical beliefs sustain themselves, but also how they relate to and evolved into scientific methodologies. Part three looked at what happened when things went wrong : how witch trials got out of control, but also what brought them to an end, as well as how magical, paganistic ideas were, and are, extremely enduring.

The early modern period saw the development of a rationalist ideology (if that's not an oxymoron) that has persisted for centuries. Some aspects of this were extremely rapid cultural shifts. The witch-hunting mania of the 1650s gave way, in less than a single lifetime, to an era when magical beliefs in general became socially embarrassing, confined much more to something approaching a lunatic fringe than being the social norm. But fortune's wheel is ever turning, and there are no guarantees that this state of affairs will persist. Indeed in some ways the western world seems bent on regression to an earlier and nastier way of thinking. 

This does not mean, by any stretch, that we are abandoning science and rationality; by no means is there necessarily a slippery slope here. But it does seem pertinent to try and make sense of how the opposite occurred, how we came to reject ideas that had been seen as normal for most of human history and adopt a rational, evidence-based scientific approach in spite of all our natural tendencies.

7) Why did this happen ?

Let me begin by emphasising the magnitude of the change that happened here. The world view that emerged from the wreck of the old bore little resemblance to its predecessor, with a radically different cosmology and, as we'll see, a vastly different moral outlook. Even the conception of time had been totally reshaped. Why, for instance, do all those medieval manuscripts with illustrations of Greco-Roman stories have everyone in medieval garb ? Why do they have the walls of Troy as those of a 13th-century castle ? There's an enormously profound bit of reasoning behind this apparent bit of artistic foolishness : the notion of time itself had changed. 

Technological development was hardly at a standstill in the medieval period, but its visible effects were, Thomas says, somewhat limited. People lived and died much as they had done for centuries. Their houses were constructed in much the same way, they planted the same crops, caught the same diseases, died just as easily, suffered just as much. There was little reason for them to suppose the past had been significantly different to the present, because in many ways it wasn't : the glory that was Rome didn't affect the world of rural agriculture very much at all. But when you start getting inventions like gunpowder and the printing press, which have visible and powerful changes on everyday life... then any pretence that the world was unchanging has to give way. Astrology played a role in this by dividing time into periods, making the idea of change more palatable. But actual technological developments, more than abstract theory, drove the changing view inexorably forwards.

This view on time matters, and not just because of its significance in itself. In the both the medieval past and classical antiquity, there was a sort of "progressive conservatism" behind all proposed changes. "Make Rome Great Again" would have been something Cicero would wholeheartedly approved of; medieval equivalents would have worked just as well. The idea is quite simple : this change will make us better not because it's new, but because it's reverting us back to the ways of our glorious past. It's almost totally without foundation, obviously, but that didn't stop people believing it. Some still do, of course.

As scientific and technological progress, err, progressed, this way of thinking was no longer tenable for the majority of people. New inventions were unlike anything ever seen, so the idea that you had to hark back to the past to justify yourself fell by the wayside. What did the world of Caesar and Alexander know of Gutenberg and Newton ? Sod all. Now you could openly propose that new ideas were better in and of themselves, not because they'd restore any lost ideals. The appeal of ancient prophecies was fatally undermined by the present being so demonstrably different to the past. The two could no longer be held to relate so directly to each other.

One issue on which I think I will provisionally disagree with Thomas is that religion was self-confirming, that it couldn't have changed by its own volition and had to have been changed by external influences. For all the circular reasoning at work in the supernatural beliefs, the opening chapter does seem to make it clear that it was a change of religious belief that underlined the wider shift in philosophical world views*. True, it hardly went from a state of "everything is God" to "everything is atoms" – it was nothing at all like that. But there was that aspect to it : magical thinking gave way to something much more materialistic than had prevailed before, however messy and imperfect that change was in reality. 

*And indeed, the Protestant movement was branded very much as a reversion to a lost and more virtuous past, a way to overcome the contemporary corruption. Like later, political ideologies of the English Civil War, this had unintended consequences. Even if early Protestants were not actively trying to rethink the nature of reality, that was the end result.

Which is not to say that the circular nature of the old beliefs wasn't extremely important. It is, as the old saying goes, impossible to people reason people out of positions they hadn't been reasoned into. People often believe things simply because other people they know and trust also believe them; understanding of the issues isn't required. Thomas himself points this out.

Advancement in scientific thinking and technological progress, however, undermined the need for magical thinking at a base and emotional level. People believed in magic in part because they needed to : it fulfilled an essential social role that could not be met in any other way. It allowed people to make decisions about issues they could not decide rationally. But when thinking advanced to the point those issues could be understood rationally, magical thinking faded away. When complex issues can be predicted quantitatively and reliably, when you can demonstrate irrefutably that things happen simply due to the physical nature of reality, then the need to moralise everything vanishes.

That moral dimension is crucial to understanding the change that occurred. The unifying factor between religion, astrology and magic was that they all had morality as one of their key features. They all held that bad things happened to people who deserved it. They denied the very possibility of random chance : there was, in effect, always someone to blame, and if that someone was God, then you must surely have deserved whatever befell you. Medieval society was not a meritocracy, but in some ways it believed it was one – or perhaps more a sort of "moralocracy" : the king's on top because he's an innately better person, the serfs are at the bottom because they're a bunch of shitheads.

The change in thinking was to be able to demonstrate that this wasn't the case. Not perfectly and not evenly (there are still monarchists today, still those who idolise celebrities, and of course still those who believe in astrology and other bunk), but still... something changed. Profoundly, and in some cases rapidly, as per the rapid decline in witchcraft trials; in living memory, normal magical rituals became the stuff of open ridicule and mockery. When you can show that things happen for entirely natural causes, you simply don't need to give them any kind of moral aspect. When you can better protect people from fire and flood, you don't need to pretend that they had it coming when their village was burned down or washed away. When the state can provide for the poor and destitute, communal solidarity is no longer needed, and the mad old cat lady need not be feared for being a social deviant.

The decline in magic is not quite mirrored by the rise of science. The former occurred well before the latter, in some cases centuries before, says Thomas. He suggests that the age became experimental before it became really successful : enough answers were being found to have faith that eventually other answers would be found as well. Instead of needing to plug the gaps with magic, the mindset became one of sufficient confidence to accept the unknowns. What is a mystery today, the thinking goes, might be understood tomorrow so long as we keep investigating. Just as the medieval mindset had cause to doubt individual wizards but not magic itself, so did their descendants come to doubt individual scientific claims but not the fundamental method of inquiry. 

In a way, says Thomas, it was more the loss of magic that led to the ascendency of science rather than the other way around. Science didn't overturn magic so much as a loss of faith in magic allowed science to flourish. The Protestant diminishment of everyday magic wasn't out of some inherently more rational world view, what with ascribing absolutely everything to God. But it did facilitate the development of such a view, because again, people needed tangible answers, and if magic was out, then science had to step up. Again, not evenly – there were even violent movements against mathematics because of its arcane symbols – but it did happen.

Today, we still place faith in the scientific method even when its results are manifestly wrong, says Thomas. In that sense, magical thinking is likely to always be with us, a deep-seated aspect of the human psyche. Just as paganistic reasoning survived the arrival of the (so-called) monotheism of Christianity, so too do many of us persist in our little rituals. It's just human nature to believe in things. Which is why I get very cross with people who insist that we should simply stop doing this, as though it were something we have any control over. We don't, not really.

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I have to end with a brief attempt to learn some of the lessons of all this. Why are we backsliding ? Thomas' analysis would suggest it's because our emotional needs aren't being met. "God is dead, and we have killed him", perhaps, but we still have gaps where we can't make a rational judgement yet the gap needs to be crossed for us to make a decision. If we have no clear moral preference and no rational judgement then something comes forth to get us across. And if it helps us, then we believe in it.

I doubt there's a single global root cause here; as per the witch trials proceeding quite differently in Britain and Europe, the same outcome might result from a multitude of reasons. Still, I think I should try to at least sketch out some possible contributing factors. Whether these are enough to explain my exasperation with the current state of affairs I don't know; I think a least some of these will be significant, but I won't attempt to guess which are the most important. I'm also acutely aware that an attempt to rationally understand a loss of rationality may be a fatally stupid thing to do, but I'm going to try anyway.

Broadly there are two categories to this. The first is how we process information :

• The obvious one in a simple information deficit. Anecdotally, there are certainly plenty of quite extraordinarily stupid people out there, and a poor education system must surely have some role in all this. Some people have been left behind, not so much materially but informatically : they have never subscribed to the wider modern world view but persist in much older, largely religious, delusions*. The Overton window has shifted how these people express themselves and what's socially acceptable, but hasn't actually altered their system of thinking very much.
• A bigger factor, I suspect, is the opposite : information overload. It's now all too easy to sink into the first emotionally-rewarding explanation one comes across. I don't necessarily mean "thing that I already agree with" here, that's a different issue. Nor do I blame people for being lazy and not seeking out better sources, which are often far more complex – even with the best outreach content available. No, the pressures of modern life, though incomparably different to the medieval era (and in some important ways vastly less) are nonetheless real. For people to reach to an immediately emotionally-satisfying answer, rather than one that's more powerful but less intuitive, isn't something I can raise issue with.
• Outright misinformation should not be underestimated. I doubt it has much of a role in in convincing people. Instead its main role is secondary, to cause confusion rather than conviction, to sow fear, doubt and mistrust of the other side. Bribery and corruption among the wealthy oligarchs is a major cause of this.
• If we don't experience a change directly for ourselves, we have to believe it's a good thing to support it happening to others. If we perceive a positive development as negative, then we're convinced the system is failing by apparently making things worse, in spite of the truth. We then start to look for alternatives, however irrational those may be. You can't feel something if you don't experience it, so you rely heavily on how people report it.
• If we do experience things directly, then a force may be perceived as good only if it causes improvements rather than merely maintaining the status quo – even if the status quo is actually quite nice. In Thomas' period things were visibly changing and improving as a result of scientific progress. In the modern era this is still (make no mistake !) happening, still a good thing... but it isn't causing such direct improvements any more, at least not ones that so inescapably change and improve our daily lives. Better cancer treatments matter a great deal to those benefiting from them but they don't directly affect the vast majority of people, at least not regularly. In short, we've come to take things for granted, and therefore don't see scientific gains for what they are, or even appreciate that it maintains our lifestyles or recognise just how much worse things could be.
• A happier factor may be a "regression to the mean" effect. Swathes of people, having become already very rational indeed, can't very well become even more rational, but can easily become at least a little bit more unhinged.
• We may have stopped seeing spiritual gains from rationality. Things have sometimes hardened into a nastier, more binary, less tolerant sort of logical thinking, "if you don't agree with my PERFECLTY REASONABLE conclusions then you're obviously a twat". This is the essence of New Atheism. By forcing people to conform, like the medieval communities, it may have exactly the opposite effect. By permitting no tolerance whatever for minor and harmless beliefs, it may drive the much worse ideas it seeks to suppress. As with misinformation I suspect the main impact of this is secondary, in that it becomes easier to tar all scientists with the same brush.
• It's probably also worth remembering that a lot of people do participate in the irrational stuff purely for its ceremonial value. They like being with their friends and singing songs; they don't actually believe much of what they're saying at all (this is how you get Christians who don't like Jesus). This doesn't make it any the less damaging if they vote in accordance with their community, however. They really do believe it's going to Church, not practising Christian teachings, that matters. For the MAGA types it's all very cult-like, if not towards particular figures (though this often happens, believing in Trump himself rather than in anything he says) then in effect making a cult out of their community : whatever their community does must be correct.

* Regular readers will know of course that I don't mean all religion is delusional. I'm thinking here larger of the American Bible-thumpers, who are quite, quite different from the parish priests of rural Britain.

The second category may be more important than all of these combined : materialistic concerns. The need for tangible gains was evident throughout the whole work, and as Thomas points out, it sometimes wasn't the arguments that changed, only their circumstances. Just as with information, it may not be enough to maintain the status quo for us to see it as a good thing : things have to improve. Now in many ways there have been huge material improvements in recent decades, but in others, there haven't. We haven't seen a substantial change in working hours in decades. Housing prices have skyrocketed. Wages have increased, but not so much in real terms. It feels like we're being asked to do more and more for less and less, especially given the poor state of public infrastructure – and with less and less guarantees for the future.

As for the solution, I leave that for another time. There's a quote going around that you can't get a fascist out of office peacefully, but I draw some hope from studies which show that this just isn't true.

I'm going to end on a more long-term note though. The magnitude of the change in world view from the medieval to modern periods was truly staggering. Let's suppose that shift was, as seems likely, broadly positive, getting us a little closer to understanding the world as it truly is, or at least in ways more useful to us. I think that's basically the case, that the scientific approach is a better way of reasoning with the world. Now extend that forward. Might we eventually change up or replace the modern scientific method completely ? Maybe our own current views, not just the details but the fundamental basis of it, our conception of reality, our cosmology, our very methodology, will all look similarly backward to our descendants as medieval magic does to us. Personally I rather hope so. And perhaps our descendants will be charitable enough to remember that while our views may have changed, we can still appreciate the old ways, still enjoy the old stories, and most importantly of all, remember that we're not as different as it may first appear.

Review : Religion And The Decline Of Magic (III)

Welcome to the third part of a four-part trilogy examining Keith Thomas' Religion And The Decline of Magic. In part one I looked at how magic and religion are intertwined but distinct, and the radical changes in how the religious movements viewed magic throughout the early modern period. I also covered some of the psychological benefits of magic beliefs. Part two developed this to help understand how magical thinking persisted in the face of changing philosophies and evidence, as well as looking at how astrology played a key role in the development of modern science.

As mentioned last time, these ideas developed and changed stochastically and unequally. Most of the devoutly religious were all bark and no bite, and indeed plenty of those with more extreme religious viewpoints shared ideas which were nominally those of their opponents. While religious persecution in terms of physical violence remained in general extremely rare, vitriolic rhetoric and other forms of oppression were common. And just occasionally this could spiral out of control into full-blown atrocities. Nowhere was this more apparent than with one of the most iconic figures of the era : the witch.

5) There were wicked witches

In all the books on witches I've read until now, one theme which has been ubiquitous was that the accused were innocent. That's been a disappointment to me – I want my cackling hags throwing babies into cauldrons, dammit ! – but Thomas has got me covered. He's very clear that yes, there were indeed people attempting to harm others by magical means. This simple point seems to have been lost in all of the more recent books, who forget that pretty well everyone did actually believe that magic worked : and once that premise is accepted, that some would try to use it malevolently becomes inescapable. Some of the people executed were in fact guilty, by any reasonable definition, of attempted murder. That their methods were ineffective didn't mean they didn't sincerely believe they were trying to murder their neighbours.

This already somewhat undermines the classical notion of a "witch hunt" in the modern sense of an unfair trial. Such things, says Thomas, absolutely did happen, but only under specific and extraordinary conditions. Matthew Hopkins is by far the most notorious example, but as every author agrees, his reign of terror was the exception that proves the rule : he flourished under the peculiarly weak enforcement of the judicial process during the Civil War. Such men were rare in the extreme. Of professional witchfinders Thomas reckons there to have been perhaps five in total. And their influence, though it could be locally devastating, was hardly unlimited. Even Hopkins backed off when challenged, and there are instances of the accused witch counter-suing for libel and winning. 

Under normal conditions, a witch trial was hardly a guarantee of any punishment at all, let alone a harsh one or death. It's perhaps similar to gladiatorial combat in how it's come to be perceived. Yes, it was dangerous – extremely dangerous, a chance of death at the few percent level is not an experience most people would volunteer for ! But just as it was hardly true that every fight ended up with a dead gladiator, it simply wasn't the case that anyone accused of being a witch was doomed. And it definitely isn't true, though there certainly were some rather extreme extenuating circumstances, that all those women were innocent victims who we unjustly persecuted.

In fact the legal status of witchcraft seems to have been ambiguous. The simplest definition, according to Thomas, is using magic to cause harm by magical means. Merely using magic wasn't ever really a crime... although even that's not quite clear. Intellectual theologians took a very hardline stance, but while it may have been a serious ecclesiastical crime, it wasn't ever much of a secular one. State infrastructure was extraordinarily weak compared to the modern era, so it depended almost entirely on local conditions. That is, it was a popularity contest. The vast majority of people simply doing magic were never brought to any kind of trial because nobody wanted to (why would they, as valued members of the community ?), and even those who were usually got away scot free. 

As we saw in part one, an awful lot of people hated the Church; they went to the ceremonies out of a sense of community and cohesion, but paid very little attention to what the priests instructed. We should remember that the modern view of the medieval Church owes a lot to its propaganda success if only for its record-keeping : after all, medieval farmers didn't tend to write a lot down, whereas for monks it was one of their major occupations. It was important and powerful (Thomas says we shouldn't go too far the other direction and assumed it played no role at all – hardly !), just not as much as we usually assume. The Church hated witchcraft, but it had nothing like absolute control over people's behaviour, let alone the law of the land.

In short, religion played a huge part in the fear of witches and the need for witch trials, but it was only a contributing factor. Nobody would have convicted a witch if they hadn't believed in witches, but, as we'll see, nobody would have brought a witch to trial without other, very powerful societal forces.

Thomas sticks pretty strictly to his remit of examining British history because enlarging the discussion would make the whole project unfeasible. But he's careful to point out that the circumstances behind the proliferation of witchcraft trials in Britain and continental Europe in this period were markedly different, so drawing any general conclusions is difficult – even the notion of what witches did were quite distinct, with the use of imps and familiars being largely a British thing, while on the continent witches would murder you and mess up your sex life. Different social factors (especially economic on the Continent) led to similar outcomes, though manifested differently and at different times. 

With this in mind, there are some interesting extenuating circumstances behind even those witches who were full-on guilty. One is that they were almost always people who had a legitimate grievance with the accused. Witches weren't accused just for funzies but because people had a genuine fear of them, because they knew they'd been wronged and retaliation would be only natural. The accusers were, Thomas says, projecting their own guilt for having harmed the supposed witch. But this wasn't a crazy claim borne of nothing but paranoia. With few avenues of legal redress, turning to magic was all but the only option for the downtrodden, short of direct physical action. And that wasn't really possible because they were also almost always poor women*, with the fraction of male witches being no more than 10% and probably closer to 1%. So, as soon as the "victim" of the witch suffered any misfortune, they'd blame someone who everyone knew was ill-disposed towards them and wasn't in a position to fight back. They may have been guilty, but ultimately it was society that was to blame.

* Their only other real outlet being arson. But that was dangerous as it would amount to full-on murder, risking far more damage than intended.

There was also a self-fulfilling nature of malignant witches. Extrajudicial punishments were so harsh that they couldn't very help but bear the whole community ill will. It was a vicious circle, and a busybody sort of society in which the slightest hint of nonconformity wasn't tolerated (Thomas contrasts it with cosmopolitan Venice and other cities, where people could largely live their own dang lives without their neighbours molesting them over the slightest thing). It was community spirit but of the very worse sort, perpetual and petty judgement for irrelevancies masquerading as morality.

And that, dear readers, is why I don't care to know my neighbours. They can live their lives however they choose and the same for me, thankyouverymuch.

But these are the general factors. What, specifically, led to such a steep rise in witchcraft trials toward the end of the period, and what brought the brief enthusiasm to an end ?

It wasn't due to a change in legal procedures, says Thomas, but an increased desire to prosecute. The change in religious beliefs brought with it different social perspectives. By reducing the Catholic hierarchy of spirits to essentially two elements – God and the Devil – the Protestant faith had simplified complex moral positions to a binary. There was now just one supreme evil for people to believe in, and the consequences could be ironic in the extreme. Satan, people said, would grant you freedom from hellfire in exchange for your soul, thus an increased fear of the Devil is precisely what led to people believing they'd made pacts with him ! They would even sell their souls to Satan in exchange, bizarrely, for becoming more virtuous, or perhaps most ironically of all, so that they could become better priests.

I mean, you just can't win against logic like that. Then as now...

While witchcraft generally might be thought of as using magic for harm, in this period it took on a more specific meaning : a union with the Devil, the use of demonic and heretical forces rather than mere ritualistic magic (equally, the lack of nuance in the beliefs increasingly made any magical practitioners seen as evil). The other great irony is the sheer repression of the society : the insistence on conformity itself prompted nonconformity, which drove them – if very seldom into actual devil-worship* – then at least into using him as an excuse. Dancing on a Sunday ? The devil made me do it, I swear !

* Thomas says the evidence for this is thin in the extreme. There may very well have been a few individuals who did indeed worship the devil, but this was only out of delusion. Devil-worship as a cult or alternative religion, with shared beliefs in a community, essentially never happened.

Another major problem with Protestantism is that it gave little way for the ordinary people to fight back, with its change of beliefs and permitted behaviour being woefully asymmetrical. That is, in the medieval era ordinary people would simply have employed their own counter-magic against their supposed assailant, but as the early modern era advanced, this became more difficult. The priests strongly discouraged it and legally it was always a grey area. People demanded tangible results; spiritual salvation might be a fine thing but it was useless if your crops had failed (the extreme natural disasters of fire, famine, floods and plague also playing no small role here). So just as they persisted in using magic, so they also reverted to using Catholic exorcisms, even though Protestants officially didn't believe they worked.

But for those who subscribed to the new way of thinking, there was only one outlet. They knew the witches were harming them but had now only one option : harming the witch herself. Changing the social order was scarcely conceivable, but something had to be done. And while people did accept other explanations for misfortune (natural disasters were seldom ascribed to witches, being viewed as either purely physical processes or the judgement of God), witches gave them a convenient way to avoid blaming themselves for their own misdeeds. Sure, I stole here milk jug, but she murdered my cow by magic ! That sort of thing.

Witchcraft trials began to fail partly under their own weight. So many accusations were brought that the whole thing eventually became suspicious; once a few cases collapsed, attendees were likely to be more more skeptical of others. Not immediately, to be sure. Initially the shift was really only towards thinking that proving witchcraft was well-nigh impossible; the standards of evidence that were previously accepted began to be seen as inadequate – especially considering that other magical explanations were still accepted. But a wider shift in thinking was happening in which the idea of the Devil and hell were becoming less and less literal, just as was happening for God. Much, much more gradually, the idea of witches as having actual magical powers became untenable.

There was also a change, as usual slow and uneven, away from relying on charity for relief of the poor to a more reliable, state-wide system of assistance. This in turn led to a diminished sense of communal solidarity and with it the insistence on absolute conformity. Villages, says Thomas, are another exception that proves the rule. Being relatively isolated, the old ways and witchcraft accusations persisted there for much longer (successful trials rapidly dwindled to naught, but extrajudicial lynchings persisted). It's interesting to note that the skeptical counterarguments against witchcraft didn't really change much over time : they won out in the end not on their own persuasive strength, but because of much broader and deeper societal changes which made them more believable. More on which in the final section.

6) The (provisional) persistence of paganism

Before tackling the possible underlying causes of all this, I want to briefly mention one final implicit theme : the persistence of distinctly non-Christian beliefs. Hutton dismissed many claims for paganism though by no means all. My impression from Thomas, though, is quite different. His view of religion is of a system that could control behaviour quite strongly (but never absolutely) but actual belief only weakly (though not negligibly). Even as it shifted in scope and degree, magical thinking was ubiquitous throughout the period, despite the increasingly hostile views of the Church.

It's true that, as Hutton says, any claims that there was some sort of long-lived pagan "religion proper" that survived the arrival of Christianity should be viewed with extreme skepticism. There is little or no evidence that anyone carried on worshiping the old Celtic or Roman deities with a shared set of doctrines and religious rites. As mentioned, evidence for devil-worship is thin almost to the point of non-existence. While it's entirely possible, even likely, that individual people did believe in and worship alternative deities in their own way, evidence of communal beliefs and practises (the hallmark of a cult or religion) is next to nothing. The single exception appears to be astrology, but even here, nobody seems to have seriously thought they were setting up a rival Church or even a pseudo-church. In the most extreme cases, they might have considered the stars and planets to be deities, but they wouldn't have excluded God or Jesus : it would have been more like the old Catholic system of saints and angels, rather than a reversion to believing in Mars and Jupiter instead.

But if pagan religion was dead and buried, the fundamentals behind its way of its thinking were not. What Hutton didn't really emphasise enough was that magical thinking was such an important part of everyday life. It was used for solving crimes, finding treasure, divining the future, murdering people, preventing murders, curing illness and ensuring good health... there were few if any areas of life that weren't touched by this most ancient way of thinking. Beliefs in magical beings like giants, dragons and fairies also persisted. The latter were distinctly non-Christian, with Thomas saying (in direct, unresolvable contradiction to Hutton) that the Church took a very dim view of them : they were used as a means of social control (e.g. clean your room or the fairies will get you !) quite outside Christian teachings. 

People demanded tangible results. Magic seemed to offer them that, even while the Church came to have a totally different, more philosophical view of the supernatural. And even Christian doctrine hardly seems a full-throated monotheism, with its angels and demons, devils and saints, monsters and wonders... never mind the holy trinity. In one sense, one kind of paganism just gave way to another. 

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It's time to try and synthesise all of this into some conclusions.  As with the different forces that gave similar results regarding witches in Britain and Europe, it's important not to over-generalise. Even so, with the world apparently determined to do things which are utterly inexplicable and as irrational as any medieval magical rites, we have to try. Stay tuned for part four.

Review : Religion And The Decline Of Magic (II)

I resume my examination of Keith Thomas' outstanding 1971 work, "Religion and the Decline of Magic". Not the snappiest of titles but it does exactly what it says on the tin. Last time I looked at how religion and magic are distinct, how the Protestant and Catholic churches had very different attitudes to them, and some of the psychological reasons why magical beliefs were beneficial. 

In this second part I'm going to begin by developing that a little further, looking at why magic is so hard to refute despite its (seemingly obvious) deficiencies and incoherency. I'm also going to cover one of the sections I found most rewarding in the book, astrology. As an astronomer its earlier conception of cosmology is fascinating in itself, but as Thomas makes abundantly clear, astrology was an incredibly important step in the advancement towards genuine science. Not only for its examination of the heavens and its use of specific mathematical methods, but also for much deeper, more profound ways of thinking without which science would never have happened.

3) Why magic "worked" : the power of circular reasoning

How was it that magic remained so appealing even when it went against all the evidence ? One major reason that it was often unfalsifiable. In particular astrology, which used genuinely complicated mathematical calculations : it was easy to make a mistake, so if all else failed, the astrologer could simply say they'd got their sums wrong. Clients could also get a second opinion, or a third... so long as one of them gave the right answer (i.e. the one they wanted), they'd still believe in the process. They'd only doubt the individuals, rather than becoming skeptical about the method itself. After all, everybody knew it worked, so there was no need to doubt it.

The same was true, maybe even more so, in medicine. People were actively looking for cures for their ailments, so when their local wizard prescribed them something and they got better, they were apt to identify the recommended remedy as responsible. They were in no sense doing any kind of systematic testing. And there were many other factors at work that made the most bizarre of cures seem normal : some illnesses go away on their own anyway (or at least diminish before returning), some prescribed herbs were genuinely useful, the placebo effect* can be quite potent in some situations... and the local wise woman would seldom try and cure anything really serious. 

* It's interesting to read here that in 1971 this was still a very new discovery.

And of course, actual medical doctors in the modern sense scarcely existed, with real scientific knowledge being extremely thin on the ground. Worse, doctors would often prescribe painful remedies which weren't any better or worse than the usually painless ones from the wizards. A final point which made the magical medical remedies unfalsifiable was that it was always possible, if the treatment didn't work, that the patient was bewitched by some other, malevolent magical practitioner. They had an answer to everything, to the extent, of course, that they explained nothing.

It's a similar story when it came to finding criminals. Since the sincere belief in magic was widespread, the idea of a wizard coming to find the guilty party could be so intimidating that they'd reveal themselves before suffering the sometimes onerous trials to determine guilt (although the practise actually ended much earlier, formally, trial by battle was legal until 1819 !). A wrong accusation could lead to the accused being extra motivated to help find the real criminal. Likewise there was a popular obsession with "ancient" (often only a couple of centuries old) prophecies, which were often hopelessly vague and/or fabrications, deliberately invented to be self-fulfilling. This could even extend to seemingly-natural phenomena : says Thomas, if enough farmers believed there would be a famine so that they didn't bother with proper cultivation of the soil, prophecy turned into reality all too easily.

The point was that the strangeness of methodologies employed by the wizards were irrelevant to belief in magical practises. They were sustained in large part through social pressures, not through any rational evaluation of the evidence (let alone any theoretical basis as to how they processes were supposed to work). It's not that people were incapable of this so much as they just didn't need to, and they had no alternatives to solve the problems magic claimed to solve. So far as the ordinary people were concerned, understanding magic wasn't an issue that needed solving. It was a practical, everyday tool which got the job done.

4) We owe a huge debt to astrology

Of all the beliefs covered here, Thomas is perhaps most sympathetic to astrology. Not because of its success, because it simply doesn't work, but because of what it tried to do. Astronomy and science in general owe more to astrology than I would have guessed.

The relationship between astrology and magic is complicated. They certainly weren't mutually exclusive. There was never a school of magical thinking and not much (though not nothing) in the way of an underlying, unifying theory behind the various rituals. Astrology made use of magical forces but astrologers would often make use of other magical practices for serving their clients as well, and in like token, wizards would sometimes use astrology to answer their own questions. Astrology was, in one sense, just a particular variety of magic which anyone could use if they had sufficient mathematical skill.

But in another sense there was a deeply profound difference and astrology wasn't just another variety of abracadabra. For astrology did possess a coherent world view, did claim to have an underlying theory and understanding of how it worked. For the first time, it was an attempt to look for quantitative patterns in data. Not in just the movement of the planets, but their supposed effects on everyday life. It did an awful lot of things very badly, being no better at avoiding circular reasoning than the other strands of magical thinking, and it certainly had no truck with being falsifiable or other modern conceptions of the scientific method. But that it bothered to make use of numerical data at all, that it found a practical use for complex and esoteric mathematics.... that makes it a legitimate precursor to modern scientific practice. And indeed even to sociology, with attempts to cast horoscopes for entire cities as well as individuals.

In terms of its actual scientific content there wasn't much reason for suspicion. It was taken quite seriously by intellectuals (even Newton*) and commoners alike, as were many magical beliefs. People could see for themselves, quite plainly, that the Sun and Moon did have an effect on the weather, the seasons and the tides, so why shouldn't the stars and planets do the same ? Since the weather and seasons affected all aspects of life, why shouldn't the planets control people's temperaments, or at least influence them to a degree ? Especially given the prevailing medical theory of humours, making it compatible with the broader scientific views of the time.

* This is not a great piece, but does make the point that many of the intellectual titans have had some seriously weird and irrational ideas. There's certainly more to reasoning than pure logic, but the conclusion that it's because "beauty is truth" is ridiculous. A much more plausible factor is creativity.

And it didn't begin as a fully-formed world view that claimed answers to every question, but as with so many belief systems, it evolved into that gradually and unevenly, only reaching the zenith of its claims after the reputable academics had largely discarded it.

We often take the modern view of cosmology for granted. There's the Earth in the Solar System with all its planets, then there's the stars which are very much further away and spread out in the galaxy, and then there are other galaxies which are massively further away again. But as I try and remind my students, until the 1920s all we had as evidence for other galaxies were smudges of light just visible through powerful telescopes. In 1620 we had very much less than this. Comets were very plausibly atmospheric phenomena and therefore entirely capable of direct influence over us; there was next to no evidence for what meteors were and no clue as to the distance of the stars. In a sense, our whole conception of distance was fundamentally different. To suppose that the stars were Sun-like objects was radical and unwarranted; lack of atomic theory made their fusion power source literally beyond imagination. So the idea they were fixed points of light on a relatively close surface, that could potentially influence us, was by no means whatsoever crazy or irrational. Mystical, yes, but as far as anyone could tell, there wasn't that much reason to doubt mysticism either. We simply didn't have the tools to evaluate things properly.

Astrology was of course eventually broken by all sensible scholars. It wasn't the shift from geo to heliocentrism, says Thomas, that was ultimately fatal, but this collective, much more radical and fundamental shift in our view of the nature of reality itself. Astrology could have accommodated heliocentrism, but not the notion that the planets were rocks and the stars burning balls of gas. That some persist with it anyway is to miss the point : once, everyone, including the brightest minds of their generations, accepted it as normal, whereas today hardly anyone takes it seriously.

But even in the period when astrology was a reputable practise, it had other detractors. As with all magical notions, astrology came under fire to highly varying degrees from different Christian sects. It was in some ways very pagan, certainly predating Christianity, with some concepts of human beings being themselves hosts to planetary systems. Just as the macrocosm of the wider Universe could directly influence us, so too could we influence our internal planets : quite literally, as above, so below. 

There were two things about astrology that really annoyed the more religiously zealous. First, it claimed a deterministic nature to the universe, with the planets – not God – as the direct cause of events (even though God as a prime mover would have accommodated this perfectly well). This was sometimes viewed as blasphemous, even though most astrologers regarded the cosmos as no more than one among many influences upon earthly life, rather than being the singular force at work – this helped give them an out when their predictions went awry, and of course justified them in being vague to begin with. 

All this caused the most friction, ironically, with the Puritans, precisely because their own deterministic beliefs were so similar : their ideas were not identical and so, says Thomas, the result as that they were rivals. In particular, while Puritans thought the future was set by God, they didn't think it was possible for anyone except God to know the future... except with the help of the devil (who was their answer to an awful lot of tricky religious questions, far more so than he ever had been for the Catholics).

More fundamentally, what annoyed both Catholics and Protestants alike was that astrology claimed it could provide moral guidance. This made it seem like a fully-on alternative religion, even a pagan religion in which (for some at least) the planets were literally gods. Thomas says that these concerns were largely overblown, with most astrologers themselves seeing no incompatibility with Christianity, but not entirely without foundation. It's fascinating to consider astrology as a late-surviving pagan practise, if not ever really a wholehearted sort of paganism itself. It's also important to remember that while such a thing would have been heresy of the highest order, for which astrologers risked the worst sort of punishments, attitudes to it were... confused. Prosecutions were extremely rare, bordering on non-existent, with even some Puritans finding nothing much wrong with it. Then as now, people are complex beasts indeed.

---

Belief in magic, then, fulfilled an essential role in society. It helped people understand their own inclinations and make their own decisions, allowing them to choose when there was no rational method of choosing but a decision had to be made. It was sustained in part by society (because everyone believed it, and in the earlier era at least, the Catholic Church actively encouraged it), in part because of lack of evidence to the contrary (itself due to a lack of scientific methodology) and because it was almost impossible to falsify.

And yet it was both necessary and unavoidable. The essence of both magic and science is in looking for patterns; in the strictly mechanistic sense, the only difference between science and magic is that the one works and the other doesn't*. Without knowing how to test things rigorously, assuming that the world behaves magically, with unseen but broadly predictable forces at work, is all but inevitable. Modern scientific practise is a hard-won (and still developing !) result of all this which owes a great debt to astrology, which tried more than any other magical belief to construct a coherent, numerically quantifiable world view.

* I'd probably go considerably further though. It's not magic if the cause is known and understood.

As we've already seen, the change of beliefs from the Catholic to the Protestant wasn't uniform or smooth. People might label themselves one or the other but in practise, especially given the understanding of religion as more a ceremonial practise than a set of beliefs, they could be anything but. Even so, the broad change from a magical to materialistic perspective brought with it enormous social changes. This was no mere esoteric quibble but a change of mindset with profound consequences. In particular, local "cunning men" and "wise women" were no longer the important community figures they'd once been. Now they were about to find themselves labelled as witches. And that's what I'll cover in part three.

Review : Religion And The Decline Of Magic (I)

I now return to the happy topic of reviewing/analysing books. Sticking with the recent theme, this time it's Keith Thomas' 1971 Religion and the Decline of Magic. Spanning 200 years of British history, from c.1500 – c.1700, this is an attempt to chart and explain one of the most profound shifts in worldviews that ever happened. The magical beliefs that pervaded all aspects of society at the start of the period were by no means dead and buried by its end, but they were confined to something approaching a lunatic fringe. How did such a wholesale replacement of irrational thinking come about ?

Now the book was so good that I couldn't avoid lending it, so I'm going to have do this from notes alone. Although large swathes of it describe particular examples, Thomas has more than enough interesting thoughts to make a readably-short write-up extremely tricky. In the end I decided the only solution I could live with was the four-part monstrosity you see here. So be it – that's just how long it needs to be.

In this first part I'll review the book as per usual and then cover the first two major topics. I'll look at how religion is distinct from, but not mutually exclusive with, magical beliefs, and then move on to the psychological benefits of magic. Part two looks at the self-sustaining, circular, unfalsifiable nature of magical beliefs but also the hugely important advances made by astrology. Part three covers everyone's favourite sort of magic (witches !), and briefly glances at how paganistic thinking persisted in a Christian environment. Finally part four attempts some conclusions.

Throughout, I've largely tried to stick to what it is that Thomas himself says. I don't have much commentary of my own to add except at the very end.

0) The Review Bit

I'm going to cut right to the chase and give this one 10/10. This monumental 800-page work is exceptionally clear and comprehensive, perfectly focused on its topic, with a spot-on perfect balance of description and analysis. Thomas sets out his case by way of example after example, each sufficiently similar to demonstrate his point but different enough never to become repetitive. He's also aware of any deficiencies in his arguments and doesn't shy away from them. Of rhetoric there is none, of humour little. But what could easily have been, in the hands of a lesser writer, an immensely dry and plodding tome, becomes instead a gripping, engrossing work of the sociology of religion. It's an analytical page-turner.

I'm giving this one the highest rating possible because I simply don't believe it's possible to improve upon it given its objectives with the evidence available. That is not to say the conclusions aren't open for debate, just that I can't imagine this huge wealth of evidence being assembled in any better way. Absolutely magisterial; so of course Amazon and Goodreads give it a 4/5 because people are a big bunch of bonkers weirdos and this is why we can't have nice things*. Honestly, it's a bit like giving Newton's Principia 4/5 because he didn't also discover relativity. 

* I looked through some of the longer Goodreads reviews and they're simply wrong, claiming that Thomas said things he blatantly didn't say. Sigh. I really must stop doing that.

Thomas is extremely sensitive to his subject. He treats everything with commendable even-handedness and without judgement; unlike Ronald Hutton, he doesn't ram it in the reader's nose that everything should be treated respectfully : he simply does so, by describing what happened and what people believed. He attempts, in the main very successfully, to explain why they believed what they did, saying that they were clearly wrong but without ever calling them stupid. There is an implicit but clear aspect of "there but for the grace of God..." : when you don't have a modern scientific system, statistical techniques or – let alone ! – technologies to test particular claims, believing what now seems like nonsense becomes much more understandable. Likewise, Thomas lets the humorous nature of some of those beliefs come forward by itself, without ever needing to make jokes about it. 

He does, I think, about as good a job of getting into the mindset of the times as is ever possible to do, exploring the role of religion and magic at all levels of society. To give one example, I've never really understood why gambling was considered a sin. Thomas explains. At one end, it was an attempt to know the mind of God, since He governed all things, and such a practise shouldn't be used for such trivialities as monetary gain. In a more extreme interpretation it could be seen as an attempt to actually control or influence God's actions, an almost magical ritual that, as we'll see, had come to be an affront to morality itself. And Thomas presents numerous other common habits that don't often come up in medieval histories (such as using magic to hunt for buried treasure, or burying animals alive for magical rites) that illustrate just how differently people believed the world worked.

If Dianne Purkiss explores the sociology of the times more widely, Thomas' concentration on this particular aspect is more revealing. A truly staggering change of mindset took place in these couple of centuries, a shift from the spiritual to the scientific that directly shaped the world we live in today. And as parts of the world appear to be backsliding into an era of less rational thinking, understanding how this change happened could scarcely be more pertinent. 

If I could level any criticism at all, it's that he doesn't fully answer this question, What he does do is address just how incredibly complex this is, looking at various different explanations and setting forth how compelling they are (often steelmanning them) but frequently then describing their limitations without undermining their value. Given that this is looking at one of the most important and complex of all topics in psychology and history, I don't think it's reasonable to ask for more. If you think you've got a definitive answer, the chances are you probably haven't properly understood the problem.

1) Religion is not the same as magic

At the start of the period Britain was Catholic; by the end it was firmly Protestant. These two different strands of Christianity had starkly contrasting attitudes to magic. They both believed in the supernatural, but that's a much broader category. Magic, to the people at the time, meant something quite specific : a ritual one could use to create some effect by unknown means (this is much as it was thought of in classical antiquity). It was seen as firmly mechanistic. So long as the ritual was performed correctly, the desired result would be achieved. There was sometimes thought to be a distinction from this sort of purely ritualistic sorcery, which anyone could do, and witchcraft, which meant using psychic powers that were either innate or granted by the devil. But this doesn't matter too much here – what's important is the mechanical nature of magic. Follow the instructions and everything should just work*.

* You might remember I went off on one about the claim that the term "supernatural" is meaningless. I haven't changed my opinion on this at all, but I would agree that if we define magic to be purely mechanistic, then it is indeed just junk science.

The attitude of the two Churches was diametrically opposed. In the Catholic era magic was normal, routine, and at least some magical practises were endorsed by everyone. The magical power of prayer was openly encouraged. Baptisms too were thought to bring physical benefits, as was receiving the Eucharist, while holy water could be used to cure sick cows (perhaps most bizarre of all was that you could say Mass as a curse) and the Bible was frequently used for divination. The Catholic Church didn't endorse all magical practises, even when it would have been to its own advantage, but it accepted some of them enthusiastically.

All that changed with the Reformation. Magical rites were out, the wizardry of the priests seen as heretical. All the supernatural power resided with God and God alone. You could of course still pray, but now this was purely an intercessional appeal – God would choose to act, there was no longer any direct, magical benefit to it. In some ways this led to a profoundly more rational or certainly more materialistic world view, but it did so by the rather perverse method of attributing literally everything to the supernatural power of God. 

How much things shifted varied wildly. Most Protestants were fairly tolerant and saw no need to denounce every minor ritual, many of which (such as the capacity for hot cross buns to protect a house) were purely for fun. Even some protestant priests participated in some of the less offensive rituals. Some of them even saw actual Catholic people as being inherently magical. At most, they might say rude things against people who believed in magic but that was about it. At the extreme end of intolerance, on the other hand, some Puritans saw all priests as witches. For them the problem was that magic allowed humans to directly act against the will of God himself. It was opposed to their whole cosmology, which (as we'll see later) God had divinely ordained from the beginning of time. Anyone seeking to counteract this was either delusional or, far worse, in league with the only valid opponent of God : Satan.

(The Calvinist conviction that everything was predetermined feels inherently like an incredibly offensive, paradoxical belief to me, but not all Protestants subscribed to such extremist moral craziness. Most of them weren't fanatics and many were comfortable with not having fully thought-through the implications of their beliefs, cheerfully ignoring any contradictions.)

Part of the reason for the inhomogeneity of the shift may have been a very different understanding of what religion was. The modern idea is pretty clear : the adherence to a set of beliefs, which often carry with them prescribed rituals that should be followed. The earlier interpretation leant very much more heavily on the ritualistic side of things. It was important that people attended Church not (just) as a means of social control and/or cohesion, but because of a genuine belief in the magical efficacy of such actions. Religion was, to a degree, not so much about belief but behaviour. Thomas gives many examples of illiterate peasants who knew next to nothing about the religious doctrines (even not knowing who Jesus was) but fully participated in the rituals, since to them, going to Church and singing songs literally did mean that they were Christian. They would not have understood the popular quote that, by analogy, that kind of reasoning means that going into a garage makes you an automobile. To them it was the rituals that were the stuff of religion, not the ideas behind them.

The power of the medieval Church is also shown to be much more limited than is popularly supposed. True, it could and occasionally did come down very hard on people indeed. But far more often, it didn't. Beliefs in ritualistic magic persisted long, long after the Reformation, and prosecutions for heretical beliefs were extremely rare – and even when they did happen, the punishment was usually modest or actually non-existent (I'll return to the peculiar topic of witchcraft later on, for which the situation was somewhat different). In some cases as much as 15% of the local populace were excommunicated, with an open hatred for religion stemming for poor public outreach on the part of the priests, who usually talked in terms the common people simply didn't understand. That said, genuine atheism and skepticism was not, says Thomas, non-existent, but firmly confined to the intellectual elite. Most of the general population just didn't actually care very much, with in some cases priests complaining that their churches had more pillars than people.

2) Magic helped people know their own minds

One common theme among all of Thomas' discussions on magical rituals is that they weren't total nonsense. Well, they were in one sense : the idea that a hot cross bun had magical powers of protection is clearly deranged. But psychologically the situation is different. There's a very nice Aeon essay, "If you can't choose wisely, choose randomly" with a strong overlap here. I'll also mention, oddly enough, the censored 1969 Royal Family documentary, the one the Queen hated so much it was never aired on television again.

This is not the panoply of power, but while the Queen occupies the highest office of state, no-one else can. While she is head of the law, no politician can take over the courts. While she is head of the state, no generals can take over the government. While she is head of the services, no would-be dictator can turn the army against the people. The strength of the monarchy does not lie in the power it gives the sovereign but in the power it denies to anyone else.

Part of the strength of choosing randomly is that while it might not get you the best outcome, it at least protects you from those intent on doing you harm : it denies them that power. Magical rituals may be founded in a wholly incorrect understanding of the nature of reality, but by making decisions randomly they too deny anyone the capacity for manipulation of others. And they do indeed make decisions. In many cases magic was used when there were simply no rational grounds for favouring any particular course of action but a decision still had to be made. Sure, you could roll the dice, but if you believe that some supernatural force is at work in a ritual, you're more likely to actually perform it because you have faith it'll work. Tossing a coin or rolling dice doesn't generally carry with it much in the way of mystique (divine providence notwithstanding).

More importantly, says Thomas at various points – be it about local wizards ("cunning men"), priests, or astrologers – such rituals help people to learn their own preferences. Another strangely tangential example : in the earliest drafts of The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo announces he's leaving Hobbiton to get married. Why ? Purely because Tolkien needed to get him out of the door. The reason was completely immaterial, he simply needed a place to start. Picking this rather random event got him to put pen to paper and helped him realise that that wasn't what he wanted the character to do. It's much easier to know your own mind when you carry the consequences of it at least a little way forward.

In the early modern period, astrologers (for example) might be called upon to suggest particular courses of action or even identify criminals. More often than not there was already a prime suspect and what was really being asked was confirmation from a higher authority; the astrologer was simply being asked to provide that extra step. If they were asked to suggest their client chose a course of action they didn't really want, say, advising them to move towns for a better job, this would give the client a clearer indication of what it was they themselves really wanted. By having this independent advice they could rethink their own thoughts more clearly, at which point, if the advice wasn't what they actually wanted, they might well seek a second opinion. Having that instruction from someone else is, perhaps, psychologically quite different from trying to run one's own mental simulation.

---

Well, that's a beginning, at least. In the Reformation we see the glimmer of a shift towards a more rational, materialistic perspective, but no more than that. And as we'll see, that change was highly uneven, in particular causing massive social problems with witches, and if it was progressive in some areas, it was positively backward in others. Both magic and religion, which are distinct psychological ideas, have emotional benefits – if they didn't nobody would believe in either of them – but that comes at a cost. 

Nowhere was this paradoxical mixture more apparent than astrology, an unfalsifiable, magical belief rooted in ideas that today are clearly nonsensical, but also of huge importance for bringing about genuine scientific methodology. And that's what I'll look at in part two.

An Astonishing Level of Humanisation

I've mentioned the difficulties of both promoting/censoring violent action on social media before and I can't really think of much to add to that post. In brief, there are plenty of cases where the kind of language I'd use about certain people in ordinary conversation wouldn't be appropriate online, where the differences between rhetoric and genuine advocacy are often easily misunderstood. There are, of course, cases where I believe violent action should happen (violence is sometimes necessary and even actively desirable), but often "should" is in a highly abstract moral sense : that is, it would be right if this thing happened, as opposed to, "I want to join/start/support an actual mob". Likewise there are things I would endorse after the fact, wouldn't lose any sleep over if they occurred, but wouldn't ever actively instigate.

But I'm in danger of just re-running that whole post. I might do that at some point, given recent degenerations of major social media outlets into fascist safe spaces. Not today though.

Instead, what I want to mention is this bizarre piece in The Atlantic about the killing of UnitedHealthcare's CEO, and how this is being outright celebrated across the internet. The Atlantic, I have to say, is a truly strange publication. Sometimes it offers highly intelligent, comprehensive reviews that provide in-depth context to a story, and sometimes it goes off on bizarre rants about how subtitles are basically worse than the Holocaust. This piece is much closer to the latter.

For some context of my own, I got really quite disgusted by some of the reaction to the deaths of those aboard the Titan submersible a couple of years ago. Sure, the company who designed and operated the Titan seem shady as hell, but I saw no evidence that this was true of the passengers. Rejoicing because some people died simply because they were rich ? What's wrong with you ?

This time my sympathies lie elsewhere. Two particular quotes do often come to mind :

For the corrupt man it's better not to be alive, for he necessarily lives badly. – Plato

No attempt at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. – Nye Bevan (founder of the NHS)

Obviously, some violence is justifiable in some conditions. Only the most diehard pacifist would argue otherwise; pretty much everyone else would agree that you're allowed to fight back against oppression. The Atlantic piece does not seem to understand that at all. It seems to actively confuse simply "being a person" with "being a good person". The title, "An Astonishing Level of Dehumanisation" aptly sets the tone, and as the piece elaborates :

At Jewell’s South Hamilton High School, the Times reported, Thompson was valedictorian, a star athlete, homecoming king, and class president. A teacher described Thompson as an excellent student, a model person, “a super kid.” As a corporate leader, he kept a low profile; friends and colleagues remembered him as mild-mannered and humble, down-to-earth and self-deprecating. He was a passionate advocate for the Special Olympics and a devoted father to his sons, Bryce and Dane. His obituary described his love for his sons as “limitless.”

“Brian was an incredibly loving, generous, talented man who truly lived life to the fullest and touched so many lives,” his wife, Paulette Thompson, told Fox News.

Err, hang on. All murderers are human. Very few indeed are truly monstrous, moustache-twirling pantomime villains cackling with delight as they torture kittens. All of them are somebody's son or daughter. Few indeed (though I think not none, despite the claims of various ancient philosophers) are malevolent purely for the sake of being malicious. Most people believe they're acting correctly most of the time – and that's precisely what makes the worse sort of villains so dangerous. 

Which means that just because it's absurd to equate "being a billionaire" with "being evil", it doesn't follow that the two are mutually exclusive either. No demographic – none at all, be it race, creed, religious affiliation, wealth, anything – has a monopoly on evil. When it comes to judging whether someone is good or bad, you have to fully consider the individual. You can't reduce it to demographics.

So the mere fact of Thompson's humanity simply isn't relevant to the case here. I don't have a hard time believing he loved his family or had perfectly ordinary, harmless interests outside his career. Without ever having heard of the guy before his death, I'm not the least bit surprised that other people loved him. I don't doubt it. Instead I claim it doesn't matter. Not at all.

Why ? Because that doesn't negate his actions as a CEO. Being loved, taking care of one's pets and/or elderly relatives, helping the disabled... none of that would give anyone pause for thought in condemning someone for, say, stabbing a stranger in the street. So it seems awfully strange to me to use any of this to mourn the passing of someone who seems to be a straightforward, clear-cut, self-serving villain. As AOC said :

For anyone who is confused or shocking or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them.

I mean... yeah ? When you hear about the kind of claims Thompson's company denied people, when you hear how many they denied compared to other companies, it's hard to see them acting as anything other than a force of oppression, nakedly profiting from the misery and suffering of the masses. It's very hard indeed to see it as anything other than a black-and-white case of this guy being the villain and the other side... not. 

Should he have been murdered ? No, of course not ! I mean it. What should have happened is that America realised it had a phenomenally stupid, ludicrously inegalitarian society and healthcare system and restructured itself accordingly; what should have happened is that Thompson spent his billions on providing healthcare to those less fortunate on the grounds that that would be patently the right thing to do. None of that happened or showed any indication of happening. And if you cut off all legal avenues of change to people, or, worse, make it so that they technically have legal possibilities but make them de facto impossible to actually exploit... well, look at history. Look at how democracy started. It wasn't because the tyrants generously decided to stop being oppressive one fine Greek morning.

The Atlantic nutjob raises another line of argument :

What a lot of people who are celebrating Thompson’s death and demonizing UnitedHealthcare don’t seem to understand — or don’t seem to want to understand — is that in every modern health-care system, some institution is charged with rationing care... if they didn’t do it, someone else would need to. The reality of scarcity is not their fault, nor is it “social murder.”

Reality of scarcity, eh ? Doesn't seem very plausible when some have basically enough money to live in a solid gold house and others, err, don't. Doesn't seem very plausible when plenty of countries are able to provide free or affordable healthcare to their whole population and the US chooses not to. And it certainly doesn't seem very plausible given the obscene levels of wealth at work in the health industry itself, let alone that UnitedHealthcare denies claims at a rate twice the industry average. Or when you hear the horror stories about denying payments for anaesthetic and the like. And if even in the US, with its jaw-droppingly awful insurance system, most companies manage to do so much better than this, then you can't give UnitedHealthcare the excuse that everyone does it by necessity. That's an absurd claim to make. 

There’s legitimacy in the frustration and anger many people feel. Nevertheless, turning to lethal violence is horrifying and ominous. So, too, is applauding and justifying assassinations...  consider what happens when the logic of those who are celebrating Mangione is applied to a different issue.  

The list of organizations and individuals who could be targeted because their critics on the left or on the right believe they support policies that lead to suffering or death is endless: gun-rights lobbies; those who want to defund the police; individuals opposing childhood vaccinations, and those who administer them; groups that want to cut funding for the global AIDS initiative; those that want the United States to withdraw from the Paris climate accords; those that oppose a higher minimum wage. So who decides which Americans are guilty of “social murder”?

This is a (somewhat) better point. It's a perfectly fine to note that the rule of law is important. Nobody wants anarchy or the tyranny of the mob; again, changing the system so that people wouldn't have felt oppressed would be, by far, the better outcome. It's also fair to point out that those in charge have to think differently and more statistically than the rest of us. That's why we have them, to make the difficult choices we can't make ourselves. Somebody has to be the one to make the unpopular choices; that we disagree with them is not as problematic as when we get mad at them for simply making the choice at all.

On that note : it isn't really fair to equate the actions of a madman with a shotgun who goes on a killing spree with those of a CEO, or political leader, whose (in)actions cause far greater causalities. The one voluntarily chooses evil, the other often has no choice but to decide between the lesser of two evils. The idea that choosing the lesser evil is still choosing evil is wrong-headed, because some level of "social murder" is unavoidable. But... and it's a big but... this doesn't mean that some CEOs and executives aren't straightforward villains either. Just because some unpleasant choices are unavoidable doesn't mean that all of them are. It certainly doesn't mean that some CEOs and leaders aren't criminally awful people. "Social murder" may not be morally equivalent to regular murder, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be stopped or its consequences are less real.

And I think there's also a fair helping of whataboutism at work here. Again, being rich hardly by itself equates with being a villain; likewise, each issue that polarises people is something to be dealt with on an individual basis, not something that can be readily generalised. Nor is it fair to equate "those who support policies" with "those who actively implement or profit monetarily from those policies". 

Crucially, while it may be indeed "horrifying and ominous" to resort to violence, certain aspects of American life are already horrifying and ominous. Pointing out that the horrible nature of the situation and the potential for further violence only ducks the question of how else the oppressed people, exactly, are supposed to change their lot; why are they supposed to suffer oppression and corporate violence routinely but are forbidden to retaliate ? This is cowering from the root cause of the problem. Again, nobody wants anarchy and violence, but you won't avoid it merely by declaring that such an outcome is bad. You have to tackle the issues that led here, and not all of those are at all equal. Crying, "slippery slope !" is nowhere near adequate to the task at hand.

This is not, I hasten to add, advocating for holding the rich and powerful literally hostage. Far from it. We are not, by nature, in a "war against all" in which peaceful coexistence is only maintained by continuous threats – that is cynical dystopian nonsense, of which more in the links. No, what I'm saying is that class wars only arise when the social contract fails, when unreasonable and unbearable demands are brought with no possibility of changing or avoiding them. Treat people fairly and reasonably and most of them will respond in kind. Treat people kindly and they won't have any grievances to address, still less any need or inclination to resort to pointless violence.

The thing is, in the end it doesn't really matter if you think this is "right" or not. What really matters is that if you push people too far for long enough, they will fight back. Whether or not they "should" is absolutely irrelevant. If you don't want them to, you have to either address their concerns or change their minds. Doing nothing is a recipe for disaster.

Finally :

The American health-care system certainly has its flaws, but those are hardly the fault of UnitedHealthcare alone. Nations such as the United Kingdom, which offer the sort of single-payer public health care that Tolentino extolls, have long wait lists for treatment, significant staff shortages, and outdated hospital infrastructure. Public satisfaction with the U.K.’s National Health Service is at a 40-year low; only 29 percent of the British public is “quite satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the NHS.

Srsly ? Sure, the NHS is in trouble, but that might have had something to do with, oh, I don't know, 14 years of Tory austerity, perhaps. During the Blair era it was routinely cited as one of the best in the world. Just as the author omits to mention how bad UnitedHealthcare is in comparison with other health insurance companies, not providing context for the UK's difficulties is disingenuous in the extreme. The author's following quote about how bad the service is I find to be downright misleading, and utterly missing the fact that we have free healthcare for all while the Americans don't.

I'm not sure I've succeeded in managing the fine line I've tried to walk. My point really is that the Atlantic arguments don't make a lot of sense. Just because someone isn't entirely evil doesn't mean they don't commit awful acts. Just because they aren't of the same moral category as someone who derives sadistic pleasure from torturing their victims doesn't mean they aren't committing oppressive, immoral acts. I find it unfair to simply say that "violence is bad" without acknowledging that a violent response was undertaken only in retaliation to acts of violent oppression. And equating different healthcare systems which are demonstrably unequal is outright misinformation. Finally, being appalled by one particular kind of violence should not be an excuse to avoid dealing with the other. Granted, they're not the same. But the consequences are, and you can't avoid dealing with the one merely by saying that the other is bad. It doesn't matter how you think people should behave – push them far enough, and eventually they will snap.

Review : A History of Britain In Ten Enemies

What better way to start the New Year than with a book review ? Let's keep it light to get back into the swing of things and start off with Terry Deary's A History of Britain In Ten Enemies. As the author of the Horrible Histories books*, this is guaranteed bestseller, and indeed it was one I both bought and received for Christmas. I'm not sure that's ever happened to me before.

* Which are amazing. The TV sketch show is genuinely brilliant and I would recommend it for viewers of all ages.

The book is... pretty good, overall, but very much a mixed bag. As I expected, it's pretty light on the detail and heavy on the jokes. Not all of the punchlines land well : some are just not funny, some are real groaners, but some are literally laugh-out-loud funny. You might not like it, but you'd have to be a pretty weird sort to ever get bored reading this. While the length of 200-odd pages mean it never gets into anything terribly meaty, the breadth of its coverage is really quite impressive given the space. It sort of reminded me of All The Countries We've Ever Invaded but in reverse.

In terms of style it feels aimed at a younger or more attention-lacking audience than your standard history book, though it's not for children as in the Horrible Histories series – there are a few bits which would be more Horrific than merely Horrible. The short, uniform-length sentences do become at times quite irritating, and sometimes the jokes are a bit forced and unnecessary. Probably the worst aspect is that it's sometimes hard to tell if Deary is being genuinely revisionist or merely trying to be provocative, and some of the claims made are either misleading or simply downright wrong. I'll say that with some confidence : I'm not a historian, but I've read enough to know (on occasion) when Deary is not so much going against the grain as leaving it completely. More on that shortly.

On the other hand, there is not a whiff of patriotic zeal to be found anywhere. For every point Deary awards to the British, he's sure to take one away again soon after*. Nor, thankfully, does he ever languish in the sort of anti-society, nihilistic, holier-than-thou self-loathing that afflicts a good many commentators**. It's cynical, but it's an amusing, wry cynicism that never takes itself too seriously. Righteousness is not a condition that ever much affects Deary. He doesn't ever judge the past by the standards of the present, or go out of his way to pronounce moral judgements except when it's unavoidable. He has axes to grind but no hobby-horses to ride, so to speak.
* There's a lot of good-natured mockery here. The American chapter is likely to find few fans across the pond, describing it as "calling itself the land of the free, apparently without irony... they also have a fondness for guns, eating unhealthy food, and playing rounders professionally."
** Much as "science advocates" are sometimes not themselves researchers, perhaps "historical commentator" would be a good term for Deary, who isn't a historian. 

I guess I have to say that I agree with Deary's sentiments pretty much entirely, even if I take all his specific claims with a rather large pinch of salt. Chief among these for setting the alarm bells ringing was his assertion that there were only a few prisoners killed at Agincourt : not even hundreds, says Deary, let alone the thousands as described in the "stories". This I find straightforwardly unbelievable. I've read several much longer and more in-depth books on Henry V's Agincourt campaign and nobody else has ever contested that the mass executions happened; they are attested by both sides. Exactly how they were viewed at the time is certainly more contestable, but I know of no reason to doubt that they took place. For a dramatic bit of revisionism like this, very much more evidence is needed than a simple denial as Deary gives. 

Similarly, his estimate on the number of combatants puts things on such an equal footing as to make the victory either seem totally unimpressive or requiring an absurdly efficient killing process from the English. Sure, the typical ratio of 5 French : 1 English is probably an exaggeration*, but again, more justification is needed to reduce this down to something more like 1.5 : 1.

* But not necessarily. If I recall correctly, Juliet Barker reckoned it probably was on the higher end of things with ~5-6,000 English and as many as 36,000 French, but with a full third of those (12,000) not actually involved in combat – thus giving an effective ratio of more like 4 : 1. This isn't crazy; other battles have been won with such ratios.

Another strange one was how British historians have viewed King John. I've grown up learning of him as being widely regarded as one of our worst-ever rulers, but Deary says it was actually the Catholic Church who hated him more than the British. This simply doesn't ring true to me at all; citation : again, longer books than these have not alluded to anything like this. Deary can also have a rather simplistically negative view of the Church as being simply a Bad Thing* which feels hopelessly one-sided. Again, is he being provocative or sincere ? It's very hard to tell, and I would have greatly preferred an approach of "here's what I honestly think". I don't mind disagreeing with an author but I do object to second-guessing their intentions. I like a good argument, but we have to do it in good faith or it's just not interesting.

* To the point that Henry VIII splitting from Rome was unquestionably a Good Thing in Deary's mind. He should perhaps have read Dominion first.

Deary does rather better in the chapters on the Dark Ages. He quotes Beecham that one should "try anything once, except incest and folk dancing", hilariously linking this back to an early incestuous monarch who was at least never accused of the going full Morris. He tells the story of Vortigen without the whole incident with the dragon, which I found very informative but he seems to think everyone already knows. I suspect he might be showing his age there a bit : we just don't learn about this in school any more, probably because nobody trusts the Dark Age materials enough (quite rightly, in my view).

In terms of the Vikings Deary is not a fan of the tendency to portray them as a complex people and ignore their bloodthirsty side; for Deary, they're more straightforwardly marauding rapists. Well, they certainly did do that, but this doesn't mean they didn't have more interesting and positive aspects to their characters and societies as well, but it's a perfectly respectable opinion. He gets a bit weird in his interpretation of the English though, e.g. describing Alfred's achievements as "underwhelming" is a truly strange thing to say, and calling Cnut the first king of Britain without even mentioning Athelstan is practically criminal. Likewise, Harold Godwinson come across here as basically a good guy, but in other books he seems to be much more of a gangster and a thug (which, yes, is different from the typical sort of militaristic-despotism which was endemic to medieval monarchs).

Adding further to the oddness of the whole thing is the grapeshot-like approach Deary takes to adding extra information and context to famous events. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn't. He does mention, for instance, the total failure of the French attempt to counter-invade England following Crecy, and the repeated failed Spanish Armadas that came after the main event (all of which were even less successful than the first)... but not the utter failure that was the English Armada. He describes Nelson as a "throughly unsavoury character" because of his tenuous links with slavery, but then again, details the Dutch raid on the Medway (which we are apt to pointedly ignore) in some detail as the shambolic failure of the British which is clearly was.

Finally, one thing I found lacking was the counterfactuals. I don't have a hard time believing, as per the blurb, that without Hitler Churchill would have just been an opposition windbag, but more exploration of what effect our enemies had on us, what might have happened without them, would have been interesting. Deary does explore how enemies act as a unifying force, sometimes on their victims but sometimes on themselves (e.g. Joan of Arc was more successful in uniting the French than actually attacking the English). There's a degree of subtlety here – it may be a light book and parts of it are questionable but it isn't stupid – but it feels under-exploited.

And of course... we've had a lot more than ten enemies. The books feels like it was rattled off rather quickly. I for one would definitely like a much longer, more carefully-written sequel that consults more with professional historians, justifies its claims more carefully, and expands both in breadth and depth. We've had All The Countries We've Ever Invaded; the time is surely right for All The Countries Who Ever Invaded Us. 

As it stands, I'm giving it 7/10 as a good read. I'd normally knock a lot more points off for inaccuracy, but I'm cutting the author some slack because he more than deserves it. I can't imagine there's anyone alive who's done more for getting children interested in history, and I very much hope he manages a few more books for adults before he too fades into the past.