Last Friday, Mary and I took our oldest grandson, who is now 32, to The Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan. The Morgan is a small but breath-taking collection of books and manuscripts that belonged to the personal collection of J.P. Morgan. The building is breathtaking, as are the books, which include an original Gutenberg Bible.
We began by seeing an exhibition of illustrated Bibles and other religious books that were over 1,000 years old. I kept thinking of the Hebrew scribes and Christian monks who spent years writing and illustrating these gorgeous volumes. Every letter, every line was perfect. How did they do it?
Then we visited the main library, a magnificent room with three layers of leather-bound books.
The room included a jewel-encrusted Bible, made in France and Austria in the 9th century
All of this splendor reminded me of the poverty in the streets outside his library and home, but I doubt that he thought much about the people outside.
In an exhibition case, there were several unusual printed documents. One was about a woman named Mary Toth or Toths, an English woman who pulled off an elaborate hoax in 1726, when she was 23 years old. She told doctors that she had given birth to bunnies. The illustration showed her, a few doctors, and many bunnies. The story spread rapidly, and many people believed that she had in fact given birth to bunnies. She was eventually discredited, briefly jailed, and eventually the charges against her were dismissed.
I said to my grandson, if that happened today, it would spread like wildfire on the internet and many people would swear it was true. My grandson said, “Some people will believe anything because they are ignorant.”
The stranger standing next to us interjected, “Some things never change.”
On the same day that we visited The Morgan Library, our frequent commenter Bob Shepherd left the following observation about why people are so gullible:
Three of the most powerful and important experiments ever performed were Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiment, Solomon Asche’s line length determination experiment, and Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment. I won’t go into the details of these here. You can look them up in a quick Google search if you are fuzzy on their details. What these experiments, which have been repeatedly replicated, show conclusively is that about two thirds of people are so driven by desire to be accepted by the group that they will conform to and actively participate in the most egregious behavior toward others in order to be themselves accepted by a perceived “authority.” Next time you are in a public place–at a game, in a restaurant, in a club–look around you. Two thirds of the people you see are potential collaborators–people capable of extreme evil, which, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is TYPICALLY characterized by mediocrity.
Years ago, when I was a baby editor, I went to work for McDougal, Littell. Ms. Littell–the co-founder’s wife–was the editor of their literature program at the time, and she had chosen for the 12th-grade book an essay by the English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper about what an “evil genius” Hitler was. Well, I risked my job by objecting to this piece because Hitler was not a genius. He was a common thug and a psychopath, and people are sheep, easily led, easily bullied into submission and acquiescence. Or consider John Gotti–the psychopathic criminal Mafia thug. The press created an image of the brilliant “Dapper Don,” who could constantly evade punishment. But after he was finally imprisoned, tapes of wire taps on Gotti were released, and these showed that he was the lowest sort of ignorant thug, incapable of clear reasoning or speech, driven by the basest motivations, and unable to say anything without accompanying it with a string of curses that stood in for the words lacking in his fourth-grade vocabulary.
People want to belong. They want to get along. They want Daddy to tell everyone what to do. And they will idolize absolute monsters if they get that from them.
Bob is a polymath—an author, editor, guitarist, teacher, and humorist–who seems to have read deeply in every field.
Oh, we stopped in the gift shop, and I bought a couple of delightful books. One was titled Rejected Books: The Most Unpublishable Books of All Time.
Some of those unpublishable books:
And I loved this cover and title.
People who write books should be fearless.
Diane Ravitch's blog 