Voltaire’s Fanaticism, part 2: Fanaticism, or Bush the President

At the end of my previous post, I summarized Voltaire’s entry for “Fanaticism” in his Philosophical Dictionary:

In sum, then, rather than attributing it to any particular religion, Voltaire saw fanaticism as a global scourge with devastating consequences. He tried to find the psychological and social conditions in which fanaticism and fanatical movements took root and spread. He viewed fanaticism as a sort of contagious illness, progressive and almost always incurable – once “the human mind has…quitted the luminous track pointed out by nature,” it was nearly impossible to return to it. He sought to capture the dual nature of the leaders of fanatical movements, both self-serving manipulators and themselves suffering from the same sickness. Finally, he considered possible checks to the growth of fanaticism, arguing that neither law nor religion were effective and placing his hopes in a reason grounded in nature, the tranquil “spirit of philosophy,” while acknowledging that even this didn’t always protect us.

This is the context and spirit in which the play Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet, should be read and understood. It’s essential that we keep readily in mind that Voltaire worked to comprehend and present fanaticism as a generic psychological and social phenomenon, as a universal danger rather than a characteristic tendency of any particular religion or culture.

To read the play in the belief that it applies specifically or exclusively to Muslims is contrary to Voltaire’s clear intent (as described in my previous post), and smacks of intellectual dishonesty and bad faith. True, a reader could always think “I know how Voltaire saw it, but I believe some sorts of people – like Muslims – are especially susceptible to fanaticism and that I myself or my culture have largely advanced beyond that danger.” But such a belief is plainly unsustainable in the face of the historical and sociological evidence. Furthermore, clinging to it despite all indications to the contrary tends toward precisely the sort of fanatical bigotry Voltaire warned against, as when he offered as an example of Christian fanaticism a certain “Biscayan bishop” who “even accused” the lord of a parish in his diocese “of having said, in the way of pleasantry, that there were good people in Morocco as well as in Biscay, and that an honest inhabitant of Morocco might absolutely not be a mortal enemy of the Supreme Being, who is the father of all mankind.”

Even more important is that reading the play as describing a specific religion or culture serves to block virtually any insights we might otherwise gain from it about ourselves, our societies (including historical and contemporary Muslim societies), and the sources and appeal of fanaticism in the past and present. Which is why, while I highly recommend reading both the play and the dictionary entry, I don’t think the play should be performed as it’s written, at least outside of predominantly Muslim contexts. Updating the work so that it can be set in the modern era would be complicated, but this would undoubtedly be the best way to draw out its insights.

While Voltaire included in the category of fanatics many Crusaders, Inquisitors, and Conquistadors, he lived only at the very birth of modern political movements. He certainly recognized the overlap between fanatical religious and political movements, but his frame of reference was primarily religious. The modern gods of History, Race, State, Civilization, and so on were still being crafted. But a critical and educational production of his work now would take this political landscape into account. Not Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet, but Fanaticism, or Lenin the Bolshevik; Fanaticism, or Hitler the Racist; Fanaticism, or North the Cold Warrior; Fanaticism, or Pinochet the Dictator; Fanaticism, or Pol Pot the Revolutionary; Fanaticism, or Putin the Strongman; Fanaticism, or Franco the Caudillo; Fanaticism, or Friedman the Neoliberal;...

As several of these examples make clear, even today no sharp line can be drawn between “religious” and “political” movements or fanaticisms. And I don’t mean by offering these suggestions to imply that a contemporary religious movement – maybe especially an Islamist movement - wouldn’t make a valid subject for an updated version of the play. But, again, if the point is to lead people to think about fanaticism and its persistent sources and dangers, that choice of subject would likely be intellectually counterproductive in addition to fomenting bigotry.

Voltaire didn’t have much choice when it came to the subject of his play about religious-political fanaticism. If the play was going to be performed, it had to situate fanaticism in another culture, preferably one to which the more fanatical of his own society were hostile. While the more enlightened in the audience would likely recognize the broader target, this inevitably carried the risk of leaving his society’s fanaticisms unquestioned by those most caught up in them (though the danger was cleverly addressed and minimized by the anonymous dictionary entry).

Today we have much more choice, the consequences for Muslims of using the play’s original subject and setting are more serious, and the need to expose the fanaticisms of our own culture is more pressing than ever. When a person whose views many (for some reason) take seriously can write something as ill-informed and idiotic as

It is time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development. This is a radically impolitic thing to say, of course, but it seems as objectively true as saying that not all societies have equal material resources. We might even conceive of our moral differences in just these terms: not all societies have the same degree of moral wealth…. To say of another culture that it lags a hundred and fifty years behind our own in social development is a terrible criticism indeed, given how far we’ve come in that time. Now imagine the benighted Americans of 1863 coming to possess chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. This is more or less the situation we confront in much of the developing world.

and claim the US is a “well-intentioned giant,” we should all recognize of the urgent necessity of shining a light on our own society’s murderous fanaticisms. Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet understood generically and applied to movements within our culture can enlighten; Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet seen through the lens of prejudice, arrogance, and, well, fanaticism can only do harm. It’s time for Fanaticism, or Bush the President.

Voltaire’s Fanaticism, part 1: the Philosophical Dictionary entry

“In a word, let us contemplate the horrors of fifteen centuries, all frequently renewed in the course of a single one; unarmed men slain at the feet of altars; kings destroyed by the dagger or by poison; a large state reduced to half its extent by the fury of its own citizens; the nation at once the most warlike and the most pacific on the face of the globe, divided in fierce hostility against itself; the sword unsheathed between the sons and the father; usurpers, tyrants, executioners, sacrilegious robbers, and bloodstained parricides violating, under the impulse of religion, every convention divine or human — such is the deadly picture of fanaticism.”

-Voltaire, “Fanaticism,” Philosophical Dictionary

In my report from the panel discussion about Charlie Hebdo earlier this month, I noted that in his introduction Ed Berenson had mentioned an 18th-century play by Voltaire about Mohammed: Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet. Having now read it, I’m surprised the play hasn’t received more attention.

Most striking is its modernity. And I don’t just mean the 2013 translator Hanna Burton’s decision to render Voltaire’s verse into modern prose (though that helps). I mean its psychological-sociological examination of fanaticism as a social phenomenon. Many people, it seems, are focused on the question of who the play is “really” about. People have discussed Voltaire’s knowledge or ignorance of and attitudes toward the historical Mohammed and the early Islamic movement. They’ve pointed to various indications within and without the work - his arguments about historical fact being secondary to artistic effect, his use of imaginary place names,… – as suggesting that he didn’t intend it to be a work of historical accuracy. Many have suggested that the “real” target of the play was Catholicism (or specific sects or movements within it), and that the use of the Muslim figure was just a means to get around Church censorship and avoid persecution.¹

It seems to me that these arguments are both right and wrong. The play is about both early Islam and contemporary Catholicism and at the same time about no religion in particular. It’s a very modern work about a social phenomenon: fanaticism. This seems clear from Voltaire’s later Philosophical Dictionary, published anonymously, which contained an entry for “Fanaticism.”² The play seems to be a dramatized version of the argument Voltaire sets forth in the extended entry.

Fanaticism as a global problem and its consequences

Voltaire’s dictionary entry about fanaticism as a generic social phenomenon was ahead of its time. “Fanaticism,” as Voltaire defines it, is “the effect of a false conscience, which makes religion subservient to the caprices of the imagination, and the excesses of the passions.” He encourages the reader to imagine a temple filled with religious fanatics of various sorts, all engaging in the bizarre practices they believe are demanded by or pleasing to their gods. They then, “full of the inspiration of their respective deities, spread the terror and delusion over the face of the earth. They divide the world between them; and the four extremities of it are almost instantly in flames: nations obey them, and kings tremble before them.”

He presents fanaticism as a global phenomenon, to which all humans are vulnerable. Throughout the entry, Voltaire uses concrete examples – some no doubt historically and anthropologically questionable – to illustrate the various bloody consequences and social-psychological characteristics of the phenomenon. These are by no means limited to a particular culture. Fanaticism almost invariably leads to some form of human (he doesn’t talk about animal) sacrifice: “It is dreadful to observe how the opinion that the wrath of heaven might be appeased by human massacre spread, after being once started, through almost every religion; and what various reasons have been given for the sacrifice, as though, in order to preclude, if possible, the escape of any one from extirpation.” He describes the various categories of people marked for sacrifice in different religious cultures - enemies, children, the “just and good,” the “most beautiful” and “most valuable,” the “purest,” the “most sacred” – offering specific examples of each from a variety of cultures.

He discusses fanaticism’s role in the crusades and the genocidal European conquest of the “New World”:

The same spirit of fanaticism cherished the rage for distant conquests: scarcely had Europe repaired its losses when the discovery of a new world hastened the ruin of our own. At that terrible injunction, “Go and conquer,” America was desolated and its inhabitants exterminated; Africa and Europe were exhausted in vain to repeople it; the poison of money and of pleasure having enervated the species, the world became nearly a desert and appeared likely every day to advance nearer to desolation by the continual wars which were kindled on our continent, from the ambition of extending its power to foreign lands.

Fanaticism, he argues, gives rise to wars, persecution, and massacres:

Let us compute the thousands who have been seen to perish either on scaffolds in the ages of persecution, or in civil wars by the hands of their fellow citizens, or by their own hands through excessive austerities, and maceration. Let us survey the surface of the earth, and glance at the various standards unfurled and blazing in the name of religion; in Spain against the Moors, in France against the Turks, in Hungary against the Tartars; at the numerous military orders, founded for converting infidels by the point of the sword, and slaughtering one another at the foot of the altar they had come to defend.

Fanaticism leads to a violent and destructive intolerance. Voltaire discusses a monk who murdered his brother for holding different beliefs; “Polyeuctes, who went to the temple on a day of solemn festival, to throw down and destroy the statues and ornaments”; the “assassins of Francis, duke of Guise, of William, prince of Orange, of King Henry III., of King Henry IV.; and “various others” - all “equally possessed, equally laboring under morbid fury...” “The most striking example of fanaticism,” notably, is close to home: “that exhibited on the night of St. Bartholomew, when the people of Paris rushed from house to house to stab, slaughter, throw out of the window, and tear in pieces their fellow citizens not attending mass.”

Fanaticism as a progressive illness

Voltaire saw fanaticism as a sort of contagious illness, a “religious madness” or “malady of the mind, which is taken in the same way as smallpox.”³ More precisely, it was akin to a symptom marking the advanced nature of an illness:

Fanaticism is, in reference to superstition, what delirium is to fever, or rage to anger. He who is involved in ecstasies and visions, who takes dreams for realities, and his own imaginations for prophecies, is a fanatical novice of great hope and promise, and will probably soon advance to the highest form, and kill man for the love of God.

The prognosis for advanced cases – individual or collective - was in his view generally negative:

When once fanaticism has gangrened the brain of any man the disease may be regarded as nearly incurable. I have seen Convulsionaries who, while speaking of the miracles of St. Paris, gradually worked themselves up to higher and more vehement degrees of agitation till their eyes became inflamed, their whole frames shook, their countenances became distorted by rage, and had any man contradicted them he would inevitably have been murdered.

…Only let a single people be thus fascinated and agitated under the guidance of a few impostors, the seduction will spread with the speed of wild-fire, prodigies will be multiplied beyond calculation, and whole communities be led astray forever. When the human mind has once quitted the luminous track pointed out by nature, it returns to it no more; it wanders round the truth, but never obtains of it more than a few faint glimmerings, which, mingling with the false lights of surrounding superstition, leave it, in fact, in complete and palpable obscurity.

Anticipating 19th- and early 20th-century elite fears about crowds and masses, Voltaire contends that people assembled in crowds are particularly susceptible to fanatical passions and irrationalities:

That almost despotic power which the enthusiasm of a single person exercises over a multitude who see or hear him; the ardor communicated to each other by assembled minds; numberless strong and agitating influences acting in such circumstances, augmented by each individual’s personal anxiety and distress, require but a short time to operate, in order to produce universal delirium.

…

We seldom get heated while reading in solitude, for our minds are then tranquil and sedate. But when an ardent man of strong imagination addresses himself to weak imaginations, his eyes dart fire, and that fire rapidly spreads; his tones, his gestures, absolutely convulse the nerves of his auditors. He exclaims, “The eye of God is at this moment upon you; sacrifice every mere human possession and feeling; fight the battles of the Lord”— and they rush to the fight.

His most subtle analysis concerns the leaders of fanatical movements. On the one hand, he presents them as cynical and self-serving manipulators:

Fanatics are nearly always under the direction of knaves, who place the dagger in their hands. These knaves resemble Montaigne’s “Old Man of the Mountain,” who, it is said, made weak persons imagine, under his treatment of them, that they really had experienced the joys of paradise, and promised them a whole eternity of such delights if they would go and assassinate such as he should point out to them.

He offers as an example of the cynical use of fanaticism Oliver Cromwell:

Cromwell said to General Fairfax: “How can you possibly expect a rabble of London porters and apprentices to resist a nobility urged on by the principle, or rather the phantom, of honor? Let us actuate them by a more powerful phantom — fanaticism! Our enemies are fighting only for their king; let us persuade our troops they are fighting for their God.”

Fairfax then “composed his regiment of red-coated brothers, of gloomy religionists, whom he made obedient tigers. Mahomet himself was never better served by soldiers.”⁴

But, despite what this story suggests, he doesn’t argue that the leaders are merely cloaking their self-serving, material goals in the language of religion. They, too, are fanatics:

What a tissue of frauds, calumnies, and robberies has been woven by fanatics of the court of Rome against fanatics of the court of Calvin, by Jesuits against Jansenists, and vice versa! And if you go farther back you will find ecclesiastical history, which is the school of virtues, to be that of atrocities and abominations, which have been employed by every sect against the others. They all have the same bandage over their eyes whether marching out to burn down the cities and towns of their adversaries, to slaughter the inhabitants, or condemn them to judicial execution; or when merely engaged in the comparatively calm occupation of deceiving and defrauding, of acquiring wealth and exercising domination. The same fanaticism blinds them; they think that they are doing good. Every fanatic is a conscientious knave, but a sincere and honest murderer for the good cause. [emphasis added]

What can check the growth of fanaticism?

As noted above, Voltaire was pessimistic about the prospects for recovery from the illness of fanaticism. Neither laws nor (it almost shouldn’t need to be said) religion could counteract it: “[W]hen the disorder has made any progress, we should, without loss of time, fly from the seat of it, and wait till the air has become purified from contagion. Law and religion are not completely efficient against the spiritual pestilence.”

In fact, “Religion…so far from affording proper nutriment to the minds of patients laboring under this infectious and infernal distemper, is converted, by the diseased process of their minds, into poison.” (With one exception: “There has been only one religion in the world which has not been polluted by fanaticism and that is the religion of the learned in China.”)

Laws, he argues,

are yet more powerless against these paroxysms of rage. To oppose laws to cases of such a description would be like reading a decree of council to a man in a frenzy. The persons in question are fully convinced that the Holy Spirit which animates and fills them is above all laws; that their own enthusiasm is, in fact, the only law which they are bound to obey.

What can be said in answer to a man who says he will rather obey God than men, and who consequently feels certain of meriting heaven by cutting your throat?

There was only one treatment and prophylactic - reason: “There is no other remedy for this epidemical malady than that spirit of philosophy, which, extending itself from one to another, at length civilizes and softens the manners of men and prevents the access of the disease.” While fanaticism both thrived on inflamed passions and further inflamed them, the spirit of philosophy worked through inducing mental calm: “The different sects of ancient philosophers were not merely exempt from this pest of human society, but they were antidotes to it: for the effect of philosophy is to render the soul tranquil, and fanaticism and tranquility are totally incompatible.”

But even this antidote wasn’t always successful. Troublingly, fanaticism could strike even the most reasonable. “It seems as if superstition were an epidemic disease,” Voltaire lamented, “from which the strongest minds are not always exempt”; “[o]ver what precipices do not men fall, notwithstanding their boasted leading-strings of reason!” Even Isaac Newton hadn’t been immune:

Were it allowable for us to reveal the disgrace of those to whom we owe the sincerest respect, I should observe here, that Newton, the great Newton himself, discovered in the “Apocalypse” that the pope was Antichrist, and made many other similar discoveries…. [I]f the exalted Newton imagined that he found the modern history of Europe in the “Apocalypse,” we may say: Alas, poor human beings!

In sum, then, rather than attributing it to any particular religion, Voltaire saw fanaticism as a global scourge with devastating consequences. He tried to find the psychological and social conditions in which fanaticism and fanatical movements took root and spread. He viewed fanaticism as a sort of contagious illness, progressive and almost always incurable – once “the human mind has…quitted the luminous track pointed out by nature,” it was nearly impossible to return to it. He sought to capture the dual nature of the leaders of fanatical movements, both self-serving manipulators and themselves suffering from the same sickness. Finally, he considered possible checks to the growth of fanaticism, arguing that neither law nor religion was effective and placing his hopes in a reason grounded in nature, the tranquil “spirit of philosophy,” while acknowledging that even this didn’t always protect us.

If this were a critical review, I would take issue with some of Voltaire’s arguments, but my intent is really just to summarize them in order to provide the necessary intellectual and political context for reading the play. In my next post on the subject, I’ll talk about the play within this context.

¹ Which he did. As Burton notes in the introduction to her translation (p. 16), after some Catholic officials raised objections and forced the play’s withdrawal from the stage, Voltaire wrote to the Vatican and received papal approval from Benedict XIV. Lord Chesterfield, Malise Ruthven mentions in her preface (p. 8), saw the play as a veiled attack on Jesus, and was flummoxed to hear the response of a Catholic ‘who was extremely edified by the way in which this impostor and enemy of Christianity had been depicted’.

² I had a hell of a time with this. The text I quote from here was published online by the University of Adelaide in Australia. They state that it’s “[d]erived from The Works of Voltaire, A Contemporary Version, (New York: E.R. DuMont, 1901), A Critique and Biography by John Morley, notes by Tobias Smollett, trans. William F. Fleming. I was unsure about the entry because it doesn’t appear in this Project Gutenberg version from 1764. But the entry is included in Volume V, which does appear in the Project Gutenberg version of The Works of Voltaire. I also found a version of the full entry in French from 1826, after Voltaire’s death. It appears Voltaire reworked and expanded on the PD throughout his life, so this might have been the last version. I haven’t been able to discover when exactly this version of the entry was completed or originally published.

³ Voltaire takes care to distinguish between two types of fanatics, of which one bears greater moral responsibility: “There are some cold-blooded fanatics; such as those judges who sentence men to death for no other crime than that of thinking differently from themselves, and these are so much the more guilty and deserving of the execration of mankind, as, not laboring under madness like the Clements, Châtels, Ravaillacs, and Damiens, they might be deemed capable of listening to reason.” [emphasis added]

⁴ Here Voltaire is quite sociological. He argues that Cromwell could only have succeeded in certain conditions: “in order to inspire this fanaticism, you must be seconded and supported by the spirit of the times.” To “make and to guide fanatics” requires the “profoundest dissimulation and the most determined intrepidity,” but “everything depends, after these previous requisites are secured, on coming into the world at a proper time.”

The Cape Ann Museum and the Gloucester Sea Serpent

I spent an afternoon last week in the Cape Ann Museum. To some extent, I had to seek it out – there isn’t much talk of it, and while it’s located in downtown Gloucester, the exterior of the building is unassuming (I drove past it even though I knew the address and was specifically looking for it). It was well worth the visit. The museum itself is larger than it appears from outside, with three floors filled with art and artifacts related to the area and its history: fine art, crafts, vessels, reconstructions,…- a nice mix that doesn’t overwhelm. It’s like a more focused local version of Salem’s Peabody-Essex Museum, which I also adore.

I started, as was recommended, on the top floor with the temporary exhibit, which is currently “Presence/Absence: New Work by Bruce Herman.” Not my favorite, to be honest, and I didn’t care for its religious themes, but I give them credit for including more contemporary works. I hope they take that impulse further, both with the temporary exhibits and with the permanent collection. In the regular galleries, there were several individual pieces that stood out: Marsden Hartley’s Rocks, Dogtown (c.1930s), Jan Matulka’s Two Seashells (c.1929), Charles Hopkinson’s paintings of his daughters, photographs and works (like George Elmer Berry’s Granite and Marble Monument (1884)) related to quarrying, a section on Philip Saltonstall Weld, carved haddock bones, and more. But the Fitz Henry Lane gallery, the museum’s centerpiece, was superb and deserving of its top billing. The light, the colors, the precision! I would love to see exhibits in New England museums present maritime artwork within its political context, but that couldn’t possibly detract from the high quality of these beautiful paintings.

One piece in the museum that caught my eye was a small illustration – I believe it was for a magazine – of the Gloucester Sea Serpent. I wasn’t familiar with this story, but the details are fascinating. A series of sightings of a giant sea serpent in the area in 1817 – embellished and sensationalized in local papers - attracted the interest of the Linnaean Society of New England, which commissioned a series of depositions of “witnesses.” The Society collected the depositions, ignoring inconsistencies and other issues, and when a small snake was discovered on a beach in nearby Essex, they identified it as a new genus, Scoliophis atlanticus - a juvenile example of the giant sea serpent!

It would be easy to conclude simply that the amateur and professional scientists involved merely succumbed to popular fervor and leave it at that. But Chandos Michael Brown’s “A Natural History of the Gloucester Sea Serpent: Knowledge, Power, and the Culture of Science in Antebellum America”* more insightfully situates the sea serpent investigations within the context of science and status struggles in the early American republic. “For a brief moment,” Brown offers,

it appeared that American naturalists had established the existence of a new genus off the shores of North America - an accomplishment that simultaneously attested to the bounty of American nature and to the genius of American science. Ambitious and resourceful, these naturalists succeeded in introducing American evidence into the contemporary, largely European debate over the hypothesis of animal extinction. Wishing only to transform the relation of American science to the learned savants of the Old World, the Boston naturalists could not have anticipated that in the process they also would discover how precarious was their status in their own land. The episode further illuminates a peculiar feature of the practice of science in America: an activity shaped, in varying degrees, by the often conflicting claims of national pride and regional loyalty. Therefore, any natural history of the Gloucester sea serpent also must adumbrate the contest for cultural authority that engaged the attention of many American intellectuals during the formative years of the early republic.

Brown describes not only the reluctance with which Christians and deists of the era met evidence of extinction (and in some cases naturalistic investigation itself), but more centrally the concerns that seemed in part to motivate scholars to embrace the notion of a giant sea serpent prowling the waters off Massachusetts. This “discovery” appeared at a moment in which New England intellectuals were seeking to demonstrate that their locality/region/nation’s wonders and science were worthy of being taken seriously by the European scientific establishment (not to mention the US government). Unfortunately for them, they clung in this instance to a personality and status-driven idea of evidence in which challenging the credibility of the personal testimony of “gentlemen” or observations couched in scientific language was perceived as a personal attack as well as to a heroic conception of science that seemed to prize bold ventures above patient empirical work.

It doesn’t appear that anyone’s reputation was ruined or finances destroyed, so I don’t feel guilt at finding the story charmingly funny. At most, it seems to have been a source of some embarrassment – especially after the Linnaean Society’s report was so flatly dismissed by Henri de Blainville, editor of the Journal de physique - and likely an object lesson for some. Interestingly, the sea serpent reports were mocked at the time, especially in the South. In 1819, Charleston writer William Crafts, who had attended Harvard and knew well the culture he poked fun at, composed a satirical play, The Sea Serpent; or, Gloucester Hoax: a Dramatic jeu d'esprit in Three Acts, from which Brown quotes some. I wish I had the whole play to read, since it sounds just wonderful. It’s a wry sociology of the sea serpent “hoax,” “which captures in the satiric movement of its own plot the greater dramas that preceded it: the thoughtless boosterism of New England culture and the self-serving promotion of the Linnaean Society, the heedless nationalism of American naturalists, and finally, the consequences of an ill-considered quest for knowledge.”

The play contains a great exchange between the characters “Linnaeus” and “Skepticus.” In the end,

Linnaeus is chastened by the revelation of his own willful misapprehension and cautions others, in the fashion of Francis Bacon, to

Deem nothing true that is not proved - nor then
Believe it all - but doubt and doubt again
Falsehood's a floating superficial thing,
but truth is deeper than the deepest spring.

But “Seraphina, the daughter of Linnaeus,” Brown notes,

has the final word, which she addresses to the Linnaean Society and to other impetuous naturalists of the young Republic, who in their desire to impress merely court humiliation:

So fares it always with the advent'rous race,
Who banish nature - and give monsters place;
Imagine miracles without their need,
Look wise in fancy - but are dupes indeed.

A very intelligent play. Somewhat sad, then, that Brown closes with a criticism of Crafts. He suggests that the “critique of a science driven by cultural chauvinism and mis-directed national pride” expressed specifically in the Scepticus-Linnaeus discussion, while showing Crafts’ skill as a writer, “must have pleased him more than it could any conceivable audience for the play.” More generally, “[t]he pity,” according to Brown, “was that he chose to satirize - within the limited district of Charleston - rather than to engage his Northern brethren.” This sounds vaguely insulting toward Charleston theater audiences, and I’m not so sure Crafts chose the limited reach (who would?). But I don’t agree with the claim that public satire is not a form – and often a very effective form – of engagement with a motivated pseudoscience.

*American Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Sep., 1990), pp. 402-436.