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| General store interior, Moundville, Alabama. Walker Evans/FSA, 1936. |
I remember being told this story years ago, by someone I was inclined to believe. A little old lady (please don't shoot me - that's what the guy said), possibly in Kentucky or Tennessee (it was a long time ago and I'm not sure), ran a story in the newsletter she produced for her church. The story said that the Procter & Gamble logo - a circular image of the Man in the Moon and thirteen stars - was actually a sign that P&G worshipped the devil. P&G started to receive phone calls, and was understandably alarmed. Lawyers and investigators went nuts trying to run the story down, and eventually found the little old lady, who said she had received the information from a trusted source and was mortified to learn that it was inaccurate. Meanwhile the story had been copied from church newsletter to church newsletter and had taken on a life of its own.
I have no idea whether this story is accurate, but the rumor did start in the 1980s, and it was remarkably persistent. Eventually P&G saw no option but to get rid of the logo. (Here's a 1985 story on the early days of the rumor, from the New York Times.)
All of this, you will note, took place before the rise of the Internet. Indeed, the medium of communication was paper. There was a second coming of the rumor, on the Amway voice mail system, which led to an award, not against Amway, but against several former Amway distributors, in 2007. (Here's a Times story from 2007.)
My point here is twofold. First, there have always been submerged narratives. Second, electronics amplifies these narratives, but it does not invent them.
So the next time some techie stands on a platform and tells you all is new, don't believe it. All they have is a bigger megaphone. And that doesn't make you smarter. It just makes you louder.
I don't suppose anybody cares too much about the death of the P&G logo - although it was a nice piece of graphic art - but the lesson is that even submerged narratives can do a bunch of damage.
For some time now, historians have been looking into these submerged narratives. It turns out there are a lot of them. Some of them surface, and even confront the controlling narrative of the time. But others remain quietly insignificant for the world at large.
The Cheese and the Worms
Here's a submerged narrative from the sixteenth century.
Domenico Scandella, aka Menocchio, was born in 1532 in the Italian region of Friuli, which extends from the Adriatic to the Alps a bit northeast of Venice. Menocchio lived almost his whole life in a little town at the foot of the Alps called Montereale, where he worked mainly as a miller and served as mayor in 1581.
I find myself thinking of Menocchio as the crazy uncle who comes to Thanksgiving dinner and shares his fantasies with the rest of the family, of course presenting them all as incontrovertible fact.
It being the sixteenth century, Menocchio's main subject of discourse was religion, and his masterpiece of speculative theology is now known as The Cheese and the Worms. Carlo Ginzburg uses the phrase as the title of his biography of Menocchio, which was originally published in Italian in 1976.
Ginzburg recalls sitting in an archive in Udine, which is not too far from Montereale, during the summer of 1962, going through records of old trials, and coming across a reference to a man who maintained that "the world had its origin in putrefaction" (p. xi - citations are to the 1980 English edition). He made a note; other research intervened; but eventually he got back to Menocchio and wrote his story.
Menocchio had been telling friends and acquaintances about his ideas for years, and eventually word got back to the Inquisition. He was denounced for heresy in 1583; in 1584 he was arrested, imprisoned, and put on trial.
Think of these proceedings as Menocchio's Thanksgiving dinner. With the Inquisitors, instead of family and friends.
He let it all hang out. "The world had its origin in putrefaction?" Happy to explain, your honor. "I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed - just as cheese is made out of milk - and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels." And one of the angels is God. (Pp. 5-6).
Things then become a bit more conventional, with Lucifer taking a fall and God creating Adam and Eve.
The Inquisitors had been asking witnesses whether Menocchio spoke "in earnest or in jest," and whether he was of sound mind. The answers came back that he spoke in earnest, and he was not mad. One of Menocchio's eleven children, Ziannuto, tried to keep the off-ramp open. He put out the word that his father was "mad" or "possessed." He also hired his dad a lawyer. (Pp. 6-7.)
For his part, Menocchio just asked for the cranberry sauce and forged ahead. He had unkind words for the Virgin Mary and the clergy, and he rejected all the sacraments except communion, where he insisted that Christ was not present in the wafer, but rather the Holy Spirit (pp. 4, 5, 9-11).
Menocchio even suggested that lawyers in court should speak in the vernacular, and not in Latin, so that the common folk could follow the proceedings (p. 9).
Not surprisingly, the Inquisitors found Menocchio guilty of heresy. He was sentenced to life in prison. In 1586, his sentence was commuted; he was allowed to go home to Montereale and told to speak no more of his many ideas (pp. 91, 93, 95).
And it appears that, for a number of years, he did just that. Eventually, however, he started talking again, and the Inquisitors got wind of it. He was rearrested in 1599 and declared a "relapsus" (pp. 103, 110).
It was not a good time to be a relapsed heretic. In fact, it could get you killed. There was some back-and-forth in Menocchio's case, but in the end the pope himself sent word that Menocchio must die. And that's what happened (pp. 127-128).
Why Kill Menocchio?
With his death, Menocchio slipped from obscurity to oblivion, where he remained for nearly 400 years, until Carlo Ginzburg told his story. I wouldn't say that Menocchio has now achieved the fame of a rock star, but last year, in 2018, the movie Menocchio appeared. So, a biography that's forty years old and still in print, and now a biopic. Not too shabby.
Reading his story from the vantage point of the 21st century, I found myself asking, "Why did they bother to kill this crazy old coot?" I suspect some of my readers may have been harboring similar thoughts for the last several paragraphs. I think, upon reflection, that the answer is two-fold.
First, Menocchio was definitely a heretic. Let's just talk about The Cheese and the Worms, and leave the other stuff on the side.
Have a look at the Apostles' Creed, one of the basic statements of Christian faith. Here are the first seven words: "I believe in God the Father Almighty." Seven words in, and Menocchio is already on shaky ground. Add the next five words - "maker of heaven and earth" - and he's toast.
At the center of Menocchio's downfall, Ginzburg places "the refusal to attribute the creation of the world to the divinity" (p. 56).
Second, we need to remember that, at this time, the Roman Catholic Church was fighting for its life. Let's take a moment and review some highlights from European History 101. In 1517, the Protestant Reformation began when Martin Luther published his 95 theses. Eventually, much of northern Europe, still considering itself Christian, declined to recognize the authority of the pope in Rome. Rome responded with the Counter-Reformation, largely engineered during the Council of Trent, which lasted from 1545 to 1563. The Wars of Religion, as they are called, culminated with the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), which devastated Germany in particular, killing as much as one-third of its population. After this catastrophe, religious animosity continued, but outright bloodshed declined.
So Menocchio propounded his ideas at an inauspicious time. Thought control through the Inquisition was already well established. And it wasn't just for obscure Friulian millers. Giordano Bruno was one of the most interesting intellectuals of his generation, and he also faced the Inquisition at roughly the same time as Menocchio.
Although Giordano Bruno supported the novel view of Copernicus that the earth revolved around the sun, it seems that the Inquisition was primarily interested in more standard deviations about the nature of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and similar issues. He was found guilty and burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.
And then came Galileo, who also supported the Copernican system, publishing a book on the subject in 1632. This time the Inquisitors were not amused, and in 1633 they forced him to recant. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
So much has changed between Galileo's time and ours. And I do think it's hard, from the vantage point of the 21st century, for us to place ourselves back in that time. Perhaps it helps to trace some of the changes as they came along. In this regard, I think it's useful to jump the Atlantic and look at some things that went on in the American colonies in the seventeenth century.
Let's first look at the Puritans in Massachusetts, who got their start a few years before Galileo's trial. The Puritans weren't interested in people whose religious views differed from theirs. Rhode Island was founded by Roger Williams, who was expelled from Massachusetts because he thought for himself. One writer calls early Massachusetts "a theocracy that brooked no dissent, religious or political."
Over the course of the seventeenth century, though, tolerance did get a foothold in the colonies. This was particularly true in William Penn's Pennsylvania, founded in 1681. Penn welcomed settlers of all faiths, not just his fellow Quakers. And they came - Huguenots, Mennonites, Amish, Catholics, Lutherans, and Jews. Anyone familiar with the history of Pennsylvania recognizes that the ideal of tolerance was not always matched by reality, but the fact that the ideal existed was a significant break from the European past.
Flash forward a hundred years to the U.S. Constitution and its First Amendment, where there is the notion that the new federal government "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Lurking under this rather legalistic language, I think I detect a new idea - the idea that we should stop slaughtering one another over theology.
The amendment goes on to protect freedom of speech, and of the press, "and the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Menocchio would not have recognized this new world. Menocchio had a lot of grievances (he was like the American colonists in this regard - have a look at the Declaration of Independence) and he longed for nothing so much as a hearing. As he told the Inquisitors, "I said that if I had permission to go before the pope, or a king, or a prince who would listen to me, I would have a lot of things to say; and if he had me killed afterwards, I would not care." (P. 9.)
Free speech, freedom of religion, and a government that listens to the people. Okay.
Pierre Clergue, the Lusty Priest
A basic problem with the old order was that the church had, from the time of Constantine the Great, become a part of the government, and its ears had become attuned to the voices of power and increasingly deaf to the voices of the people.
It has been observed that, as secular power increases, spiritual authority tends to decrease. This creates an empty niche for people who wish to present themselves as the new spiritual authority.
To see how this plays out on the ground, let's parachute into the fourteenth century, to a little village on the northern edge of the Pyrenees called Montaillou, and have a look at the village priest, named Pierre Clergue.
Montaillou is the title of a book by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. It was published in French in 1975 and in English in 1978, and provides a portrait of this little town between 1294 and 1324, relying on remarkably rich records of the Inquisition.
Montaillou, located at an elevation of around 1,300 meters, was a farming and sheepherding settlement that in the early fourteenth century had a population of around 200 or 250. The Clergues were one of the most important families in the area. They were prosperous peasants, and they had also cornered effectively all the official power in the town. Pierre, as the village priest, was the religious authority, conducting services, hearing confession, and collecting tithes, which are taxes owed to the church. (The penalty for not paying your tithes was excommunication.) His brother had the title of bayle, which made him the chief civil officer, collecting taxes and enforcing the law. Together, the two brothers had a very nice little version of Tammany Hall. They pretty much controlled the town and the town's relations with the outside world, and Pierre was definitely the senior partner. (See chapter 3.)
Pierre also had an eye for the ladies. On page 155, Le Roy Ladurie lists twelve of his mistresses whom we know by name. Among them was a young cousin, Grazide Rives, who later married Pierre Lizier. "At that time," she told the Inquisition, "I was a virgin. I think I was fourteen or fifteen years old. He deflowered me in the barn [borde] in which we kept the straw." (P. 158.) Another conquest was Esclarmonde Clergue, Pierre's sister-in-law. (Leviticus 18:16 suggests in strong terms that a man should not have sex with his sister-in-law.)
Pierre also had a long affair with a local noblewoman, Beatrice de Planissoles. Beatrice told the Inquisition that they practiced a form of birth control that she perceived to be effective. There was an herb, which was wrapped in a tiny piece of linen. "And he had a long cord which he used to put round my neck while we made love; and this thing or herb at the end of the cord used to hang down between my breasts," as she told the Inquisition (p. 173). And he would insert the herb in her vagina before they had sex. And if they were ever concerned that the herb had gone astray - in moments of passion, such things have been known to happen - she could always tug on the cord, put the herb in his hands, and he could replace it.
Effective or not, it was a nice game. Pierre clearly enjoyed entertaining Beatrice. At one point, they were both in the village of Prades d'Aillon, and he prepared a bed for them in the church so they could spend the night there. "Oh! Oh! How can we do such a thing in the church of St. Peter?" she protested (p. 309). Very 1960s.
They had interesting conversations. On the subject of incest, something of a personal interest for Pierre, he had this to say: "When the world began brothers knew their sisters carnally, but when many brothers had one or two pretty sisters, each brother wanted to have her or them. Hence many murders." And so sex between brothers and sisters was forbidden (p. 52). I suppose we should give Pierre high marks for originality, but it probably would have been safer not to go there.
Pierre was a powerful man and an accomplished seducer. Normally, friendly persuasion would work, but if it didn't, as Le Roy Ladurie puts it, "he might say to a woman, either you sleep with me or I'll see that you are denounced to the Inquisition in Carcassonne." (P. 67.)
Denounce her for what, you ask. Well, it turns out that many of the people in Montaillou were adherents of the Cathar, or Albigensian, heresy. This was essentially a reboot of the third century Manichean heresy. Without getting into too much detail, the Cathars believed that evil existed independently of good, which implied that God was not almighty.
The Cathars didn't view themselves as heretics, but rather heroic Christians pursuing a better path within the church. There were two kinds of Cathars - a small elite known as perfecti and the larger group of followers, called credentes. The perfecti at this time were shadowy figures moving from place to place, ministering to their flocks, but rarely staying in any one spot for long. The credentes, on the other hand, pretty much blended in with the regular Catholics. They practiced baptism and went to confession and mass. They also had an underground side, hiding perfecti in their houses, giving them alms, and guiding them to the next safe house. But to an outsider, life in Montaillou would have looked normal and Catholic. (Pp. viii, 265, 310-311, 325.)
However, the church took a dim view of Cathars, and a threat of denunciation to the Inquisition would have been a powerful motivator to compel compliance with whatever Pierre Clergue wanted.
One of the most interesting parts of all this, to me, was that Pierre Clergue was himself a Cathar heretic. It took the Inquisitors a very long time to figure this out, but Pierre eventually wound up in the famous jail in Carcassonne, where he died.
Simon de Montfort, Trouncer in Chief
There's even another layer beyond this, though. The church had been fighting for a century to eliminate the Cathars. They should have been gone, but the flame of heresy had not been extinguished. It had been greatly diminished; it had gone to the mountains, and gone underground, but it had not been completely destroyed. Montaillou was the last center in France of the Cathar heresy. (Pp. vii-ix, xii, 231.)
Let's dial back from 1320 to the year 1200. Cathars were all over southern France, and not just up in the Pyrenees. They were in the lowlands, and in the big towns, and in the chateaux of the nobility.
There's a liminal space between being submerged and being fully on the surface. Swimmers know this space when they float on their backs on a summer day, and gaze up at the sky. Submariners in World War II called it "decks awash."
I think of the Cathars in, say, Toulouse in 1200 as being decks awash. If you looked, you could see them, but they weren't particularly demanding your attention. Frankly, they'd already taken over, and they were doing just fine where they were.
The church saw the Cathars, and it launched a preaching campaign. Things didn't go very well. In 1204 there was even a great debate, in Carcassonne, between Catholic and Cathar clergymen, with a large audience in attendance. Things still didn't go very well. (Zoe Oldenbourg's Massacre at Montsegur, published in English in 1961, is still my favorite history of the Albigensian Crusade. The Carcassonne debate is on page 91.)
In August 1205 reinforcements arrived in the form of a young Spaniard, the future St. Dominic. He really put his heart into it, but in the end it wasn't enough.
The church moved on to enforcement. In 1208, Pope Innocent III called for a crusade to suppress heresy in southern France. In July 1209 an army of crusaders showed up in front of the town of Beziers and, through a stroke of good luck, captured it quickly. The crusaders then killed all the inhabitants. On that day it didn't matter whether you were a loyal Christian or a Cathar heretic. If you were in Beziers, you died.
Terror works. The resistance largely collapsed. The crusaders did lay siege to Carcassonne, which surrendered after a few days.
In their own minds, at least, the crusaders had achieved their goal of conquest. The question now was how to manage the occupation. Several senior nobles, including the duke of Burgundy, were asked to stay behind and lead the effort. They all declined. Did they sense the looming quagmire? Perhaps.
Terror works up to a point. It creates fear and perhaps temporary compliance. But it also winds a spring of anger, which is only waiting for its moment.
In the end, the job went to Simon de Montfort, a lesser noble who nonetheless had substantial lands near Paris and was an experienced soldier who had served in the Fourth Crusade. Most of the crusaders went home, leaving Simon with only a small permanent force at his disposal. In the coming years it would be supplemented from time to time by fresh detachments of crusaders, whose presence was always temporary.
Simon was a capable soldier, but he lacked troops, and so he relied on terror as he played what was in effect a rather large game of whack-a-mole. Towns and castles would submit to him and swear an oath of loyalty. He would leave to deal with another insubordinate castellan, and rebellion would rise in his rear.
To Simon it may have looked like anarchy, but it wasn't. It was the feudal system doing what it was best at - resisting an outside invader. Of course, the system had been designed to deal with Visigoths and Vikings and Vandals, and not the pope and the king of France.
At any rate, Simon was good at his job; in 1216 the king of France rewarded him with the title Lord of Languedoc. Then one day in June 1218 Simon was fighting, once again, outside the walls of Toulouse. As Oldenbourg relates, Simon's brother, Guy de Montfort, "was wounded by an arrow fired from the ramparts. As Simon hurried across to him, lamenting loudly, he was struck on the head by a stone from a stone-gun, which (the Chanson tells us) was served and fired by women and young girls. 'A stone flew straight to its proper mark, and smote Count Simon upon his helm of steel, in such wise that his eyeballs, brains, teeth, skull and jawbone all flew into pieces, and he fell down upon the ground stark dead, blackened and bloody.'" (P. 198.)
The war continued, with the king of France playing an increasingly prominent role. In 1271, Languedoc became a direct dependency of the French crown.
Even before the start of the crusade, the Cathars had been using an old fort at the edge of the Pyrenees as their headquarters. Montsegur was a small place perched atop a remarkably steep pinnacle of rock. As life in the lowlands became increasingly perilous for the Cathars, Montsegur grew in importance as a refuge and stronghold. In 1243 the crusaders launched a siege of this almost, but not quite, impregnable position. The siege lasted nine months, until March 1244; when the defenders finally agreed to give up, they were given good terms, but the 200 or so perfecti in the fort had to die. It was, by all reports, quite a bonfire.
I think we can call Montsegur the end of major combat operations, although massacres and roundups continued for a very long time. In 1308 the Inquisition came to Montaillou, arrested almost all the adult and adolescent residents, and carted them off to jail in Carcassone. Some were released fairly quickly; others stayed longer. I do wonder how the children and sheep did without any grownups around. (Montaillou, pp. 63-64.)
During the course of this long conflict you can see feudalism gradually crumbling, along with early stirrings of the centralized French nation-state. What we do not see, from the start of the Crusade in 1209, is any sustained effort to win the hearts and minds of the people. Instead we had the Inquisition. People were encouraged to abandon their heretical beliefs and return to the Catholic faith, and if they did so they were allowed to live. If they refused to recant (as almost all the perfecti refused), or if they relapsed (as Menocchio did), they would normally be killed.
The church had mounted a campaign of persuasion before the start of hostilities, with earnest preachers such as St. Dominic doing their best. But after the war began, even the Dominicans found themselves going on a war footing. In 1233, a few years after Dominic's death, the pope put the Dominicans in charge of the Inquisition.
I'm inclined to think that the Inquisition was one of the great institutional innovations of the high middle ages, comparable to the rise of the universities, but with very different effect.
As Oldenbourg puts it, "Other later epochs were to experience the pressure of similar police-state terrorization; but it is the Dominican Inquisition which must take credit for having actually invented the system. Once the trail had been blazed, there were plenty of imitators ready to follow them along it and perfect their methods: though it would seem that, apart from purely technical improvements, there was very little left for them to discover." (Pp. 308-309.)
What Do We Know about Alternate Narratives ?
Alternate narratives serve a purpose. They explain stuff. Take the Procter & Gamble rumor, at the beginning of this story. Maybe the little old lady just asked herself, "Why does such a boring company have such an interesting logo?"
I made this up, of course. Maybe she thought this, and maybe not.
On the other hand, I don't know whether she actually existed. Having a little old lady as your protagonist personalizes the story in a pleasant way, and the story itself provides a zany but engaging answer to a question that she may never have asked. Other narratives, like a competitor planting disinformation, aren't nearly so much fun. How easy it is to slip through a door into a world where belief is more important than fact, and conjecture can rapidly harden into received wisdom.
What can we learn from Menocchio? For me, the key thing about him was how grounded he was in the material world - things he could see and touch. His analogy of the cheese and the worms is, to me, very telling. Menocchio was literate; he had access to books, and he read them. But his key insight came from his daily life.
He thought he had witnessed the spontaneous generation of life, so he had no problem building his story of the creation of the world on a foundation of old cheese.
The humble maggot has fooled many people over the years. The egg that produces a maggot is very small. Maggots do seem to come out of nowhere, but they don't. (They do go on to become flies, which then plant more of the tiny eggs.)
Joseph Leidy, a scientist who lived in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, spent a considerable amount of his time trying to convince people that they had not witnessed the spontaneous generation of life. He seemed to find this business of batting down incorrect conclusions a bit frustrating, but he soldiered dutifully on, answering letter after letter as politely as he could. (See The Last Man Who Knew Everything.)
On to the Cathars and the independent existence of evil. Christians have been wrestling with the problem of evil for several millennia now. St. Augustine's thought was that evil is simply the absence of good - a state of disorganization, if you will.
I confess to considerable sympathy for St. Augustine's point of view. Most of the evil I have seen has come through the slow grinding of bureaucratic processes, where many people touch an issue, and arguably good intentions, deformed by other arguably good intentions, can lead to poor outcomes.
I've led a sheltered life. Let's go back to Montaillou in 1310 - a shepherd stands in a snow-dappled alpine meadow, staring at an angry she-wolf who is clearly willing to kill him to get at the sheep he's guarding. Does he care much about the hungry wolf pups at home in the burrow? Or is he more worried about the fact that all he has in his hands is a shepherd's crook? If he had the time and inclination to analyze the wolf's motives, would he see a state of disorganization or evil incarnate?
I think people need narratives that relate to their lived experience. When the controlling narrative fails to provide that, alternate narratives will emerge.
Tolerance, Anyone?
So how should we deal with all these competing narratives? One thing I'm pretty certain of is that suppression is a bad idea. If you've got a century to spend, and you're willing to seriously damage the institutions that you're trying to defend, you may be able to declare victory at some point. That's what happened with the Albigensian Crusade.
Or you could try tolerance. America is, of course, the land of alternate narratives. Many people came here because they were being persecuted for their ideas in their home countries. Others simply bring with them the ideas and culture of a place that is very different from the United States. And then there were the hippies in the 1960s who just decided to think for themselves. Or was it the marijuana talking?
It's America. We don't all have to believe the same thing or view the world the same way. But we do need to respect the other guy's right to do the same thing. It seems a bit odd to have to say this in the United States, but the way things have been going lately, I feel obliged to mention it.
We actually do have a controlling narrative. It's enshrined in our Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Let me translate, freely. Respect the competing narratives. Fight over facts. Do not impose your beliefs on others who do not share your beliefs.
Social Media
We do have a problem with our social media. I think the problem is manageable, and frankly it's not new. Communications have been gaining in reach and speed since the invention of the printing press. The idea of removing the middleman is also not new. Around the time Gutenberg was printing his bibles, Martin Luther was suggesting that Christians did not need a large clerical bureaucracy to mediate between God and the individual. You could just get down on your knees and dial up the deity directly. Now, that was a big deal.
I think the basic problem with the social media, as currently constituted, is their tolerance for anonymous authors, or false identities, which amounts to the same thing.
Aristotle, in his book on rhetoric, said that there were three main elements of a speech: ethos, pathos, and logos. Logos is logical argument, pathos is the appeal to emotion, and ethos is the identity and character of the speaker.
On social media, we need to know who is talking to us. Have a look at these two statements:
"Hi, my name is Ivan. I'm a colonel in the KGB. Hillary Clinton is bad. Donald Trump is good!"
"Hi. I'm Dorothy, a church-going, God-fearing little old lady in Kansas. Hillary Clinton is bad. Donald Trump is good!"
In our current situation, Ivan may be the only one telling the truth. Or maybe he's lying too.
I think the social media require other reforms as well, but I think knowing the speaker is basic.
See also How Do We Put This Back Together?
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