Progressives replace one set of superstitions with another.
Progressives replace one set of superstitions with another.
S uperstitions are most powerful when given legal force. So, when James VI of Scotland — later James I of England and Ireland — believed witches had conspired against his Danish bride and worked with the Devil to summon storms and sink royal ships, he helped fuel a craze. He even wrote a best-selling book on the subject, Demonology. Perhaps this helps explain why Scotland executed five times as many witches between the 16th and 18th centuries than any other European country.
Though the Witchcraft Act was repealed in 1736, last month, the Scottish parliament introduced new legislation to exonerate those killed and offer official apologies. In one sense, the move is uncontroversial. Those convicted of witchcraft, most of whom were women, were obviously subjected to terrible injustice. Which is why the Massachusetts House of Representatives officialy proclaimed victims of the Salem witch trials innocent in 2001. But what good does this do anyone now, when the last victims died hundreds of years ago?
The truth is that this has much more to do with the agendas of the living than justice for the dead. After all, enthusiastically declaring historic injustices to be unjust bestows certain political advantages. For starters, it immediately places the declarer “on the right side of history” — on the side of fairness and progress. It also distracts from more pressing political issues — such as, in the case of Scotland, plummeting literacy rates and a worsening teacher shortage. Perhaps most significantly, it helps advance ideological claims that are largely unrelated to the historical injustice in question.
The exoneration proposals were heralded by the campaign group Witches of Scotland. If this were really about witch hunts, the constructive — not to mention relevant — point of focus would be the parts of the world where this is still happening, for instance in Nigeria, Tanzania, India, and Papua New Guinea. However, the campaign’s leading lawyer, Claire Mitchell QC, takes a more ideological than practical approach. According to her, pardoning those convicted of witchcraft is “not dissimilar to how Scotland needs to face up to its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”
The petition references the successful tactics of the Black Lives Matters campaign and says that women in Scotland “have not yet achieved parity in many ways including the workplace, in wages etc.,” While it is certainly true that women in some countries are still discriminated against — for instance, those living in Afghanistan under Taliban rule or Uyghur women in China — it is simply not true that women in Scotland face systemic sexism. Yet, to the organizers of this movement, the killing of witches hundreds of years ago is just one more shameful example of Western civilization’s oppressive roots.
Natalie Don, a Scottish National Party MSP, said of the witchcraft exoneration that, “This is an issue that does have a resonance in the modern day: by righting this wrong it can have an impact in challenging gendered and patriarchal attitudes in society.” Ironically, however, the Scottish government’s attitudes toward gender only replace old superstitions with new ones. While the mobs once armed with pitchforks, now, they assemble on Twitter.
It has been made abundantly clear, for instance, that dissenting views on the transgender issue are not welcome within the government’s party. One of the government’s most prominent frontbench MSPs was sacked for her outspokenness on sex-based rights. Scottish universities have become similarly intolerant. Abertay University Law School recently investigated one of its students who was accused of “making offensive comments and behaving in a disrespectful manner during class discussion” after she said that her definition of a woman is someone with a vagina.
Last year, the Scottish government passed a law repealing a dormant blasphemy law, under which no one had been prosecuted for nearly 200 years. When examined more closely, it transpired that this symbolic gesture actually instituted a new blasphemy law. The Scottish Police Federation warned that the so-called Hate Crime and Public Order Act “would move even further from policing and criminalizing of deeds and acts to the potential policing of what people think or feel, as well as the criminalization of what is said in private.”
Progressives can trick themselves into thinking that they are moving in a clear linear trajectory from the injustice of the past toward the promise of the future. Yet more often than not, they merely replace one set of superstitions with another.