Witch-hunters, birthers, and the “Hammer of Truth”
There’s an interesting article today in the Boston Globe about the Malleus Maleficarum – "The Hammer of Witches."
"The lengthy tome was medieval Europe’s definitive guide to recognizing and prosecuting witchcraft, the justification for a wave of burnings-at-the-stake — largely of peasant women — that took place from the late 1400s to about 1520. And it helped spread the paranoid notion of a vast satanic conspiracy: a world where demons roamed freely, enticing women to cast spells, kill babies, interfere with procreation, and try to delay the fast-approaching End Times. (At the time, many thought the Earth’s sell-by date was 1535.)
"Written largely by a Dominican friar from Germany named Henricus Institoris, republished broadly in its day, the Malleus was last translated from Latin to English in the 1920s. This month Cambridge University Press published a modern translation in a one-volume paperback."
The translator, Christopher Mackay, a professor of history and classics at the University of Alberta, makes a couple of interesting points, which aren’t explicitly connected in the article, although I think they ought to be.
First, he says, "The thing that I find most relevant to today is how you view the world around you. You see what you think you’ll see and you don’t see what you don’t think you’ll see."
The other point is this: "One of the reasons why the Malleus is important is that it’s published 35 years after the invention of movable type, which made the dissemination of ideas much easier than it had been. The point is that it made this stuff fashionable, gave it a very elaborate intellectual underpinning. If the bishop of Bamberger or someone like that gets a hold of this idea and he takes it into his head, he’s going to apply it."
Both of these things seem very apropos today, where "birther" and other conspiracy theories run rife. People probably always have seen only what they wanted to see, so that for example, birthers (those who claim that Obama is not a US citizen) can repeatedly claim that Obama’s birth certificate has never been produced, when in fact it has (and the Republican governor of Hawaii has even certified that it’s genuine).
But while in the past, people who had such bizarre notions would have remained as isolated eccentrics, today the invention of the internet allows these people not only to communicate with one another but to reinforce each other’s ideas. The more they talk to each other and repeat each others’ ideas, they more isolated they become from reality. Now it’s "Joe the Plumber" (who is neither called Joe nor is a plumber) who "gets a hold of this idea and he takes it into his head."
He’s aided and abetted by cynics like Lynn Cheney, who refuse to criticize the birthers, some of whom strike me as being seriously deranged. In fact when invited to offer criticism of the birthers she attempts to support their meme that the president is not American by suggesting that he does not want to defend America. She refuses to "speak truth to stupid" because "stupid" is her most dependable constituency.
Bill Maher had a hilarious but scary piece recently about how lousy the media is at "speaking truth to stupid" (his phrase, by the way):
…recently we had the Swift Boat allegations against John Kerry, in which Kerry was accused of volunteering to serve in Vietnam so he could jump in front of a bullet so he could get a medal and then throw it away to satisfy his urge to insult real Americans. This was so stupid that Kerry refused to even discuss it.
And we all know how well that worked out.
The birthers are the "Hammer of the truth" — not in the sense that they say anything true but in the sense that they take a hammer to truth. They’re the modern equivalent of the witch-hunters of the middle ages, creating a world of delusion and steadfastly refusing to participate in the world of reality.
6 Responses to “Witch-hunters, birthers, and the “Hammer of Truth””
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You’re currently reading “Witch-hunters, birthers, and the “Hammer of Truth”,” an entry on Bodhipaksa's blog, bodhi tree swaying
Published: Aug 02 2009
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Category: Religion & Society
In my opinion the Republican Party has been taken over the most extreme religious right (people who love to push their beliefs on others while trying to take away their rights) and that’s who they need to focus on if they real want to win. Good Luck, because as they said in WACO, “We Ain’t Coming Out”.
In the same vein, to all the birthers in La, La Land, it is on you to prove to all of us that your assertion is true, if there are people who were there and support your position then show us the video (everyone has a price), either put up or frankly shut-up. I heard Orly Taitz, is selling a tape (I think it’s called “Money, Lies and Video tape”). She is from Orange County, CA, now I know what the mean when they say “behind the Orange Curtain”, when they talk about Orange County, the captial of Conspiracy Theories. You know Obama has a passport, he travel abroad before he was a Senator, but I guess he fooled them too?
Certainly the extreme element are very vocal at the moment, and moderates live in fear of alienating them and shrinking the base even more.
An interesting development with regard to the theme of my blog post has been the enthusiastic reception given to a fake Kenyan birth certificate purportedly belonging to Obama. The certificate gets his father’s age wrong, the name of the country wrong, the name of the district wrong, the name of the hospital wrong, and places the birth in a city that wasn’t in fact even part of Kenya at the time of Obama’s birth. None of these inconsistencies matter at all, of course, because there are perfectly “reasonable” explanations for them if you really hate Obama and the fact that we have a Democratic President. I believe this is the third fake Obama birth certificate to show up.
We used to live in Lauder 30 miles South of Edinburgh in the Scottish Borders. Like most borders towns Lauder has a common riding – an annual festival in which the bounds of the borough are ridden on horse back. The ride can involve over 100 horses from all over the area and is lead by the ‘Cornet’, who is a man of the town. After the ride there is much drinking and merriment. Sounds quaint but there is a sinister feel to it all if you are an outsider (think of “The Wicker Man” if you have ever seen the 1973 movie with Christopher Lee).
What makes the event silly is that the cornet has to be ‘local’ – meaning born in the town – which is rarely physically possible these days as there is no hospital but we all know what it means. Lauder has at tops 2,000 inhabitants. It is no good being born ‘of’ a neighboring town and moving to Lauder at the age of two. You must be of the town and male. As Lauder is now largely composed of incomers who commute up to Edinburgh the common riding is in effect a way of asserting that you can never truly belong to the place for at least one or two generations.
Now Lauder does not proclaim itself to be the land of the free or bang a gong about how anyone can make it to the top so there is no hypocrisy here. One may not like it but it is honest straightforward stuff.
Unfortunately the USA does call itself the land of the free and does promote the American Dream (meaning of course the US Dream as it may not apply in the rest of the Americas).
Isn’t is amazing that a land largely made up of immigrants, many of them first generation immigrants, puts up with a constitution that mandates that no one, no matter what their contribution to the nation, may become president if they weren’t born in the right place. This is the nation that had a revolution to reject the notion of inherited power yet here we have it enshrined. The circumstances of your birth control your destiny.
Isn’t it even more amazing that the debate is now about where Obama was born and not how stupid the constitution is…. but perhaps everyone is just relieved it prevents Arnie running.
I rant. I apologize. I get on with writing my boring report for work instead
Oh, I do like a good rant, but I’ll try not to take the bait. I guess the framers of the constitution were wary of putting the country’s armed forces in the hands of someone who might have divided loyalties, which seems reasonable enough, although possibly they had a premonition of Arnie becoming governator. It’s the idea of the US being the “land of the free” that I could really go on about and where I have to exercise restraint and merely wish you good luck with your report.
I like the point about how faster modes of communication (print, the Internet) allow certain falsehoods to be amplified in a feedback loop. It’s worth remembering that politics in the early US republic were partisan and often unruly. Politics was a man’s game, and it involved a lot of drinking! Every newspaper was aligned with a political ideology; objectivity wasn’t part of journalism in that time.
I think one of the reasons that extremists dominate politics in the US now is because of the apathy of those who would dominate from the middle — if they cared. Caught up in all of the cool things that capitalism in the 21st century creates, those without a fierce emotional commitment to a political agenda simply fail to pay attention. “The world watches America; American watches TV.”
Hmmm, yes. Those in the middle largely don’t pay much attention, and those at the extremes pay selective attention, preferring only to hear views they agree with. I’m trying to make a point of following people on Twitter who I don’t agree with, but who are amenable to discussion. All in the context of avoiding following too many people so that I don’t get overwhelmed.