Review : The Witches (III)

It's time to wrap up my rundown of Stacy Schiff's The Witches. In part one we looked at what made Salem so unique : the weirdness of the magical claims and the extent to which they spread throughout the community. In part two we began to see why this was so different from the usual situation in which one or two witches might be accused from time to time and then nothing much for years at a time. The courts were flawed and corrupt, twisting evidence to suit their purpose, allowing suspicion of the procedure itself to be viewed as evidence as witchcraft. Suspects were housed in appalling conditions but granted freedom if they confessed, which is perhaps the only reason that the execution rate wasn't very much higher – but at the same time explains the extremely high accusation and conviction rate.

In this final post, let's go into the underlying ideology at work. If the courts allowed and even encouraged the crisis, it still would never have happened at all without some deep-seated beliefs in absolute nonsense. We'll end on what happened afterwards, but first, we need to turn our attention to just what the hell was going on.

The Problems Of Being Holier Than Thou

Schiff, it must be said, presents a more believable picture of Puritan life than Gaskill – if conditions were as harsh as he claimed, everyone would simply have died. In Schiff's account the general state of the populace is more nuanced. Yes, they worked fucking hard and life was tough. But they did have leisure time. Taverns might be frowned upon but they existed, and life was not so wholly joyless as Gaskill claims : people might even laugh and joke from time to time.

It was also unavoidably corrupt. With a devout and perverted belief in a meritocracy*, wealth was a symbol of moral virtue and poverty its opposite. The poor did not deserve charity because they were by definition sinners. This seems to have been a sincerely held belief, not merely an excuse to keep those on top in their favoured position : the idea of equality was dismissed as literally Satanic. They had an intensely conscious moral belief that their batshit nonsense was righteousness. 

* That is, that society was meritocratic rather than that it should be meritocratic, or that any steps needed to be taken to make it so. 

To that end, even the wealthy were, impossibly, all but forbidden from actually enjoying their wealth. This level of repression and hierarchy led inevitably to widespread abuse by the civic leaders, sometimes physically and sexually, of their downtrodden flock. In an environment which was already challenging just to survive, this wasn't helping anyone's sanity.

Nor, for that matter, were the all-pervasive judgements, the "surveillance society of the soul" as Paul Lay described it. In but one of many social paradoxes (good grief these people were a right bunch of shits*), this was a group who had deliberately sought out a remote location where they could freely judge each other without their community being judged by others. The continuous judgements, the relentless meddling in everyone else' daily lives, led to a climate of fear. If there were happier moments, the general environment was that of a complete dystopia. They were obsessed with justice, after a fashion, but only in the punitive rather than the moral-philosophical sense : they wanted to inflict judgements, not enforce moral standards. Plato would have torn his hair out in disgust, and then probably punched them all in the face.

* Calvinism, I think, might be one of the most self-destructive systems of thought every devised. I have a lot of sympathy and respect for the idea that the world has an unknown, godly component to it, but I think of Puritanism as little better than a terrorist sect.

All this raises the distinct possibility that the accusations and confessions were, in part, not only the result of social contagions. Some of them may have been the result of actual, medical-grade hallucinations : they may really have believed they saw some of the things they claimed to have seen. A not-so-guilty pleasure for me at the moment is the Uncanny podcast, and I have to wonder how many modern-day supernatural claims can be explained by a similar process. Certainly the belief in even the most preposterous magical claims was sincere; if some folklore was really never any more than a story, then witchcraft is one case where the beliefs were absolutely solid : one unfortunate woman was executed for selling chickens after happening to turn up after a magical summoning ritual. 

And once again, hypocrisy was rife. They believed magic was real but forbade its use. As Keith Thomas pointed out, by removing the option of counter-magic, the only recourse was to deal with the practitioners. But there's another level of irony at work in this which speaks to a deeper fear. Puritans, as a persecuted people, now became Nietzschean monsters, themselves the persecutors of the lowest of (their own) society. Perhaps this illustrates the difference sorts of fear felt throughout various demographics more broadly. It's one thing to be afraid for yourself and to want to protect your loved ones, but it's quite another to be afraid of other people and want to oppress them.

What didn't help matters was that analytical but uncritical mindset. They took the apparent presence of a vast throng of demonic witches not as evidence of their own corruption, but in their own self-importance : after all, Satan wouldn't bother if they weren't so godly that he needed to destroy them. It felt good to be pursued by demons because that only showed how holy they were.

What a bunch of absolutely contemptible fuckwits. But I digress.

Nor did it help that their moral world view was hugely over-simplified. Essentially all evils were attributable to a single source : Satan. This meant that any wrongdoing had but a single cause, an enormously binary "if you're not with us you're against us" view of morality. Small wonder that questioning the judicial process raised immediate suspicions that the critic was themselves likely a witch. These people may not have been coherent, but they were at least self-consistent.

One final paradox concerns the community views on gender. In this case the victims were predominantly but not overwhelmingly female, something I've neglected despite Schiff giving much excellent commentary here. For the sake of space, I'll reduce this to noting that the expected role of women wasn't exactly that of a modern "trad wife" incel nonsense, but it did inflame male insecurities. Women didn't have a lifestyle that was physically any easier than that of men, and could be both oppressed (with limited rights of speech and power, with the entire town leadership being exclusively male) but also independent (running their own businesses and speaking out regardless of what the law permitted). Again, it makes sense that in having a more confined social role, women were necessarily more likely to deviate, and correspondingly more likely to be seen as susceptible to Satan's power. Everyone, to the Puritan way of thinking, was guilty of something, women most of all, and calling it witchcraft only gave that guilt a name.

In short, these people were completely mad.

Epilogue : The Aftermath

Salem began with the spectacular testimony of an enslaved Indian woman (eventually freed without a trial), from which followed a rapid, all-consuming explosion, an obsession with eliminating all witches at all costs. It so dominated the village that essential work was at real risk of not being done, which in those situations began to present a danger to life.

What Schiff doesn't analyse much is why Salem in particular went to such extremes. Gaskill noted that more cosmopolitan, tolerant, liberal places in America had no such problems with witchcraft, or at least very much less – and certainly no risk of the runaway situation which happened in Salem. But this does not explain why only Salem went into a near-catastrophe : there were other Puritan colonies in the area, but they didn't fall into such an all-consuming passion for self-destruction.

There are at least two possible contributing factors. First, Schiff notes that the Salem villagers were especially quarrelsome and given to pettiness, not willing to help each other, prone to responding over-harshly to the merest slight. Given the small size of the population, the nature of individual characters could potentially be a major issue here : if just one or two of the town leaders had been a bit more sympathetic, a bit less willing to inflame the worst tendencies of the common people, things might well have turned out very differently.

The second factor may be political. The village was intensely conflicted in its loyalties, seeing themselves as a fully independent offspring of Britain whereas the British very much regarded them as a minor and subservient colony. The colonists felt a profound need to demonstrate their independence as a legal entity, and prominent court trials could show the world that Salem was no petty backwater that was dependent on a larger government for its survival.

The trials ended as swiftly as they had begun. In Schiff's narrative, there's a bit of a wobble in the last couple of months, a little more skepticism creeping through... and then they ended completely. As with witch hunts back in the motherland, in part the sheer number of witches being accused eventually made people question the whole process. It took time, but whereas trying (say) one or two witches per year might be sustainable indefinitely – indeed accusations persisted even into the 20th century – the idea of hundreds began to be seen as preposterous. A combination of mounting concern and the practical need to get back to work brought the proceedings to a sharp but anti-climactic end. It was, ultimately, a self-limiting problem, but not before nineteen people had died and hundreds more been accused of wild, murderous intent.

Given the magnitude of the event, it might be thought that a return to normality was all but impossible. In fact it seemed to happen swiftly, perhaps in part out of the pressing needs of manual labour. Even so, the accused (and the convicted, remembering that confessions were by far the best route to avoiding sentences) and the accusers now found themselves having to learn to get along all over again.

It wasn't easy. Sometimes reconciliation was absolutely impossible. Some left, others died. Some pulled together. In one way the general opinion did an important pivot : suddenly everyone realised that maybe those thought to be bewitched were not, by definition, reliable witnesses. Perhaps also the trials had become self-sustaining, and by putting an end to them, most ordinary people felt much less need to accuse their neighbours even if they might privately still believe them guilty. 

One of the key issues that had dominated the trials was whether Satan could deceive the innocent. Like whether spectral evidence (hallucinations of a single person) should be admitted, this was a highly controversial topic. The issue was that if Satan could affect the unwilling, then his power would be implausibly great, a rival God that undermined Calvinist predestination. The solution was an uneasy compromise : Satan could sometimes deceive the innocent but not usually. It was all very ad-hoc, corrupt enough to excuse the friends of judges while allowing mass convictions. But perhaps this too gave a little wedge, an excuse for the accusers, after things had calmed down, to say that the accused weren't as guilty as they'd thought.

Any notion that it was the accusers fault just wasn't on the table. Some key antagonists did, eventually, change their minds. Initial apologies stopped short of admitting responsibility – exactly as in the case of modern politicians, barely apologies at all : "I'm sorry if you feel offended that we executed some innocents as well" sort of thing. Other key voices never wavered from their fervent belief that everything they had done was necessary and right, though only a very few indeed actually thought the trials should continue. It was all very awkward. 

There was a distinct undertone to the whole thing, an unspoken suspicion lingering in the air that maybe we've made a horrible mistake. Or perhaps more likely that they were about to make a horrible mistake : thank goodness we only executed all the guilty ones and stopped ourselves from carrying on, we'd have gone too far if we'd done that.

Being able to utter this out loud was too terrible a prospect at the immediate end of the trials; it took a full century to manage this. None of the accusers ever faced justice : the atrocity was only recognised for what it was long after everyone had died. But even though these people were fantastically stupid, they weren't simple caricatures. At least one of the main accusers left a substantial fund to help Indian students, hardly the action of someone purely intent on inflicting harm. Which again makes it all the more disturbing : that people did actually think through (albeit badly) their actions and conclude that they were doing the right thing.

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I've talked many times about how politically we can sometimes feel on the edge of chaos. Not all journalism is sensationalist rhetoric (although much of it is)... some of the more hyperbolic stuff does accurately reflect what can happen if things go on unchecked.

Salem represents a prime example of just how true this can be, how a narrow difference in thinking can lead to disaster. The villagers were not, in a sense, unintelligent. They were logical and analytical, but not curious or critical. They saw a phenomena and explained it according to their own world view, never stopping to question their assumptions for a moment. They had a devastatingly binary view of reality and morality : anything not of God was of the Devil, anyone who didn't think like them was highly suspicious. They allowed themselves little in the way of reward for following a lifestyle of almost unrelenting discipline, but ensured that everyone who failed to uphold their standards was delivered the full measure of blame.

Things twist so much when you allow room for an opinion rather than facts, to have a belief but allow room for doubt. It's not about whether you belief the Universe is run by a big beardy man in the sky or a collection of electrical fields, it's about how you think people who believe differently should be treated. How we respond to each other is, sociologically, much more important that what we ourselves personally feel. But the moment we make those feelings for facts, the minute we start thinking our position unassailable, the more likely we are to slide into intolerance.

Salem also shows how, even in a seemingly worse-case scenario of ideological and political freefall, hitting rock bottom is by no means guaranteed. Success is not final and failure is not fatal; most complaints about contemporary British politics are borne of a woeful, deplorable lack of imagination. Salem is what happens when you really take the brakes off, allow that imagination freedom with almost nothing to temper it. Don't come complaining about inheritance taxes for farmers to me, sunshine.

The pessimistic take from Salem is that the witch hunts went on for as long as they did : as Schiff put it, nobody was guilty except the accusers. The optimistic take is that they did stop : the town could have collapsed completely, but it didn't. And the ugly take is that no justice was ever meted out to the demented fuckwits who believed in ludicrous nonsense, who maintained that everything they'd done was correct even as they stopped doing it. They were never at the receiving end of the judicial system they were so keen to inflict on others. In the end, Salem, perhaps, is an illustration of how if there isn't justice for all, there isn't justice for anyone.