From: rjb@milton.u.washington.edu (LeGrand Cinq-Mars)
Subject: Re: Faith and violence (was: Wasting Time (was: Hitler (was: Numbers)))
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1992 04:44:41 GMT


Breaking one of my own customs, I'd like to annotate a recent post in this
thread just a little.

From: grimoire@byron.u.washington.edu (John Greer)
Subject: Faith and violence (was: Wasting Time (was: Hitler (was: Numbers)))
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 21:16:52 GMT

Yes, that Republican platform business was certainly eccentric; there's
a a certain irritating dentist-drill quality to the whole thing.  You
can hear it whining away, but you don't exactly feel like rushing over
to really experience it in its fullness.  (Washington State Republicans,
we're talking about here.)  There was an election some time ago in which
someone ran on the platform of giving That Part of the state to Idaho --
"And if they don't take it, we'll invade, and make them take it!"

Fear of human beings who wield supernatural malice, however, is hardly
a Christian invention -- nor is the willingness of the people who have
that fear to do something about it.  In fact, I would hazard to suggest
that the main reason most Americans are most aware of European and
American "witch" scares is because of a (perhaps unconscious, residual, and
unintentional) Eurocentrism -- or at least the sort of natural and
unculpable parochialism that comes along with living mostly in one country,
speaking and reading mostly one language, and knowing (if the studies
so often cited in the news nowadays have any accuracy at all) some fragments
of history from tertiary or quarternary sources at best.

There is a considerable body of literature on this in the social sciences,
though of course there is also a considerable amount of junk -- for
example the credulous nonsense about Vast Abusive Leagues of
International Satanists that is published as "research" in certain
journals, and which shows no signs of having any familiarity with
releveant research findings or methodology as they've been developed
over the last century.  This means that to actually gain a sense of
what's going on here, one has to do a bit of work, reading bales of
often vilely written academic material.  Still, the Bainbridge & Stark
_Theory of Religion_ is a good place (it's a sort of digest of research
findings, with avery useful bibliography) to begin, as are Mary Douglas'
theoretical adventures _Purity and Danger_ and _Natural Symbols_, again
because she points to a lot of the other literature.

"Magical attack" scares occur (and have been documented) all over the place.
The question is, when and why do they seem plausible, and when and why do
they become general conflagrations?  Kuhn, documenting an outbreak in
Ch'ing China, thinks the answer is bureaucracy.  Douglas thinks it has to
do with the interaction of types of group boundaries with types of
internal authority structure.  Despite widespread real belief in
witches (in the traditional folklore sense of malevolent wielders of
supernatural power) in the US in the 19th and early 20th centuries,
events like the Blymire witch-murder (Pennsylvania, 1929) were a rarity
--an incomprehensible rarity, far less intelligible (and thus less
threatening) than then the Jonestown kool-aid hydrocyanic acid test
was to people in the US a few years ago.

I am generally convinced that mentioning personal experience in articles
on the Net means nothing, since it's all just words on the screen, and
anyone can say anything and be anyone if they bother to learn a bit
about various ways the system works, and can pretend to be a crazed
street-screamer by pushing the caps-lock key.  But... (breaking another
custom): I attended a continuing education training workshop put on
by the Western Psychotherapy Association in Seattle about a year ago,
and took a day-long workshop in Satanic Child Abuse (SCA -- is that a
coincidence?).  The people who ran it were not Christian -- the WPA
seems to be more or less vulgar Jungian, and the presenters here were
somewhere farther along the declension:  the New Age dripped from their
pores and puddled among the cushions on the floor.  About the closest
thing to a testable claim produced during the presentation was the
statement that Gilles de Rais had been executed during the French
Revolution.  True, in a sense --but not I'm sure in the sense they
meant it.  Assuming that is, that one can speak of people  meaning anything
when they haven't a clue about the nature of evidence, or about what
might constitute a coherent argument.

The question of the origins of religious and political persecutions 
and witchcraft panics is an empirical question, one that has received
quite a bit of attention in the social sciences.  From what I know of
the current state of the research, I would suspect that it's far less
likely that such things are driven by what people believe than by
certain features of social structure.  In other words, I should think such
things could happen in a community with any or no religion, as long as
certain structural features were in place, and certain stresses applied.

I also would suggest that the best research is that most clearly based 
in the particulars of carefully gathered evidence, rather than in the
ecstasies of self- evident theorizing.

When one is in the grip of divine revelation, one of course knows what
is true and what isn't, and what fits and one doesn't, and who's right
and who's wrong.  That's fine -- that's doing divine revelation.  When
one does social sciences, one does something else entirely.  Some people
can do both, some people can't do either without getting them all mixed
up.

If dirt is matter in the wrong place, what's epistemology in the wrong
place?

Psyche was lucky -- she had friendly ants to help her sort it out.

--LeGrand


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