And I will be the first to admit that I could be completely wrong in this evaluation. After all, when I think "Puritan" I usually also think "timid." Whether any of this is true, or just a stereotype built up in my head from who knows what, I have no idea.
But back to Mather... The reason I got this image of him was simply
because of the passion you can feel leaking through his words. You can tell he cares very much about God and the salvation of the people around him. However, as we know now, he may have been too quick to accuse people of "devilish" activities.
I found it interesting that, all in the same day, I had class discussions over Cotton Mather and the idea of hindsight bias. In my psychology class, we talked about how people often times can be asked a question about something and not know the answer, but as soon as they hear what the answer is automatically say "oh, yeah, I knew that." It's a bias - we hear the answer and even though we didn't know it, it suddenly becomes obvious.
It is easy for us t
o look back and see just how wrong Mather was. I mean, after all, he accused a woman of witchcraft, which eventually led to her death and the Salem Witch Trials. This is a big accusation! And looking back now, we see how ridiculous it was. But.... I can't help and feel sorry for Mather.
Living in a newly discovered land - with no maps, no GPS, no wi-fi, no cell phones - would be terrifying. We are spoiled today. Not only do we have all of these things but we also have scientific discovery. We understand the things that go "bump in the night" much more than they would have in the 1600's. I don't think it is difficult to understand why people had fears of supernatural activity during that time. I think, in complete honesty, I would have been just as afraid as any of them.
Now, this is not me justifying his actions. I do not at all think that anything Mather did was necessarily right. I can, however, have empathy for him. I don't fully understand where he was coming from, but I can see why he did what he did. It's that hindsight bias coming into play again.
I think it's something that is comparable to, say, the Iraqi war. People might look back in 200 years and say "What were they thinking!?" In our defense, and in Mather's defense, we were doing what we thought was the correct thing to do. Don't we all deserve a little bit of a break for that?
I found this picture on Google. Is it wrong for me to think that this just affirms my first suspicions about his character?
I see where you get that image of Mather in the pulpit :) I've never heard of hindsight bias before, and the way you tie it to how we now think of Mather and the Witch Trials is interesting and sounds right to me. None of us can say how we'd have behaved in Salem, and (although it's not fun to say) something tells me that I probably would've believed the accusations brought against my neighbors, or at least not questioned them. (Because then I probably would've been called a witch, too.) I agree with you that the world at the time of the Salem witch trials made it difficult not to believe in witchcraft and evil in the night: most of the land was unsettled, nights were darker then (no electricity), life was hard, and religion stood at the center of puritan towns. I can give Mather a break, but the problem that our book's introduction seemed to have with him is that he became skeptical of the evidence in the trial and said nothing. I can see why--he thought the devil was out to get New England, and it wasn't his town or directly his business--but it still leaves some disappointment with my empathy.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great post! And that Google picture definitely reinforces your image of Mather, haha! :)