Chapter One of this review was an excellent start. I really wanted to find out what happened in Morzines!
This is the first time I've seen a book review that told me "I'm not going to summarize this book for you, just go read it yourself". I do not think this is what I want a book review to be.
I have been so flummoxed by the Book Review finalists last year and again this year. To me, at least 2/3 of them have been atrocious, failing to make a good case to read the reviewed book nor even being interesting pieces of writing in their own right.
I also found this one very disjointed, though thankfully not 20k words like some of the rambling treatises that this community inexplicably loves.
This wasn't a bad review per word (or at least, the writing quality was alright), but wasn't a review. I can just about understand doing this with something very short, but given one thing I got from this is that the book's either very or too long, I'd kind of like to know more before I start reading it.
I thought I had just finished the introduction, and I was getting excited to settle in for another 20k words... And then the review inexplicably just ended.
I have never voted in the book reviews before, content to let the rest of the community do so. This has worked out so far. This year's selections are suggesting to me that maybe I should start participating. If for no other reason than that I will therefore have leg to stand one if I want to complain about the selections.
(This raises an interesting thought: how many people voted this year? How does that compare to previous years? Quality may be subjective, but one can't disagree that this years selections are certainly _different_ than previous years. I'm very curious as to why that might be)
I agree. An ASX style book review should, I think, be in the style of Scott's reviews - actually tell me the book's thesis in plain language, inform me well enough that I know whether or not I will want to read the book myself (without relying on exhortations from the reviewer), and add at least one thought-provoking insight I'll be thinking about for the next week.
But this text does exactly that: it presents the thesis, gives a thought provoking insight ("the shift away from the belief in preposterous happened somewhat organically") and gives the flavour of the style and vibe, albeit in a somewhat unconventional form of discussing others' criticism. Having read the review I'm pretty much certain I don't want to read the book.
True, but I believe the affirmative action finalists were all supposed to be fiction, poetry, or other things that people don't usually review. This was a non-fiction review so I doubt it got that kind of boost.
It's possible that it was random luck and this particular review was only read and scored by people who really liked it.
I agree. I don't read the "book reviews" because I might want to read the book, I read them in hopes of learning something interesting or thought provoking.
If you want to find out, there's an article about it from the 1997 "Journal of Modern History" which reveals a lot more going on than the rather simple "superstitious peasants get dragged into the 19th century by big city rationalist doctor" account as above. There was an entire cauldron (hah!) full of background causes, revolving around politics, poverty, gender roles, gender roles being reversed, religiosity, assumptions about how to deal with those, and the kind of socially approved ways in which to 'run amok'. Including interest in the practices of table turning and spirit rapping, which had originated in 1840s America, amongst the village women.
"Possession on the Borders: The "Mal de Morzine" in Nineteenth-Century France
Ruth Harris"
Unlike the somewhat glib "Standard protocol for treating these afflictions called for accusing someone of witchcraft, preferably a poor, socially isolated, old woman, (although, in a pinch, anyone of any sex, status, or age would do, and often did), torturing her until she confessed to creating the calamity by consorting with the Devil, and, after that, lighting her on fire, first strangling her to death, if, at this stage of the proceedings, one judged that a modicum of mercy was in order", this isn't what happened in Morzines. In fact, the village was very poor, very isolated, the men had to migrate for work only coming home at particular times of the year, it was hyper-religious, and the initial phase of what would become the wave of "possessions" started with young girls getting ready to make their First Communion and reporting Marian apparitions. And the equivalent of 'gentrification', that is, local officials and ambitious men getting a leg up over their neighbours and the villagers by insinuating themselves into positions under the new French government, including "the dissolution of their treasured Confraternity of St. Esprit in 1860 and the transfer of its assets to a secular bureau de bienfaisance in the last moment of Savoyard administration."
That quickly degenerated into convulsions, fits, and claims of being possessed, and the blame was put on some witch's curse. It spread to adult women, and the blame was later fixed on "witches" - but these witches were *men*, not old women. The remedies the women demanded were not "burn the witches" but asking for exorcism by the local priest, and travelling outside the village to find magnetisers (practitioners of an early form of mesmerism). Local authorities also called for physicians to provide their services, so their only response was not "help, demons!" in a letter to Paris.
Morzines only became officially part of France upon the annexation of Savoy in 1860, and the 'curse' had started in 1857. The French authorities put pressure on the local priest to stop the exorcisms (presumably under the same rationalist attitude about witchcraft and possession) and that only made matters *worse*, because now the traditional 'cure' was being withheld and there was nothing to hold back the 'curse'. When Dr. Constans finally showed up, he didn't rely merely on soothing medical advice, but on the forced secularisation programme of the French authorities, being accompanied by soldiers and using exile, as well as hospitalisation, of the afflicted in order to control the outbreak and prevent it spreading:
"The women believed themselves possessed as a result of a mal donné, a witch's curse, and they sought to counterattack through magic, magnetism, and pilgrimage, going far from their village world in search of relief.
…The degree of attention lavished on the girls and women – numbering around two hundred at the end of 1861 - is evidenced by the physicians whom the Savoyard authorities and later the French administration summoned to investigate the strange epidemic. A local medical man, who diagnosed the outbreak as demonopathy in 1857, was followed by Doctor Arthaud, a Lyonnese physician, who made the more up-to-date diagnosis of "hystéro-démonopathie" around the end of 1860. But the resistance of the mal to orderly control and treatment seemed to require a more interventionist policy, and in 1861 Adolphe Constans, a Parisian alienist with court connections and the inspecteur général des asiles des aliénés, arrived to repress the furious public displays. Unwilling merely to observe and analyze, Constans used all his considerable power to expel the afflicted from Morzine, to intern some in public hospitals, and to use both a small detachment of infantry and a new post of the gendarmerie to maintain order. By 1863, it appeared that his methods had worked, and most of the Morzinoises, seemingly cured, were allowed to return. However, when the bishop, Monseigneur Magnin, visited the village the following year, the mal reappeared in more violent form: some ninety women flew into mad convulsions, attacking and insulting him and pleading desperately for a collective exorcism.
The outbreak brought Constans and the infantry back to the village, causing many of the women to flee through the mountain passes into Switzerland, fearful of being deported like criminals to the New World. But the terrified response of the afflicted was misplaced. After this second outbreak, more subtle measures of "education morale" were introduced, with the foundation of a library and the institution of a regime of lectures and dances intended to provide some "enlightened" diversion and "soothing" distraction. Through a mixture of subsidy and coercion-which ended with billeted soldiers helping villagers with the harvest-as well as the continued hospitalization of the possessed, Constans and his successors forced the mal underground. By 1873, only a few lone sufferers remained, women who experienced their convulsions in private ignominy, eking out a meager and marginal existence either in Morzine itself or in neighboring Switzerland.
[The "Rapport du Docteur Broc," one of Constans's successors, gives a brighter picture on August 12, 1867, Arch.Dep., claiming that the majority had reverted to a simple hysterical state. Although some still went on secret pilgrimages and had crises at home, the seizures no longer occurred in public and never during religious services.]"
"At first glance, the witch accusations seemed to share all the characteristics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with animal death, illness, and misfortune followed by individual and collective efforts to forestall the witches' power. But such superficial similarities are deceptive. At Morzine, nineteenth-century tensions were revealed by the accusations, as powerful men - first a vengeful priest and later representatives of the state within the local community - became the targets of hatred. For in the early modern period, older women were most likely to be accused of blighting crops, killing livestock, and deforming babies with black magic. For a brief moment during the mal such a traditional figure almost appeared, when one of the girls at the communion lesson spoke of an old (unnamed) woman from the neighboring commune of Gest as the likely source of evil. She never appeared again in the narrative, however. Villagers instead transferred their anger against those who benefited from political change and were held responsible for upsetting the already delicate spiritual and economic balance of the community. This important shift shows how wrong it is to see witchcraft in Morzine as a throwback; the villagers built on a centuries-old tradition but invested witchcraft with new and different psychic and social anxieties."
So to reduce the Morzines affair to simplistic "silly old peasant backwardness and mediaeval superstition against shiny new big city belief in reason and logic" is to greatly underestimate the swirling morass of forces under the surface that were roiling village life.
Indeed, the article even makes a case for the successful cure not being the introduction of rationality as such, but rather social improvements, economic stimulus, and the introduction of 'new blood' to the village. The village was poor, isolated, and the villagers were women without men; by building roads, bringing in resources for social activity, and literally having outside men show up for the local women to interact with, as well as participate in the work and spend money, the atmosphere changed and the impetus for the possession mania was dissipated:
"Moreover, Constans's "solutions" could be dramatically punitive. He was almost a caricature of the nineteenth-century secularizing physician, representing that tradition in its coercive rather than its tolerant guise. Indeed, his therapeutic rationale was perhaps harsher in its implications than that proposed by the local clergy. Had it worked, exorcism would have provided a means of expelling the "devils" both from the physical bodies of the women and from the contaminated territory of the parish. In contrast, Constans demanded the suppression of the "demons" and insisted that they were an integral aspect of the malady rather than a discrete foreign agent that could be spewed forth and thus ejected. I am hardly suggesting that exorcism had no physical or psychological costs, but it might have brought the relief of blaming the "devils." In contrast, Constans's analysis of demonopathy and hysteria focused on the illness's pervasive, inescapable quality and the individual's (and local society's) responsibility for it.
Above all, Constans generated more fear, as women fled across the mountains to escape the infantry or were forcibly detained in nearby hospitals until they were "cured." Even he ultimately recognized the need for a more subtle policy. He redrew Morzine's boundaries and had an important imperial road built that channeled movement in new directions, literally transforming the territory of the mal. With these physical changes came a shift in social welfare; he provided pensions for the needy and even subsidized the families whose womenfolk were hospitalized. New clergymen, whom Constans hoped would oppose the demonic and magical beliefs of the parishioners in the confessional, arrived in the village to unite administrative and religious authority. Bals, music societies, and a library were introduced to soothe and enlighten, while the soldiers billetted in the village ultimately transformed the village economy by paying for their room and board and helping with the harvest."
These comments (well, quotes from another work) are far more interesting and informative than the actual book cover blurb. I was left with a nagging doubt of "this sounds like such a Just-So Story, is that really how it all went down? where are the links to evidence?", so it's nice but depressing to see such suspicions confirmed. Rationalism: balderdashing mundane socioeconomic development since 1861...
Being of backwards superstitious Catholic peasant stock myself, my first instinctive reaction to such a neat juxtaposition of "and then the problem was solved by the smart, rational, STEM professional from the big city" is "oh yeah? what *really* happened?"
I lucked out in finding that article because it is really interesting and wants to tackle the event from more than just a feminist angle (a majority female, due to economic circumstances, village where those who were simultaneously victims and accusers turned against male authority figures and accused men of being the mysterious witches cursing, spell-casting, and possessing them), and goes into reasonable depth about what really happened.
So I can at least thank the reviewer for introducing me to a little nugget of history that I had not previously known.
I had ChatGPT tell me what happened, it's quite great.
The events in Morzine, a village in the French Alps, in the mid-19th century involved a case of mass hysteria or collective delusion, often described as a form of "mass demonic possession." This phenomenon affected many villagers, particularly young women, who exhibited symptoms such as convulsions, trance states, and claims of possession by devils. The situation drew significant attention from both religious and medical authorities, leading to interventions by the Catholic Church and the French government.
### Dr. Augustin Constans and His Investigation
Dr. Augustin Constans, the Inspector General of the Insane Department in France, was dispatched to Morzine in 1861 to investigate the widespread hysteria and possession claims. Upon his arrival, he observed the entire village in a state of severe depression and fear, believing they were afflicted by demons. Dr. Constans approached the situation from a medical and rational standpoint, differing from the religious view that had previously dominated the village's response.
### Dr. Constans' Solution to the Problem
Dr. Constans attributed the events in Morzine to psychological factors rather than supernatural ones. He believed that the hysteria was a result of social, environmental, and psychological conditions, exacerbated by the religious fervor and local superstition.
Here are the key steps Dr. Constans took to address the issue:
1. **Rational Explanations**: Dr. Constans provided a rational explanation for the events, emphasizing that the symptoms exhibited by the villagers were not due to demonic possession but rather a form of hysteria. He argued that these were psychological manifestations that could be treated with medical intervention rather than exorcisms or other religious practices.
2. **Separation of Affected Individuals**: He recommended separating the most affected individuals from the rest of the village to prevent the spread of hysteria. This separation would reduce the influence of mass suggestion and allow for more controlled medical observation and treatment.
3. **Medical Treatment**: Dr. Constans implemented a treatment regimen that included rest, proper nutrition, and isolation from the factors that were believed to be contributing to the hysteria. He also discouraged religious rituals that might reinforce the villagers' fears and delusions.
4. **Reducing Superstition and Fear**: By addressing the villagers' fears through education and rational explanations, Dr. Constans sought to reduce the community's susceptibility to superstition and collective delusion.
5. **Collaboration with Local Authorities**: He worked with local civil and religious authorities to implement these measures and ensure that the villagers were receiving proper care and support.
### Outcome
Dr. Constans' intervention, focusing on medical treatment and reducing the spread of panic, eventually led to a decline in the cases of hysteria and possession in Morzine. His approach demonstrated the effectiveness of a scientific and rational response to what was perceived as a supernatural phenomenon. The case in Morzine became an important example in the study of mass hysteria and collective psychological phenomena.
For further details on Dr. Constans' investigation and the events in Morzine, you may refer to historical medical journals and accounts of the period, as well as studies on mass hysteria in historical contexts.
"Most people think just like they eat, i.e., with whatever utensils they grew up with."
This is a very pithy statement. My grandfather, not a stupid person at all, grew up in rural Slovakia before WWII. Belief in witches was pretty widespread back then, and it took him several decades of life in urban secular settings to somewhat, but not completely, abandon it.
Makes you wonder what our modern-day equivalents of belief in witches could be. I recently heard Robert Sapolsky say that about our belief in free will and most (perhaps all) moral responsibility:
"So, the challenge is to just imagine what things people a century from now will be saying about our time period and things we still thought were volitional and things that we punished people for and things that we rewarded people for, where there was absolutely no basis for it."
It does get a little spooky when you dive into free will. We think there are no limits, but really there are societal limits (blinders) to our actions, and these limits change as you change societies.
My mom told me, we live in a prison of our parent's making. But we alone hold the keys to the gate. We don't use the keys, we sit in the prison, building another just like it for our children. That prison is our societal expectations. Maybe your society expects you to go to university, that's what you do, because that's your prison. Maybe your society expects you to be a tradesman, that's someone else's prison. I see young hoodlums in jail, and I realize that's their prison—in the metaphorical sense. We don't have free will, we live within the expectations (prisons) of our respective societies.
It's a tricky topic for sure. Your mom is right, though there's also a bright side to it - society used to expect everyone to be a farmer, or do whatever your father did, but we have a lot more choice today (or if not choice, then at least there are more complex influencing factors and potential outcomes).
I actually don't agree with Sapolsky that we don't have free will - I don't disagree with any of his scientific claims, or the claim that our behavior is determined by culture and biology. But I think that it's a matter of looking at the right level of emergence. Just as temperature as a concept doesn't exists in particle physics, free will doesn't exist as a biological concept. But looking at the level of cognition, how do you describe an agent that formulates its own goals, imagines different futures, and acts such that the desired imagined future comes about? Sure, ultimately the goals we pursue were determined by causes and conditions - that holds for a human as much as for a bacterium. But a human has these layers upon layers of meta-cognition, impulse control and self-organization. In lieu of a better term, we might call that free will.
The similar take I've heard is that what thoughts, emotions, or impulses come into your head is largely outside of your control, but you do have the "free will" to choose NOT to do something or NOT to engage with a thought / emotion.
Free will in that schema being more of a veto than the ability to positively manifest or do whatever you want.
That sounds like an important piece of the puzzle. Maybe the main way we control ourselves is through unconscious processes generating a bunch of options, and a conscious process picking one. Still, the conscious process ultimately makes its choice due to some internal state which was produced by external factors (and now we're back at a lower level of emergence again).
You have to look across the fence—as it were—to see that there is a fence. Cannibalism for instance. That's a hard fence for us in the west. If you're in Papua New Guinea, not so much, where the people engage in cannibalism as a funerary practice.
People who have left Islam feel the same way about pork as we do about long-pig.
So there is a fence you're unwilling to cross. It's probably not really a hard thin line as much as its a force field.
Probably why we despise the homeless the way we do. We can't imagine being homeless, they're living 'across the fence' as it were.
>Makes you wonder what our modern-day equivalents of belief in witches could be.
<mildSnark>
Virtue signaling luxury beliefs on the left and a belief in the omniscient wisdom of the free market (even in situations where it is known to fail) on the right? :-)
Many Thanks! Hmm, do you have any possibilities in mind? I'm writing from the USA, which is rather polarized these days, so the set of beliefs which are
>almost universally accepted as obvious
is rather depleted these days...
Maybe some of the patterns of daily life sort-of kind-of fit? 69% of Americans commute solo to work (as I did myself before retirement) ( https://www.autoinsurance.com/research/us-commuting-statistics/ ). Maybe regarding this as the natural pattern of daily life will be considered "wrong" in the future - after all, it was different in the past, and may change again someday.
I agree, but that seems more like a value than a belief (the line can be blurry sometimes, but I meant more like a belief about what the world is, not how it should be).
One possibility is maybe how we view agency. Michael Levin says some interesting things about it. Most people intuitively think of humans being very agentic, and animals having agency to various degree. But it looks like organs, tissues and other subsystems of the body, even down to single cells have agency, in the sense of being able to achieve goals through various means, in the presence of obstacles. Perhaps companies or other collections of people have agency in a non-metaphorical sense.
>But it looks like organs, tissues and other subsystems of the body, even down to single cells have agency, in the sense of being able to achieve goals through various means, in the presence of obstacles.
In that sense, I, personally, think that this is a perfectly reasonable view, and it extends down to feedback loops like thermostats or energy minimization in a (cold) physical system.
I would make a distinction between "able to achieve goals through various means, in the presence of obstacles" and this _plus_ "able to respond to incentives separate from the immediate goal" (and possibly plus "able to negotiate goals with other agents"). To the extent that people blur these distinctions, and take the inability to respond to incentives separate from the immediate goal as _implying_ an inability to achieve a goal in the presence of obstacles, an absence of agency in even the limited sense, then I would agree that the popular conception may be both pervasive and wrong.
As a possible contestant in Western cultures (and this is necessarily a post that will get a bunch of pushback): Individualism (as a good thing). I feel like the polarisation we're observing in the US may fundamentally stem from that philosophic position and I'm concerned there are no ways to patch that up. To be clear, I don't have a better model, nor a solution, I'm still at the beginning of thinking about this, myself, and at least so far I think individualism is better than the alternatives, but I do suspect that culturally we've bought into individualism to a degree that's gotten detrimental. So maybe that's a blind spot similar to a belief in witches.
(I really should explore this space some more and sort my thoughts and findings. But it's a project that's only going to happen once various other projects are done, on the order of a few years. So, apologies for the half-assed response, but maybe someone finds it useful anyway.)
I think we underestimate how important a community is, both for mental health but also just enjoyment of life. I'm not sure how much of that is because we overestimate individualism, and how much is due to people moving around for careers, partners etc. Is that some of what you had in mind?
If you don't mind unpolished thoughts and bad examples, I'll try responding to this:
Some of that, certainly! But I'm more thinking of that if you champion individual worth and opinions, there is a fundamental way in which that philosophy supports people defending said worth and opinions. That means value of not expressing oneself and not other-ing oneself in the interest of social harmony goes down. For example, I think a reason we're talking so much about people getting offended these days is because being offended is a pretty low-cost way to establish yourself as an individual, drawing your personal lines in the sand. I don't think we're collectively reflecting very much on whether the lines really needed drawing. "Your [feeling/trait] is valid" is something I often nod along with when I see it, and have said often, myself, but I'm actually not sure it scales if it's fully internalised.
To stress, I have no better solution, and I'm still on team individualism. These are very squishy proto-theses. (I'm very eccentric, myself, so I've definitely other-ed a lot, and boy do I have opinions. But I do look at myself and wonder if it scales - and that's even though I personally go out of my way to not make my eccentricities a problem to anyone else. I do have a dual-cultural background, which I think helps - but not so much that I've got solid intuitions that would let me unpack this whole topic yet.)
Idea of progress. “people used to die all the fucking time. plus they were very prejudiced, and put people in little boxes based on trivial characteristics like skin color, sexual preference, gender, wealth, and national origin. And they were all sad
and angry all the time, and had no self-awareness and their jokes were so old timey they weren’t even really jokes and couldn’t even have made people of their own era them laugh. Now we die a lot less lots and lots of us don’t put people in boxes any more and we’re gonna hassle the people who still put other people in boxes til they stop doing that shit, and we are all very self aware and have awesome standup comics right there on Netflix.”
I believe in progress, at least that it occurred, and could potentially keep going. I don't think people were more sad and angry than now, and might have been less. I think that's because while progress fixed many problems, we've created others.
if we’ve fixed some problems but created some new ones, and you don’t think we’re
less sad and angry than people in the past, and we might even be more sad and angry — then are the grounds for saying that overall we have made Progress with a capital P? Obviously there are areas where we have made
progress. But have we made progress in some deep, central way?
How about the notion that there's a universally correct morality? Or at least as far as humans are concerned, for slightly more sophisticated audiences.
I'm a big believer in markets. But I don't think that they're omniscient, nor do I know anyone who thinks they are (and I know plenty of big believers in markets). But here's the rub - for most things, markets happen to be the best mechanism we have. Market failures exist, but it is not clear that government intervention is superior on average
>But here's the rub - for most things, markets happen to be the best mechanism we have. Market failures exist, but it is not clear that government intervention is superior on average
Agreed. Many Thanks! There are a very few cases where the economics of the industry creates natural monopolies (notably local electricity and water supply), and I think that government intervention is a net positive there, but these are special corner cases.
I think they may be even more special than you appreciate. The interventions are net positive provided that you have decent state capacity and a 'good' political settlement. These are much rarer commodities than economists in developed countries have typically acknowledged in their premises when reasoning about market failure.
Except our belief in free will is more incoherent than wrong. Most people don't even understand what they are believing in well enough to explain how it relates to views like compatibalism.
Tbh, I don't blame them. I struggle to formulate a fully coherent theory myself. The crucial piece seems to be that a deterministic and acausal description of the world without free will, and an uncertain (in the Knightian sense) and causal description with free will, both can describe the same world, if they describe it at different levels of emergence. But it's unclear how to relate these levels of emergence. If we designate the fundamental level as more real than the emergent level, does that also mean thermodynamics is not real? It's also unclear exactly what property free will is - is it some way of describing self-organizing dynamics of agents that can self-reflect? How would one describe in rigorous terms?
I just don't see a problem that requires solving. Do I have free will? Well my will isn't being dictated by someone outside myself. What else do you even want to know?
Maybe it's only the remnants of a homunculus style conception of the self that identifies it with a soul that differs from the mere meatsack that we feel a pressure here. But ultimately it's not the burden of the person answering to dispell the feeling that something is weird -- the person claiming there is something that hasn't been explained or is incomplete who needs to make the showing.
You don't need a solution to a purely apparent problem. The right answer to Zeno's paradox wasn't calculus it was to shrug and go "ok so there is a time at which it reaches the point 1/2^n of it's starting distance from the target. If you think that's a problem it's your burden to explain why"
“… my will isn't being dictated by someone outside myself. What else do you even want to know?”
Yep, I like this minimalist approach a lot. I’ve been working on defining meaning using a similar set of arguments.
There are some problems, like extended cognition, and the outside world affecting the inside of you through actions like drugs… but overall I think this works. You just divide the world physically into the inside me vs outside me parts, and all the difficulties of homunculi and magical free will just melt away.
I feel like you made a good argument for the opposite position :) Zeno didn't understand that you can divide a finite interval into infinite terms.
We have an illusion of free will, which makes us feel like our decisions are made by us, independently of any outside factors.
The hard science position is that none of our decisions are independent of outside factors, any more than the 557th domino brick falling is independent of the 1st.
Both explanations are bad, even if the latter is true. The first one is bad because it's false. Obviously our decisions are influenced by outside factors, and who we are is a result of outside factors too.
The problem with the hard science position is that it equally well describes everything else in the universe, when there's clearly something different going on with humans. So it explains nothing.
To me, the problem that requires solving is both defining what free will is, so rigorously that you can determine for any algorithm whether it has free will, and then to explain how it works. For example, it might turn out that free will is a property of agents that learn their own utility functions, have a self-model and self-control. This combination makes it computationally intractable to predict what the utility function or behavior of the agent is, without simulating the agent.
So it's really a problem in (some point in the future) in the field of AI. Same as Zeno's paradox really is a basic calculus question, imo.
Why should we expect that we should be able to define free will to do that? And why would it matter anyway. Definitions are just abbreviations we use to shorten descriptions. If you insisted on having necessary and sufficient conditions to distinguish an enhancement of a person from a cure of a disease I’d reject the distinction as unimportant, unprincipled and ultimately confused. Until you make a case for there being some principled distinction here why should I think this is any different (if it doesn't have to be principled it's trivial )
Plenty of concepts that seem intuitive to us at first turn out to be subtly incoherent or just aren’t actually principled. Very few of the concepts we find useful in non-technical contexts ever extend to a principled definition. It's an infamously difficult problem to define “table” or “game” with explicit necessary and sufficient conditions.
But what do you mean by choose? And why are you assuming that somehow in tension with determinism?
For instance, the fact that it might flow from who you are that you would never hand your loved ones into the secret police for a bit more spending money doesn't seem in tension with the idea that you choose that freely. Indeed, finding out that — at the level of fundamental physics — there was some element of chance in whether or not you did that wouldn't seem like it was more of a choice. It would feel like it is less of one.
But once you accept that it can still be a completely free choice even if it is completely predictable from your nature or character then what's the issue? Sure, maybe you can in theory predict how you’ll act using the laws of physics based on the current state of the universe but part of that state is a description of you. It's not denying that you have the choice, indeed if it wasn't predicted by a complete description of your character and dispositions that would actually be denying you agency and leaving it up to some external (none you) process to make the choice.
At some level what's really doing the work here is the reluctance we feel to identify ourselves with the physical crap in our brain. If you imagined it was fundamental laws of how souls work rather than laws of physics that predicted your future choices would that make u feel better?
Are you saying assuming materialism is just as much an assumption as assuming the existence of supernatural phenomena? To me, the problem with that is that people have been studying supernatural phenomena scientifically, and never found anything. If they exist despite that, it must be either because we're so biased that we can't see them despite using our best method for finding out the truth, or there's a conspiracy to suppress results.
If materialism isn't true, then science isn't the tool we think it is. I.e., if the experienced universe is a projection of the mind and not substantial in itself, then the scientific method may be part of our dream and not something outside it which can interrogate the world objectively.
Alternatively, maybe witches had some yet-to-be discovered special abilities which were not supernatural but appeared to be because we haven't yet uncovered all the laws of nature. Maybe the genes for witchcraft disappeared because we burned them all. Being mostly facetious here.
If there are non-material things, does it matter? Either they affect something material in a repeatable way, and can in principle be measured and controlled in experiments. Or they don't affect anything material, and so they don't matter in any way.
I suppose you could have things that affect something material in a non-repeatable way, like "glitches in the matrix"? But then we'd never know whether they really happened, or were just measurement errors.
Maybe our modern-day equivalent of belief in witches will be disbelief in witches.
"Lol, just look at those superstitious materialists, inventing BS about 'mass hysteria' and 'mental illness' to cover what was so obviously demonic possession! Luckily we've grown beyond such primitive foolishness."
> Makes you wonder what our modern-day equivalents of belief in witches could be
The WEF - A witch's coven led by Satan himself, Klaus Schwab :-P
Seriously, perhaps this question is best approached by considering the characteristics people believed witches possessed: They were thought to secretly cast spells which would cause damage to others or to their property such as livestock, ascribing a deliberate malign intent to what were rarely more than chance misfortunes.
The modern equivalent of that would appear to be conspiracy theories concerning groups claimed to be secretly undermining nation states and threatening prosperity, with evil intent. One often sees the WEF accused of this, even though they seem to me a fairly well-meaning organisation, and Schwab no more than a glorified secretary and events organiser.
Whether or not free will exists, it is still important to act as though it does, so that you can create incentive structures that shape peoples actions in socially beneficial ways.
She was not. She was accused of murder and one of the prosecution lawyer referred to her as a diabolical and "a which" when describing her character. Notably in Italian it's more common to use which as a derogatory term, and I don't think anybody in the court thought he meant to accuse her of actually consorting with supernatural forces.
That whole process was a shitshow in any case, no need to exxagerate the facts.
A. Because of the sand which is (sandwiches) there!
Now, if we're talking about a witch who goes into sandwich-making as a job, then we've got Which 'Wich Witch as the shop name! (Or if we prefer, Which Witch 'Wich! Or Witch Which 'Wich!) 😁
Which 'Wich Witch - the witch who works for Which 'Wich
Which Witch 'Wich - what sandwich made by the witch do you want?
Witch Which 'Wich - this store caters to witches (only)
>Dr. Constans’ next action was highly unorthodox. Standard protocol for treating these afflictions called for accusing someone of witchcraft, preferably a poor, socially isolated, old woman, (although, in a pinch, anyone of any sex, status, or age would do, and often did), torturing her [etc.]
Ironically, witchcraft wasn't illegal in most of the dark ages, because most important people regarded magic as an ignorant country superstition. Belief in witchcraft was more of a Renaissance phenomenon.
That's my understanding as well. And in England, at least, there was a strong political dimension as well. The Tudors and Stuarts were paranoid about plots from any direction, including the supernatural, and so passed a lot of laws that encouraged people to be on the lookout for witches. No surprise, witches started being spotted. The witch-hunt craze petered out pretty soon after the government lost interest.
Elizabeth I got her court astrologer to choose a propitious day for her coronation (previous coronations had been arranged for major feast days), and James I wrote a book on demonology. They were certainly a supernaturally-inclined bunch of monarchs.
Hear me out. A lot of people are trashing the review but I liked it.
The starting was strong, leaving me on edge to explore for myself. The rest of the review was on par as well. Readers need to realise that if something is not conventional, doesn't mean it is not what claims to be. This is a book review as well. A pretty excellent one even. Encourages us to pick it up and have a go by carefully picking up key events that we may come to like.
I felt it was just getting started and then it stopped suddenly with "read the book yourself!" Okay, but why should I? Why is Lecky so sound on the topic? He was a 19th century writer with the prejudices and unconscious biases of his time, did he get around those or is the book full of "everyone know 19th century English gentleman peak of creation" style assumptions?
I was worried by the start - it was a long time before any mention of the book, so I didn’t know if it was a book from the 2010s or one from the 1970s, or if the person was doing some abstract “review” of actual history rather than a book. We eventually got the mention of the book, but it was after a distracting story. And then the review ended.
I admit that I read these reviews because I want to know the contents of the book without having to read it myself. Few non-fiction books are worth reading from start to finish. Much better for someone to helpfully hack them and tell us about the twenty pages that were worthwhile.
"Few non-fiction books are worth reading from start to finish. "
That might be more of an effect of the modern-day book market. It seems like today, the main reason to publish a non-fiction book it to establish yourself as an "expert" with big, serious, hardcover *book*, and then you can go rake it in from lectures and tv appearances. The core ideas come from scientific articles that are much shorter, and could probably be summarized in an essay or even a tweet.
But it doesn't have to be like that. These older books are more like a textbook, where every single chapter is jam-packed with info and it's just hard to sum it up without losing a lot. I mean, it's pretty much summarized by its own title: "Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe."
"So, why listen to me when the book is just a click away. Don’t even scroll up. Here’s Chapter 1, on the decline of the belief in witchcraft. I think you’ll realize pretty quickly whether this book is your cup of tea or not. Thanks for reading."
Why do we need a review if the conclusion is just "here's a link to the book, go read it"? The review didn't explain why Lecky's book is better than similar works. It didn't tell us if there are similar works. Why pick Lecky and not Gibbon or a slew of modern writers?
Plus. it didn't help its case with the Morzine anecdote, as several of us have picked that apart as not being what it is claimed to be. So, leaving that out or just giving it in a couple of sentences would have been a better idea.
As others have said, the review just seemed to be starting (all the above is introductory material, now the reviewer will go into the book) but it stopped dead with "read the book".
Being a frequent complainer against rambling, overly long "reviews", I have to give at least some props here. It could have been so much more, but for what it is, it does a good job of telling me what to expect from the book and whether or not I want to read it. That's not the whole job of a book review, but it's one critical part, done right.
> Lecky observes that everybody believed in witchcraft until they didn’t
My understanding is that the official position of the Catholic Church was that witches didn't exist, and anybody claiming they did was making trouble (and perhaps deceiving people into believing Satan had more power than he actually does). This official position was not enough to convince most laymen though.
It's been a long time since I've read Wallace Notestein's "A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718" (publ. 1909), but IIRC:
As you say, Catholicism discouraged belief in witchcraft because Catholic theology regarded the Devil as relatively powerless. More than that, early Renaissance thinkers held that cases of witchcraft or demonic possession were either natural phenomenon, malicious gossip, or confidence jobs perpetrated by grifters and sleight-of-hand artists. (An early book on stage magic was apparently written for the purpose of explaining away a lot of the "evidence" for witchcraft.)
That began to change after the Reformation, because Protestant theology had the effect of granting demons a lot more power, so that the existence of witches became an object of real (if largely theoretical) concern. In England, at least, there were two further complications. First, the Tudors and Stuarts were paranoid, and were ready to credit any anti-government plot, even those with a supernatural tinge, with a degree of plausibility. Laws were passed that encouraged people to be on the lookout for witches, so it's no surprise that witches started being spotted. Moreover, competition amongst folk healers also encouraged accusations of witchcraft: if a healer's craft didn't work, he or she had both a motive and a theoretical justification to accuse a competitor of malign interference.
The government's position, that witchcraft was both real and dangerous, coupled with a rise in accusations, had the effect of reversing intellectual opinion in the absence of any change in real evidence. Where before only cranks argued for the existence of witches, now you were a crank if you hewed to the old skepticism. The low point came during the English Civil War when civic order broke down, allowing witch-hunters to roam and persecute freely.
The stopper began to go back in the bottle after the Civil War, and the government ceased to be greatly concerned with "supernatural" plots (and became more focused on "Popish" plots) and discouraged witch-hunting in the cause of civil peace. Once again intellectual opinion flipped, and again it was less because a change in evidence (still less on account of a "rise of Rationalism") and much more because the persecution of witches ceased to be a profitable endeavor.
Notestein's account aligns pretty closely with Lecky's, it sounds like, including the fundamentally non-rational causes of belief in witches, but also carries the strong implication that non-belief in witches can also have (and historically has had) non-rational causes. It is an account not of a "rise of Rationalism" but of how different beliefs and behaviors come to the fore as different priors take turn in the saddle.
Hmmm… the Bible seems to support the belief in witches. The Law of Moses says “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” not “don’t worry about witches, they’re not real.” And then there’s the Witch of Endor (no relation to Ewoks).
I'd have to double-check, but I believe the "witches" whom we shall not suffer to live were interpreted as poisoners, i.e., people who made harmful potions using natural ingredients. Not sure how the Witch of Endor was explained.
Also, all the old testament stories were "our god can beat up your god", not "your god doesn't even exist".
It's kind of funny to see how the Dreamworks Prince of Egypt changed the Egyptian priests' magic into implied stage magic and trickery in line with modern Christian ethos.
>Standard protocol for treating these afflictions called for accusing someone of witchcraft, preferably a poor, socially isolated, old woman...torturing her until she confessed to creating the calamity by consorting with the Devil.
There are special vibes to such 'old' books. I probably won't read this one, at least not anytime soon, but I once found a late 19th century book on sexual health printed in Warsaw. It was full of prejudice and, by modern standards, fictional medical advice having little to do with factual evidence. But it was fun to show it to friends who could read Polish and have a good laughter together.
I am planning to read some early thearises on physics though, it should be very fun and useful for me
Interesting review, but Lecky is out of date and, to my mind, way too self-congratulatory towards rationalism. The European witch panic began in the 1400s and ended before 1700 for reasons that are very hard to explain. Being for and against witch persecution in the 16th and 17th centuries did not align very well with rationalism in the modern sense. Famous scientists like Jean Bodin (creator of the first quantitative economics) and Robert Boyle believed in witchcraft. Neither of the authors of the two most famous anti-witchcraft books was a rationalist. Johannes Weyer believed that witchcraft was common among cynical courtiers who promoted witch trials as a way to advance their careers; he opposed the persecution of witches on humanitarian grounds. His goodness shines out across the centuries, but he was in no way a modern thinker. Reginald Scot dismissed witchcraft because he was a cynic of the classical school who dismissed just about everything, including science. And then there's Montaigne, who opposed witch trials without taking any stand on whether witchcraft was real because he thought the accused witches he had met were insane. When Lecky wrote it was indeed hard to see how the persecution had ended, since among the writers of books persecutors always far outnumbered skeptics. Thanks to recent scholarship summarized by Michael Hunter in "The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment" we now know that there was a major argument in which the witch believers were routed, but it doesn't appear in books because it was mainly conducted orally. (My review is at: https://benedante.blogspot.com/2021/01/michael-hunter-decline-of-magic-britain.html)
Plus there is the problem that the decline of belief in witches and demons in the 18th and 19 centuries was accompanied by the rise in belief in all sorts of other irrational constructs: nationalism, communism, anarchism, race science, etc. Bad as it was, the witch persecution hardly rivals World War I or II as a supremely irrational act.
>Here we encounter one of the great challenges facing any historian: most of what matters in history is spoken, and few of history's major actors have been book-writing people.
Ouch! One often reads that "history is written by the victors". It is sobering to think that it is written by an unrepresentative subset of the elites of the victors...
>So the question of why the English stopped trying people for witchcraft when it was still a capital crime, and most of the common people still believed in it, and most of the books published on the subject still argued for it, has this answer: because any lawyer or judge who involved himself in such a case risked being laughed at by all the other lawyers, and jeered out of his favorite coffee house.
Ouch! In this case the jeerers got the right answer - but this was accidental, and a terrible way to make decisions. One semi-related contemporary case was the SETI got tarred with the same brush as kidnapped-and-probed-by-UFO reports, despite having drastically different arguments for and against plausibility. In general, I see few controversial questions where the weight of evidence is so overwhelming that treating one side of the discussion with ridicule is warranted.
<i>Plus there is the problem that the decline of belief in witches and demons in the 18th and 19 centuries was accompanied by the rise in belief in all sorts of other irrational constructs: nationalism, communism, anarchism, race science, etc. Bad as it was, the witch persecution hardly rivals World War I or II as a supremely irrational act.</i>
Worth pointing out that spiritualism was pretty popular in the 19th century, including among educated people. And astrology, healing crystals, wicca, and the like are underdoing a revival nowadays.
Perhaps the real reason we don't have witchcraft trials any more is simply that people who believe in magical powers generally tend to view them as neutral or benign rather than evil.
"Perhaps the real reason we don't have witchcraft trials any more is simply that people who believe in magical powers generally tend to view them as neutral or benign rather than evil."
No, today we have trials about who has the right to channel the Atlantean spirit sage 😀
So far, few of this year’s crop of book reviews have been up my alley, but yours definitely was! Reasonably long, actually a book review, articulate in communicating the book’s fascinating main insight. Thanks for sharing :)
I was thinking the problem with this review was that it was going to be too long. It was a long way in before I heard anything about what book was being reviewed - when it was from, who it was by, or even if it was actually a book rather than one of the other types of entry we’ve had recently (I was half worried this would be a “review” of the actual history itself, rather than a review of a book about the history!)
But then the actual review started - and suddenly stopped!
Anyway, hearing about this book made me really interested in the use of the word “rationalism” here. This doesn’t seem to be the traditional philosophical use of the word, which contrasts rationalism (the reliance on a priori reasoning as the only source of true knowledge, associated with people like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) with empiricism (the reliance on actual observation to see what the world is like, associated with people like Berkeley, and Hume, and Locke). It seems somewhat closer to the use of the word “rationalism” as used in the communities this blog is a member of, where it seems to stand in for both rationalism and empiricism, in that it’s a kind of epistemological hygiene (but agnostic about how much comes from a priori reasoning about how an artificial intelligence would behave and empirical reasoning about which interventions actually improve lives). But is it actually the same? And if the book acknowledges that both rationalists and irrationalists mainly just pick up intellectual habits from their community, then how does that fit in?
That use of rationalism is very similar to how it's used in this community, yes, and has a very long history. It's one reason I think this community would be better referred to as neo-rationalists. (Although the similarities to old-style rationalists are certainly great, so maybe it's fair enough to just view it as the latest chapter in a long novel.)
The timing of the writing of this book is interesting, because (if I understand correctly) Spiritualism was still growing in popularity at this time. No doubt belief in supernatural things had overall declined, but still!
According to the article I quoted above, that was part of the impetus that kicked it all off in Morzines! Local girls and women were playing around with the fashionable table turning of the period! That wasn't the originating incident by itself, but it shows that it's not a clear-cut story of "backwards mediaeval beliefs", but rather the modern beliefs in a new form of supernaturalism were just as flourishing.
I'm pretty sure it was NOT standard procedure to burn witches in France 60 years after the French revolution. Indeed, when I look it up that's more than a hundred years after the last one. You're talking about a heavily modernized secularized country at that time.
Yeah, our reviewer fell into the trap of pop culture "everybody knows..." that of course the silly old superstitious backwards peasants and the gullible local yokel authorities writing "help, demons!" letters to Paris would be witch-burning.
It's good old 19th century propaganda about the dusty old Middle Ages and the darkness of unenlightened cruelty versus our modern days of Science and Progress (and, for the English at least, solid Protestant values), so in a way it's fitting for a review of a 19th century door-stopper.
But it's not history, as is being pointed out in this thread.
This was 1861. "Standard protocol" in France certainly did not call for witch burning. Nothing of the sort had occurred for over 100 years. The last officially-sanctioned execution for witchcraft appears to have been in Macon [missing an accent circonflexe here] in 1745.
By 19th Century standards, this writing is pretty lucid. Decently short sentences. A refreshingly lack of unnecessary flourish and elliptical phrasing. (I’d like someone to write a book about why writing became so dense in the 19th Century, compared to the 18th and 20th.)
I've always assumed it was because 19th-century writers grew up being taught Latin, which handles deeply-nested sentences more gracefully than English - "in order to do X" becomes a snappy "ut" + infinitive, for instance.
I have a direct ancestor in 17th-century New England whose death was ruled to be murder due to a literal ghost story. The _only_ specific evidence introduced at the trial was a witness swearing that the deceased had appeared in a dream to say that the accused did it. Based entirely on that the court convicted my 10th-great uncle -- son of the deceased and the person who'd discovered the body -- of murder, and they hanged him.
Among the many interesting anecdotes and historical oddities which my decades of family-tree research has turned up, that one most vividly reminds me to feel lucky to live now rather than "back in the day".
I think the point that people -- including me and you -- find it very very difficult to form beliefs in a rational way that doesn't take for granted huge parts of our societal epistemology is super important. And it's a point I don't think rationalists pay enough attention to.
Ultimately, it's neither psychologically nor practically possible to just start from the ground up Descartes style (but not even him) and really reevaluate all the things your society takes for granted. Especially because they infect all explanations so truly uprooting them would require rebuilding almost everything.
My point isn't to critisize being a rationalist, indeed, if anything it points to the great value in societal epistemic hygiene. But I do think it points to the importance of doing things to make sure future generations inherit a better societal epistemology.
It looks like an error, since the spelling does seem to be "Morzine". And ironically, in modern times it is now a ski resort, or rather the ski resort is located in the territory of the commune:
The tourist guff is very funny, because it bigs up the history angle but carefully does not mention 1861 And All That. Also the bit about "Most budgets and tastes are catered for in Morzine; from pizza and pasta, to steaks, Savoyard specialities and gourmet French cuisine", when according to the "Journal of Modern History" article:
"The community subsisted on a meager mountain agriculture that produced barley-corn, oats, and potatoes. Scarce resources were spent on bread, which increased the burden of debt and forced ever more men onto the road to Switzerland. Otherwise, the community depended on livestock, the key resource that, when threatened by illness, unleashed the witchcraft fears that haunted the village.
…Among the many subversive activities of the "devils" were their rejection of local food, described by Constans as miserable bread, "potatoes of bad quality; salted and smoked meat, often contaminated; the residues of milk; and a bad cheese, hard and heavy, called tomme." Instead, they demanded cripplingly expensive alternatives associated with luxurious city life, such as sugared black coffee and chocolates. …Their demands later became so extreme that they wanted the same food at home that they had eaten at government expense when in hospital, and, if their families protested, convulsions began again, always preceded by an epigastric crisis in which they felt as if they would explode."
Somehow I doubt the "Savoyard specialities" for the tourists include mouldy meat and oat bread 😁
Yeah I used to ski in the area regularly so that's why I couldn't get past this misspelling.
Thanks for the anecdote! I Today's Savoyard specialties sound more appealing, but it is indeed heavily based on potatoes, smoked meat and cheese, I guess the quality of the products just skyrocketed
Whew, good job all the witches and demons moved on by the time you visited! You had no idea how near you came to being a possessed sufferer of convulsions demanding luxuries like sugar in your coffee!
Yeah, all the tourist euros now mean they can buy good bread 😁 Though if the French doctor said the local cheese was bad, it *must* have been bad. Even with the modern versions, you can see why back then that cheese might have been not the greatest:
"Tommes are normally produced from the skimmed milk left over after the cream has been removed to produce butter and richer cheeses, or when there is too little milk to produce a full cheese."
Raises all kinds of speculations I'm way too lazy to investigate. Were the Savoyards superstitious yokels or sly mountainfolk taking the measure of their new flatlander masters? Was it a (unconscious?) attempt at illegibility? Or conversely, was "sending agitated demonopaths to the funny farm until they get calmer" a euphemism for "sending agitated recalcitrant locals to the slammer until they get calmer"? Was there a crisis in local hierarchy that muddled the message?
"Were the Savoyards superstitious yokels or sly mountainfolk taking the measure of their new flatlander masters?"
The 1997 paper goes into this. That was all part of the psychological forces moving the community. Certain people used the opportunity to get new/better positions and to enrich themselves at the expense of their neighbours (in the view of the neighbours). The village itself was isolated and very poor, so the changes of modernisation, if you like, were breaking up already precarious social structures. The mood of the time was one in which visions and religious revivals were taking place.
"Was there a crisis in local hierarchy that muddled the message?"
You've hit the nail on the head. Constans' arrival was not, as the review implies, a brave reformer treating the mentally ill with compassion via rational enlightenment; he came in with the force of the state, including soldiers and police; had an agenda about the disgusting backwards peasants who needed to be dragged into the light, by force if necessary; and did lock sufferers (who were all women) up in hospitals until they got 'cured'. Unless you were 'cured', you didn't get out. So, as with previous discussions about involuntary commitment, sufferers had an incentive to pretend to be 'cured' so they could get out, whether or not this was in fact the case.
This régime seemed to work and he went back to Paris, but the moment he was gone it all sprang up again, so he had to come back. But this time, seeing that he couldn't force a cure, he engaged in social and economic improvement. *That* stuck.
JSTOR is a pain in the backside, but you can set up an account to read a certain number of articles for free, and it's worth it to read the background of what was going on:
> Dr. Constans’ next action was highly unorthodox. Standard protocol for treating these afflictions called for accusing someone of witchcraft, preferably a poor, socially isolated, old woman, (although, in a pinch, anyone of any sex, status, or age would do, and often did), torturing her until she confessed to creating the calamity by consorting with the Devil, and, after that, lighting her on fire, first strangling her to death, if, at this stage of the proceedings, one judged that a modicum of mercy was in order.
It would be helpful if book reviewers did a little research before they offhandedly make historically incorrect statements. The last accused witch who was put on trial was Anna Göldi in Glarus Switzerland — and that was eighty years before the Morzines incident — in 1782.. Protestant churches and the Catholic church started questioning the legitimacy of witch trials in the late 17th century, but most didn't formalize their opposition to them until the mid-18th century. In 1749, Pope Innocent XIII issued a bull that effectively discouraged the use of torture and other extreme measures in witch trials. And In 1736, the British Parliament passed the Witchcraft Act, which essentially ended the legal persecution of witches in Great Britain — decriminalizing witchcraft and focusing on the prosecution and punishment of fraudsters who claimed to have magical powers.
As for the Glarus trial, the claims of witchcraft made against the defendant Anna Göldi were withdrawn because the laws against witchcraft had been repealed. According to Wikipedia's entry for her, "During her trial, official allegations of witchcraft were avoided, and the court protocols were destroyed. The sentence does, therefore, not strictly qualify as that of a witch trial." The last *official* witch trial in Europe was the trial of Maria Pauer in Austria. Maria Pauer was executed for witchcraft in 1750 in the city of Salzburg.
Reads more like a discarded draft of a review. But then I have found most if not all of the reviews so far to be bad in one way or another.
While we current humans of the 21st century are of course the epitome of history, we should note that there is still considerable belief in the occult, from Aleister Crowley to Black Sabbath to not religious but spiritual to possibly certain major religions. If you like, you can probably go to the ghetto in any American city and find someone to curse your enemies with a bit of voodoo.
Meanwhile from the south black africans merrily believe in witches, similar to what the review describes, even today. Ryszard Kapucinski (sp?) described one case, in West Africa; I have myself seen more situationally amusiing such evidence in East Africa. So perhaps the review also evidences a certain parochial whiteness that only a good dose of DEI can cure.
I was mildly amused by the early book reviews and the (generally half-hearted) attempt to link the subject to some rationalist cause like YIMBY or AI alignment. There was a running joke in the comments that this was how to get your book review on the finalist list. This review is the most blatant example thus far.
The review itself, if you can call it that, doesn't summarize the actual book. I know some people are put off by the longer reviews, but this one was like a review of the table of contents. And half of the review is taken up by a false historical story and a brief biography of the author. But it made it into the finalist bracket. Is a review of a book about rationalism the ultimate meta power play? I'm seriously tempted to write a review for next year and just fabricate the whole thing, fitting in as many nods to rationalism as I can without reviewing a real book. Just to see how it's received.
It wouldn't be a bad review with a little condensing and editing, but now we're getting into "reviews of the reviews" and I better stop before we get trapped in a recursive loop.
I liked this a lot. I feel like a lot of reviews recently have tried to emulate Erik Hoel’s from 2022 and use the review format as a jumping off point for a giant essay. But that’s definitely not the only way to write a review. This one was simply doing a different thing.
And I’ll say that despite the review being short and rather unconventional, I for one got to the end and actually - for the first time with any ACX book review - started reading the book itself.
If this sounds naive please excuse, but isn't rationalism "the belief that all behaviour, opinions, etc. should be based on reason, rather than emotions or religious beliefs."?
I've operated for 70 years with this Oxford Learner's definition.
Am I missing something? What's all the fuss?
[This, from one whose bumper sticker reads 2 + 2 = 4]
I'm not trying to be unnecessarily cruel here, but if reviews like these past few are the "finalists", I shudder to think of what the non-finalist essays are like.
This one at least is reviewing an actual work of non-fiction targeted at reasonably-intelligent adults and not, uh, rhyming dictionaries, comic books, or conspiracy websites, but it leaves me wondering if the reviewer has ever read an actual ACX/SSC-style "book review". There's nothing of substance here that can't be gleaned from the title of the book and maybe the back jacket. This would be a fine Goodreads "review", but here it's just trite. I don't think it's actually ChatGPT - at least, not based on the prompts I tried - but it's "ChatGPT-y", if you understand the distinction.
My free advice to Scott is to maybe consider winnowing down the "finalists" a little more, because I think too much chaff devalues the concept as a whole and runs the risk of causing people to be less inclined to contribute their best, or even at all. I get the appeal of a bunch of free content which is at least mildly-interesting to skim through and requires little more than a Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V, but maybe consider posting them as "Book Review Also-Rans" (or a more charitably-worded version thereof) after the main finalists have been posted.
While I broadly agree that I can't see how this got to be a finalist, I don't think we should be throwing the onus back on Scott to pick the finalists. ACX readers are the ones who voted in the finalists, and if the resulting selection means we're a bunch of uninformed voters, so be it.
"In 1966, Tuck ran for the California State Senate. ...When defeat became inevitable, Tuck made the now notorious statement, "The people have spoken, the bastards."
I remembered the phrase because it's exactly the kind of thing that sticks in the memory, then looked it up to see who said it. Thank you Google and Wikipedia for being my supplemental memory 😁
It would be interesting to see the scores for the finalists, to see if most of these weaker entries could be eliminated just by raising the cutoff.
Another option for Scott would be a "you divide I choose" sort of setup - either Scott or the readers come up with "finalist-candidates", and the other side chooses the actual finalists.
Frankly though, I think readers shouldn't be involved in the curation process. Crowdsourcing is showing its age all across the web, and no matter how special ACX readers might be, in the end they're still a crowd. I don't trust crowdsourcing to come up with the objectively best selection, rather than the selection they subjectively like the most, and I for sure don't trust its subjective tastes will match mine.
Except I quite clearly said "[this is] causing people to be less inclined to contribute their best, or even at all" and "readers shouldn't be involved in the curation process". I'm not sure why I would want to contribute more, or go against my own beliefs on the wider issue, considering the number of readers and subscribers to Scott's Substack benefit me in no way. I'm having a hard time figuring out what your remark is intended to add beyond snark.
"Frankly though, I think readers shouldn't be involved in the curation process."
The problem is that with 156 finalists this year, Scott can't reasonably judge them all; he said himself "I can't read 150 reviews alone" in the "Choose Book Review Finalists 2024" post.
"Another option for Scott would be a 'you divide I choose' sort of setup - either Scott or the readers come up with 'finalist-candidates', and the other side chooses the actual finalists."
This one's more plausible, and that is what Scott did explicitly in 2022 (possibly the other years as well, but he didn't go into as much detail about finalist selection those years). But this year, he explicitly said that he's interfering in favor of the weaker entries:
"In past years, most reviews have been nonfiction on technical topics. To keep things interesting, I’m going to try some affirmative action this time (sorry, Supreme Court). ~25% of finalist slots will be reserved for books from nontraditional categories - fiction, poetry, and books from before 1900 are the ones I can think of right now, but feel free to try other nontraditional books."
The more fundamental issue might be that readers choosing from 150 reviews will probably choose the ones whose subject matter they already like; e.g. comic book fans are more likely to read the "Silver Age Marvel Comics" review, poetry fans are more likely to read the "The Complete Rhyming Dictionary" review, etc. And those fans will probably vote the review higher than the median ACX reader would, just because of the positive association with the subject matter.
I could see a world where some of these niche book reviews get 1/5th the votes of the more mainstream non-fiction ones (is a rhyming dictionary non-fiction? I could see the argument either way), but those votes are all 9 or 10 out of 10, because the book review could skip the critical step of convincing its voters that the subject matter was worth discussing. Look around in the comments of pretty much any finalist - including this one - and you'll probably find people praising it and saying that it's the best review this year.
Barring Scott somehow enforces random reviews, I don't see how you solve that selection bias problem.
A book review should not be a summary of the book in question, as these essays so often are. Instead the reviewer should describe his reactions to reading it, and suggest why you, the reader of the review, might want to read it, or avoid it. In short, a review answers the question "Is it any good?"
This review does just that, and no more. It is of a length consistent with published book reviews in newspapers and magazines that still supply them (I used to subscribe to Harper's just for Hitch's book reviews, and always read them in the Times, the Telegraph and the Spectator).
I have been enjoying these book reviews. But I was reflecting during the week on how few of them leave me with the slightest inclination to read the underlying book. They tend strongly towards essays on a topic related to the book, using ideas from the book as a starting point (and so illustrate the views of the reviewer more clearly than those of the author).
I see that many people disliked this review for bucking those trends. While it is sloppy, and looks like the author abandoned it half-way through, it has the benefit of not revealing too much about the book, of highlighting some strengths and weaknesses (while presumably omitting many more) and it did encourage me to attempt the first few pages of the first chapter, and random samplings further in.
My own review of the book: the prose is heavy and Victorian. This is not surprising, the author was writing in the 1860s. The topics in the book reflect that background. I opened page 220 at random, and found the author handwringing about depictions of women as statues in Catholic churches. At page 365, a blow-by-blow recounting of the Reformation. At page 395: "during that gloomy period the only scholars in Europe were priests and monks, who conscientiously believed that no amount of falsehood was reprehensible when conduced to the edification of the people". In other words, the author is easily identified as C19th clergy in the Church of Ireland/England tradition railing against the failings of Catholics. Maybe there are other topics in there that I missed, but the relevance of a random page to my day-to-day life is minimal. (Book review idea: comparison between monks of the Dark Ages qua Lecky and propaganda in modern times, Fox News or whatever.)
My review of the review: half baked and unfinished. Some attempt to pull out topics of interest to the readers of this blog, but incompletely developed and abandoned halfway through. Uncompelling and inaccurate in places:
- witch-hunting was likely in nineteenth century France, and I suspect was never carried out with quite as much transparent disbelief as suggested by the writer
- one suspects that the borders of "the empire of prejudice" would have been drawn rather differently by Lecky than by the reader of the review, this might have been investigated
- 750 references are fine, but what does he do with them? Much like Nietzsche, it seems Lecky felt that a topic was understood when its history was traced fully. Some comparison to modern scholarship would have helped. Unlike e.g. Burke, it seems Lecky left little trace on modern thought, it would be good to know why.
I feel that the turgid title of this book alone should serve as a warning sign. Haven't read it, but the title is "The Rise of Rationalism in Europe" with twice as many words. Not even "The History of the Rise of Rationalism in Europe," which would be bad enough; no, we gotta work "Influence of the Spirit of" in there too. Why? What did the English language ever do to you, Lecky?
(also what others have said about the misrepresented history of witchcraft in general and this one village incident in particular, etc.)
The book's view of what was typical in treatment of supposed cases of witchcraft does not seem right to me. I would like some evidence that such psychopathic brutality was considered typical.
Depending on the historical period, the country, and whether it was the religious and/or secular authorities versus a local mob acting out of hysteria, it might have been typical.
But by 1860 in the middle of Europe? No (again, unless of course it was a local mob acting out of hysteria). The authorities, as we see by the French official response, were not holding witchcraft trials, and neither was the church (Catholic or Protestant). Even in Morzine, this was *not* what happened; the victims were all female, and the accused were all male, including such authorities as the bishop when he turned up to see what was happening:
"The afflicted sought ever more powerful priests and pinned great hopes on the pastoral visit of Monsignor Magnin in 1864. A French government appointee of Savoyard origin, Magnin had sought reconciliation with the secular authorities, but Constans's use of the army to quell the mal and the physician's high-handed attitude toward the clergy quickly soured relations. Magnin's desire to defend the faithful and to exercise his moral and spiritual authority, however, did not mean he was willing to exorcise. He was convinced that the mal was mental illness, not diabolical possession, and had resisted the parishioners' entreaties.
When he arrived, the Morzinois seemed calm, but seven or eight women were in convulsions by the time he came to the church and, later, between sixty and eighty were rolling around in the cemetery, screaming insults at him when he refused to exorcise one sufferer: "Wolf of a bishop, we must tear out his eyes; he hasn't the power to cure the girl; no, he cannot rid the girl of the devil." On his refusal to exorcise her, they set on him inside the church, kicking and insulting him, spitting in his face, and finally ripping off his pastoral ring."
To quote the article from "The Journal of Modern History":
"At first glance, the witch accusations seemed to share all the characteristics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with animal death, illness, and misfortune followed by individual and collective efforts to forestall the witches' power. But such superficial similarities are deceptive. At Morzine, nineteenth-century tensions were revealed by the accusations, as powerful men - first a vengeful priest and later representatives of the state within the local community - became the targets of hatred. For in the early modern period, older women were most likely to be accused of blighting crops, killing livestock, and deforming babies with black magic. For a brief moment during the mal such a traditional figure almost appeared, when one of the girls at the communion lesson spoke of an old (unnamed) woman from the neighboring commune of Gest as the likely source of evil. She never appeared again in the narrative, however. Villagers instead transferred their anger against those who benefited from political change and were held responsible for upsetting the already delicate spiritual and economic balance of the community. This important shift shows how wrong it is to see witchcraft in Morzine as a throwback; the villagers built on a centuries-old tradition but invested witchcraft with new and different psychic and social anxieties."
> He then develops his general thesis that rationalism did not triumph by the force of logic because people are not logical. [Claim 1:] Most people think just like they eat, i.e., with whatever utensils they grew up with. [Claim 2:] The general intellectual beliefs of a given society are therefore not shaped by detailed arguments or other intellectual causes, but are modified by a host of social, political, and industrial influences.
I think the first claim is solid. Most people believe what other people around them believe. It can be the teachings of their science teacher, their priest or some conspiracy telegram group.
I don't think that the second claim follows from the first claim. Sure, you can have societies where the people in charge are no more logical than the average, and the people who are more logical end up getting burned on the stake frequently, but you don't have to.
As soon as you have a society with an appreciable rate of technological process, you require some elites with an understanding of empiricism. Now, there are certainly configurations where these eggheads stay firmly subservient to whatever greater ideological framework is in place, but other outcomes are more likely.
To convince the rabble, it is always beneficial to offer miracles. If Christian priests could reliably pull of that water to wine and feast from limited resources tricks, virtually everyone would be Christian. The missionaries of rationality bring a ton of miracles with them. Steam engines. Electricity. Planes. Vaccines. Mobile phones. Of course, today's miracle is tomorrow's normal state of affairs.
Now, I will grant that our collective beliefs do not move as they would for an ideal Bayesian agent, and are indeed subject to a lot of other influences. But generally (with a few exceptions), we seem to lumber on the track which would have been left by such an agent.
Seems like the western world was lucky that the primary enemy the late medieval church chose was witches - if they had to pick an enemy, an imaginary one is among the least-bad possibilities, since as the review points out, it was a mistake they recovered from.
I was going to complain, like everyone else, that the review was too short an uninformative, but then I clicked on the link to the book, and enjoyed reading it, so I guess the review achieved it's goal, at any rate.
Today, far fewer people believe in the miraculous, but conspiracy theories are alive and thriving. If only Q ANON and it's ilk would go the way of demonic possession. It might result in less weaponized mass disinformation. This, truly, is the superstition of our day.
I think it's much easier to criticize a review than it is to write one, so all submissions should be treated with respect and appreciation. Thanks for writing, OP!
Chapter One of this review was an excellent start. I really wanted to find out what happened in Morzines!
This is the first time I've seen a book review that told me "I'm not going to summarize this book for you, just go read it yourself". I do not think this is what I want a book review to be.
I have been so flummoxed by the Book Review finalists last year and again this year. To me, at least 2/3 of them have been atrocious, failing to make a good case to read the reviewed book nor even being interesting pieces of writing in their own right.
I also found this one very disjointed, though thankfully not 20k words like some of the rambling treatises that this community inexplicably loves.
This wasn't a bad review per word (or at least, the writing quality was alright), but wasn't a review. I can just about understand doing this with something very short, but given one thing I got from this is that the book's either very or too long, I'd kind of like to know more before I start reading it.
I thought I had just finished the introduction, and I was getting excited to settle in for another 20k words... And then the review inexplicably just ended.
It's not fair to tease us like that! 😀
At least the final sentence of the review wasn't "And then I woke up." :-)
...before ever quite becoming a review.
I have never voted in the book reviews before, content to let the rest of the community do so. This has worked out so far. This year's selections are suggesting to me that maybe I should start participating. If for no other reason than that I will therefore have leg to stand one if I want to complain about the selections.
(This raises an interesting thought: how many people voted this year? How does that compare to previous years? Quality may be subjective, but one can't disagree that this years selections are certainly _different_ than previous years. I'm very curious as to why that might be)
At the contest start, Scott mentioned that unorthodox reviews would be given a bonus. I am pretty happy with the results so far.
Shame the Old Testament one didn't make it in there then.
I agree. An ASX style book review should, I think, be in the style of Scott's reviews - actually tell me the book's thesis in plain language, inform me well enough that I know whether or not I will want to read the book myself (without relying on exhortations from the reviewer), and add at least one thought-provoking insight I'll be thinking about for the next week.
As an extra bonus, an ACX style book review should omit the name of the book’s author, and preferably also the title.
But this text does exactly that: it presents the thesis, gives a thought provoking insight ("the shift away from the belief in preposterous happened somewhat organically") and gives the flavour of the style and vibe, albeit in a somewhat unconventional form of discussing others' criticism. Having read the review I'm pretty much certain I don't want to read the book.
But you have to admit, it's pretty funny the extent to which this book review is the 'draw the rest of the f---king owl' of book reviews.
These were the top book reviews as voted on by the people, no? Even though I didn't hate it, I'm surprised this one made it in here!
Apparently the selection wasn't purely by popular vote - Scott gave a bonus to "unorthodox" reviews in order to up the variety this time
True, but I believe the affirmative action finalists were all supposed to be fiction, poetry, or other things that people don't usually review. This was a non-fiction review so I doubt it got that kind of boost.
It's possible that it was random luck and this particular review was only read and scored by people who really liked it.
Motion to rename the "Your Book Review" contest to "Your Book Report", since that is clearly what it is, and what people are looking for.
Non fiction reviews usually do that kind of thing, though? Unlike fiction ones?
I agree. I don't read the "book reviews" because I might want to read the book, I read them in hopes of learning something interesting or thought provoking.
If you want to find out, there's an article about it from the 1997 "Journal of Modern History" which reveals a lot more going on than the rather simple "superstitious peasants get dragged into the 19th century by big city rationalist doctor" account as above. There was an entire cauldron (hah!) full of background causes, revolving around politics, poverty, gender roles, gender roles being reversed, religiosity, assumptions about how to deal with those, and the kind of socially approved ways in which to 'run amok'. Including interest in the practices of table turning and spirit rapping, which had originated in 1840s America, amongst the village women.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2953593?read-now=1&oauth_data=eyJlbWFpbCI6InR1aXJzZWFjaDI3OUBnbWFpbC5jb20iLCJpbnN0aXR1dGlvbklkcyI6W10sInByb3ZpZGVyIjoiZ29vZ2xlIn0#page_scan_tab_contents
"Possession on the Borders: The "Mal de Morzine" in Nineteenth-Century France
Ruth Harris"
Unlike the somewhat glib "Standard protocol for treating these afflictions called for accusing someone of witchcraft, preferably a poor, socially isolated, old woman, (although, in a pinch, anyone of any sex, status, or age would do, and often did), torturing her until she confessed to creating the calamity by consorting with the Devil, and, after that, lighting her on fire, first strangling her to death, if, at this stage of the proceedings, one judged that a modicum of mercy was in order", this isn't what happened in Morzines. In fact, the village was very poor, very isolated, the men had to migrate for work only coming home at particular times of the year, it was hyper-religious, and the initial phase of what would become the wave of "possessions" started with young girls getting ready to make their First Communion and reporting Marian apparitions. And the equivalent of 'gentrification', that is, local officials and ambitious men getting a leg up over their neighbours and the villagers by insinuating themselves into positions under the new French government, including "the dissolution of their treasured Confraternity of St. Esprit in 1860 and the transfer of its assets to a secular bureau de bienfaisance in the last moment of Savoyard administration."
That quickly degenerated into convulsions, fits, and claims of being possessed, and the blame was put on some witch's curse. It spread to adult women, and the blame was later fixed on "witches" - but these witches were *men*, not old women. The remedies the women demanded were not "burn the witches" but asking for exorcism by the local priest, and travelling outside the village to find magnetisers (practitioners of an early form of mesmerism). Local authorities also called for physicians to provide their services, so their only response was not "help, demons!" in a letter to Paris.
Morzines only became officially part of France upon the annexation of Savoy in 1860, and the 'curse' had started in 1857. The French authorities put pressure on the local priest to stop the exorcisms (presumably under the same rationalist attitude about witchcraft and possession) and that only made matters *worse*, because now the traditional 'cure' was being withheld and there was nothing to hold back the 'curse'. When Dr. Constans finally showed up, he didn't rely merely on soothing medical advice, but on the forced secularisation programme of the French authorities, being accompanied by soldiers and using exile, as well as hospitalisation, of the afflicted in order to control the outbreak and prevent it spreading:
"The women believed themselves possessed as a result of a mal donné, a witch's curse, and they sought to counterattack through magic, magnetism, and pilgrimage, going far from their village world in search of relief.
…The degree of attention lavished on the girls and women – numbering around two hundred at the end of 1861 - is evidenced by the physicians whom the Savoyard authorities and later the French administration summoned to investigate the strange epidemic. A local medical man, who diagnosed the outbreak as demonopathy in 1857, was followed by Doctor Arthaud, a Lyonnese physician, who made the more up-to-date diagnosis of "hystéro-démonopathie" around the end of 1860. But the resistance of the mal to orderly control and treatment seemed to require a more interventionist policy, and in 1861 Adolphe Constans, a Parisian alienist with court connections and the inspecteur général des asiles des aliénés, arrived to repress the furious public displays. Unwilling merely to observe and analyze, Constans used all his considerable power to expel the afflicted from Morzine, to intern some in public hospitals, and to use both a small detachment of infantry and a new post of the gendarmerie to maintain order. By 1863, it appeared that his methods had worked, and most of the Morzinoises, seemingly cured, were allowed to return. However, when the bishop, Monseigneur Magnin, visited the village the following year, the mal reappeared in more violent form: some ninety women flew into mad convulsions, attacking and insulting him and pleading desperately for a collective exorcism.
The outbreak brought Constans and the infantry back to the village, causing many of the women to flee through the mountain passes into Switzerland, fearful of being deported like criminals to the New World. But the terrified response of the afflicted was misplaced. After this second outbreak, more subtle measures of "education morale" were introduced, with the foundation of a library and the institution of a regime of lectures and dances intended to provide some "enlightened" diversion and "soothing" distraction. Through a mixture of subsidy and coercion-which ended with billeted soldiers helping villagers with the harvest-as well as the continued hospitalization of the possessed, Constans and his successors forced the mal underground. By 1873, only a few lone sufferers remained, women who experienced their convulsions in private ignominy, eking out a meager and marginal existence either in Morzine itself or in neighboring Switzerland.
[The "Rapport du Docteur Broc," one of Constans's successors, gives a brighter picture on August 12, 1867, Arch.Dep., claiming that the majority had reverted to a simple hysterical state. Although some still went on secret pilgrimages and had crises at home, the seizures no longer occurred in public and never during religious services.]"
Thanks for the summary!
The article even deals with the witchcraft angle:
"At first glance, the witch accusations seemed to share all the characteristics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with animal death, illness, and misfortune followed by individual and collective efforts to forestall the witches' power. But such superficial similarities are deceptive. At Morzine, nineteenth-century tensions were revealed by the accusations, as powerful men - first a vengeful priest and later representatives of the state within the local community - became the targets of hatred. For in the early modern period, older women were most likely to be accused of blighting crops, killing livestock, and deforming babies with black magic. For a brief moment during the mal such a traditional figure almost appeared, when one of the girls at the communion lesson spoke of an old (unnamed) woman from the neighboring commune of Gest as the likely source of evil. She never appeared again in the narrative, however. Villagers instead transferred their anger against those who benefited from political change and were held responsible for upsetting the already delicate spiritual and economic balance of the community. This important shift shows how wrong it is to see witchcraft in Morzine as a throwback; the villagers built on a centuries-old tradition but invested witchcraft with new and different psychic and social anxieties."
So to reduce the Morzines affair to simplistic "silly old peasant backwardness and mediaeval superstition against shiny new big city belief in reason and logic" is to greatly underestimate the swirling morass of forces under the surface that were roiling village life.
Indeed, the article even makes a case for the successful cure not being the introduction of rationality as such, but rather social improvements, economic stimulus, and the introduction of 'new blood' to the village. The village was poor, isolated, and the villagers were women without men; by building roads, bringing in resources for social activity, and literally having outside men show up for the local women to interact with, as well as participate in the work and spend money, the atmosphere changed and the impetus for the possession mania was dissipated:
"Moreover, Constans's "solutions" could be dramatically punitive. He was almost a caricature of the nineteenth-century secularizing physician, representing that tradition in its coercive rather than its tolerant guise. Indeed, his therapeutic rationale was perhaps harsher in its implications than that proposed by the local clergy. Had it worked, exorcism would have provided a means of expelling the "devils" both from the physical bodies of the women and from the contaminated territory of the parish. In contrast, Constans demanded the suppression of the "demons" and insisted that they were an integral aspect of the malady rather than a discrete foreign agent that could be spewed forth and thus ejected. I am hardly suggesting that exorcism had no physical or psychological costs, but it might have brought the relief of blaming the "devils." In contrast, Constans's analysis of demonopathy and hysteria focused on the illness's pervasive, inescapable quality and the individual's (and local society's) responsibility for it.
Above all, Constans generated more fear, as women fled across the mountains to escape the infantry or were forcibly detained in nearby hospitals until they were "cured." Even he ultimately recognized the need for a more subtle policy. He redrew Morzine's boundaries and had an important imperial road built that channeled movement in new directions, literally transforming the territory of the mal. With these physical changes came a shift in social welfare; he provided pensions for the needy and even subsidized the families whose womenfolk were hospitalized. New clergymen, whom Constans hoped would oppose the demonic and magical beliefs of the parishioners in the confessional, arrived in the village to unite administrative and religious authority. Bals, music societies, and a library were introduced to soothe and enlighten, while the soldiers billetted in the village ultimately transformed the village economy by paying for their room and board and helping with the harvest."
These comments (well, quotes from another work) are far more interesting and informative than the actual book cover blurb. I was left with a nagging doubt of "this sounds like such a Just-So Story, is that really how it all went down? where are the links to evidence?", so it's nice but depressing to see such suspicions confirmed. Rationalism: balderdashing mundane socioeconomic development since 1861...
Being of backwards superstitious Catholic peasant stock myself, my first instinctive reaction to such a neat juxtaposition of "and then the problem was solved by the smart, rational, STEM professional from the big city" is "oh yeah? what *really* happened?"
I lucked out in finding that article because it is really interesting and wants to tackle the event from more than just a feminist angle (a majority female, due to economic circumstances, village where those who were simultaneously victims and accusers turned against male authority figures and accused men of being the mysterious witches cursing, spell-casting, and possessing them), and goes into reasonable depth about what really happened.
So I can at least thank the reviewer for introducing me to a little nugget of history that I had not previously known.
Thanks for this impressive reply. Of course what they really needed was IFS.
Thank you very much for this.
... yeah, I have to admit, this one was a disappointment. I was hoping to get an actual book summary.
Turns out it was a book revue.
I had ChatGPT tell me what happened, it's quite great.
The events in Morzine, a village in the French Alps, in the mid-19th century involved a case of mass hysteria or collective delusion, often described as a form of "mass demonic possession." This phenomenon affected many villagers, particularly young women, who exhibited symptoms such as convulsions, trance states, and claims of possession by devils. The situation drew significant attention from both religious and medical authorities, leading to interventions by the Catholic Church and the French government.
### Dr. Augustin Constans and His Investigation
Dr. Augustin Constans, the Inspector General of the Insane Department in France, was dispatched to Morzine in 1861 to investigate the widespread hysteria and possession claims. Upon his arrival, he observed the entire village in a state of severe depression and fear, believing they were afflicted by demons. Dr. Constans approached the situation from a medical and rational standpoint, differing from the religious view that had previously dominated the village's response.
### Dr. Constans' Solution to the Problem
Dr. Constans attributed the events in Morzine to psychological factors rather than supernatural ones. He believed that the hysteria was a result of social, environmental, and psychological conditions, exacerbated by the religious fervor and local superstition.
Here are the key steps Dr. Constans took to address the issue:
1. **Rational Explanations**: Dr. Constans provided a rational explanation for the events, emphasizing that the symptoms exhibited by the villagers were not due to demonic possession but rather a form of hysteria. He argued that these were psychological manifestations that could be treated with medical intervention rather than exorcisms or other religious practices.
2. **Separation of Affected Individuals**: He recommended separating the most affected individuals from the rest of the village to prevent the spread of hysteria. This separation would reduce the influence of mass suggestion and allow for more controlled medical observation and treatment.
3. **Medical Treatment**: Dr. Constans implemented a treatment regimen that included rest, proper nutrition, and isolation from the factors that were believed to be contributing to the hysteria. He also discouraged religious rituals that might reinforce the villagers' fears and delusions.
4. **Reducing Superstition and Fear**: By addressing the villagers' fears through education and rational explanations, Dr. Constans sought to reduce the community's susceptibility to superstition and collective delusion.
5. **Collaboration with Local Authorities**: He worked with local civil and religious authorities to implement these measures and ensure that the villagers were receiving proper care and support.
### Outcome
Dr. Constans' intervention, focusing on medical treatment and reducing the spread of panic, eventually led to a decline in the cases of hysteria and possession in Morzine. His approach demonstrated the effectiveness of a scientific and rational response to what was perceived as a supernatural phenomenon. The case in Morzine became an important example in the study of mass hysteria and collective psychological phenomena.
For further details on Dr. Constans' investigation and the events in Morzine, you may refer to historical medical journals and accounts of the period, as well as studies on mass hysteria in historical contexts.
a book review? in my acx book reviews?
I was like ok now it begins and u said to read it myself 😭
GPT, please expand this review to 20,000 words. Ctrl+v.
"Now let me explain how this is relevant to AI safety..."
"Most people think just like they eat, i.e., with whatever utensils they grew up with."
This is a very pithy statement. My grandfather, not a stupid person at all, grew up in rural Slovakia before WWII. Belief in witches was pretty widespread back then, and it took him several decades of life in urban secular settings to somewhat, but not completely, abandon it.
Makes you wonder what our modern-day equivalents of belief in witches could be. I recently heard Robert Sapolsky say that about our belief in free will and most (perhaps all) moral responsibility:
"So, the challenge is to just imagine what things people a century from now will be saying about our time period and things we still thought were volitional and things that we punished people for and things that we rewarded people for, where there was absolutely no basis for it."
It does get a little spooky when you dive into free will. We think there are no limits, but really there are societal limits (blinders) to our actions, and these limits change as you change societies.
My mom told me, we live in a prison of our parent's making. But we alone hold the keys to the gate. We don't use the keys, we sit in the prison, building another just like it for our children. That prison is our societal expectations. Maybe your society expects you to go to university, that's what you do, because that's your prison. Maybe your society expects you to be a tradesman, that's someone else's prison. I see young hoodlums in jail, and I realize that's their prison—in the metaphorical sense. We don't have free will, we live within the expectations (prisons) of our respective societies.
It's a tricky topic for sure. Your mom is right, though there's also a bright side to it - society used to expect everyone to be a farmer, or do whatever your father did, but we have a lot more choice today (or if not choice, then at least there are more complex influencing factors and potential outcomes).
I actually don't agree with Sapolsky that we don't have free will - I don't disagree with any of his scientific claims, or the claim that our behavior is determined by culture and biology. But I think that it's a matter of looking at the right level of emergence. Just as temperature as a concept doesn't exists in particle physics, free will doesn't exist as a biological concept. But looking at the level of cognition, how do you describe an agent that formulates its own goals, imagines different futures, and acts such that the desired imagined future comes about? Sure, ultimately the goals we pursue were determined by causes and conditions - that holds for a human as much as for a bacterium. But a human has these layers upon layers of meta-cognition, impulse control and self-organization. In lieu of a better term, we might call that free will.
The similar take I've heard is that what thoughts, emotions, or impulses come into your head is largely outside of your control, but you do have the "free will" to choose NOT to do something or NOT to engage with a thought / emotion.
Free will in that schema being more of a veto than the ability to positively manifest or do whatever you want.
That sounds like an important piece of the puzzle. Maybe the main way we control ourselves is through unconscious processes generating a bunch of options, and a conscious process picking one. Still, the conscious process ultimately makes its choice due to some internal state which was produced by external factors (and now we're back at a lower level of emergence again).
What are the hard limits to your society.
You have to look across the fence—as it were—to see that there is a fence. Cannibalism for instance. That's a hard fence for us in the west. If you're in Papua New Guinea, not so much, where the people engage in cannibalism as a funerary practice.
People who have left Islam feel the same way about pork as we do about long-pig.
So there is a fence you're unwilling to cross. It's probably not really a hard thin line as much as its a force field.
Probably why we despise the homeless the way we do. We can't imagine being homeless, they're living 'across the fence' as it were.
>Makes you wonder what our modern-day equivalents of belief in witches could be.
<mildSnark>
Virtue signaling luxury beliefs on the left and a belief in the omniscient wisdom of the free market (even in situations where it is known to fail) on the right? :-)
</mildSnark>
Hmm, these don't seem fundamental enough. I feel like it has to be something both wrong and also almost universally accepted as obvious.
Many Thanks! Hmm, do you have any possibilities in mind? I'm writing from the USA, which is rather polarized these days, so the set of beliefs which are
>almost universally accepted as obvious
is rather depleted these days...
Maybe some of the patterns of daily life sort-of kind-of fit? 69% of Americans commute solo to work (as I did myself before retirement) ( https://www.autoinsurance.com/research/us-commuting-statistics/ ). Maybe regarding this as the natural pattern of daily life will be considered "wrong" in the future - after all, it was different in the past, and may change again someday.
I agree, but that seems more like a value than a belief (the line can be blurry sometimes, but I meant more like a belief about what the world is, not how it should be).
One possibility is maybe how we view agency. Michael Levin says some interesting things about it. Most people intuitively think of humans being very agentic, and animals having agency to various degree. But it looks like organs, tissues and other subsystems of the body, even down to single cells have agency, in the sense of being able to achieve goals through various means, in the presence of obstacles. Perhaps companies or other collections of people have agency in a non-metaphorical sense.
Many Thanks!
>One possibility is maybe how we view agency.
>But it looks like organs, tissues and other subsystems of the body, even down to single cells have agency, in the sense of being able to achieve goals through various means, in the presence of obstacles.
In that sense, I, personally, think that this is a perfectly reasonable view, and it extends down to feedback loops like thermostats or energy minimization in a (cold) physical system.
I would make a distinction between "able to achieve goals through various means, in the presence of obstacles" and this _plus_ "able to respond to incentives separate from the immediate goal" (and possibly plus "able to negotiate goals with other agents"). To the extent that people blur these distinctions, and take the inability to respond to incentives separate from the immediate goal as _implying_ an inability to achieve a goal in the presence of obstacles, an absence of agency in even the limited sense, then I would agree that the popular conception may be both pervasive and wrong.
As a possible contestant in Western cultures (and this is necessarily a post that will get a bunch of pushback): Individualism (as a good thing). I feel like the polarisation we're observing in the US may fundamentally stem from that philosophic position and I'm concerned there are no ways to patch that up. To be clear, I don't have a better model, nor a solution, I'm still at the beginning of thinking about this, myself, and at least so far I think individualism is better than the alternatives, but I do suspect that culturally we've bought into individualism to a degree that's gotten detrimental. So maybe that's a blind spot similar to a belief in witches.
(I really should explore this space some more and sort my thoughts and findings. But it's a project that's only going to happen once various other projects are done, on the order of a few years. So, apologies for the half-assed response, but maybe someone finds it useful anyway.)
I think we underestimate how important a community is, both for mental health but also just enjoyment of life. I'm not sure how much of that is because we overestimate individualism, and how much is due to people moving around for careers, partners etc. Is that some of what you had in mind?
If you don't mind unpolished thoughts and bad examples, I'll try responding to this:
Some of that, certainly! But I'm more thinking of that if you champion individual worth and opinions, there is a fundamental way in which that philosophy supports people defending said worth and opinions. That means value of not expressing oneself and not other-ing oneself in the interest of social harmony goes down. For example, I think a reason we're talking so much about people getting offended these days is because being offended is a pretty low-cost way to establish yourself as an individual, drawing your personal lines in the sand. I don't think we're collectively reflecting very much on whether the lines really needed drawing. "Your [feeling/trait] is valid" is something I often nod along with when I see it, and have said often, myself, but I'm actually not sure it scales if it's fully internalised.
To stress, I have no better solution, and I'm still on team individualism. These are very squishy proto-theses. (I'm very eccentric, myself, so I've definitely other-ed a lot, and boy do I have opinions. But I do look at myself and wonder if it scales - and that's even though I personally go out of my way to not make my eccentricities a problem to anyone else. I do have a dual-cultural background, which I think helps - but not so much that I've got solid intuitions that would let me unpack this whole topic yet.)
Idea of progress. “people used to die all the fucking time. plus they were very prejudiced, and put people in little boxes based on trivial characteristics like skin color, sexual preference, gender, wealth, and national origin. And they were all sad
and angry all the time, and had no self-awareness and their jokes were so old timey they weren’t even really jokes and couldn’t even have made people of their own era them laugh. Now we die a lot less lots and lots of us don’t put people in boxes any more and we’re gonna hassle the people who still put other people in boxes til they stop doing that shit, and we are all very self aware and have awesome standup comics right there on Netflix.”
I believe in progress, at least that it occurred, and could potentially keep going. I don't think people were more sad and angry than now, and might have been less. I think that's because while progress fixed many problems, we've created others.
if we’ve fixed some problems but created some new ones, and you don’t think we’re
less sad and angry than people in the past, and we might even be more sad and angry — then are the grounds for saying that overall we have made Progress with a capital P? Obviously there are areas where we have made
progress. But have we made progress in some deep, central way?
How about the notion that there's a universally correct morality? Or at least as far as humans are concerned, for slightly more sophisticated audiences.
I'm a big believer in markets. But I don't think that they're omniscient, nor do I know anyone who thinks they are (and I know plenty of big believers in markets). But here's the rub - for most things, markets happen to be the best mechanism we have. Market failures exist, but it is not clear that government intervention is superior on average
>But here's the rub - for most things, markets happen to be the best mechanism we have. Market failures exist, but it is not clear that government intervention is superior on average
Agreed. Many Thanks! There are a very few cases where the economics of the industry creates natural monopolies (notably local electricity and water supply), and I think that government intervention is a net positive there, but these are special corner cases.
I think they may be even more special than you appreciate. The interventions are net positive provided that you have decent state capacity and a 'good' political settlement. These are much rarer commodities than economists in developed countries have typically acknowledged in their premises when reasoning about market failure.
That's a reasonable point of view. Many Thanks!
Except our belief in free will is more incoherent than wrong. Most people don't even understand what they are believing in well enough to explain how it relates to views like compatibalism.
Tbh, I don't blame them. I struggle to formulate a fully coherent theory myself. The crucial piece seems to be that a deterministic and acausal description of the world without free will, and an uncertain (in the Knightian sense) and causal description with free will, both can describe the same world, if they describe it at different levels of emergence. But it's unclear how to relate these levels of emergence. If we designate the fundamental level as more real than the emergent level, does that also mean thermodynamics is not real? It's also unclear exactly what property free will is - is it some way of describing self-organizing dynamics of agents that can self-reflect? How would one describe in rigorous terms?
I just don't see a problem that requires solving. Do I have free will? Well my will isn't being dictated by someone outside myself. What else do you even want to know?
Maybe it's only the remnants of a homunculus style conception of the self that identifies it with a soul that differs from the mere meatsack that we feel a pressure here. But ultimately it's not the burden of the person answering to dispell the feeling that something is weird -- the person claiming there is something that hasn't been explained or is incomplete who needs to make the showing.
You don't need a solution to a purely apparent problem. The right answer to Zeno's paradox wasn't calculus it was to shrug and go "ok so there is a time at which it reaches the point 1/2^n of it's starting distance from the target. If you think that's a problem it's your burden to explain why"
“… my will isn't being dictated by someone outside myself. What else do you even want to know?”
Yep, I like this minimalist approach a lot. I’ve been working on defining meaning using a similar set of arguments.
There are some problems, like extended cognition, and the outside world affecting the inside of you through actions like drugs… but overall I think this works. You just divide the world physically into the inside me vs outside me parts, and all the difficulties of homunculi and magical free will just melt away.
I feel like you made a good argument for the opposite position :) Zeno didn't understand that you can divide a finite interval into infinite terms.
We have an illusion of free will, which makes us feel like our decisions are made by us, independently of any outside factors.
The hard science position is that none of our decisions are independent of outside factors, any more than the 557th domino brick falling is independent of the 1st.
Both explanations are bad, even if the latter is true. The first one is bad because it's false. Obviously our decisions are influenced by outside factors, and who we are is a result of outside factors too.
The problem with the hard science position is that it equally well describes everything else in the universe, when there's clearly something different going on with humans. So it explains nothing.
To me, the problem that requires solving is both defining what free will is, so rigorously that you can determine for any algorithm whether it has free will, and then to explain how it works. For example, it might turn out that free will is a property of agents that learn their own utility functions, have a self-model and self-control. This combination makes it computationally intractable to predict what the utility function or behavior of the agent is, without simulating the agent.
So it's really a problem in (some point in the future) in the field of AI. Same as Zeno's paradox really is a basic calculus question, imo.
Why should we expect that we should be able to define free will to do that? And why would it matter anyway. Definitions are just abbreviations we use to shorten descriptions. If you insisted on having necessary and sufficient conditions to distinguish an enhancement of a person from a cure of a disease I’d reject the distinction as unimportant, unprincipled and ultimately confused. Until you make a case for there being some principled distinction here why should I think this is any different (if it doesn't have to be principled it's trivial )
Plenty of concepts that seem intuitive to us at first turn out to be subtly incoherent or just aren’t actually principled. Very few of the concepts we find useful in non-technical contexts ever extend to a principled definition. It's an infamously difficult problem to define “table” or “game” with explicit necessary and sufficient conditions.
>What else do you even want to know?
Whether the future is open, so that humans can choose a future of their liking.
But what do you mean by choose? And why are you assuming that somehow in tension with determinism?
For instance, the fact that it might flow from who you are that you would never hand your loved ones into the secret police for a bit more spending money doesn't seem in tension with the idea that you choose that freely. Indeed, finding out that — at the level of fundamental physics — there was some element of chance in whether or not you did that wouldn't seem like it was more of a choice. It would feel like it is less of one.
But once you accept that it can still be a completely free choice even if it is completely predictable from your nature or character then what's the issue? Sure, maybe you can in theory predict how you’ll act using the laws of physics based on the current state of the universe but part of that state is a description of you. It's not denying that you have the choice, indeed if it wasn't predicted by a complete description of your character and dispositions that would actually be denying you agency and leaving it up to some external (none you) process to make the choice.
At some level what's really doing the work here is the reluctance we feel to identify ourselves with the physical crap in our brain. If you imagined it was fundamental laws of how souls work rather than laws of physics that predicted your future choices would that make u feel better?
How about performance enhancing or happiness producing drugs or genetic modification are bad. Eating meet is ok. Probably all sorts of health shit.
Except for the last vague category, none of those are statements of fact one could be wrong about.
Perhaps not believing in witches is our modern-day equivalent of belief in witches.
Are you saying assuming materialism is just as much an assumption as assuming the existence of supernatural phenomena? To me, the problem with that is that people have been studying supernatural phenomena scientifically, and never found anything. If they exist despite that, it must be either because we're so biased that we can't see them despite using our best method for finding out the truth, or there's a conspiracy to suppress results.
If materialism isn't true, then science isn't the tool we think it is. I.e., if the experienced universe is a projection of the mind and not substantial in itself, then the scientific method may be part of our dream and not something outside it which can interrogate the world objectively.
Alternatively, maybe witches had some yet-to-be discovered special abilities which were not supernatural but appeared to be because we haven't yet uncovered all the laws of nature. Maybe the genes for witchcraft disappeared because we burned them all. Being mostly facetious here.
If there are non-material things, does it matter? Either they affect something material in a repeatable way, and can in principle be measured and controlled in experiments. Or they don't affect anything material, and so they don't matter in any way.
I suppose you could have things that affect something material in a non-repeatable way, like "glitches in the matrix"? But then we'd never know whether they really happened, or were just measurement errors.
Or am I thinking about this the wrong way?
If nothing is truly material and everything is a projection of mind, a dream, so-to-speak, then we have no objective measurement tools.
We know materialism is false, because of the existence of qualia and forms. Belief in supernatural phenomena is far more intellectually respectable.
Also the existence of ghosts. And angels.
Maybe our modern-day equivalent of belief in witches will be disbelief in witches.
"Lol, just look at those superstitious materialists, inventing BS about 'mass hysteria' and 'mental illness' to cover what was so obviously demonic possession! Luckily we've grown beyond such primitive foolishness."
Darn, I see Hank Wilbon beat me to it.
> Makes you wonder what our modern-day equivalents of belief in witches could be
The WEF - A witch's coven led by Satan himself, Klaus Schwab :-P
Seriously, perhaps this question is best approached by considering the characteristics people believed witches possessed: They were thought to secretly cast spells which would cause damage to others or to their property such as livestock, ascribing a deliberate malign intent to what were rarely more than chance misfortunes.
The modern equivalent of that would appear to be conspiracy theories concerning groups claimed to be secretly undermining nation states and threatening prosperity, with evil intent. One often sees the WEF accused of this, even though they seem to me a fairly well-meaning organisation, and Schwab no more than a glorified secretary and events organiser.
Whether or not free will exists, it is still important to act as though it does, so that you can create incentive structures that shape peoples actions in socially beneficial ways.
In 2007 Amanda Knox was charged with Witchcraft and Murder in Italy. It made me consider whether or not I wanted to visit Italy in 2010.
Having trouble finding evidence she was arrested for witchcraft, do you have a link?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/27/amanda-knox-witch-hunts-italian-court
She was not. She was accused of murder and one of the prosecution lawyer referred to her as a diabolical and "a which" when describing her character. Notably in Italian it's more common to use which as a derogatory term, and I don't think anybody in the court thought he meant to accuse her of actually consorting with supernatural forces.
That whole process was a shitshow in any case, no need to exxagerate the facts.
Kind of like how Lucy Letby was described in the press as an "angel of death". I don't think anyone was suggesting that she was a celestial being.
*Witch, and I despise English spelling
Which witch? 😁
“Which ‘Wich” is the name of an American sandwich chain. Sadly, it doesn’t have a witch on its logo - a missed opportunity if ever there was one.
Like the joke!
Q. Why are you never hungry at the seaside?
A. Because of the sand which is (sandwiches) there!
Now, if we're talking about a witch who goes into sandwich-making as a job, then we've got Which 'Wich Witch as the shop name! (Or if we prefer, Which Witch 'Wich! Or Witch Which 'Wich!) 😁
Which 'Wich Witch - the witch who works for Which 'Wich
Which Witch 'Wich - what sandwich made by the witch do you want?
Witch Which 'Wich - this store caters to witches (only)
>Dr. Constans’ next action was highly unorthodox. Standard protocol for treating these afflictions called for accusing someone of witchcraft, preferably a poor, socially isolated, old woman, (although, in a pinch, anyone of any sex, status, or age would do, and often did), torturing her [etc.]
No. Witch trials had been out of fashion for more than a century by 1861. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_early_modern_period#Decline_of_the_trials:_1630%E2%80%931750 The last witch-burning in France was in 1678: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_France#End_of_witch_trials
It's hard to want to read the rest of the review when it starts with such a glaring mistake.
Was going to point this out. I didn't know the exact date ranges, but this smelled like a strawman of the "dark ages".
(Also, just read the rest of the review, it's very short lol)
Ironically, witchcraft wasn't illegal in most of the dark ages, because most important people regarded magic as an ignorant country superstition. Belief in witchcraft was more of a Renaissance phenomenon.
That's my understanding as well. And in England, at least, there was a strong political dimension as well. The Tudors and Stuarts were paranoid about plots from any direction, including the supernatural, and so passed a lot of laws that encouraged people to be on the lookout for witches. No surprise, witches started being spotted. The witch-hunt craze petered out pretty soon after the government lost interest.
Elizabeth I got her court astrologer to choose a propitious day for her coronation (previous coronations had been arranged for major feast days), and James I wrote a book on demonology. They were certainly a supernaturally-inclined bunch of monarchs.
> It's hard to want to read the rest of the review when it starts with such a glaring mistake.
Fortunately for you, they forgot to upload the rest of the review anyway.
To be fair, the reviewer acknowledges it as "the final holdout of the old beliefs... one of the final skirmishes".
Hear me out. A lot of people are trashing the review but I liked it.
The starting was strong, leaving me on edge to explore for myself. The rest of the review was on par as well. Readers need to realise that if something is not conventional, doesn't mean it is not what claims to be. This is a book review as well. A pretty excellent one even. Encourages us to pick it up and have a go by carefully picking up key events that we may come to like.
Well done. 👏🏽
I felt it was just getting started and then it stopped suddenly with "read the book yourself!" Okay, but why should I? Why is Lecky so sound on the topic? He was a 19th century writer with the prejudices and unconscious biases of his time, did he get around those or is the book full of "everyone know 19th century English gentleman peak of creation" style assumptions?
I was worried by the start - it was a long time before any mention of the book, so I didn’t know if it was a book from the 2010s or one from the 1970s, or if the person was doing some abstract “review” of actual history rather than a book. We eventually got the mention of the book, but it was after a distracting story. And then the review ended.
I admit that I read these reviews because I want to know the contents of the book without having to read it myself. Few non-fiction books are worth reading from start to finish. Much better for someone to helpfully hack them and tell us about the twenty pages that were worthwhile.
Seconded! And I enjoy the related discussions in the comments.
"Few non-fiction books are worth reading from start to finish. "
That might be more of an effect of the modern-day book market. It seems like today, the main reason to publish a non-fiction book it to establish yourself as an "expert" with big, serious, hardcover *book*, and then you can go rake it in from lectures and tv appearances. The core ideas come from scientific articles that are much shorter, and could probably be summarized in an essay or even a tweet.
But it doesn't have to be like that. These older books are more like a textbook, where every single chapter is jam-packed with info and it's just hard to sum it up without losing a lot. I mean, it's pretty much summarized by its own title: "Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe."
The end rather undercuts what goes before it:
"So, why listen to me when the book is just a click away. Don’t even scroll up. Here’s Chapter 1, on the decline of the belief in witchcraft. I think you’ll realize pretty quickly whether this book is your cup of tea or not. Thanks for reading."
Why do we need a review if the conclusion is just "here's a link to the book, go read it"? The review didn't explain why Lecky's book is better than similar works. It didn't tell us if there are similar works. Why pick Lecky and not Gibbon or a slew of modern writers?
Plus. it didn't help its case with the Morzine anecdote, as several of us have picked that apart as not being what it is claimed to be. So, leaving that out or just giving it in a couple of sentences would have been a better idea.
As others have said, the review just seemed to be starting (all the above is introductory material, now the reviewer will go into the book) but it stopped dead with "read the book".
Being a frequent complainer against rambling, overly long "reviews", I have to give at least some props here. It could have been so much more, but for what it is, it does a good job of telling me what to expect from the book and whether or not I want to read it. That's not the whole job of a book review, but it's one critical part, done right.
No, that's the job of a blurb.
> Lecky observes that everybody believed in witchcraft until they didn’t
My understanding is that the official position of the Catholic Church was that witches didn't exist, and anybody claiming they did was making trouble (and perhaps deceiving people into believing Satan had more power than he actually does). This official position was not enough to convince most laymen though.
It's been a long time since I've read Wallace Notestein's "A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718" (publ. 1909), but IIRC:
As you say, Catholicism discouraged belief in witchcraft because Catholic theology regarded the Devil as relatively powerless. More than that, early Renaissance thinkers held that cases of witchcraft or demonic possession were either natural phenomenon, malicious gossip, or confidence jobs perpetrated by grifters and sleight-of-hand artists. (An early book on stage magic was apparently written for the purpose of explaining away a lot of the "evidence" for witchcraft.)
That began to change after the Reformation, because Protestant theology had the effect of granting demons a lot more power, so that the existence of witches became an object of real (if largely theoretical) concern. In England, at least, there were two further complications. First, the Tudors and Stuarts were paranoid, and were ready to credit any anti-government plot, even those with a supernatural tinge, with a degree of plausibility. Laws were passed that encouraged people to be on the lookout for witches, so it's no surprise that witches started being spotted. Moreover, competition amongst folk healers also encouraged accusations of witchcraft: if a healer's craft didn't work, he or she had both a motive and a theoretical justification to accuse a competitor of malign interference.
The government's position, that witchcraft was both real and dangerous, coupled with a rise in accusations, had the effect of reversing intellectual opinion in the absence of any change in real evidence. Where before only cranks argued for the existence of witches, now you were a crank if you hewed to the old skepticism. The low point came during the English Civil War when civic order broke down, allowing witch-hunters to roam and persecute freely.
The stopper began to go back in the bottle after the Civil War, and the government ceased to be greatly concerned with "supernatural" plots (and became more focused on "Popish" plots) and discouraged witch-hunting in the cause of civil peace. Once again intellectual opinion flipped, and again it was less because a change in evidence (still less on account of a "rise of Rationalism") and much more because the persecution of witches ceased to be a profitable endeavor.
Notestein's account aligns pretty closely with Lecky's, it sounds like, including the fundamentally non-rational causes of belief in witches, but also carries the strong implication that non-belief in witches can also have (and historically has had) non-rational causes. It is an account not of a "rise of Rationalism" but of how different beliefs and behaviors come to the fore as different priors take turn in the saddle.
Hmmm… the Bible seems to support the belief in witches. The Law of Moses says “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” not “don’t worry about witches, they’re not real.” And then there’s the Witch of Endor (no relation to Ewoks).
The Bible? Catholics don't read that :)
I'd have to double-check, but I believe the "witches" whom we shall not suffer to live were interpreted as poisoners, i.e., people who made harmful potions using natural ingredients. Not sure how the Witch of Endor was explained.
Also, all the old testament stories were "our god can beat up your god", not "your god doesn't even exist".
It's kind of funny to see how the Dreamworks Prince of Egypt changed the Egyptian priests' magic into implied stage magic and trickery in line with modern Christian ethos.
I understood that to be the priests trying to show that Moses only did stage magic, by replicating it.
Which is more the rationalist ethos.
>Standard protocol for treating these afflictions called for accusing someone of witchcraft, preferably a poor, socially isolated, old woman...torturing her until she confessed to creating the calamity by consorting with the Devil.
In 19th century France?
Okay, I have an idea of why the other finalists thus far have made it, whether I've liked them or not, but I have to say I'm completely at loss here.
Scott: Your act of submitting a non-functional book review was an act of unmitigated gall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gclTYk_8dRQ
There are special vibes to such 'old' books. I probably won't read this one, at least not anytime soon, but I once found a late 19th century book on sexual health printed in Warsaw. It was full of prejudice and, by modern standards, fictional medical advice having little to do with factual evidence. But it was fun to show it to friends who could read Polish and have a good laughter together.
I am planning to read some early thearises on physics though, it should be very fun and useful for me
Interesting review, but Lecky is out of date and, to my mind, way too self-congratulatory towards rationalism. The European witch panic began in the 1400s and ended before 1700 for reasons that are very hard to explain. Being for and against witch persecution in the 16th and 17th centuries did not align very well with rationalism in the modern sense. Famous scientists like Jean Bodin (creator of the first quantitative economics) and Robert Boyle believed in witchcraft. Neither of the authors of the two most famous anti-witchcraft books was a rationalist. Johannes Weyer believed that witchcraft was common among cynical courtiers who promoted witch trials as a way to advance their careers; he opposed the persecution of witches on humanitarian grounds. His goodness shines out across the centuries, but he was in no way a modern thinker. Reginald Scot dismissed witchcraft because he was a cynic of the classical school who dismissed just about everything, including science. And then there's Montaigne, who opposed witch trials without taking any stand on whether witchcraft was real because he thought the accused witches he had met were insane. When Lecky wrote it was indeed hard to see how the persecution had ended, since among the writers of books persecutors always far outnumbered skeptics. Thanks to recent scholarship summarized by Michael Hunter in "The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment" we now know that there was a major argument in which the witch believers were routed, but it doesn't appear in books because it was mainly conducted orally. (My review is at: https://benedante.blogspot.com/2021/01/michael-hunter-decline-of-magic-britain.html)
Plus there is the problem that the decline of belief in witches and demons in the 18th and 19 centuries was accompanied by the rise in belief in all sorts of other irrational constructs: nationalism, communism, anarchism, race science, etc. Bad as it was, the witch persecution hardly rivals World War I or II as a supremely irrational act.
>Here we encounter one of the great challenges facing any historian: most of what matters in history is spoken, and few of history's major actors have been book-writing people.
Ouch! One often reads that "history is written by the victors". It is sobering to think that it is written by an unrepresentative subset of the elites of the victors...
>So the question of why the English stopped trying people for witchcraft when it was still a capital crime, and most of the common people still believed in it, and most of the books published on the subject still argued for it, has this answer: because any lawyer or judge who involved himself in such a case risked being laughed at by all the other lawyers, and jeered out of his favorite coffee house.
Ouch! In this case the jeerers got the right answer - but this was accidental, and a terrible way to make decisions. One semi-related contemporary case was the SETI got tarred with the same brush as kidnapped-and-probed-by-UFO reports, despite having drastically different arguments for and against plausibility. In general, I see few controversial questions where the weight of evidence is so overwhelming that treating one side of the discussion with ridicule is warranted.
<i>Plus there is the problem that the decline of belief in witches and demons in the 18th and 19 centuries was accompanied by the rise in belief in all sorts of other irrational constructs: nationalism, communism, anarchism, race science, etc. Bad as it was, the witch persecution hardly rivals World War I or II as a supremely irrational act.</i>
Worth pointing out that spiritualism was pretty popular in the 19th century, including among educated people. And astrology, healing crystals, wicca, and the like are underdoing a revival nowadays.
Perhaps the real reason we don't have witchcraft trials any more is simply that people who believe in magical powers generally tend to view them as neutral or benign rather than evil.
"Perhaps the real reason we don't have witchcraft trials any more is simply that people who believe in magical powers generally tend to view them as neutral or benign rather than evil."
No, today we have trials about who has the right to channel the Atlantean spirit sage 😀
1997:
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19970612&slug=2544252
2008:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/tearful-testimony-wraps-up-knight-weaver-trial/
So far, few of this year’s crop of book reviews have been up my alley, but yours definitely was! Reasonably long, actually a book review, articulate in communicating the book’s fascinating main insight. Thanks for sharing :)
I was thinking the problem with this review was that it was going to be too long. It was a long way in before I heard anything about what book was being reviewed - when it was from, who it was by, or even if it was actually a book rather than one of the other types of entry we’ve had recently (I was half worried this would be a “review” of the actual history itself, rather than a review of a book about the history!)
But then the actual review started - and suddenly stopped!
Anyway, hearing about this book made me really interested in the use of the word “rationalism” here. This doesn’t seem to be the traditional philosophical use of the word, which contrasts rationalism (the reliance on a priori reasoning as the only source of true knowledge, associated with people like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) with empiricism (the reliance on actual observation to see what the world is like, associated with people like Berkeley, and Hume, and Locke). It seems somewhat closer to the use of the word “rationalism” as used in the communities this blog is a member of, where it seems to stand in for both rationalism and empiricism, in that it’s a kind of epistemological hygiene (but agnostic about how much comes from a priori reasoning about how an artificial intelligence would behave and empirical reasoning about which interventions actually improve lives). But is it actually the same? And if the book acknowledges that both rationalists and irrationalists mainly just pick up intellectual habits from their community, then how does that fit in?
That use of rationalism is very similar to how it's used in this community, yes, and has a very long history. It's one reason I think this community would be better referred to as neo-rationalists. (Although the similarities to old-style rationalists are certainly great, so maybe it's fair enough to just view it as the latest chapter in a long novel.)
The use of "rationalism" in this book strikes me as more than a little question-begging.
The timing of the writing of this book is interesting, because (if I understand correctly) Spiritualism was still growing in popularity at this time. No doubt belief in supernatural things had overall declined, but still!
According to the article I quoted above, that was part of the impetus that kicked it all off in Morzines! Local girls and women were playing around with the fashionable table turning of the period! That wasn't the originating incident by itself, but it shows that it's not a clear-cut story of "backwards mediaeval beliefs", but rather the modern beliefs in a new form of supernaturalism were just as flourishing.
I'm pretty sure it was NOT standard procedure to burn witches in France 60 years after the French revolution. Indeed, when I look it up that's more than a hundred years after the last one. You're talking about a heavily modernized secularized country at that time.
Yeah, our reviewer fell into the trap of pop culture "everybody knows..." that of course the silly old superstitious backwards peasants and the gullible local yokel authorities writing "help, demons!" letters to Paris would be witch-burning.
It's good old 19th century propaganda about the dusty old Middle Ages and the darkness of unenlightened cruelty versus our modern days of Science and Progress (and, for the English at least, solid Protestant values), so in a way it's fitting for a review of a 19th century door-stopper.
But it's not history, as is being pointed out in this thread.
This was 1861. "Standard protocol" in France certainly did not call for witch burning. Nothing of the sort had occurred for over 100 years. The last officially-sanctioned execution for witchcraft appears to have been in Macon [missing an accent circonflexe here] in 1745.
Oops! Others got there first. Sorry, Drethelin.
By 19th Century standards, this writing is pretty lucid. Decently short sentences. A refreshingly lack of unnecessary flourish and elliptical phrasing. (I’d like someone to write a book about why writing became so dense in the 19th Century, compared to the 18th and 20th.)
I've always assumed it was because 19th-century writers grew up being taught Latin, which handles deeply-nested sentences more gracefully than English - "in order to do X" becomes a snappy "ut" + infinitive, for instance.
I have a direct ancestor in 17th-century New England whose death was ruled to be murder due to a literal ghost story. The _only_ specific evidence introduced at the trial was a witness swearing that the deceased had appeared in a dream to say that the accused did it. Based entirely on that the court convicted my 10th-great uncle -- son of the deceased and the person who'd discovered the body -- of murder, and they hanged him.
Among the many interesting anecdotes and historical oddities which my decades of family-tree research has turned up, that one most vividly reminds me to feel lucky to live now rather than "back in the day".
I think the point that people -- including me and you -- find it very very difficult to form beliefs in a rational way that doesn't take for granted huge parts of our societal epistemology is super important. And it's a point I don't think rationalists pay enough attention to.
Ultimately, it's neither psychologically nor practically possible to just start from the ground up Descartes style (but not even him) and really reevaluate all the things your society takes for granted. Especially because they infect all explanations so truly uprooting them would require rebuilding almost everything.
My point isn't to critisize being a rationalist, indeed, if anything it points to the great value in societal epistemic hygiene. But I do think it points to the importance of doing things to make sure future generations inherit a better societal epistemology.
Why is 'Morzine' consistently written here with an 's' in the end? It in an error from the book or was it actually spelled like that 150 years ago?
It looks like an error, since the spelling does seem to be "Morzine". And ironically, in modern times it is now a ski resort, or rather the ski resort is located in the territory of the commune:
https://simply-morzine.co.uk/want-to-learn-more-about-morzine-then-read-on/
The tourist guff is very funny, because it bigs up the history angle but carefully does not mention 1861 And All That. Also the bit about "Most budgets and tastes are catered for in Morzine; from pizza and pasta, to steaks, Savoyard specialities and gourmet French cuisine", when according to the "Journal of Modern History" article:
"The community subsisted on a meager mountain agriculture that produced barley-corn, oats, and potatoes. Scarce resources were spent on bread, which increased the burden of debt and forced ever more men onto the road to Switzerland. Otherwise, the community depended on livestock, the key resource that, when threatened by illness, unleashed the witchcraft fears that haunted the village.
…Among the many subversive activities of the "devils" were their rejection of local food, described by Constans as miserable bread, "potatoes of bad quality; salted and smoked meat, often contaminated; the residues of milk; and a bad cheese, hard and heavy, called tomme." Instead, they demanded cripplingly expensive alternatives associated with luxurious city life, such as sugared black coffee and chocolates. …Their demands later became so extreme that they wanted the same food at home that they had eaten at government expense when in hospital, and, if their families protested, convulsions began again, always preceded by an epigastric crisis in which they felt as if they would explode."
Somehow I doubt the "Savoyard specialities" for the tourists include mouldy meat and oat bread 😁
Yeah I used to ski in the area regularly so that's why I couldn't get past this misspelling.
Thanks for the anecdote! I Today's Savoyard specialties sound more appealing, but it is indeed heavily based on potatoes, smoked meat and cheese, I guess the quality of the products just skyrocketed
Whew, good job all the witches and demons moved on by the time you visited! You had no idea how near you came to being a possessed sufferer of convulsions demanding luxuries like sugar in your coffee!
Yeah, all the tourist euros now mean they can buy good bread 😁 Though if the French doctor said the local cheese was bad, it *must* have been bad. Even with the modern versions, you can see why back then that cheese might have been not the greatest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomme
"Tommes are normally produced from the skimmed milk left over after the cream has been removed to produce butter and richer cheeses, or when there is too little milk to produce a full cheese."
An interesting wrinkle is that in early 1861 Savoy had only been part of France for a few months.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Turin_(1860)
Raises all kinds of speculations I'm way too lazy to investigate. Were the Savoyards superstitious yokels or sly mountainfolk taking the measure of their new flatlander masters? Was it a (unconscious?) attempt at illegibility? Or conversely, was "sending agitated demonopaths to the funny farm until they get calmer" a euphemism for "sending agitated recalcitrant locals to the slammer until they get calmer"? Was there a crisis in local hierarchy that muddled the message?
"Were the Savoyards superstitious yokels or sly mountainfolk taking the measure of their new flatlander masters?"
The 1997 paper goes into this. That was all part of the psychological forces moving the community. Certain people used the opportunity to get new/better positions and to enrich themselves at the expense of their neighbours (in the view of the neighbours). The village itself was isolated and very poor, so the changes of modernisation, if you like, were breaking up already precarious social structures. The mood of the time was one in which visions and religious revivals were taking place.
"Was there a crisis in local hierarchy that muddled the message?"
You've hit the nail on the head. Constans' arrival was not, as the review implies, a brave reformer treating the mentally ill with compassion via rational enlightenment; he came in with the force of the state, including soldiers and police; had an agenda about the disgusting backwards peasants who needed to be dragged into the light, by force if necessary; and did lock sufferers (who were all women) up in hospitals until they got 'cured'. Unless you were 'cured', you didn't get out. So, as with previous discussions about involuntary commitment, sufferers had an incentive to pretend to be 'cured' so they could get out, whether or not this was in fact the case.
This régime seemed to work and he went back to Paris, but the moment he was gone it all sprang up again, so he had to come back. But this time, seeing that he couldn't force a cure, he engaged in social and economic improvement. *That* stuck.
JSTOR is a pain in the backside, but you can set up an account to read a certain number of articles for free, and it's worth it to read the background of what was going on:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2953593?read-now=1&seq=16#page_scan_tab_contents
I have no idea on what’s right but it is spelled Morzines in the 1861 book linked in the review.
> Dr. Constans’ next action was highly unorthodox. Standard protocol for treating these afflictions called for accusing someone of witchcraft, preferably a poor, socially isolated, old woman, (although, in a pinch, anyone of any sex, status, or age would do, and often did), torturing her until she confessed to creating the calamity by consorting with the Devil, and, after that, lighting her on fire, first strangling her to death, if, at this stage of the proceedings, one judged that a modicum of mercy was in order.
It would be helpful if book reviewers did a little research before they offhandedly make historically incorrect statements. The last accused witch who was put on trial was Anna Göldi in Glarus Switzerland — and that was eighty years before the Morzines incident — in 1782.. Protestant churches and the Catholic church started questioning the legitimacy of witch trials in the late 17th century, but most didn't formalize their opposition to them until the mid-18th century. In 1749, Pope Innocent XIII issued a bull that effectively discouraged the use of torture and other extreme measures in witch trials. And In 1736, the British Parliament passed the Witchcraft Act, which essentially ended the legal persecution of witches in Great Britain — decriminalizing witchcraft and focusing on the prosecution and punishment of fraudsters who claimed to have magical powers.
As for the Glarus trial, the claims of witchcraft made against the defendant Anna Göldi were withdrawn because the laws against witchcraft had been repealed. According to Wikipedia's entry for her, "During her trial, official allegations of witchcraft were avoided, and the court protocols were destroyed. The sentence does, therefore, not strictly qualify as that of a witch trial." The last *official* witch trial in Europe was the trial of Maria Pauer in Austria. Maria Pauer was executed for witchcraft in 1750 in the city of Salzburg.
Reads more like a discarded draft of a review. But then I have found most if not all of the reviews so far to be bad in one way or another.
While we current humans of the 21st century are of course the epitome of history, we should note that there is still considerable belief in the occult, from Aleister Crowley to Black Sabbath to not religious but spiritual to possibly certain major religions. If you like, you can probably go to the ghetto in any American city and find someone to curse your enemies with a bit of voodoo.
Meanwhile from the south black africans merrily believe in witches, similar to what the review describes, even today. Ryszard Kapucinski (sp?) described one case, in West Africa; I have myself seen more situationally amusiing such evidence in East Africa. So perhaps the review also evidences a certain parochial whiteness that only a good dose of DEI can cure.
I was mildly amused by the early book reviews and the (generally half-hearted) attempt to link the subject to some rationalist cause like YIMBY or AI alignment. There was a running joke in the comments that this was how to get your book review on the finalist list. This review is the most blatant example thus far.
The review itself, if you can call it that, doesn't summarize the actual book. I know some people are put off by the longer reviews, but this one was like a review of the table of contents. And half of the review is taken up by a false historical story and a brief biography of the author. But it made it into the finalist bracket. Is a review of a book about rationalism the ultimate meta power play? I'm seriously tempted to write a review for next year and just fabricate the whole thing, fitting in as many nods to rationalism as I can without reviewing a real book. Just to see how it's received.
The real value in the reviews this year has been in the comments along the way.
It wouldn't be a bad review with a little condensing and editing, but now we're getting into "reviews of the reviews" and I better stop before we get trapped in a recursive loop.
I liked this a lot. I feel like a lot of reviews recently have tried to emulate Erik Hoel’s from 2022 and use the review format as a jumping off point for a giant essay. But that’s definitely not the only way to write a review. This one was simply doing a different thing.
And I’ll say that despite the review being short and rather unconventional, I for one got to the end and actually - for the first time with any ACX book review - started reading the book itself.
If this sounds naive please excuse, but isn't rationalism "the belief that all behaviour, opinions, etc. should be based on reason, rather than emotions or religious beliefs."?
I've operated for 70 years with this Oxford Learner's definition.
Am I missing something? What's all the fuss?
[This, from one whose bumper sticker reads 2 + 2 = 4]
I'm not trying to be unnecessarily cruel here, but if reviews like these past few are the "finalists", I shudder to think of what the non-finalist essays are like.
This one at least is reviewing an actual work of non-fiction targeted at reasonably-intelligent adults and not, uh, rhyming dictionaries, comic books, or conspiracy websites, but it leaves me wondering if the reviewer has ever read an actual ACX/SSC-style "book review". There's nothing of substance here that can't be gleaned from the title of the book and maybe the back jacket. This would be a fine Goodreads "review", but here it's just trite. I don't think it's actually ChatGPT - at least, not based on the prompts I tried - but it's "ChatGPT-y", if you understand the distinction.
My free advice to Scott is to maybe consider winnowing down the "finalists" a little more, because I think too much chaff devalues the concept as a whole and runs the risk of causing people to be less inclined to contribute their best, or even at all. I get the appeal of a bunch of free content which is at least mildly-interesting to skim through and requires little more than a Ctrl-C + Ctrl-V, but maybe consider posting them as "Book Review Also-Rans" (or a more charitably-worded version thereof) after the main finalists have been posted.
While I broadly agree that I can't see how this got to be a finalist, I don't think we should be throwing the onus back on Scott to pick the finalists. ACX readers are the ones who voted in the finalists, and if the resulting selection means we're a bunch of uninformed voters, so be it.
To quote Dick Tuck:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Tuck
"In 1966, Tuck ran for the California State Senate. ...When defeat became inevitable, Tuck made the now notorious statement, "The people have spoken, the bastards."
How do you manage to have such a huge collection of apropos quotes?!
I was just wondering the same thing, especially as this so American-arcane and she's Irish!
I remembered the phrase because it's exactly the kind of thing that sticks in the memory, then looked it up to see who said it. Thank you Google and Wikipedia for being my supplemental memory 😁
It would be interesting to see the scores for the finalists, to see if most of these weaker entries could be eliminated just by raising the cutoff.
Another option for Scott would be a "you divide I choose" sort of setup - either Scott or the readers come up with "finalist-candidates", and the other side chooses the actual finalists.
Frankly though, I think readers shouldn't be involved in the curation process. Crowdsourcing is showing its age all across the web, and no matter how special ACX readers might be, in the end they're still a crowd. I don't trust crowdsourcing to come up with the objectively best selection, rather than the selection they subjectively like the most, and I for sure don't trust its subjective tastes will match mine.
Sounds like you're volunteering to read/vote on more of the submissions next year!
Except I quite clearly said "[this is] causing people to be less inclined to contribute their best, or even at all" and "readers shouldn't be involved in the curation process". I'm not sure why I would want to contribute more, or go against my own beliefs on the wider issue, considering the number of readers and subscribers to Scott's Substack benefit me in no way. I'm having a hard time figuring out what your remark is intended to add beyond snark.
"Frankly though, I think readers shouldn't be involved in the curation process."
The problem is that with 156 finalists this year, Scott can't reasonably judge them all; he said himself "I can't read 150 reviews alone" in the "Choose Book Review Finalists 2024" post.
"Another option for Scott would be a 'you divide I choose' sort of setup - either Scott or the readers come up with 'finalist-candidates', and the other side chooses the actual finalists."
This one's more plausible, and that is what Scott did explicitly in 2022 (possibly the other years as well, but he didn't go into as much detail about finalist selection those years). But this year, he explicitly said that he's interfering in favor of the weaker entries:
"In past years, most reviews have been nonfiction on technical topics. To keep things interesting, I’m going to try some affirmative action this time (sorry, Supreme Court). ~25% of finalist slots will be reserved for books from nontraditional categories - fiction, poetry, and books from before 1900 are the ones I can think of right now, but feel free to try other nontraditional books."
The more fundamental issue might be that readers choosing from 150 reviews will probably choose the ones whose subject matter they already like; e.g. comic book fans are more likely to read the "Silver Age Marvel Comics" review, poetry fans are more likely to read the "The Complete Rhyming Dictionary" review, etc. And those fans will probably vote the review higher than the median ACX reader would, just because of the positive association with the subject matter.
I could see a world where some of these niche book reviews get 1/5th the votes of the more mainstream non-fiction ones (is a rhyming dictionary non-fiction? I could see the argument either way), but those votes are all 9 or 10 out of 10, because the book review could skip the critical step of convincing its voters that the subject matter was worth discussing. Look around in the comments of pretty much any finalist - including this one - and you'll probably find people praising it and saying that it's the best review this year.
Barring Scott somehow enforces random reviews, I don't see how you solve that selection bias problem.
Respectfully, this is a pitch, not a review!
I seriously want to read the book now. This is only the second review this year that actually made me want to read the book.
A book review should not be a summary of the book in question, as these essays so often are. Instead the reviewer should describe his reactions to reading it, and suggest why you, the reader of the review, might want to read it, or avoid it. In short, a review answers the question "Is it any good?"
This review does just that, and no more. It is of a length consistent with published book reviews in newspapers and magazines that still supply them (I used to subscribe to Harper's just for Hitch's book reviews, and always read them in the Times, the Telegraph and the Spectator).
I have been enjoying these book reviews. But I was reflecting during the week on how few of them leave me with the slightest inclination to read the underlying book. They tend strongly towards essays on a topic related to the book, using ideas from the book as a starting point (and so illustrate the views of the reviewer more clearly than those of the author).
I see that many people disliked this review for bucking those trends. While it is sloppy, and looks like the author abandoned it half-way through, it has the benefit of not revealing too much about the book, of highlighting some strengths and weaknesses (while presumably omitting many more) and it did encourage me to attempt the first few pages of the first chapter, and random samplings further in.
My own review of the book: the prose is heavy and Victorian. This is not surprising, the author was writing in the 1860s. The topics in the book reflect that background. I opened page 220 at random, and found the author handwringing about depictions of women as statues in Catholic churches. At page 365, a blow-by-blow recounting of the Reformation. At page 395: "during that gloomy period the only scholars in Europe were priests and monks, who conscientiously believed that no amount of falsehood was reprehensible when conduced to the edification of the people". In other words, the author is easily identified as C19th clergy in the Church of Ireland/England tradition railing against the failings of Catholics. Maybe there are other topics in there that I missed, but the relevance of a random page to my day-to-day life is minimal. (Book review idea: comparison between monks of the Dark Ages qua Lecky and propaganda in modern times, Fox News or whatever.)
My review of the review: half baked and unfinished. Some attempt to pull out topics of interest to the readers of this blog, but incompletely developed and abandoned halfway through. Uncompelling and inaccurate in places:
- witch-hunting was likely in nineteenth century France, and I suspect was never carried out with quite as much transparent disbelief as suggested by the writer
- one suspects that the borders of "the empire of prejudice" would have been drawn rather differently by Lecky than by the reader of the review, this might have been investigated
- 750 references are fine, but what does he do with them? Much like Nietzsche, it seems Lecky felt that a topic was understood when its history was traced fully. Some comparison to modern scholarship would have helped. Unlike e.g. Burke, it seems Lecky left little trace on modern thought, it would be good to know why.
I am used to seeing on here reviews who summarize the contents of the books and substantively engage with the arguments at length.
So the ending was a surprise. I thought for a sec maybe the rest of the review is available for paying subscribers only.
Maybe Scott is trying to pass on the message "no your review doesn't have be daunting 20k words of the book's summary to be featured here."
I feel that the turgid title of this book alone should serve as a warning sign. Haven't read it, but the title is "The Rise of Rationalism in Europe" with twice as many words. Not even "The History of the Rise of Rationalism in Europe," which would be bad enough; no, we gotta work "Influence of the Spirit of" in there too. Why? What did the English language ever do to you, Lecky?
(also what others have said about the misrepresented history of witchcraft in general and this one village incident in particular, etc.)
It wouldn't be a properly scholarly 19th century work if the title alone didn't take up an entire paragraph 😀
It's positively laconic by comparison with cookery book titles of the 17th and 18th centuries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Cookery_Made_Plain_and_Easy#/media/File:Art_of_Cookery_frontispiece.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Collection_of_Above_Three_Hundred_Receipts_in_Cookery,_Physick_and_Surgery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Experienced_English_Housekeeper#/media/File:The_Experienced_English_Housekeeper_Elizabeth_Raffald_Title_Page_1775.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady%27s_Complete_Guide#/media/File:Advert-for-The-Lady's-Complete-Guide-1788.png
The book's view of what was typical in treatment of supposed cases of witchcraft does not seem right to me. I would like some evidence that such psychopathic brutality was considered typical.
Depending on the historical period, the country, and whether it was the religious and/or secular authorities versus a local mob acting out of hysteria, it might have been typical.
But by 1860 in the middle of Europe? No (again, unless of course it was a local mob acting out of hysteria). The authorities, as we see by the French official response, were not holding witchcraft trials, and neither was the church (Catholic or Protestant). Even in Morzine, this was *not* what happened; the victims were all female, and the accused were all male, including such authorities as the bishop when he turned up to see what was happening:
"The afflicted sought ever more powerful priests and pinned great hopes on the pastoral visit of Monsignor Magnin in 1864. A French government appointee of Savoyard origin, Magnin had sought reconciliation with the secular authorities, but Constans's use of the army to quell the mal and the physician's high-handed attitude toward the clergy quickly soured relations. Magnin's desire to defend the faithful and to exercise his moral and spiritual authority, however, did not mean he was willing to exorcise. He was convinced that the mal was mental illness, not diabolical possession, and had resisted the parishioners' entreaties.
When he arrived, the Morzinois seemed calm, but seven or eight women were in convulsions by the time he came to the church and, later, between sixty and eighty were rolling around in the cemetery, screaming insults at him when he refused to exorcise one sufferer: "Wolf of a bishop, we must tear out his eyes; he hasn't the power to cure the girl; no, he cannot rid the girl of the devil." On his refusal to exorcise her, they set on him inside the church, kicking and insulting him, spitting in his face, and finally ripping off his pastoral ring."
To quote the article from "The Journal of Modern History":
"At first glance, the witch accusations seemed to share all the characteristics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with animal death, illness, and misfortune followed by individual and collective efforts to forestall the witches' power. But such superficial similarities are deceptive. At Morzine, nineteenth-century tensions were revealed by the accusations, as powerful men - first a vengeful priest and later representatives of the state within the local community - became the targets of hatred. For in the early modern period, older women were most likely to be accused of blighting crops, killing livestock, and deforming babies with black magic. For a brief moment during the mal such a traditional figure almost appeared, when one of the girls at the communion lesson spoke of an old (unnamed) woman from the neighboring commune of Gest as the likely source of evil. She never appeared again in the narrative, however. Villagers instead transferred their anger against those who benefited from political change and were held responsible for upsetting the already delicate spiritual and economic balance of the community. This important shift shows how wrong it is to see witchcraft in Morzine as a throwback; the villagers built on a centuries-old tradition but invested witchcraft with new and different psychic and social anxieties."
Thank you!
> He then develops his general thesis that rationalism did not triumph by the force of logic because people are not logical. [Claim 1:] Most people think just like they eat, i.e., with whatever utensils they grew up with. [Claim 2:] The general intellectual beliefs of a given society are therefore not shaped by detailed arguments or other intellectual causes, but are modified by a host of social, political, and industrial influences.
I think the first claim is solid. Most people believe what other people around them believe. It can be the teachings of their science teacher, their priest or some conspiracy telegram group.
I don't think that the second claim follows from the first claim. Sure, you can have societies where the people in charge are no more logical than the average, and the people who are more logical end up getting burned on the stake frequently, but you don't have to.
As soon as you have a society with an appreciable rate of technological process, you require some elites with an understanding of empiricism. Now, there are certainly configurations where these eggheads stay firmly subservient to whatever greater ideological framework is in place, but other outcomes are more likely.
To convince the rabble, it is always beneficial to offer miracles. If Christian priests could reliably pull of that water to wine and feast from limited resources tricks, virtually everyone would be Christian. The missionaries of rationality bring a ton of miracles with them. Steam engines. Electricity. Planes. Vaccines. Mobile phones. Of course, today's miracle is tomorrow's normal state of affairs.
Now, I will grant that our collective beliefs do not move as they would for an ideal Bayesian agent, and are indeed subject to a lot of other influences. But generally (with a few exceptions), we seem to lumber on the track which would have been left by such an agent.
Relevant link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
Seems like the western world was lucky that the primary enemy the late medieval church chose was witches - if they had to pick an enemy, an imaginary one is among the least-bad possibilities, since as the review points out, it was a mistake they recovered from.
When they fought Islam, they often got their ass kicked.
I was going to complain, like everyone else, that the review was too short an uninformative, but then I clicked on the link to the book, and enjoyed reading it, so I guess the review achieved it's goal, at any rate.
Today, far fewer people believe in the miraculous, but conspiracy theories are alive and thriving. If only Q ANON and it's ilk would go the way of demonic possession. It might result in less weaponized mass disinformation. This, truly, is the superstition of our day.
I really liked this "review".
I think it's much easier to criticize a review than it is to write one, so all submissions should be treated with respect and appreciation. Thanks for writing, OP!