Exceptional Wisdom: Modern Heresies that were Once Considered True by Most People

McCamy Taylor

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Mon Jul-13-09 07:03 PM
Original message

Exceptional Wisdom: Modern Heresies that were Once Considered True by Most People

Truth is eternal, knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.
Madeleine L'Engle, An Acceptable Time

I am going to step into my time capsule to explore some universal “truths” which were once treated as heretical, dangerous or just plain preposterous by the overwhelming majority of people. I thought it would be interesting to see what our world would be like today if mass consensus had been required before the human race could evolve its body of knowledge.

I. Segregation Now, Segregation Forever

At one time, separate but unequal was not simply considered to be a good idea. It was the rule of the land. Take the case of Virginia. After the US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education Virginians were so incensed at the notion of allowing White and Black children to mingle that they authorized their elected officials to close the public schools in their state, rather than see them integrated. This plan was dubbed “Massive Resistance.” Here is a link.

http://www.lva.virginia.gov/exhibits/brown/resistance.htm

In January 1956 white Virginians overwhelmingly supported a referendum to call a constitutional convention. After months of debates in the General Assembly, Governor Stanley ruled out control of anti-integration efforts at the local level and proposed to deny state appropriations to schools that integrated. Gray and the other commission members repudiated their report (which recommended what the Governor was proposing) and supported his plan. Massive Resistance became enshrined in the new state constitution. Virginians reacted to these decisions by petitioning and corresponding with Governor Stanley and local and state leaders.

Read about how Virginians agreed to make education “optional”, how they stripped public funds from any school that complied with the order to integrate and how they voted to close any school that came under federal jurisdiction.

Over the next half century, public opinion would gradually change on this issue. However, it took the courageous action of the U.S. Supreme Court to force Americans to confront their prejudices and come to the realization that they were unfounded. Good thing the Court did not make its rulings based upon popular consensus.

II. The Flat Earth Society

That is Galileo, facing the Roman Inquisition.

In 1611 Galileo came to the attention of the Inquisition for the first time for his Copernican views. Four years later a Dominican friar, Niccolo Lorini, who had earlier criticized Galileo's view in private conversations, files a written complaint with the Inquisition against Galileo's Copernican views. Galileo subsequently writes a long letter defending his views to Monsignor Piero Dini, a well connected official in the Vatican, he then writes his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina arguing for freedom of inquiry and travels to Rome to defend his ideas
In 1616 a committee of consultants declares to the Inquisition that the propositions that the Sun is the center of the universe and that the Earth has an annual motion are absurd in philosophy, at least erroneous in theology, and formally a heresy. On orders of the Pope Paul V, Cardinal Bellarmine calls Galileo to his residence and administers a warning not to hold or defend the Copernican theory; Galileo is also forbidden to discuss the theory orally or in writing. Yet he is reassured by Pope Paul V and by Cardinal Bellarmine that he has not been on trial nor being condemned by the Inquisition.
Snip
In 1633 Galileo was formally interrogated for 18 days and on April 30 Galileo confesses that he may have made the Copernican case in the Dialogue too strong and offers to refute it in his next book. Unmoved, the Pope decides that Galileo should be imprisoned indefinitely. Soon after, with a formal threat of torture, Galileo is examined by the Inquisition and sentenced to prison and religious penances, the sentence is signed by 6 of the 10 inquisitors. In a formal ceremony at a the church of Santa Maria Sofia Minerva, Galileo abjures his errors. He is then put in house arrest in Sienna. After these tribulations he begins writing his Discourse on Two New Sciences.
Galileo remained under house arrest, despite many medical problems and a deteriorating state of health, until his death in 1642. The Church finally accepted that Galileo might be right in 1983.

http://phyun5.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/Notes_www/node52.html

III. “More Doctors Smoke Camels than Any Other Cigarette”

Would I kid you? Once upon a time, before it became the rule of the land to criticize smoking as the number one preventable cause of death, smoking was considered a good thing. Here is an article about Camel’s now notorious “More doctors smoke camels than any other cigarette” ad campaign.

http://www.old-time.com/commercials/1940%27s/More%20Doctors%20Smoke%20Camels.html

When tobacco companies were trying to promote cigarettes, they claimed that their product would help cut down on the incidence of tuberculosis (by decreasing the use of spittoons for chewing tobacco). A century ago, they would have protested loudly if anyone had dared to suggest that cigarette smoking actually increases a person’s risk for developing pulmonary TB, as the study linked below does.

http://www.tripdatabase.com/spider.html?itemid=650934

With countries like the U.S. handing out free cigarettes to their troops and to those incarcerated in prison, it might have been difficult to get anyone to perform or fund such a study. If the majority of people do not want to learn something (like cigarettes are harmful to their health) there are many ways that they can make like the three monkeys and keep themselves blind, deaf and mute.

IV. The Only Good ____is a Dead _____

Our forefathers (and mothers) were brought up reading the same Declaration of Independence that we read in school. And yet, for some reason, quotes like

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/freedom/doi/text.html

Were not read literally. If they had been, we would not have gone through a long period in this country in which people would lynch Blacks, Latinos, Asians and others and then photograph themselves next to corpse and send the photos to friends and family in the form of postcards.

You thought that lynching was a dark secret of the distant American past, a shameful act perpetrated by sinister men who had to hide their faces behind white hoods in order to disguise their shame? Think again. Lynchings were once like carnivals. They were family affairs. Bring your kids, let them see death up close. The victim was only a ____after all.

http://www.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/african/2000/lynching.htm

Smile for the camera, ma’am. Let future generations know how proud you were to brutally suppress anyone who challenged the status quo. Mob rule is the American way, and if most folks think it, then it must be right.

V. I Can Not Define Pornography, but I Know What It Is When I Read It

For over ten years after its publication in Paris in 1922, James Joyce's novel for the ages, Ulysses, was banned in the United States on grounds of obscenity.

http://everything2.com/node/1084121

Read about how U.S. authorities suppressed the novel which would later be named the most important English language work of fiction in the 20th century. Just the thought of anyone masturbating while reading about Leopold Bloom masturbating is enough to send giggles through a modern audience. In this enlightened age, we know that censorship accomplishes nothing….

Other literary standards that were once considered too shocking for anyone to read----

Madame Bovary .

However, when Flaubert refused to denounce Emma in Madame Bovary for her actions and Emma herself did not ask for forgiveness, Flaubert was charged with pornography and blasphemy, and the book was banned.

http://www.answers.com/topic/madame-bovary-novel-5

In 1934, the American public, outraged over the on screen excesses of people like Mae West, went along with the Hollywood Code. Among other things, the Code stated that

The ridicule of religion was forbidden, and ministers of religion were not to be represented as comic characters or villains.

Snip

Portrayals of miscegenation were forbidden.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code

That meant a realistic portrayal of Galileo’s ordeal at the hands of the Roman Inquisition and a film biography of the life of Thomas Jefferson, whose mistress also happened to be his slave were both forbidden. And so, a generation found its attitudes and beliefs about history, morality and human nature warped by the need to allow nothing on the screen that might offend anyone.

What is now proved was once, only imagin'd.
William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

VI. If Thoughts Are Crimes, then Those Who Think are Criminals

If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

snip

The issue involved here is quite a simple one: Is every opinion, however unpopular — however foolish, even — entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say ‘Yes’. But give it a concrete shape, and ask, ‘How about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?’, and the answer more often than not will be ‘No’, In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses. Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organised societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg said, is ‘freedom for the other fellow’. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.

George Orwell, preface to Animal Farm

Forget mere censorship. U.S. history is full of instances of people being executed for what they said rather than because of what they did.

The judge in the case , Webster Thayer, allegedly stated to the jury "This man, (Vanzetti) although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacco_and_Vanzetti

Joe Hill was executed for belonging to the IWW---International Workers of the World, the only union of its day that admitted women and minorities.

In Chicago 1968, Mayor Daley sent out his police to beat protesters, but it was the protesters who went on trial as the Chicago Seven.

A few years later, the nation under Richard Nixon did not even wait for a trial verdict before sending out troops to execute war protesters at Kent State. Such talk was dangerous in a time of war. People needed to be taught to keep their mouths shut.

"He…kept after me all day for more facts. Hoping rioters had provoked the shooting… There’s an opportunity in this crisis as in all others – but it’s very hard to identify & know how to handle it. Main need right now is to maintain calm & hope this serves to dampen other demonstrations rather than firing them up."
Haldeman writing about Nixon’s reaction to the shooting.

http://speccoll.library.kent.edu/4May70/MissionBetrayed.htm

Of course, Kent State did not accomplish what Nixon wanted. Though it took years, the family members of the victims finally had their day in court. The dead are remembered as martyrs rather than as dangerous traitors. The only truly effective way to stifle dissent is to convince people to censor themselves.