Why I Wrote “The Crucible” (1996)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/10/21/why-i-wrote-the-crucible

by thazework • 6 years ago

77 37 6 years ago

exo762• 6 years ago

Witches are fantasy. Communists are real, and some of them were acting on orders from Stalin's USSR. It's not the same thing.

Foober223• 6 years ago

Well, witches are/were real. The magical powers part may be up for debate.

dibujaron• 6 years ago

He specifically addresses this in the article.

cultus3• 6 years ago

So therefore it follows that blatant disregard for civil liberties is justified? I thought you guys were against "cancel culture."

phaemon• 6 years ago

...for he rails at Communism, when the land is almost lost in Capitalism; and would cry Fire! Fire! in Noah's flood.

cmiles74• 6 years ago

Many of them were also imaginary, as history has made clear.

daenz2• 6 years ago

I don't think we're quite there yet, but it conjures up modern-day videos of people being accused of white supremacy and told that the evidence for it is the fact that they don't see it. I wish I was joking. This[0] was posted recently on one of my hyper-progressive acquaintances Instagram. Does it not have a similar level of paranoia as when people chased witches or communists?

0. https://i.imgur.com/0mzw6D8.png

GavinMcG• 6 years ago

I think that's wrong in a way that's kind of subtle. It seems to equate the system being created by intentional minds with the system being an intentionally-created one. But intentional people can still be non-intentional participants in emergent phenomena.

Tweaking it brings up an important point that's made in debates here on HN about privacy, censorship, etc., in relation to developer ethics. That is, if you are an intelligent and intentional participant in building something, and you're not thinking about second-order effects, the system you're building will still have them.

The intention in making Facebook more "engaging" probably wasn't to have radicalizing isolated communities. But Facebook was intentionally developed toward more engagement, and that was the result. Ask people who worked on the project and they'll almost certainly tell you they had no intention of worsening the situation in Myanmar. But the system that led there was still intentionally created.

a13692099932• 6 years ago

Not that it necessarily addresses your actual point, but regarding Facebook, engagement is the malicious intention. Claiming that Facebook developers didn't intend to spread memetic plagues, only to increase engagement, is like claiming that armed robbers didn't intend to shoot people, only to steal their money.

cultus3• 6 years ago

There's not much of an equivalence between some professor saying something illiberal and the apparatus of state power doing something illiberal.

jakelazaroff2• 6 years ago

You say this as if "socialism" and "communism" aren't routinely deployed as scare words against everyone to the left of Mitt Romney. That paranoia is still present — it just goes unnoticed because the censorship campaign was largely successful.

daenz2• 6 years ago

This is "whataboutism." Rather than relate to validity (or invalidity) of my point, you are re-framing the argument ("You say this as if") in a way that suggests I need to defend someone else doing something else.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 6 years ago

The thing that strikes me about this piece, is the tremendous research and hard work involved.

My father worked for the CIA in the "red scare" days. It was an...interesting...time.

lostlogin2• 6 years ago

Have you anything you can share about it?

ChrisMarshallNY2• 6 years ago

This is his bio, on my site: http://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/MikeMarshall.htm

cultus3• 6 years ago

I'm kind of surprised that an apparently large segment of HN thinks McCarthyism was a good thing.

lostlogin2• 6 years ago

What makes you think that HN readers agree with McCarthyism?

jacobwilliamroy• 6 years ago

Well cultus did get downvoted. So there's that.

the_only_law• 6 years ago

Scroll down

virissimo• 6 years ago

I read "The Crucible" in a high school English class and it significantly affected my political outlook, but having learned more of the history of that era (much of it not public knowledge when I first read it and certainly not when it was written) it's no longer clear to me that it still works as allegory.

From the article: "McCarthy—brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true—boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had “lost China” and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department—staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents—was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that."

Well, as the Venona project cables declassified in 1995 show, the State Department didn't just contain intellectuals that were pro-Soviet: it contained actual Soviet agents in contact with the USSR. This was by no means restricted to the State Department, but also included the Treasury, OSS (pre-CIA), and even the White House. See here: https://web.archive.org/web/20110514040131/http://www.access....

In addition, it is now known that the CIA ran an operation, at the request of Allen Dulles, to feed McCarthy false information about who in the government were Soviet spies with the deliberate purpose of discrediting him: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/48603/did-the-c....

Maybe this calls for a remake of "The Crucible", not as tragedy, but as supernatural horror.

schoen• 6 years ago

In the past I've thought that the trouble with "McCarthyism" was its lack of respect for freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, as well as some of the dynamics of "moral panic". That doesn't mean that McCarthy was literally personally wrong about all of his claims, and as you point out, some of them have subsequently been vindicated. It also doesn't mean that the anti-Communist or anti-Soviet cause was unimportant.

I guess this raises a big question for me: what does liberalism look like in a cold war (or a hot war)? The illiberalism of the cold war as well as other things that were done to prosecute it (including the exaltation of espionage and the seemingly irreversible boom in spy agencies and the classified world) are deeply upsetting to me even though they responded to a real and, I would agree, grave threat.

chmod6003• 6 years ago

Freedom has a fundamental asymmetry: it's much easier to give it up than to get it back. Imagine a society where it's possible to sell yourself into slavery -- you start out free, but in a moment of desperation you lose it forever.

Enemies of a free state use the state's freedom against it by exploiting this asymmetry. A moment of naivety by a voter or someone in power, or a traitor/spy, can dramatically undermine freedom.

The only solution is vigilence, which is hard to keep up forever. The Bill of Rights helps, but at some point we need to reject the politicians that are too naive to defend freedom.

EDIT: The socialist movement in the U.S. is of grave concern. Especially the Bernie Sanders brand, where he's a nice guy but somehow can't even recognize a failing socialist state a few years before it fails (Venezuela).

mariodiana• 6 years ago

For years, on the infrequent occasions when the subject of "The Crucible" would come up I would tell people, "But there were no witches in Salem."

That's the difference.

Undoubtedly, McCarthy was an odious individual in many ways. That has nothing to do with there being communists in Hollywood, the State Department, and wherever else.

Stay tuned. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

bsder• 6 years ago

Well, as the Venona project cables declassified in 1995 show, the State Department didn't just contain intellectuals that were pro-Soviet: it contained actual Soviet agents in contact with the USSR.

A stopped clock is correct twice a day.

1) Communist didn't automatically mean spy. And spy didn't automatically mean communist. In fact, most of our worst breaches weren't "communists".

2) The problem isn't just saying: "We have spies." It's finding real evidence on them.

The primary problem is finding real spies--and McCarthy had absolutely zero useful evidence to that end. If anything, he made it easier for the spies by kicking up so much cover.

So, McCarthy destroyed a lot of people ... destroyed civil liberties across the board ... and provided nothing useful to actually root out the real threats.

And this assumes that McCarthy was doing this to find actual spies and not for political gain. An assumption which I do not at all credit McCarthy with.

coolgeek• 6 years ago

The issue is that being a communist isn't - and shouldn't be - a crime.

Collaborating with a hostile foreign power is - and should be - a crime.

McCarthy made no distinction between these two ends of the spectrum. Collaboration requires intent, which McCarthy often failed to provide evidence of. In those failures, he discredited himself and his enterprise.

spodek• 6 years ago

The threat of communism is different than environmental destruction, but for those looking for historical precedent to illuminate today's problems, I recommend Bury The Chains by Adam Hochschild. It's on British abolitionism, especially Thomas Clarkson, also William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp, in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

Their actions and success seem inspiringly relevant to our times. Here's a podcast on the connections: https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo....

mnd999• 6 years ago

Interesting, but as per the guidelines, politics is offropic and this should be removed.

TT3351• 6 years ago

It seems from some of the comments that some of HN thinks it's ok for the federal or state government to treat Americans who are communists or socialists differently from those who are not. I hope this is a minority view.

neonate• 6 years ago

https://archive.is/BXp0u

Why I Wrote “The Crucible” (1996)

Related Stories