Tuesday
One question about the Congressional committee investigating Donald Trump’s January 6 coup attempt is whether supporters will believe the evidence, regardless of how compelling it is. So far we’ve learned that, while everyone around Donald Trump was telling him that he lost the election—with the notable exception of an inebriated Rudy Giuliani—he went on to claim election fraud anyway. He also went on to raise a quarter of a billion dollars on that false claim, not to mention persuading followers to assault our electoral system.
I’d like to think that truth will win the day, but the final scene in Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo warns us against easy optimism. The play pits scientific truth against religious superstition, and even though Galileo himself (under threat of torture) recants his findings, it appears that truth will win out. That’s because Galileo’s pupil Andrea Sarti has smuggled his final book—Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences—out of the country, so that his discoveries will not die with him.
In the last scene, Andrea is sneaking the book across the border. While dealing with customs officials, he sees that several kids are preparing to break the milk jug of a woman they have labeled a witch, based on a shadow they see on her curtains.
Andrea: And how do you know she is a witch?
Boy (points to shadow on house wall): Look!
Andrea: Oh! I see.
Boy: And she rides on a broomstick at night—and she bewitches the coachman’s horses. My cousin Luigi looked through the hole in the stable roof, that the snowstorm made, and heard the horses coughing something terrible.
Seeing this as an opportunity to introduce the boy to the scientific method, Andrea asks for more details about the hole in the roof. The boy senses that he is in the presence of a doubter:
Boy: You are not going to say Old Marina isn’t a witch, because you can’t.
Andrea: No, I can’t say she isn’t a witch. I haven’t looked into it. A man can’t know about a thing he hasn’t looked into, or can he?
Like Trump pointing at Georgia suitcases supposedly filled with illegal ballots, however, the boy claims to have proof:
Boy: No! But THAT! (He points to the shadow.) She is stirring hellbroth.
Because a good scientist reexamines the evidence, however, Andrea lifts the boy up to the window:
Andrea: What do you see?
Boy (slowly): Just an old girl cooking porridge.
Andrea: Oh! Nothing to it then. Now look at her shadow, Paolo.
(The boy looks over his shoulder and back and compares the reality and the shadow.)Boy: The big thing is a soup ladle.
Andrea: Ah! A ladle! You see, I would have taken it for a broomstick, but I haven’t looked into the matter as you have, Paolo.
So what is the result? Not what Andrea hopes for. As he is given the go-ahead to cross the border, he looks back and sees the boy kick over the woman’s milk jug:
Boy (shouting after Andrea): She is a witch! She is a witch!
Andrea: You saw with your own eyes: think it over!
(The boy joins the others. They sing.)
One, two, three, four, five, six,
Old Marina is a witch.
At night, on a broomstick, she sits
And on the church steeple she spits.
Brecht has a disconcerting way of exploding our cherished fantasies. In this play about the battle of science against superstition, a noxious superstition wins in the end. Those who want to see a woman as a witch—or who want to see those who attacked the Capitol as peaceful tourists, Antifa members, or spontaneous rioters—can persuade themselves to disbelieve our own eyes.
Those of us who put their faith in reason (including me) need to acknowledge this. And pray that Trump’s “alternate facts” don’t prevail once again.