Reviews for Ethical Consensus and the Truth of Laughter the Structure of Moral Transformations

The average rating for Ethical Consensus and the Truth of Laughter the Structure of Moral Transformations based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-10-23 00:00:00 Mark Davis This is exactly what it says it is: a biography of Samuel Parris. And Gragg doesn't try to make Parris seem either better or worse (or more interesting) than he actually was. The picture that comes through is quite clear: an ordinary man with a mediocre mind, not quite as smart as he thought he was, dumped into a situation that he had no hope of dealing with. Most of Gragg's primary evidence is Parris's sermon book, and he admits he's using that to make what conjectures he can about Parris's daily life and behavior, but he quotes the sermons extensively and persuasively to support his ideas. Like every other historian of Salem, he claims to have found the real reason the witchcraft trials happened as they did, but in Gragg's case, I'm actually persuaded. The decisions that Samuel Parris made were crucial: Parris decided not to treat the afflicted girls through isolation and prayer, which had been a successful method in a recent and widely publicized case (except for his own daughter Betty, whom he sent out of Salem Village, and Betty, it should be noticed, recovered without causing any further public drama); Parris seems to have been an instigator in the decision to ask the girls to make accusations and to act on their answers; Parris certainly was a champion of the admissibility of spectral evidence; and Parris was the one, when members of his church started being accused, who decided to condemn and excommunicate them, rather than question the testimony of the afflicted. And Gragg doesn't make the mistake of saying it's all Parris. He's very aware of the other factors; although, like most historians who focus on the male adults in Salem, he pays little to no attention to the afflicted girls and women, he at least shows some awareness of the absent subjectivity. And he has a wonderful lengthy footnote animadverting about other historians' tendency to explain away witchcraft as a transparent vehicle for psychological/social/sexual/economic/other discontents. The only bone I would pick with this book is that Gragg works much too hard to try to find a unifying theme in Parris' life (the "quest for security" of the title). It's the one place where he seems to me to make the mistake of trying to inflate his material beyond what it is, and it just isn't necessary. Other than that, this is a patient, well-documented, coolly non-partisan biography that does an excellent job of explaining how and why Samuel Parris was instrumental in making the Salem witchcraft crisis the large-scale tragedy that it was.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-10-16 00:00:00 Matthew Smith I read this book in 7th grade as part of my history project on the Salem witch trials. My memory is a bit sketchy, but the overall impression I recall was one of feeling both sorry for the man and dislike for him at the same time. The sorrow comes from the fact that he had a bit of a hard life leading up to becoming the pastor of Salem Village, and then when he was there he was perpetually being underpaid and underappreciated by the very people who requested his services. The dislike was from my feeling that he overplayed his "I'm underappreciated" card, and acted somewhat haughtily toward his people. All in all, I think I need to re-read this, but recall that it was a very nice way to understand one big aspect of the trials, and remove much of the fictionalization that was in my brain from having been so exposed to The Crucible over the years.