Witch-Hunting in European and World History - Ronald Hutton

If I'm going to talk about witch hunting, my first question should be, what is a witch? And it's a very pertinent question because in the English speaking world today, there are four totally different definitions of a witch. All are entirely legitimate and viable. Two of them are old and two of them are modern and they're kind of bumping into each other like dodgems. In the contemporary world, the one that is probably the oldest and certainly was till recently, the most commonly used is the most relevant for my talk tonight. And also the nastiest. It is a witch who uses magic specifically to harm other people and their possessions, but almost as old. Going right back to the Anglo-Saxons is a different definition, which as a witch is somebody who uses magic for any purpose, good or bad. Now, this definition was actually coined by people who didn't approve of magic, who didn't think that people should use it, people in the religious and political elites, and they used it deliberately to smear good magicians, those who offered magic to help people usually for a fee with the idea of being witches. Those who believed seriously in magic and used it, never used the word witch of a good magician. So the educated people who used it in the second sense often qualified it by speaking of people who used magic for benevolent purposes as good witches or white witches. But as I say, people who actually feared witchcraft or applied themselves to folk magicians never used the term witch of good magicians. And there are two modern and equally legitimate definitions. One is the feminist one, but a witch is a symbol of independent female power that a witch was a feisty woman, victimized by male structures of authority who use the acqui accusation of witchcraft to bring her down. And there is no doubt that the image of the witch is one of the very few images of independent female power that traditional European culture has bequeathed the present. And finally, the fourth definition, which like the feminist one appeared in the 19th century and is going strong, is a witch, is a practitioner of a pagan nature focused religion. But I'm going to be concentrating upon the first of those, the nasty negative definition because it's at the root of which persecution. So what's the problem today? The problem today is there's plenty of witch persecution. Far too much of it. If you want to attend an actual witch trial at the present day, you need only go to Cameroon, Ghana, Malawi, the Ivory Coast, or Saudi Arabia because all of those countries have laws against presumed witchcraft and penalties for it. In the case of the four African countries, these laws have been quite recently introduced or reintroduced in the case of Saudi, the law is traditional. The penalties in the African countries are fines or imprisonment for being a convicted witch. In Saudi Arabia, you are still executed by beheading, but the nations that have reintroduced laws against Europe could and do justify it by claiming that they're saving lives. And there is some truth in this because in many other countries which don't have current laws against witchcraft, vigilante action against suspected witches had resulted in a horrific number of murders. The Tanzanian Mis Ministry of the Interior estimated that in just four years in the mid 1990s, around 5,000 people were burned to death by their neighbors as suspected witches in the central areas of Tanzania alone. And the murder of suspected witches is a serious problem currently in most of Africa, south of the Sahara, most of South Asia, particularly India, Indonesia, the islands of the Western Pacific, including Papua New Guinea and most of Latin America. So it's a a very bad current problem. And the question for me is what should be done? I suggest that something be done to stop it. Nations that have current traditions of which persecution, that is persecution of people for the presumed use of bad magic and magic being defined as the creation of physical change by apparently uncanny means these use two arguments to suggest that their people should be allowed to go on behaving in this way. The first is that a belief in witchcraft is traditional to their cultures, which is true. And that attempts by external nations to interfere with what's going on counts as colonialism or imperialism renewed. And that in any case, no state has the right to interfere in the internal affairs of another. And the other argument is that which craft kills in societies which believe in it. And this is simply true, the reason was discovered first by an American doctor called Walter Cannon in the Second World War when he was hired by the American armed forces to discover why American servicemen in the Pacific Theater of War were frequently dying of non-fatal wounds. They thought that they'd been badly wounded and they then died. They were supposed to have died of shock. But shock is not a medical condition. Canon discovered the reason by going sideways and looking at the records of autopsies carried out by European doctors working in European colonial territories in the early 20th century in societies which seriously feared witchcraft. And the autopsies revealed that in societies which really fear witchcraft, if you think you've been fatally bewitched, you stop being able to sleep, you stop being able to eat, and your system is bombarded by stress induced adrenaline. And this terrific pressure on the body means that if you have any defect in a vital organ that is dormant and by itself would not create a problem, the waves of adrenaline exploded and you die, you are literally frightened to death. So the argument goes that in societies which really fear witchcraft, witchcraft can kill people. Now these are powerful arguments I would counter them and have done. I suggest in the first case that it is true that no states or inhabitants of states have the right to try and interfere coercively in the affairs of different nations. But I think they do have a right to voice opinions about what is going on in them. And the world has active collectively in the past, the recent past to wipe out systems like slave trading and slavery and to intervene to discourage genocide. So admonitions objections, suggestions can legitimately be made. And as for the voodoo death effect, that's people being frightened to death by the belief they've been bewitched. If a society is convinced that those who do not fear witchcraft are not vulnerable to it, then there is a double benefit. People stop dying of fear of it altogether and they also stop blaming their neighbors for it and attacking them. So the way out is beneficial for all. The result of this commentary is that I have a particular relationship to the issue that in 2017 I published a book which called for a global effort to discourage and ends witch hunting of which persecution, much as a global effort had wiped out smallpox and is much lessening the incidents of polio and starting to reduce malaria. We could, in theory, end witch hunting on this planet in a couple of centuries with a sustained communal effort. This book was read and it coincided with a parallel movement among an international group, which I joined. And in 2019, we held a conference at the University of Lancaster, which is noted for human rights research in order to frame a resolution for the United Nations. There were two keynote addresses I gave. One, the UN rep gave the other and we drafted the resolution. And in 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Committee passed it. And in March last year, the Pan-African Parliament, which is uh, a powerless but influential body representing all Sub-Saharan African nations, drew up a set of guidelines to help governments in Africa enforce the resolution. So something is being done, but it will take a long time to be wholly a factual. So where does Europe fit into this pattern? Europe has in many ways a common experience with the rest of the world in that it has a serious record of witch hunting, but with two big differences. It is the only place on earth where witchcraft became equated with a particular religion, the religion of satanism as opposed to Christianity. And the second difference is the good news that it's the only area of the world where a profound official belief in witchcraft with widespread witch hunting has been replaced by a profound official disbelief in witchcraft with a ban, an effective ban on witch hunting. So possibly in that respect, Europe could provide a model for the rest of the world. So let's look at how Europe achieved both parts of those differences, the equation of witchcraft with satanism and the spread and then end of witch hunting. And to understand this, we need to look at the ancient context because Europe and the Near East were divided into different cultural zones in the ancient world with different attitudes to witchcraft in each which all contributed to later medieval and early modern European witch hunting. The first area was the fertile crescent, that area of densely populated land sweeping from Palestine round through Lebanon and Syria into what's now Iraq. This contained the ancient civilizations of Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, the Venetians, Philistine's, Hebrews, et cetera. And here there was a profound fear of witchcraft, which included the death penalty for presumed and convicted witches. And the particular idea that there are malevolent spirits in nature who hate humanity and are route to make life difficult or terminal for it, and with whom evil humans would make alliances to bewitch their neighbors. The Greeks gave these near Eastern spirits the name demons, which we still use. Ancient Rome added two more features to the brew. One was an intense fear of witches who are stereotypically regarded as evil ied women. And this supplied some potent literary images to the tradition. For example, the most famous witches in English literature are those in Shakespeare's Scottish play with their famous chants, double double toil and trouble fire burn and cauldron bubble cackle, cackle pretty well. Everybody knows that fewer people know that some of Shakespeare's verse is taken from a poem by the ancient Roman poet hoist about evil witches in ancient Rome. And the Romans were big time witch hunters. Between two and 300 years before the Christian era started, pagan Romans held a series of witch hunts in the biggest in and around Rome. Between two and 300 years, BC or b, CE 3000 people were executed, which has a bigger body count than anything achieved later by Christian Europe. So pagan ancient Europe has serious terrifying witch hunting and there is a German contribution. Ancient pagan Germany believed that there were evil women who flew around at night because of magic and dreamed sleeping men of their life energy by taking out vital organs and substituting inadequate short-lived substitutes. And they then removed these uh, succulent bodily parts to cannibal feasts of like-minded female witches, uh, where they could enjoy a party together and plan more evil. And this going right back before the dawn of history is the origin of the idea of the witches Sabbath. So we have here three components and they all get into Christianity. Christianity comes out of the fertile crescent with its fear of witches and demons. It picks up the Roman propensity to stage bid cunts and the Roman literary stereotype of witches and also the German fear of nocturnal meetings of cannibal female witches. But it doesn't really do much with these for a thousand years. And this is not because early Christianity was especially benevolent so much as that it had a theological problem, which is a belief in an all powerful, all good and omnipresent and all knowing God. And if you believe in a God like this, it's difficult to believe that such a deity would enable wicked human beings to work real magic and harm others. And so wherever Christianity spread in Europe, it stopped witch hunting at least on a big scale. It outlawed belief in the German cannibal witch and executed people who killed women for it. It made it possible to accuse people of working magic to harm others, but only as an act from one individual to another. And the burden of the proof rested on the person making the accusation. And it's very hard to prove that somebody has bewitched you. The result is a dramatic decrease in persecution for magic. Uh, with only 20 trials of bad witchcraft recorded the whole of Europe between the years 1000 and 1300. But then there's a change from 1400 onwards, a new belief appears among Western and central Christians, those who owe allegiance to the Catholic medieval church. And it's a belief that God has decided to test human faith by allowing Satan to provide evil human beings with demonic help to work bad magic and destroy their neighbors, their picked targets among their communities in order to eliminate good Christians, disrupt the world's, make good people suffer and make the world lose faith in the true religion. And this idea reintroduced witch hunting and the death penalty for witchcraft was reintroduced in state after state with a change in the law that made the burden of proof rest upon the accused. And if it's difficult to prove that somebody has bewitched you, it's equally difficult to prove you haven't bewitched somebody else, particularly if torture is used to encourage you to confess, which was the case in many European states and executions under this new model of satanic witchcraft span the years 1423 to 1782, they're very precise In Europe, we had no idea how many victims this wave of trials of the new kind claimed until recently figures like 9 million victims were toted around from the 18th century. We've had enough local research covering the whole of Europe now to provide an overall guess somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 victims for sure, and probably in the second register the lower half of that 40 to 50,000 overall. Now in the annal of early modern European atrocity, this is a small figure. When a Roman Catholic army stormed the German Protestant city of Magdeburg in 1631, they murdered the inhabitants and killed anything from 20 to 40,000 people in 48 hours. So there's a slight chance that the entire number of victims in the witch trials was matched by one slaughter of one German city in the walls of religion. And it's also a small animal in uh, the reckoning of the atrocities of nature. In this period, bubonic Plague, the biggest epidemic killer, dispatched a hundred thousand Londoners in three months in one year, 1665 and plague epidemics on a large scale were once a generation experiences all across Europe. So it looks as if the witch trials are a sideline, a side issue compared with much of what's dreadful about early modern Europe. But they're not because they're concentrated in space, they're found packed into a zone stretching across Europe from Britain in the west to Poland and Hungary in the east. The biggest concentration, half the total are in Germany and Switzerland in the center. And they're also concentrated in time. 80 to 90% of the victims of the witch trials die in one long lifetime, 1560 to 1640. So a low overall figure conceals truly nightmarish local experiences, big body counts in particular communities. Most early modern European communities never had a witch trial, but those that did could eliminate large numbers of their population in one west German town open. Now in one year in the 1630s, one third of the population was accused of witchcraft by the other two third, the magistrates showed discretion in only executing one 13th of the entire population. But that's still an awful lot of people in a few months. So why does early modern Europe supposedly better educated, more civilized than earlier Medieval Europe do this to itself. We are not in the Dark ages. The period 1580 to 1640, it's the age of Shakespeare of Galileo. It's the age of exploration and scientific revolution, and yet it's the main epoch for witch hunting in the history of Christian Europe. Well, we don't have agreed answers, but we can point to changes in late medieval Europe that were likely to have made Western and central Christians lose their nerve. And there are three. The first is that European Christianity is contracting for most of the Middle Ages. Christianity had been expanding in Europe. It had converted vast areas of northern and central Europe to the faith in the first thousand years of the Middle Ages. And it had driven back Islam in the next 200 years from most of Spain, from Sicily, and from large areas of the near East, including Jerusalem itself. But by 1300 the Crusades had been defeated and the near East completely lost for good. And in the next century, the 14th Islam breaks into Europe in the person of the Turks in 1453, they take Constantinople, one of the two capitals, the Christian world by 1500, they've got the whole of the Balkans in 1526 Hungary goes down and they reach the gates of Vienna in three more years. Then they pause by lamb, but they turn south, they take in the Muslim states of Syria and Egypt and then head west to take the whole of North Africa right up to Morocco by 1578, which means they can now strike north against any part of Christian Mediterranean, Europe as well as pushing ahead by land in the east. And many people in this period thought that European Christianity was probably doomed. On top of this, the climate was changing. It had been unusually good for most of the Middle ages. Agriculture had spread into large areas of poor marginal land successfully. But from 1300, the globe wobbles and the European climate deteriorates dramatically becoming much colder and wetter with longer colder winters and shorter wetter hammers, areas of agricultural land go outta action all over the continent. And famine becomes serious and widespread quite rapidly. And the climate more slowly keeps on worsening for another 200 years. Nobody knows why this is happening, just as nobody knows why the Turks kept winning when they expanded and nobody understands the third terrible blow either. For 700 years, Europe had been free from epidemic disease. But in 1346, the black death arrives bubonic plague reappearing for the first time in seven centuries, at almost half of the population of Europe dies horribly in three years and the plague digs in it hits again different areas of Europe about once each generation removing more people. The population of Europe declines dramatically in the late Middle Ages and nobody knows what's causing the disease. You put these three things together and you can see why late medieval European Christians feel that God is really angry with them and they need to do something about it. And looking at Christianity in trying to improve it is one reaction looking for hidden enemies within who are undermining it and making God angry is another. And that's when the idea of the Satanic conspiracy using witches appears and spreads and spreads. But it spreads initially very slowly between 1400 and 1500. It's confined to the Alps and the Rhine Valley and northern Italy and probably doesn't claim more than a few thousand victims. And in the early 16th century, it actually decreases for a while because that's the time when the urge to improve and reform. Christianity blows it apart instead in the West as Protestant and Catholic turn against each other and begin to fight for the soul of Christian Europe. And that's when the three big developments I've described of Islam climate and disease kick in again propelling this idea of the Satanic witch. And that's why the really dreadful time for which persecution is 1580 to 1640 because this is the period when Protestants and Catholic realize that they're not gonna be able to agree, they're not gonna be able to make up their differences and set out all out to kill each other, to destroy the other type of religion and to reestablish their own across Europe. And that period is the period of the wars of religion and of widespread of religious persecution. Par ex, the laws, the religious thermometer zooms up to fever pitch and the belief in a satanic conspiracy of witchcraft seems much more plausible with Christendom rent apart. And people slaughtering each other for having the wrong opinions about Christianity and they are linked together. Hunting witches is rarely a solitary enthusiasm of a regime in this period. It's almost always one item on an agenda which will include getting rid of the Jewish population, getting rid of Protestants or Catholics depending on which side you happen to be getting rid of vagrants people, homeless people seeking work, and more positively improving religious education, relieving the poor and trying to get rid of social ills. So it's a cleaning up of local society to make it seem more godly and please God better. And eliminating presumed witches is one item upon this agenda. And there are very few enthusiastic witch hunters. Most areas of Europe, as I've said, don't produce a witch hunt. Those that do almost never produce two, it's usually something that hits a particular community wants or in a particular period of time and then stops. But as said, big body counts can be produced. The worst areas for which hunting are in that zone of Europe between Britain and Poland and Hungary, where Protestants and Catholic are at each other's throats, that fault line, that San Andreas fault of early modern religion extending where the two sides are eyeball to eyeball. But even in this area, there's a considerable difference between regions and states in the number of people they murder judicially under the label of witches. One thing that makes witch hunts worse is having a weak or tiny state. The reason why Germany and Switzerland are the worst areas for witch hunting overall is because they're both decentralized politically into local units. Switzerland to this day has a strong local system of cantons where people literally meet together as a an assembly that can see each other to do things. And Germany was divided into hundreds of states, many of them really small, which meant that the people in charge of the judicial system were literally living on top of a panicking populace who were accusing people of witchcraft, dragging them in front of the magistrates who'd just be down the street and demanding that they be put to death. And the magistrates would very often feel they had to do something or be murdered themselves, where you have bigger states with systems of centralized professional justice, so the courts are further away from the communities on the boil, then there tends to be much more careful sifting of evidence and a much lower execution rate. Such happy nations are include England, France, Bavaria, Prussia, and Saxony. But where you get tiny states and Germany is full of them, so is Switzerland, then you get big body counts. But also you can have a quite large state. But if you have decentralized justice, then you are still going to be in serious trouble and one such state as Scotland. Scotland is geographically quite a large monarchy, but justice is carried out at the local level. So in Scotland, if you are accused of witchcraft, then you'll be accused by your neighbors who will then persuade you, often forcibly to confess, and they'll then send your confession to the central government, which will read it. And if it sounds plausible, they then empower the people who've got the confession out of the accused, the right to try and condemn them. So this is a system which the accused can't really escape. You have very little chance of being acquitted if you're accused of witchcraft in Scotland. And that's why Scotland is one of the worst areas for witch hunting in Europe. And having one fifth of the population of England manages to execute up to five times as many people as the English state executes because most of the time the English have a size courts in which professional judges travel out from London and instruct juries, imp paneled from all over a county who will almost certainly not know the accused and their communities something that's bubbling away. Underneath everything I've said is that the push to kill people as witches across most of early modern Europe comes from below. It's not inquisitors or judges or an elite going out and arresting people and then dragging them off to be tried. It's ordinary people fearing and hating their neighbors, generally, genuinely believing that they are witches, um, setting out when they're frightened enough of them to have them tried and put to death. The classic crimes of which presumed witches are suspected are those that imperil people's lives and their livelihoods. Above all, witches are suspected of killing children by malevolent magic, which causes the child mysteriously to sicken and die. And in a Europe with very little understanding of disease and of infection, many are parents with an apparently healthy baby or toddler or small child, or watching them suddenly sicken and feel helpless as they see them die can be persuaded. This is witchcraft and there are a few things which inflame people's emotions worldwide more than child molestation or murder, but also witches were blamed for destroying crops, livestock for making farm machinery or industrial machinery malfunction, doing everything that undermines people's identities, prosperity and their very lives and those of their loved ones. So in an age of rampant disease and of bad weather and of political religious chaos, it's easy to see how fear of witchcraft could explode in communities in which one person would encourage another to believe in the conspiracy theory. And across Europe, most of those accused were women. This wasn't in fact because witchcraft was woman hunting. There was a great deal of misogyny around in Europe at the time, and these are all patriarchal societies in which men dominate public life and run the show wherever government law and public acts are concerned. But there are areas of Europe where men were the majority of the accused. We didn't really know why until recently, until the 2010s. In fact, when I led a research project at the University of Bristol, my own university to crack this problem, and we managed to do it by enlisting knowledge of witchcraft beliefs going back to the ancient world, which really matter as I've suggested. And it was found that they were responsible that in Iceland for example, magic was associated with literacy, special writing, and as rooms and men were in control of that. So when the satanic witch idea got into Iceland and a vicious witch hunt resulted, men were 93% of the victims over in the Eastern Baltic in Finland and the Baltic states. And in parts of Russia, there's a different spiritual tradition again coming from the pagan past. And that is shamanism, the belief that magic should be conducted by specialists who communicate with the spirit world in a state of trance in order to benefit communities and predict the future. And the majority of shamans in these areas were men. And so they were accused of witchcraft. When the witch hunt got in in Normandy, it was shepherds who regarded as the expert magician. So it was they who died when the witch hunt got there in the Austrian lands, it's vagrants who were thought of as the magical experts. And so they were rounded up and killed, and most of those were male. But across most of Europe, it was women who were suspected. And again, the reason seems to be prehistoric that in ancient Europe, it was believed that men could learn magic, but they had to do that from teachers or books. Women could just do it. It was in them. They were the magical sex, which is why ancient Europe turned to them, where men couldn't figure out with the normal religious system what was happening, why they resorted to female experts like the prophetess at Delphi in Greece like the Sybil at Qai in Italy, German prophetess like the Lada and Irish prophetess like feto. And so when the idea of the witch conspiracy came in, it was automatically assumed that as the magical sex was female, they would produce the witches. And that's why, uh, the majority of victims overall were female. And yet the areas in which the majority was firmly male had the same religious, social, gender and political systems as those that hunted women. So none of those can be an explanation. This is all prehistoric tradition. And a further irony, a final irony on this, and that is the lands that eliminated which hunting fastest in Europe were those most directly controlled by the most fearsome, coercive powers in Europe, the Popes and their machinery for a suppression, the Inquisition and the Spanish Inquisition, inspired by the popes one. And in both areas, these ruthlessly efficient, utterly effective, highly educated bureaucrats decided that the evidence for witchcraft was so difficult to prove objectively that it really was going to be more disruptive, more trouble than it was worth to allow witch trials. They weren't afraid of anybody, they had no Protestants down there. They'd either rounded up the Jewish community and put them in a ghetto in Italy, or they'd expelled them in Spain. So there was no need for the authorities to encourage a purging of society. And so the areas where the most fearsome of all the enforcement agencies for early modern religion existed were the areas that stopped witch hunting. So the good news wise, zenned, well, in many ways it was a feature of a scientific age. Witch hunting was a failed experiment. There was this idea that sounded plausible about the satanic conspiracy. And so some people in certain places were willing to give a try to eliminating the witches as they eliminated the wrong kind of Christian or corralled or expelled Jewish people or attacked Muslims. But it didn't work. It was observed that areas that held witch trials did not have better weather, healthier children, more productive farms than those that didn't. On the contrary, they were as unlucky as before, but they are also divided, decimated, and traumatized. Witch hunting did not deliver the goods, and that's why it was usually stopped after a big witch hunt had occurred. But in the latter half of the 17th century, the threats to Christian Europe all receded. In the later 17th century, the Turks tried another big advance. In Europe, they actually conquered southern Poland, Pola, and they decided to get Vienna and breakthrough into Germany. But outside the city of Vienna, their army was surprised and annihilated. And then Christianity Counterattacked. Within five years it had retaken Hungary by 1700, the Turks had been pushed right back into the Balkans and broken. They were no longer a threat to Europe, which simply grabbed more and more Turkish land for the next 150 years. And the globe wobbled again in the mid 17th century and the climate improved. Suddenly European agriculture, which had been struggling to keep up, went into surplus. Famine, was banished in area after area. And finally in the same period, bubonic plague began to retreat from Europe. And by 1700, it was almost gone, largely due to much improved quarantine procedures. So Europeans were suddenly much safer, much more prosperous, having a much more comfortable life. And also the wars of religion hadn't worked. It was blatantly obvious that for whatever reason, God wanted most of Northern Europe to stay Protestant and most of Southern and eastern Europe to stay Catholic. And the two sides would have to live together. So toleration broke out as the only means of realistically coming to terms with the world. And so vagrants, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and suspected witches all began to be tolerated together in a Europe in which God seemed in a much better mood. And Europeans much more successful, aggressive expansionist are now turning on the rest of the world. So how was which hunting ended? Well, there's a sequence in every state. First courts begin to doubt the evidence, it seems without torture more and more difficult to come up with convincing evidence of witchcraft. And so courts become more and more reluctant to convict and then they stop convicting. And once they've stopped convicting a few decades later, the laws are useless. So the laws are repealed. So that means that local people who still fear their neighbors, attack them instead and murder them. And so it takes 150 years for states to develop policing systems that make this unviable, but it's done. And the final stage, which takes a hundred more years ending in the 20th century in most of Europe, including Britain, is to induce a general disbelief in magic among the populists. So they genuinely no longer fear witchcraft. And that's the final touch. That's how it was done. The problem is, as you can see, it needs two to 300 years, but it's can be done by a sustained stage, by stage effort. And what could be done across a continent and its colonies can be done worldwide. The only problem here is that disbelief in satanic witchcraft or evil witchcraft is itself a matter of faith. Nobody can prove that demons don't exist. The Christian devil doesn't exist, that bewitch doesn't happen. And so rather than using a flat denial of their existence, which is itself a faith position, it's easier to do what earlier modern Europe did and judge by results to point out that persecution of witches may secure some short term ends, but in the long term, it's inclined to produce a suspicious, divided, traumatized and vulnerable society. Removing it wins on all those points. So this has been a talk about history, but it's shown that the past matters. These are areas in which we can actually learn from it. It's a talk about the present where things that were an issue in Europe a few hundred years ago are still a serious issue in about half the total surface of the globe, if not more. And it's a talk about the future by uniting the past and present to be able to make a better world for us all. And so with that hope, at least I end a series of lectures. And what I hope is a positive note and what I'm certain is about a serious contemporary issue.