Image by: Adrian Pingstone, 2005. The photograph is of a Latin Bible made in Belgium in 1407. © Public domain. The Bible is on display in Malmesbury Abbey in England. Wikimedia Commons.
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In the United States, many people believe, as comedian David Letterman says, "that professional wrestling is real but the moon landing was faked."
For example:
"In June of 1921, a man traveling by steamship under the alias “Arthur Staley” landed in New York. He walked into a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of the United States, no doubt looking over his shoulder as he did so. The leadership of the party had been meeting in secret—to avoid the now frequent raids conducted by agents of zealous Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer— but Staley had been told the location. He handed the committee a document marked with the seal of the Communist International or “Comintern,” the governing body of all the world’s communist parties which met in the Kremlin. “This is to certify that Comrade A. Staley is duly sent by the Executive Committee of the Comintern to American Agency for Party work,” it read. A further document in Yiddish explained Staley would establish a Yiddish newspaper for communist propaganda purposes targeted at America’s thriving Jewish labor movement.
Staley’s 1921 visit should have a greater place in the history books. It marked the launch of Russia’s first disinformation campaign against America."
— A Century of Russian Disinformation: Part One: The Little Known Story of Russia's First Efforts to Provoke Revolution in America, Catherine Prendergast, Catherine's Substack, Dec 8, 2023
See also my story: "Who Paid For Millions of Fascist Pamphlets in the US in 1940?" Nazi Germany did, explained in ‘Prequel’ by Rachel Maddow. It's a 7-minute read on Medium. I've unpaywalled the link for you.
Information avoidance, according to several authors in a 2010 paper published in the Review of General Psychology, is "any behavior designed to prevent or delay the acquisition of available but potentially unwanted information."
On the topic of avoidance, Katy Montgomerie in 2023 notes a similarity in argument styles of “GC people” (i.e., so-called Gender Critical people) and “religious cultists.” Montgomerie says:
“When you find something in their worldview that's an internal contraction or that's disproved by evidence they do this thing where they avoid confronting the realisation just before they get there. Like you set them up and just before they close the loop they deflect. They do it in a way where it could only happen as consistently as it does if they were already aware of the contradiction and are just unwilling to face it.” (tweet 1, tweet 2)
Someone who is committed to a conspiracy theory probably spends a lot of time deep in their denialism, because they have to buttress those walls, and so they have less time to spend learning things broadly. Things they learn about the world broadly might eventually challenge their conspiracy theory on a limited topic, and they won't allow that. This amounts to a refusal to have useful knowledge of multiple kinds. When people elevate these limited knowledge conspiracy theorists to, say, political office, everyone is stuck with an incompetent leader.
Anti-trans activists make political parties lose elections. Their singular Qanon-style obsession makes them incapable of *any* sort of job, let alone political office. Hire one as a kitchen hand, they'll refuse to combine the vegetables & tell you George Soros made the plates.
— Pauline Pantsdown (@PPantsdown) April 1, 2023
Lawrence Davidson characterized the arguments in Rick Shenkman's 2008 book Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter as saying that Americans are: "(1) ignorant about major international events, (2) knew little about how their own government runs and who runs it, (3) were nonetheless willing to accept government positions and policies even though a moderate amount of critical thought suggested they were bad for the country, and (4) were readily swayed by stereotyping, simplistic solutions, irrational fears and public relations babble." Davidson then said that this is "a default position for any population," but that it is still a concern when, for example, "polls show [that] over half of American adults don’t know which country dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or that 30 percent don’t know what the Holocaust was." Such confusion isn't unique to the United States. "In the middle of March 2008," wrote Javier Cercas (translated by Anne McLean) in The Anatomy of a Moment, "I read that according to a poll published in the United Kingdom almost a quarter of Britons thought Winston Churchill was a fictional character."
In 2013, a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation (reported in The Week on May 10) found that 19 percent of Americans believed that the Affordable Care Act, known popularly as "Obamacare," had already been repealed or overturned, and another 42 percent weren't sure.
In 2014, the National Science Foundation said that only a slight majority of Americans polled were able to correctly respond that viruses can't be treated with antibiotics and that 26 percent said that the sun revolves around the Earth. Citing a prior poll by this organization on this same question, Susan Jacoby wrote in 2008 that "The problem is not just the things we do not know...it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism...The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation." Tom Nichols, commenting on Jacoby's column in his 2017 book The Death of Expertise, said: "Ordinary Americans might never have liked the educated or professional classes very much, but until recently they did not widely disdain their actual learning as a bad thing in itself. It might even be too kind to call this merely “anti-rational”; it is almost reverse evolution, away from tested knowledge and backward toward folk wisdom and myths passed by word of mouth — except with all of it now sent along at the speed of electrons."
Since 2014, a small but growing group of "Flat Earthers" has met regularly in Fort Collins, Colo., with sympathetic meetings occurring in a half-dozen other U.S. cities. A leader recalls seeing a YouTube video that promoted the idea of a flat earth. “It was interesting, but I didn’t think it was real. I started the same way as everyone else, saying, ‘Oh, I’ll just prove the earth is round.’ Nine months later, I was staring at my computer thinking, ‘I can’t prove the globe anymore.” The article in the Denver Post says of this group: "Many subscribe to the 'ice wall theory,' or the belief that the world is circumscribed by giant ice barriers, like the walls of a bowl, that then extend infinitely along a flat plane." In 2017, searching YouTube by the exact phrase "flat earth" (with quotation marks) yields three-quarters of a million videos. In 2018, CNN reported, "a YouGov survey of more than 8,000 American adults suggested last year that as many as one in six Americans are not entirely certain the world is round, while a 2019 Datafolha Institute survey of more than 2,000 Brazilian adults indicated that 7% of people in that country reject that concept, according to local media."
In 2010, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting received funding amounting to 0.00014% of the U.S. federal budget. CNN/Opinion Research found early the next year that "Forty percent of those polled believe funding the CPB receives takes up 1 to 5 percent of the budget, 30 percent believe public broadcasting takes up 5 percent or more of the budget and 7 percent of respondents believe the non-profit receives 50 percent or more of the federal budget." The final cohort of respondents who thought it was more than half of the budget may also suffer from general mathematical or political illiteracy, but it seems nonetheless fair to say that many people have false beliefs about the funding for public broadcasting. (For comparison, when a Roper poll in 2007 accurately informed participants that the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) receives funding equivalent to about $1 per American per year, half of the respondents said this amount was "too little.")
In 2019, when asked about Arabic numerals by an opinion polling firm, a majority of Americans (56 percent) said the numerals should be excluded from the curriculum in American schools. ("Arabic numerals" are the shapes we recognize as numbers: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.) The question was designed to highlight how quickly most Americans would respond in a prejudiced manner to anything labeled "Arabic."
"There’s no shame in not knowing; there’s shame in not wanting to know. For years I’ve said this to my college students as a way of telling them that learning should never stop. But I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that, at a certain point, there should be shame in not knowing," Charles Taylor wrote in an opinion piece for the Boston Globe. He fretted over "creative-writing students who have never heard of Edith Wharton or Ralph Ellison; journalism students who can’t identify the attorney general; students who don’t know what the NAACP or the Geneva Convention are."
"The emerging narrative of this election is that Donald Trump was elected by people who are sick of being looked down on by liberal elites. The question the people pushing this narrative have not asked is this: Were the elites, based on the facts, demonstrably right?
* * *
That Trump voters chose an easily disprovable myth over readily available facts is one sign of their willful ignorance.
And still this imperviousness to fact pales next to the racism and xenophobia and misogyny — in other words, the moral ignorance — that Trump’s supporters wallowed in. All of the condescension of which liberals have been accused can’t begin to match the condescension of the current storyline that Trump voters are too disenfranchised or despised or dismissed to be held morally responsible for their choices.
* * *
The apologists for Donald Trump voters have given their imprimatur to a culture that equates knowledge and expertise with elitism, a culture ignorant of the history of the country it professes to love and contemptuous of the content of its founding documents."
It isn't clear from this brief column how Taylor thinks factual knowledge and moral knowledge might be related. Most people would say that moral knowledge depends on drawing conclusions that incorporate factual knowledge. (For example, you have to know whether someone else is threatening you before you can properly decide how to act in "self-defense." As another example, you have to know whether a crime occurred before you can express your opinion about it. Berel Lang wrote: "...the most extreme Holocaust 'revisionists' — Faurisson, Rassinier, Butz — do not deny that if the Holocaust had occurred, it would have been an enormity warranting moral reflection, judgment, and whatever else followed from these, presumably including condemnation and punishment; they deny only that it did occur.") Some would also say that moral knowledge is not merely a concatenation of ordinary beliefs and social agreements but that it exists in some separate sphere.
Brian Klaas' 2017 book The Despot's Apprentice: Donald Trump's Attack on Democracy provides this example of people willing to give up a democratic norm due to a false belief about how a previous election was conducted.
“According to a poll taken in August 2017, 47% of Republicans believe he [Trump] won the popular vote — even though he lost it to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes. Even more horrifying, 68% of Republicans mistakenly believe that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 contest. And here’s the authoritarian kicker for good measure: 52% of Republicans surveyed said that they would support postponing the 2020 presidential election if President Trump suggested that doing so was necessary to ensure that only legal citizens could vote. Democracies die when presidents can postpone elections based on the mythology of a pernicious lie.”
Nearly a year later, in May 2018, 48% of Republicans still held the false belief that millions of votes had been cast illegally, and 35% said they were unsure.
And in November 2020, days after Joe Biden won the popular vote by at least 4 million votes and also won the Electoral College (with the same number of electoral votes that Trump had won in 2016, incidentally), a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only 6 in 10 Republicans said Biden had won. The false belief grew more popular and stuck. An Ipsos poll conducted March 30-31, 2021 found that 6 in 10 Republicans believed that Trump was the rightful victor and that the election had been somehow stolen from him, while nearly as many believed more specifically that Biden had won due to some form of vote fraud or election rigging.
Some political choices are motivated by beliefs that are not merely incidentally false, but superstitious and, I would argue, horribly immoral. Newsweek reported in January 2018 that "many evangelical Christians believe that Trump was chosen by God to usher in a new era, a part of history called the 'end times,'" and, accordingly, this group "overwhelmingly support[s] President Donald Trump because they believe he'll cause the world to end." [Emphasis mine.]
Many Americans said in an August 2018 poll that “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior,” despite the First Amendment guaranteeing the freedom of the press. The breakdown was partisan: 12 percent of Democrats, 21 percent of Independents, and 43 percent of Republicans believed the president should be allowed to shut down newspapers.
Across various countries, in a 2019 study, about 10-30% of atheists have superstitious beliefs. Agnostics are a little more likely to be superstitious. Meanwhile, 30-70% of the general population, which includes religious believers, is superstitious. This shows that while atheism correlates with a lower likelihood of superstitious belief, it does not root out superstition entirely. Belief in God and belief in superstitions are separate things.
More reasoning skills or relevant knowledge background does not always help someone arrive at the correct answer. If their reasoning is motivated by something other than seeking truth (see the definition of "motivated reasoning"), then their enhanced reasoning skills will only abet them in seeking their ulterior motive. Ezra Klein wrote in Why We're Polarized:
If the problem was truly that people needed to know more about science to fully appreciate the dangers of a warming climate, then their concern should've risen alongside their knowledge. But here, too, the opposite was true: among people who were already skeptical of climate change, scientific literacy made them more skeptical of climate change.
This will resonate with anyone who’s ever read the work of a serious climate change denialist. It’s filled with facts and figures, graphs and charts, studies and citations. Much of the data is wrong or irrelevant. But it feels convincing. It’s a terrific performance of scientific inquiry. And climate-change skeptics who immerse themselves in researching counterarguments end up far more confident that global warming is a hoax than people who haven’t spent much time studying the issue. This is true for all kinds of things, of course. Ever argued with a 9/11 truther? I have, and they are quite informed about the various melting points of steel. More information can help us find the right answers. But if our search is motivated by aims other than accuracy, more information can mislead us — or, more precisely, help us mislead ourselves. There’s a difference between searching for the best evidence and searching for the best evidence that proves us right.”
Other times, people simply don't care whether what they're saying is true, regardless of their ability to investigate the relevant facts. A 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 14 percent of US adults have shared fake news despite knowing that it was fake.
But, as Daniel DeNicola wrote in "You don’t have a right to believe whatever you want to":
"Consider those who believe that the lunar landings or the Sandy Hook school shooting were unreal, government-created dramas; that Barack Obama is Muslim; that the Earth is flat; or that climate change is a hoax. In such cases, the right to believe is proclaimed as a negative right; that is, its intent is to foreclose dialogue, to deflect all challenges; to enjoin others from interfering with one’s belief-commitment. The mind is closed, not open for learning. They might be ‘true believers’, but they are not believers in the truth.
* * *
Beliefs shape attitudes and motives, guide choices and actions. Believing and knowing are formed within an epistemic community, which also bears their effects. There is an ethic of believing, of acquiring, sustaining, and relinquishing beliefs — and that ethic both generates and limits our right to believe. If some beliefs are false, or morally repugnant, or irresponsible, some beliefs are also dangerous. And to those, we have no right.”
“The 2000 [presidential] campaign was something of a fact-free zone,” said Brendan Nyhan, who was an undergraduate at Swarthmore at the time and who subsequently founded a political fact-checking website called Spinsanity that led to a book All the President's Spin. In his doctoral program at Duke University, he moved on to ask, as Maria Konnikova put it: "If factual correction is ineffective, how can you make people change their misperceptions?"
From Konnikova's article:
[For more examples of how this might work, see these Disruptive Dissertation blog posts. In religious thought: "The specious claim that human calamities are caused by an angry God" In political thought: "False reports that President Obama is a Muslim"]"Until recently, attempts to correct false beliefs haven’t had much success. Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol whose research into misinformation began around the same time as Nyhan’s, conducted a review of misperception literature through 2012. He found much speculation, but, apart from his own work and the studies that Nyhan was conducting, there was little empirical research.
* * *
One thing he learned early on is that not all errors are created equal. Not all false information goes on to become a false belief — that is, a more lasting state of incorrect knowledge — and not all false beliefs are difficult to correct.
* * *
When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur.
Konnikova went on to say:
In a series of studies that they’ve just submitted for publication, the Dartmouth team approached false-belief correction from a self-affirmation angle, an approach that had previously been used for fighting prejudice and low self-esteem. The theory, pioneered by Claude Steele, suggests that, when people feel their sense of self threatened by the outside world, they are strongly motivated to correct the misperception, be it by reasoning away the inconsistency or by modifying their behavior.
* * *
Normally, self-affirmation is reserved for instances in which identity is threatened in direct ways: race, gender, age, weight, and the like. Here, Nyhan decided to apply it in an unrelated context: Could recalling a time when you felt good about yourself make you more broad-minded about highly politicized issues, like the Iraq surge or global warming? As it turns out, it would."
It is also important to note the difference between actually believing something and merely claiming to believe it to maintain one's public image. Public image is more obviously related to one's identity and also to one's material interests. Alexander C. Kaufman provided this example:
"In December 2006, Exxon Mobil Corp. convened a two-day summit of environmental and ethics experts at a rural retreat near the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia....For decades, Exxon had funded far-right think tanks that seeded doubt over the scientific consensus on climate change. [The new CEO Rex] Tillerson and Ken Cohen, Exxon’s PR chief and chair of its political action committee, wanted to broaden the company’s political reach. One step was changing their messaging about climate change, moving away from the denial the company had been attacked for supporting....Not long after the summit, Exxon began to modify its public stance on climate change."
Sometimes what is claimed publicly is done to maintain relationships and make money. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky on how the American mass media operate:
"But a critical analysis of American institutions, the way they function domestically and their international operations, must meet far higher standards; in fact, standards are often imposed that can barely be met in the natural sciences. One has to work hard, to produce evidence that is credible, to construct serious arguments, to present extensive documentation — all tasks that are superfluous as long as one remains within the presuppositional framework of the doctrinal consensus. It is small wonder that few are willing to undertake the effort, quite apart from the rewards that accrue to conformity and the costs of honest dissidence."
A user writing as "Exiled Consensus" in December 2018 said that it gives "too much credit" to climate change denialists to say that they are primarily motivated by science denialism.
It is equivalent to saying that cigarette company lobbyists analyze the facts, read the studies, conclude that cigarettes do not cause lung cancer, and are happy when their children develop smoking habits. Quite simply, such analysis does not occur, as author Ari Rabin-Havt explains in Lies, Incorporated. The intention of denial is to pollute discourse and sow doubt. That alone is considered a victory as it stalls action which can harm cigarette sales, or fossil fuel production. It is not science denial; rather, it is anti-profit denial, as the science is not even considered in the first place.
Or consider that Trumpist radio host Bill Mitchell tweeted in March 2020 that the coronavirus was "climate change 2.0," his way of saying that politicians were scaremongering. Mitchell is inclined to worry neither about climate change nor pandemic — or so he publicly claims. Intentionally ignoring scientists is part of his political ideology, as "GOP Climate Change Denial Set The Stage For Trump’s Coronavirus Conspiracies" more broadly (to quote a Huffington Post headline in July 2020).
Nyhan's work, by contrast, seems to be about more privately held beliefs.
Pessimism can drive down the accuracy of our estimates, according to Steven Pinker in his book Enlightenment Now:
"In a recent survey Hans Rosling found that less than one in four Swedes guessed that it [the average global life expectancy] was that high [71.4 years in 2015], a finding consistent with the results of other multinational surveys of opinions on longevity, literacy, and poverty in what Rosling dubbed the Ignorance Project. "The logo of the project is a chimpanzee, because, as Rosling explained, 'If for each question I wrote the alternatives on bananas, and asked chimpanzees in the zoo to pick the right answers, they'd have done better than the respondents.' The respondents, including students and professors of global health, were not so much ignorant as fallaciously pessimistic."
Albert Einstein said, "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not sure about the former." Elbert Hubbard: "Everyone is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding that limit." George Bernard Shaw said it would be better to know that one does not know: “Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.” As hope, nonetheless, the words of Phyllis Bottome: "There is nothing final about a mistake, except its being taken as final."
"According to Chapman University’s Survey of American Fears, more than 20 percent of Americans believe Bigfoot is real, the same number who believe the Big Bang actually happened," William Giraldi wrote in 2019.
Brian Klaas wrote in The Evolution of Stupidity (and Octopus Intelligence): What we can learn about intelligence, stupidity, and ourselves—from some of the smartest, strangest, alien-like creatures on the planet (The Garden of Forking Paths, April 23, 2024):
"Sadly, so much of our discourse around intelligence and stupidity gets hijacked by pseudoscience, racism, and debates over whether arbitrary measurements like IQ are valid. We ignore more interesting questions around intelligence and stupidity that we can learn not from ourselves, but from other species. In particular:
1. What, specifically, does it mean to be “intelligent?” What do we mean when we say that humans and chimps and dolphins and crows are intelligent?
2. Why did some species—including us—become smart, while others didn’t?
3. Why is stupidity still so widespread in humans?"
Jared Yates Sexton wrote in The Midnight Kingdom (2023):
"Powell had earned his fortune as a lawyer representing the tobacco company Philip Morris, parrying the blows of critics who asserted that cigarettes were causing an epidemic of cancer in America. Though Powell and his associates fought these accusations tooth and nail, secretly they knew them to be true. ... This tactic would later be replicated by the oil industry as their own scientists confirmed that the burning of fossil fuels was beginning to endanger the environment and contributed to calamitous global climate change. By 1968 they already knew their businesses were creating 'serious world-wide environmental changes' that could lead to 'the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, a rise in sea levels, warming of oceans,' and a whole host of apocalyptic scenarios. Rather than deal with the looming crisis responsibly or ethically, the oil companies borrowed a page out of Big Tobacco’s playbook by using their resources to fund spurious science, often relying on the same individuals and companies to break consensus and inspire falsified skepticism."
"Richard Herrnstein, one of [B. F.] Skinner’s most-accomplished students, later his colleague in Harvard’s Psychology Department, and a luminary of radical behaviorism, once explained to me that any action regarded as an expression of free will is simply one for which 'the vortex of stimuli' that produced it cannot yet be adequately specified. We merely lack the means of observation and calculation."
— Shoshana Zuboff
In 2023, we're seeing the Supreme Court's "systematic discounting of, & even hostility to, the expertise of administrative agencies. It's an aggressive, assertive form of ignorance from a very powerful body", i.e., the court is embracing "populist epistemology". — Kevin Elliott on Bluesky
In reply to which, someone mentioned this paper: Populist Constitutionalism 101 North Carolina Law Review 1763 (2023). Anya Bernstein and Glen Staszewski.
This is one reason (among several) that it’s worth society’s trouble to fully fund a community of *full time nonsense specialists*: scholars, reporters, and communicators on misinformation, disinfo, pseudoscience, and fringe, quack, and paranormal claims (plus research on extremism, propaganda, etc)
— Daniel Loxton (@danielloxton.bsky.social) January 1, 2025 at 9:14 PM
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Most working scientists are traditionally very reluctant to engage with fringe claims because it wastes time, invites abuse, and also *is not their area of expertise* (except for a few who make nonsense an additional specialty). Creationists clobbering scientists in debates is the classic example
— Daniel Loxton (@danielloxton.bsky.social) January 1, 2025 at 9:18 PM
Society has never come close to supporting skeptics, debunkers, misinfo reporters, and disinfo researchers at any level remotely approaching the scale of the problem—and even today, during the “infodemic” or “misinformation apocalypse,” there are Very Serious People who deny there’s any such need
— Daniel Loxton (@danielloxton.bsky.social) January 1, 2025 at 9:22 PM
"...Republicans are often significantly better at ignoring the policy details and focusing instead on shaping schemas within which voters perceive the world. Too many people in politics wrongly think you’ll win the argument if you have better facts. But winning the argument in politics isn’t often about finding more or better facts. It’s about perception and the cognitive shortcuts we use to process information as we sort our world into neat categories that make sense."
Brian Klaas, Schemas and the Political Brain: The neuroscience and psychology of why better facts don't make winning arguments in politics. Garden of Forking Paths, Apr 18, 2025
Chandler Fritz: In an essay for our April 4, 2024, issue, you wrote about how scholars of the early modern world must contend with deeply strange things, like flying saints and levitating nuns, without getting stuck between “the dogmas of unconditional faith and unconditional secularism.” How can a scholar embrace those strange things without looking silly?
Erin Maglaque: Historians of the premodern world must reckon with strange things all the time; it’s one of the delights of the job. For a long time, influenced by anthropologists, historians of premodern Europe tried to make these strange things make perfect sense. We tried to decipher the early modern past as if it were an alien planet; we tried to piece together the symbolism of early modern religious rituals; we tried to understand the social functions of various odd aspects of early modern popular culture. In short, we tried to smooth early modern belief into something rational. But this is not always satisfying, because people are not always rational—not then, and not now.
Some historians of a more conservative bent have reacted strongly against those earlier, broadly accepted cultural approaches. These scholars have argued that all those odd things—levitation, bilocation, miracles of all kinds, witchcraft—really did happen. To my mind that is bad history, not least because it puts us out of a job. If we accept that saints really did fly in the seventeenth century, what would be left to explain? I suppose the early modern past would become the intellectual terrain of gravitational physicists rather than historians.
...it might be more useful to think about the texture of that fantasy and what it suggests about the interior lives of the people who believed it.
— Interview in the New York Review of Books, emailed to subscribers, March 21, 2026
New type of prosecutorial misconduct just dropped cases.justia.com/new-mexico/s...
— Mrs. Detective Pikajew, Esq. (@clapifyoulikeme.favrd.social) April 30, 2026 at 8:47 PM
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People also believe false things about electric cars.
Who Counts the Rain: African climate. European ink. Old empire, new format. Roberto Suarez, Medium, April 11, 2026
"This latest phase of U.S. war [against Iran] is going horribly, of course, because this gang of fascist goons are not only reprehensibly vile and cruel and bigoted, but also they're just as incompetent as you could expect a gang of fascist goons to be. They think that strength is only achieved by murdering, so they've torched their soft power and isolated themselves from our former friends and allies, and they've fired top generals with experience in military strategy and tactics to make way for more fascist goons who can be trusted to follow illegal orders from their fascist goon bosses. This confederacy of goons think that their wealth and whiteness and maleness conveys automatic competence, so they never bothered to learn anything about anything, and they fired everyone who knew anything about anything, and dismantled all the programs that helped make anything work or might have created any advantage of any kind. They fired the knowledgeable for the offense of being knowledgeable. They dismantled the programs for the offense of being incomprehensible to them." — A. R. Moxon, A Confrontation With Truth, The Reframe, April 13, 2026
"Why Americans Are So Ignorant: It's Not Just Fox News," Lawrence Davidson, Consortium News, April 8, 2013.
Javier Cercas. The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-five Minutes in History and Imagination. (2009) Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. p. 3.
"Poll: Americans way off on public broadcasting funding," Politico.com, April 1, 2011.
"Highlights of the 2007 Roper Public Opinion Poll on PBS."
"Yes, there is shame in not knowing." Charles Taylor. Boston Globe. Dec. 19, 2016.
Berel Lang. Heidegger’s Silence. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996. p. 14.
Ezra Klein. Why We're Polarized. New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020. Chapter 4.
"I don't want to be right," Maria Konnikova, New Yorker, May 19, 2014.
"Rex Tillerson Supposedly Shifted Exxon Mobil’s Climate Position. Except He Really Didn’t." Alexander C. Kaufman. Huffington Post. Dec. 26, 2016.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 1988. p. 305.
Elbert Hubbard, quoted in The Village Voice, quoted again in The Week, Feb. 22, 2013. p. 19.
George Bernard Shaw, quoted in RefDesk.com, quoted again in The Week, July 18, 2014. p. 15.
Phyllis Bottome, quoted in the Associated Press, quoted again in The Week, June 13, 2014. p. 15.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2020.
To avoid false beliefs, don't use AI.
Read: Oops! State Dept. Mislabels Every Country On A Map Of Africa At Global Conference: Profoundly embarrassing. Ryan Grenoble, HuffPost, Jul 30, 2026
Trump Threatens To Sue Think Tank Over Study That Found He’s Wrong The Center for American Progress said it will not retract the report despite Trump’s pledge of a $5 billion lawsuit. Ryan Grenoble, Aug 21, 2026
If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.
Pierre Darmon's Le Tribunal de l'Impuissance (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979) was translated into English "for the general reader," minus "technical appendices dealing with juridical matters, and all footnotes and detailed references," according to the publisher's note. The English edition is Damning the Innocent: A History of the Persecution of the Impotent in pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Viking, 1986).
Historical context from Wikipedia (accessed 24 Nov 2025):
"The ancien régime (/ˌɒ̃sjæ̃ reɪˈʒiːm/; French: [ɑ̃sjɛ̃ ʁeʒim]; lit. 'old rule') was the political and social system of the Kingdom of France that the French Revolution overturned through its abolition in 1790 of the feudal system of the French nobility and in 1792 through its execution of King Louis XVI and declaration of a republic. "Ancien régime" is now a common metaphor for "a system or mode no longer prevailing".
The 17th century was a perilous time for a man to be accused of failure to consummate a marriage. It often led to pseudo-medical examinations by the Church, to a public trial in court, and to legal dissolution of the marriage. The examination was generally informed by “the eternal trinity which confirms a man’s virility: ’erecting, entering, emitting’, in the words of the surgeon Guillemeau.” (p. 13) The examination of at least one man in 1694 was invasive enough to involve the surgical removal of a large bladder stone. (p. 115) By the 19th century, there was a backlash against this entire enterprise, and the public debate about impotence subsided.
Darmon writes:
"Deep in the shadowy unconscious of every man lurks a terrible fear of castration. The myth of virility can be seen as the sublimation of this anxiety into a more abstract form which is the basis of a man’s prestige, yet completely beyond his control. The forces that do control it are certainly mysterious. From one day to the next, its happy functions, the tangible proof of male prestige and perfection, can vanish like smoke in the wind, for no apparent reason. It is a cruel state of uncertainty. For all his pride, the virile male is a man trapped by his celebrated and over-estimated body, and the endless escalation of his physical prowess, which, far from reassuring him, plunge him into an infernal spiral of anguish. At any moment, the world which he has built up around himself may disintegrate. For this reason, the trial and condemnation of his impotent fellow men affords him substantial consolation. It serves to idealise his own position, and allows him the opportunity to display his own conformity with the collectively approved sexual norms – a conformity which is statutory, mandatory and of divine ordinance. The priests themselves submit to it, and the Church casts out all those whose virile organ, though sworn to inaction, reveals the slightest anomaly." (p. 2)
Thus impotence trials had a “dual objective: to reassure and to incriminate.” (p. 13) "Is it any coincidence that, from Sparta to Nuremberg, the most disastrous ideologies have been those founded largely upon a coherent mythology of virility?" (p. 229)
Darmon says we need a "categorical" and "visceral rejection" of the impotence trial, and a recognition that "to debate impotence in the first place is to trigger off a poisonous chain of logic" that will lead to an impotence trial. (p. 228-229) These trials were especially bad for men, constituting a form of public shaming. They did seem to empower women to divorce their husbands, but this could backfire, as sometimes the woman would be taken into custody. In 1667, a woman who petitioned the High Court of Provence for separation from her husband was sent to a convent by the bishop. Darmon says this was about "depositing temporarily in the hands of a third party an object whose ownership was in dispute. The husband had first of all to prove his ability to operate the object before he could reclaim it. In the eyes of the law, the title deed was acknowledged as valid only under these conditions." (p. 127)
Despite this opinion, however, Darmon's writing conveys humor when relating many situations. In describing the idea of "relative impotence" (when a man is able to perform sexually with one person but not another), he says this idea "was responsible for situations which made complete nonsense of the institution of marriage," including a man who fathered children with several concubines in his house but had never slept with his wife. "After twelve years of this regime, his wife finally came to realise that her household was in certain respects infringing the laws of Christian marriage." (pp. 25-26) He also quotes a transcript of an investigation in which a physician Croissant de Garengeot noted of one man's erection: "far from lasting longer upon being handled, as is the case with the true erection, it immediately faded away." After which Maître Simon: "What penis, he [Simon] exclaimed, however swollen it might be, when handled and examined by Garengeot (since M. Col de Vilars was content to hold the candle all the time) would not wilt on the very spot? Did this oracle from Bourges flatter himself that he was of sufficiently comely appearance and had a sufficiently enlivening hand to stroke the imagination of a man of modesty?" (p. 183)
There was a longstanding fear that if a woman was bound to a man who could not have the kind of intercourse that was sanctioned by the authorities, she was at risk of being abused as he took out his sexual frustration on her. “For the theorists of the classical period, the ‘counsel’ and advocacy of chastity drew its inspiration from an excessively refined conception of human nature. Sexual continence in marriage was merely a fiction, an abstraction. In reality – which was rather more prosaic – the wife of an impotent man was prey to the lascivious excesses and perverse wit of a spirit unhinged by its disability.” (p. 66) In part because of this, from the 16th century, “the marriage of a eunuch was seen as an intolerable threat to the doctrine of Christian marriage.” (pp. 12-13) As an example, in 1655, Denis Pinot wanted to marry Marie Bulot, but their parish priest would not publish the banns because Denis Pinot was, “by common knowledge,” a eunuch. The couple appealed to the High Court of Paris, but the court rejected the appeal. This case was famous for being a rare outcome. Generally, partners who wanted to marry would not reveal such a secret. (pp. 68-69, 71) In the eyes of the authorities: “By marrying, the impotent man commits an act of larceny, profanes a sacrament, and indulges in an inhumane, cruel and dangerous act. These were the three themes which, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, recurred incessantly in the writings of jurists and theologians.” (p. 59) Yet: “At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the surgeon Guillemeau noted that the removal of one or even of both testicles did not put a definitive end to sexual relations.” (p. 23)
Accusations of impotence could, of course, be brought up as a pretext for preventing marriages that others opposed for other reasons and interests.
“Thus in 1639 an inhabitant of Pamiers decided to get married. His brother tried to prevent him, on the grounds that he lacked ‘those natural parts necessary for marriage.’ The accused retorted that ‘the beauty, whom the matter most concerned, had no complaints, and, when this was no longer the case, she would have him tamquam patrem, non tanquam maritum’ (as a father if not as a spouse). The parliament of Toulouse ruled that the marriage could proceed. Needless to say, ‘the beauty’ had been made heiress to a tidy little fortune.” (p. 67-68)
Darmon mentions one brief anecdote from Ancillon's 1707 Traité des Eunuques, but it is possible he learned about it from a secondary source, as this book is not mentioned in his bibliography. (It was a rare book that seems never to have been reprinted until it was digitized in 2010.) He does, however, address the question of eunuchs, since this overlaps significantly with the question of impotence.
"In the case of eunuchs – those afflicted by 'overt impotence' (Tagereau) resulting from some congenital malformation – there were fewer problems. In its fullest snese, the term 'eunuch' means a complete absence of genitals. Occasionally these do exist, but with some flagrant anomaly. Tagereau reported the case of a man 'possessed of two penises, each hindering the other', of another whose testicles were situated above his penis, and of a third 'who had a penis the size of a wart and testicles that of two peas, hardly discernible.'
The contempt in which these unfortunate individuals were held by the general public reduced them to the level of outcasts or monsters. 'They bear the mark of their ignominy upon themselves,' wrote the theologian Fevret. 'How might we consider them to be whole, since this blemish in them is so considerable, and what reasons might induce us to believe them fit for marriage?' The verdict of Sébastien Roulliard was even more savage: 'These castrates are incapable of progeny, and we do take it as given that it is these which either sex is accustomed to hold in abomination, and whom the Greeks termed half-men or half-women, neither men nor women.' In their hatred of eunuchs, some went so far as to call them creatures of the devil. According to the lawyer Peleus, 'spados [eunuchs] are incubate demons, for which reason, in the manner of those spirits that have relations with women, their substance is colder than the icy wastes of Scythia, and does spoil the reproductive faculty that women possess by nature.
As a result, eunuchs found themselves outcasts, rigidly ostracised by ecclesiastical and civil legislation....the articles of canon law...prescribe[d] a scrupulous and intimate physical examination of candidates for the monastic orders. ...eunuchs were prohibited from admittance to [civil] public office..." (pp. 17-18)
Through the 16th century, eunuchs – men with no testicles and no ability to ejaculate, but sometimes with the ability to get erections – were permitted to marry, but if their wives brought them to impotence trial, the marriage could be dissolved. On June 27, 1587, Pope Sixtus V required that the marriages of eunuchs should be dissolved regardless of whether the married couple wanted that. This was followed at the turn of the century by a prolonged legal battle of the Baron d'Argenton who sought to prove that his testicles, while undescended and thus not visible, nevertheless existed. He lost the case. In 1604, "[t]he whole of Parish rushed to be present for the autopsy of his body," and, when the doctors found his undescended testicles, "D'Argenton was posthumously declared potent, and the Faculty of Medicine in Paris pronounced by decree 'that for the purposes of engendering offspring, it is not requisite that the testicles be present in the scrotum of a man, provided nevertheless that he display other and sufficient marks of virility.'" (pp. 21-22)
Meanwhile, "hermaphrodites" – those who exhibited physical characteristics of both sexes – were at risk of summary execution from Roman times all the way through the ages, despite Ulpien's third-century Lex Repetundarum statute that dictated that they should be assigned to one sex or the other and treated accordingly, a precedent that continued to influence pre-Revolutionary France.
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Chevalière d'Éon (1728–1810)
One question is whether empiricism itself can be empirically verified. Michael Lerner:
"Consider its [scientism’s] central belief: ‘That which is real is that which can be verified or falsified by empirical observation.’ The claim sounds tough minded and rational, but what scientific experiment could you perform to prove that it is either true or false?"
Another is whether, although empiricism is indeed a value, there may be other methods and approaches that are also valuable. Sir James Baillie:
"Empiricism is so true that the closer one keeps to it – without becoming an empiricist! – the better. Just as, on the contrary, Idealism is so questionable that the farther one keeps from it – without ceasing to be an idealist! – the truer will one's view of reality be."
Daniel C. Dennett:
"This spell must be broken, and broken now. Those who are religious and believe religion to be the best hope of humankind cannot reasonably expect those of us who are skeptical to refrain from expressing our doubts if they themselves are unwilling to put their convictions under the microscope. ... If the case for their path cannot be made this is something that they themselves should want to know. It is as simple as that. They claim the moral high ground; maybe they deserve it and maybe they don’t. Let’s find out."
In philosophy, it is important to define one's terms precisely, as advised by Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet:
"One of the essentials for any sound philosophy is to produce for every science an exact and precise language in which every symbol represents some well defined and circumscribed idea; and so by rigorous analysis to guarantee that every idea is well defined and circumscribed."
Defining terms enables them to be verified. However, if defined too rigorously, one loses the flavor, subtlety and ambiguity of ideas, as well as the different human perspectives that generate them.
Michael Lerner. The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. p. 132.
Sir James Baillie, Reflections on Life and Religion, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1952. p 252-3
Daniel C. Dennett. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Penguin Group, 2006. p. 17.
Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. (1794) Translated by June Barraclough. Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, Inc. 1955. p 44.
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Epicurus said: "Philosophy is useless if it does not drive away the suffering of the mind."
What will end suffering and bring joy? Is it a final analysis, or is it the process of thinking itself?
First, we may need to begin with reverence, as Sir James Baillie wrote: "The final and supreme destiny of the scholar is to unite wisdom with kindness, knowledge with love, care for truth with love of man – and without reverence that is not possible." We may also need curiosity, as St. Augustine wrote: "We learn better in a free spirit of curiosity than under fear and compulsion." We may need to accept our humble limitations and contradictions, as Johannes Climacus wrote:
"That which makes understanding so difficult is precisely this: that he [the learner] becomes nothing and yet is not annihilated; that he owes him everything and yet becomes boldly confident; that he understands the truth, but the truth makes him free; that he grasps the quilt of untruth, and then again in bold confidence triumphs in the truth."
And we may need to resist assumptions, conclusions, labels, and roles that are given to us, as James Baldwin wrote:
The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor can one's family, friends, or lovers – to say nothing of one's children – to live according to the world's definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.
Epicurus, quoted by Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy, Vintage Books, 2000. p 55.
Sir James Baillie, Reflections on Life and Religion, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1952. Title page.
Augustine, Confessions, I:14
Johannes Climacus (Soren Kierkegaard), Philosophical Fragments, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1985. p 30-1.
James Baldwin, quoted by John Stoltenberg as an epigraph to Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. New York: Meridian, 1989.
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A character in a novel by Gregory David Roberts called truth a "bully". People feel they have to pursue and honor truth even when they don't like it or it doesn't seem to serve them.
"...take yesterday, for instance, when we were all talking about truth. Capital T Truth. Absolute truth. Ultimate truth. And is there any truth, is anything true? Everybody had something to say about it – Didier, Ulla, Maurizio, even Modena. Then you said, The truth is a bully we all pretend to like. I was knocked out by it. Did you read that in a book, or hear it in a play, or a movie?"
This truth, this bully, requires its own bully – the challenge of falsehood – to compel it to strengthen itself. John Stuart Mill wrote, "If opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil's advocate can conjure up."
But then, maybe the devil's advocate is also correct, as per Neils Bohr: "There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of the great truth is also true."
Some see a "hierarchy of truth," as explained by Kovach and Rosenstiel:
"It is interesting that oppressive societies tend to belittle literal definitions of truthfulness and accuracy, just as postmodernists do today, though for different reasons. In the Middle Ages, for instance, monks held that there was actually a hierarchy of truth. At the highest level were messages that told us about the fate of the universe, such as whether heaven existed. Next came moral truth, which taught us how to live. This was followed by allegorical truth, which taught the moral of stories. Finally, at the bottom, the least important, was the literal truth, which the theorists said was usually empty of meaning and irrelevant. As one fourteenth-century manual explained, using logic similar to what we might hear today from a postmodern scholar or a Hollywood producer, 'Whether it is truth of history or fiction doesn't matter, because the example is not supplied for its own sake but for its signification.'
"The goal of the medieval thinkers was not enlightenment so much as control. They didn't want literal facts to get in the way of political/religious orthodoxy. An accurate understanding of the day threatened that control – just as today it is a weapon against oppression and manipulation."
What reins in truth? It does require "a measure of some kind" or else it is not viewed as truth. Nicholas Fearn:
"The wider conclusions of Protagoras may be self-refuting, but he did hit upon an important insight. This is the thought that every truth requires a measure of some kind. Truths are not true of and in themselves, but are true within a system of thought, or according to certain rules that test their veracity. This would be the case even if there were only one objective measure of truth. It is unequivocally true that two plus two equals four, but only because four is always the result when we apply the rules of addition correctly. The value of a pair of shoes, on the other hand, may be different according to whether they are given to a beggar or a king, but in each case their value is a value to someone. In both cases, the measure of the truth is external to what it evaluates. How we are to evaluate the measure is another issue, and one that does not always have an easy answer. It will certainly not do to say that this measure is simply 'reality' or 'the way things are,' since how we divine the nature of things is precisely what is in question."
Gregory David Roberts. Shantaram. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2003. p. 60.
John Stuart Mill. Essay on Liberty, quoted in Rollo May, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1972. p 109-110.
Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001. p 38.
Nicholas Fearn. How to Think Like a Philosopher. New York: Grove Press, 2001. p 15.
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Aga Mohamed was a real person. He is portrayed, partly fictionalized, in Zohrab, the Hostage (1832) by James Justinian Morier, who served as British ambassador to Persia 1810-1816. In the article below, emphasis is placed on how this character is portrayed, without regard to possible "spoilers" of the three-volume novel.
Although the author acknowledges that all of Persia is full of stories – some within living memory – of "the famous Aga Mohamed Shah, famous for his cruelty, his wisdom, and his wars" and "the ominous aspect of his ferocious countenance," nevertheless he says that his story changes some historical facts. Amima was really Mohamed's mother, but in the novel, she is his niece. Mohamed really killed one brother and blinded another, but in the novel their fates are combined in a character called Hussein Kuli. The attack on Asterabad is fictitious, but inspired by "the enormities of his cruelty" during the siege of Kerman, the facts of which can be found in Sir John Malcolm's History of Persia, Vol. II. The novel contains anecdotes about a bloody handkerchief (Vol. II) and counting eyes with a whip handle (Vol. III), which he says "were related to me by creditable witnesses."
But it has not been my object to draw a miniature picture of his character; I have only attempted a sketch. He is my prototype, and I have placed him in my narrative, as a painter sometimes inserts a dragon or some such monster in the foreground of his landscape.
* * *
We are told, – Either follow tradition, or invent such fables are consistent with themselves:
"Aut famam sequere, aut sibi convenienta finge."
The chief eunuch is called the Khajeh Bashi; he lives in the palace. He "served Aga Mohamed with great zeal, although he dreaded the violence of his character with a feeling amounting to something more than womanish fear." (p. 152) He is addressed with terms of respect, for example, "Almas Aga" (diamond lord), but he responds by acknowledging his humble status: "Almas is her slave, and only waits her commands to show her the excess of his devotedness," he says to Amima, addressing her in the third person. (p. 154) The king, Aga Mohammed Shah, calls him to appear whenever anything important happens. He is, for example, in charge of supervising the Shah's nephew Fatteh Ali's goodbye to his sister. (p. 54) He is also in charge of maintaining the Corook, which is a clear path in front of the Shah's women when they are allowed to take a journey. The public is notified in advance not to cross the Corook on pain of death. "...the whole being marshalled by the royal eunuchs, who with loud shrill voices, and angry words and gestures were casting about the eyes of watchfulness and suspicion, in order to discover any audacious trespasser who might have transgressed the awful Corook. The whole was closed by the person of the Khajeh Bashi or eunuch in chief and a numerous suite, who were ready at the smallest signal to scour the country, and inflict immediate death on any unfortunate offender." (p. 29)
"the reader will perhaps be curious to become more intimately acquainted with the person of the extraordinary being who will form one of the principal features of the following narrative.
Nature, in forming Aga Mohamed Shah, intended to have installed a mind of uncommon vigour into a body capable of seconding its energies, by making it full of activity and strength; but the whole scheme was frustrated by the cruelty of man. Whilst the sharpness of intellect was preserved, it became diseased with ill-humour and moroseness, for every time that his body became an object of contemplation, he entertained such disgust towards himself that he feeling finished by placing him at enmity with all mankind. What would otherwise have been tall and erect, was now bent with the curve of apparent age; – what would have been strength of muscle and breadth of shoulder, seemed blighted and shrivelled. His face, particularly in a country where beards are universally worn, appeared like a blotch of leprosy, for it was almost totally hairless, – it could only boast of a few straggling bristles, which here and there sprouted at irregular distances, like stunted trees upon a poor soil. The skin which covered it resembled wetted parchment, hanging in baggy furrows down the cheeks, under the chin, and about the neck. This spectral countenance, for so it might be called, was, however, lighted up by a pair of small grey eyes of more than human lustre, which, from under two ragged curtains of eyelids, flashed all their intelligence abroad, and as they expressed rage, jealousy, or cruelty, made those who were exposed to their fire feel as if they were under the fascination of some blood-seeking monster. But with all this there were moments when this face would smile, and would even relax into looks of pity and benevolence, but so treacherous were these symptoms esteemed, that at length they were only looked upon as signals of some extraordinary disaster, or as beacons to warn those in danger to be upon their guard. (pp. 10-12)
"It is impossible to describe the expression of the face upon which the eyes of all present were turned, for bereft as it was of its native manliness, all that could be read in it was distrust, envy, and hatred." (pp. 33-34)
On another occasion, his niece's servant reports that "the Shah looked in a vastly killing humour". (p. 148)
"At length he came, and though but slightly attended, still his presence produced a sensation of awe that nothing could suppress, which might be likened to the instinct of smaller animals, that feel the neighbourhood of some large and venomous snake, without actually seeing it." (pp. 174-175)
The Shah has a "hideous" humpback as an attendant and, in particular, as a barber, and "it was generally supposed that the Shah had selected him for his important office, in order to keep himself in good humour with his own deformities." (pp. 12-13) The arrangement "was the ichneumon waiting upon the crocodile," and the humpback was "hated as a spy, and dreaded as an informer." (p. 13) Similarly, the chief eunuch, the Khajeh Bashi, was "many shades uglier than his master" and that, the author commented, "perhaps might have been the reason of his preservation." (p. 153)
The Shah has a falling out with his nephew on a hunting trip, because they both shoot at the same animal, and the Shah's first gunshot does not kill it, but the nephew's second shot fells it. "As soon as the successful result of it was seen, the envy and rage of the Eunuch at once started into active passion." (pp. 43-44) Even hours after the incident, he seems "not unlike a venomous snake coiled up within itself, ready to dart upon its unconscious prey." (p. 47) Because of this incident, he essentially threatens his nephew with death – letting him know that he killed his father and will easily kill him, too – and sending him away into a kind of temporary exile.
Contemplating the prisoner Zohrab, the Shah is "like the bloodhound, which, though muzzled, still snarls and snaps at what he thinks ought to be his prey". (pp. 98-99) When Zohrab approaches the Shah, "he obeyed and stood nothing daunted, with head erect and a firm countenance, exhibiting in his person a specimen of manly beauty which strongly contrasted with the degraded form before whom he stood." (p. 111) Zohrab says he does not mind if the Shah insults him or destroys him, "but when thou abusest my father, he who is thy equal, and to whom thou partly owest thy elevation, he, whom compared to thee is as the finest gold to the vilest copper, then I will speak; then I will tell thee, base dog! that I throw back thy odious words to thy face, and that I spit upon thy odious presence. And now do thy worst." (p. 116)
The chief huntsman had the idea to make a pillar of skulls (kelleh minar) of animals he slaughtered and to place Zohrab's head at the top. When he presents this delightful idea to the Shah, the Shah unaccountably turns the idea of violence against the loyal huntsman. "'What head can be better than thine?' roared the tyrant, in savage merriment." He instructs the chief executioner, the Nasakchi Bashi, "who was always in attendance," to "go complete the minar" and behead the huntsman. (p. 123) The Shah's strange order is not immediately believed by those present. "His horrid face broke into a demoniacal expression of fury when he saw that there was hesitation in obeying his commands. The ragged skin which fell in furrows down his cheeks began to bloat; the eyes seemed to roll in blood, and the whole frame, from which in general all circulation seemed to fly, wore a purple hue..." He is about to behead the huntsman himself, when the executioner steps up quickly behind the doomed huntsman and does his duty "with one blow of his deadly black Khorassan blade." (p. 124) The sight of the "streams of gore flowing and spouting in all directions" caused the Shah immediately "to be soothed into quiet," and "his features resumed their wonted dull and leaden expression." (p. 125) He then turns against the executioner for having fulfilled his command: "'Dog and villain,' he exclaimed, 'why did you slay my chief huntsman? what demon impelled your officious hand in this deed? well is it for you that there is such a feeling as compassion, and that the Shah can spare as well as he can spill! Go, go! clear up your work, and finish it by wiping your own self from our presence.'" (p. 126)
After the death of the chief huntsman, the Shah is regretful, but falls short of contrition, blaming the events on the appearance of Zohrab and lamenting his own loss of face in the eyes of his subjects.
"And thus I lost that poor old Hussein! – where shall I get such another servant? Evil was the hour when the Mazanderani youth came across my path. We have committed a crime which but for him never would have been; we have lost a servant whom we shall never replace; and my subjects look upon Aga Mahomed as a monster of injustice!" (p. 184)
Zohrab's life will be spared, but he must marry Zulma, the chief executioner's daughter.
The second volume focuses on the unrequited love of Zohrab and Amima and on Zohrab's dilemma in being forced to marry Zulma.
There is a comment about how eunuchs look older than they are:
"Upon the frame and countenance of an eunuch, an appearance of premature age settles the cast of his features even from youth, and the changes are not so strong as upon the man, whose beard, like the verdant foliage of nature, shews by the variety of its tints..." (p. 98)
The Shah is described:
He was seated on his throne surrounded by a throng of the most brilliantly arrayed courtiers and attendants. He himself was dressed so entirely with jewelry, that as the sun glanced upon him, the eye could scarcely meet the beautiful and magnificent refulgence. A crown, in the front of which shone conspicuous a diamond of immense size, was placed on his head, whilst a pair of armlets or bazûbends, those distinguishing badges of Persian royalty, also composed of stones of immense value, were distinguished on the upper limb of each arm; here glistened those two famous diamonds the koh nûr and the deriah nûr, the mountain, and the sea of light, which had been seized by Nadir Shah among the spoils of the Moguls at the siege of Delhi, and upon which the Persians now looked as talisans which gave their possessor a lawful claim upon the throne.
His sword was placed across his knees; nothing could exceed the richness of its belt and sheath; a resplendent dagger glittered in a girdle of incalculable value, whilst he was backed by a pillow, so inlaid with precious stones, that it looked like a work of mosaic. But with all this his appearance was scarcely human; a dressed skeleton would have filled his place as well; at best he became a living illustration of the vanity of life. The jewels in which his person was incased, were contrasted with the ghastliness of his features, whilst those same features seemed to destroy the value of the jewelry.
But still how dreaded a king was he to his subjects! They could not attach ridicule to any thing belonging to one who had gained power and a throne by superiority of intellect, and which he had exercised in elevating their country to great eminence among the nations of Asia. There was something so uncommon in the circumstance of a being, so degraded in his person, raising himself to kingly power, that that circumstance alone gave a character of the marvellous to his appearance, and surrounded him by feelings of awe and mystery, highly conducive to the establishment of his power. (pp. 103-104)
Amima, while receiving advice from a dervish behind a curtain, faints, and in the commotion that includes the arrival of the Khajeh Bashi (chief eunuch), the curtain is pulled back and the dervish accidentally sees her face. More women and eunuchs come to solve the problem, and the dervish turns and leaves. (p. 130)
The race of a eunuch – somewhat surprising that this is the first mention, as the palace eunuchs were racially segregated in Persia – appears in this sentence: "he perceived a well-veiled and richly dressed woman alighting from a finely caparisoned mule, held by a young black eunuch." (p. 136)
Zohrab had a little adventure in which he manages to enter the area of the palace that contained the women's apartments by dressing as a woman escorted by a servant, Ali. Zohrab was forced to stop and leave Ali when "they came to the wicket where a guard of eunuchs was stationed" and then he tried to find his way out of the palace, fearing "instant death" if he attracted the attention of more eunuchs. (p. 152) Two eunuchs were suspicious and were about "to lay violent hands upon him" when Amima's servant Mariam silences them, pretending to recognize the unknown figure as a woman, and invites Zohrab in. (p. 153) His arrival startles Amima, but, after she recovers from her faint, she begins to warm to him. Just then, they hear that the Shah, accompanied by "impatient eunuchs," wished to pass through the room to go to he turret (he is actually seeking the dervish, whom he distrusts), and they fear for their lives. Zohrab had nowhere to hide in the room, and he could not put his costume back on because harem women were not allowed to veil themselves in front of the Shah. They quickly knot scarves together and lower Zohrab off the turret to a nearby roof. The Khajeh Bashi finally bursts in, "foaming with rage at the impediments placed in the way of the performance of the Shah's commands," and Mariam responds to him: "And who are you, you old carcass without a soul! you old scabbard without a sword!" He argues back that he must do the Shah's bidding, because "by a nod of his head he may take off mine," and Mariam retorts, "We'll all teach the Shah to nod...and there let us trust may your hated noddle be nodded off." (pp. 163-164) The Khajeh Bashi sees the knotted scarves on the turret and he says, "In any other harem, a katl-i-âm, a universal massacre, would ensue." Mariam says that the women may tie their scarves any way that they like, and that if the eunuch speaks any more, they will hang him with the rope. (p. 165) They untie the scarves, and the Shah enters and is none the wiser.
Zohrab meanwhile has an interview with Zulma, who professes to be mad with love for him, but he rebuffs her and tells her he never consented to the marriage and will never marry her.
Through an act of trickery, Zohrab's father, Zaul Khan, rescues him from captivity and brings him home. The Shah is furious. "He was accustomed to look upon himself as the most quick-sighted and penetrating of human beings; what then was his mortification to find himself thus completely outwitted, and by one whom he so entirely despised! The feeling was maddening to the highest degree – he could scarcely contain his wrath from falling upon the whole city at once, so enraged was he at the situation of a dupe in which he thought he was placed." (p. 261) He orders the chief executioner and the head guard to be whipped for their negligence, and they are bastinadoed into unconsciousness. (pp. 262-263)
The Shah then calls a witness to the activities of the "dervish" and of Zulma. The witness is identified as a Kechekchi (also spelled Keshekchi, meaning unknown to me) and a servant of the Shah. He says he saw the pair but admits that he was too "afraid" to do anything. At this time, the Humpback reveals that he found Amima's armband under Zohrab's pillow; it had once belonged to Amima's father, but the Shah had given it to Amima, and she had given it to Zohrab as a token of her affection.
His first impulse was to order instant execution upon her who had excited his wrath; but so malignant were his present feelings that he seemed to have pleasure in dwelling upon them, in order hat he might devise a more sweet and perfect revenge. The pause, the awful pause, which ensued during these his cogitations was felt by those present as if they stood on the verge of eternity – as if they were awaiting the signature of their death-warrant, so sure were they that none but the most dire results could accrue from the delay.
* * *
At length rousing himself from his apparent stupor, like the deadly boa rising from torpor and preparing for a fresh victim, he wreaked the first effects of his rage upon the poor keshekchi. "Strike his neck," he roared out to the full extent of his terrible voice, as he looked upon the offender. "Go, and let others know what it is to be negligent of the Shah's affairs."
Upon this a ferash ghazeb, a most ferocious monster, stepped up, and with one blow of his sword, severed the wretched man's head from his body. (pp. 267-8)
The "odious king" proceeds with more executions of the innocent along with the guilty, and his subjects respected his authority. "'Tis true they would call him a shaitan, a devil, a blood-drinker, a despot, but then at the same time they would add the epithet ajaîb, wonderful, which in most of their minds would also imply "admirable." (p. 269)
The Humpback reveals to the Shah that a man was seen climbing down from the turret, exiting the harem. The Shah calls for the Khajeh Bashi, addressing him as "Pander." The Khajeh Bashi is terrified by the allegation. (p. 274) The Shah is angry because he had previously felt toward Amima "a devoted tenderness, a sense of gratitude towards her for allowing him to feel that at least there was one creature in the world who cared for him," but now he sees that as "a mere illusion". (p. 276) He fantasizes throwing Amima off the turret with his own hands. The Khajeh Bashi goes to Amima's quarters late at night to fetch her and bring her before the Shah. She finds this highly irregular, and tells him, "the first words I utter will be complaint of thee. Will the Shah consent to see his niece exposed to the gaze of man without her veil?" (p. 281) In response, "the hideous creature indulged in a malignant exulting chuckle". (p. 282) Instead of bringing her to the Shah, however, he brings her to a horseman, and she is left exposed in the wilderness to die. She is rescued by a man who says that his brother was castrated by Adil Shah, a rival of his father's, and that he would have met the same fate soon after had Adil Shah not died. (p. 312)
Volume III opens with the Shah's rage:
"The violence of feeling which had urged the Shah to the destruction of his niece, was succeeded by acts of unprecedented barbarity, as if he were anxious to stifle the feelings of remorse which the one had raised in his heart, by others still more atrocious. In losing Amima he had lost the only tie in which the affections of his heart were engaged; having once surmounted this, he overthrew every barrier, and like a wild beast breaking from his confinement, spread terror and alarm wherever his steps carried him. The first ravings of his fury turned towards the Khajeh Bashi."
The people gather quickly when they hear the Shah is about to sit on the throne, "for in the presence oft he tyrant, who could say that his turn for destruction might not be the next upon the book of fate?" In this case, the Shah speaks pointedly to the prime vizir Mirza Hajji Ibrahim to demonstrate to everyone that "he had arisen blameless, and that the confidence reposed in him had not in the slightest degree diminished." (p. 23) The Shah then gives military orders about clothing, provisions, and weapons. "His sagacity awed almost as much as his cruelty. Every one felt that, under the scrutiny of such an eye and such a mind, to do one's duty was inevitable, and therefore none flinched, but went heartily to work in its accomplishment." (p. 24)
Shir Khan Beg was summoned, and "the eyes of all were turned towards him, as one destined to receive a further infliction of punishment. ...he could scarcely stand, so truly was he terrified (in common let it be said with all the Persians of his day) by merely knowing himself to be near the presence of the Shah. He made his proper bow, and left his shoes at the door." (p. 40) Later, however, Shir Khan Beg is honored with rich dress, including a ceremonial diamond-hilted dagger whose honor he has always dreamed of. The Shah is thus able to assign him to a dangerous expedition. (pp. 98-102)
Zohrab has an opportunity to kill the Shah. Ali points his musket at him, but Zohrab orders him down.
"The moment of vengeance elapsed, and once of serious meditation succeeded. Zohrab was lost in a thousand reflections upon the sigh of the being whose life he had just spared. His own persecutor, the murderer of his Amima, the invader of his country, the announced murderer of himself, his father, mother, and family; the proclaimed shedder of the blood of thousands of innocent people. All this had gone by, and he had refrained from taking vengeance into his own hand. The Mussulman youth felt that such destinies were to be wielded by the hand of an all wise Providence, and not placed at the disposal of a weak and erring mortal such as himself." (pp. 132-133)
Zulma tells the Shah that, one day, Ali arrived from Asterabad to deliver a letter to the humpback. Ali repeatedly refused to tell Zulma what the letter contained, but finally, Zulma seized it from him, discovered its "treachery," and reported it to the Shah. The Shah asked the executioners to ready the rope on a lightning-struck pine tree, as Ali waited, pinned by guards, and he also sent for the humpback.
"There sat the king, coiled up as it were in the folds of his power, like the dragon of the wilderness spreading terror around; above him reared the towering stem of the pine, scathed and blackened, overtopping all the trees of the forest, stretching out its burnt and withered ranches in stiff and rigid outlines, and presenting no bad emblem of the withered person of the Shah himself." (pp. 158-159)
As soon as the humpback is brought to him and the Shah reads the letter, the humpback is hoisted up on the rope and swings from the pine tree. The Shah then asks for Ali. (pp. 164-165)
"After the defeat of the royal army at the attack of the Tehran gate, the Shah had solemnly sworn on the Koran and by his own head, that he would deliver up the city for three successive days to the pillage of his troops; and that he would not be satisfied unless at the end of that time twenty mauns of human eyes were placed before him. Humanity shudders at this recital, but true it is that in Persia, now as in ancient times, the extraction of eyes was always a punishment resorted to when death was not inflicted. Noses and ears were also frequently commanded to be brought before the conqueror, upon sacking a city; eyes almost always." (p. 198)
The Shah hates Zaul, "and he determined never to sheathe his sword until dead or alive he had both father and son in his possession." In the Shah's tent, surrounded by his supporters, "his face beaming with ferocious malignity, he pronounced the awful sentence of the katl-i-aum, or general massacre, and to give it an appearance of lawful and religious severity, he caused a firman for that purpose to be issued, sanctioned by a fetvah of the Mushtehed of Persia." (p. 199-200) It was the Siege of Kerman, and there was "heard the uplifted voices of a whole city in malediction of the tyrant." (p. 200)
From his horse, the Shah yelled, "A hundred tomauns for the head of Zaul, and five hundred for Zohrab alive." Everyone takes up the call for arms. (p. 202)
Zohrab sees his father slain, and then he cuts a pursuer in half (p. 204) and manages to rescue his father's body before being beaten and brought to the Shah. The Shah tells him it is his last day. Zohrab asks to be killed immediately so that he can "die without being grateful to thee for any thing." Then he asks the Shah if he may be the "atoning sacrifice" for the innocent people so that the bloodshed will stop. "If thou hast a heart, let my words reach it; and if thou hast a soul, let the fear of a future life and future retribution overtake it." The Shah calls him a "dog" and orders him to stop preaching. Zohrab retorts that he is the "father of dogs". (p. 213) To increase his suffering, the Shah orders: “Let his confinement be so strict, that the Shah will be jealous if even a ray of light visits him.” (p. 214)
Eyes of victims are brought to the Shah. Sadek assures the Shah that it is the requested number. The "unfeeling" Shah warns him that, if there are not enough, Sadek's own eyes will be taken to meet the request. The executioner shows him the tray of eyes and begins to count them, then the Grand Vizir Hajji Ibrahim bursts out with a plea for mercy for the innocent victims. "The perverseness of the Shah's mind, acting upon his hot and ardent nature, was like a parasitical plant, which is seen to entwine itself, cover over, and take possession of a large tree in the forests of tropical climates..." He then dismisses his executioner from his responsibilities. (pp. 216-218)
When the Shah's nephew Fatteh Ali appears, older than everyone remembers him, they long for his kingship. (pp. 234-235) The Shah cannot abide hearing complimentary words about his nephew because he feels that he is being negatively compared to his nephew. (p. 238) When the Shah tells his nephew that he killed his sister Amima, his nephew curses him, and the Shah orders him killed. (pp. 248-249) Fatteh Ali is taken to prison, lamenting Amima’s death. Sadek longs to tell him the truth but can’t. (pp. 253-254)
The Shah tells Sadek that "my liver is turned into blood," but Sadek prostates himself and begs: "Your slave is too great a lover of his Shah to commit such an act. Let the Shah kill him, but let him stay his hand from the blood of the innocent youth." The Shah calls Sadek a "base reptile" and dismisses him, but privately, the Shah worries that he is losing favor among his own servants. (pp. 259)
The Shah orders Zohrab to be paraded backwards on a donkey, spit on, then impaled. (p. 265)
Then he tells Zulma: Her father, the chief executioner, must kill Sadek before dawn. He doesn’t tell her why. Meanwhile, Sadek finds his name on a kill list, and Sadek and Hussein conspire to stab the Shah in his sleep. The Shah awakens enough to run around the room first before he’s stabbed in the heart and falls, still declaring he is the Shah. “And thus fell the scourge of Persia’s fair kingdom, and of her soft and thoughtless sons.” (p. 280)
Sadek removes the Shah's head and also takes the kill list. He then breaks the news to the confined prince Fatteh Ali that his uncle, the Shah, is dead, and that his sister, Amima, lives. Sadek puts the severed head in the Grand Vizir's room as a prank. (p. 285)
When Zulma hears the news of the Shah's death, she wants to tell the imprisoned Zohrab. Fatteh Ali gives him the news about the Shah and Amima. Fatteh Ali is bedecked with the koh noor and deriah noor jewels on his arms. (p. 320)
Zohrab marries Amima. Zulma settles for a quarrelsome marriage with Shir Khan Beg. Sadek chooses voluntary exile.
James Morier. Zohrab, the Hostage. London: Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, 1832.
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