Eleven Days

Posted on April 4, 2004 in Myths & Mysticism Social Justice

Elitists love to point out the stupidity of crowds. One of their favorite anecdotes concerns the reaction to the English adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752. Most accounts of the mobs that gathered paint them as Luddites (who also, when you look at it, have a legitimate beef). There is no denying that the calendar was an improvement over the old one, but accounts such as this one miss an important point:

The change was thoroughly unpopular with people who deplored it as popery, disapproved of John Bull’s ways being altered to conform with those of foreigners or who simple-mindedly thought that eleven days had been taken out of their lives. Some claim that mobs gathered to bawl `Give us back our eleven days’, there were riots in Bristol and quite a few country people insisted on observing Old Christmas Day on January 5th.

When in doubt, elitists point to “superstition” (in this case Christmas Day of all things!) and “opposition to progress” (a gloss for “stupidity”). A full accounting needs to be made here. Workers lost eleven days of wages and landlords charged a full month’s rent. Feeling powerless against the people who screwed them, they railed against the government which had changed the calendar and not required that the landlords prorate their rents for September 1752.

Think of this when you wonder why people don’t turn on their bosses here in America, why they blame “liberals” for the fact that all their hard work amounts to nothing, for why their jobs are being shipped overseas, for why they react angrily when “eggheads” are quick to correct them for their belief in urban legends and slow to press for reform.

Any compassionate human being wouldn’t recite this anecdote so incompletely. (It may never have happened.) If we want to win people over to Science, we’re going to have to learn to tell the full truth to ourselves.