I thought your post about the Connecticut witch trials the other day was fascinating. I'm a lawyer, and it's so interesting to hear about a court system applying rigorous legal analysis (e.g., precisely defining the elements of the crime and considering evidentiary issues) to a cause of action that we today (in our admittedly ethnocentric, duh-modern-people-superior way) perceive to be sheer superstition.
I respect that you're never supposed to write nonfiction on spec, though.
One thing that you might consider in your strictly hypothetical why-do-we-care conclusion: the famous Yale prisoner-guard study. I think the results of that study imply that there's some kind of situational instinct that drives groups of people to persecute each other. I mean, the sole difference between the two groups of people in that study is that one group had arbitrarily been granted power over the other group. And they had to call the whole thing off because of the persecution that arose.
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momijizukamori
I wish you would
Date: 2009-12-21 10:19 pm (UTC)I respect that you're never supposed to write nonfiction on spec, though.
One thing that you might consider in your strictly hypothetical why-do-we-care conclusion: the famous Yale prisoner-guard study. I think the results of that study imply that there's some kind of situational instinct that drives groups of people to persecute each other. I mean, the sole difference between the two groups of people in that study is that one group had arbitrarily been granted power over the other group. And they had to call the whole thing off because of the persecution that arose.