One thing last week’s election revealed is how fond we are of the stories we want to believe.
How else to explain the fact that so many voters believe that 21,000 dead people voted in Pennsylvania, or cling to the discredited tales of the “Biden crime family” stealing the election in a conspiracy with the “Gay Communists for Socialism.”
Social psychologists talk about “confirmation bias” — the tendency to interpret new information in a way that confirms what you already believe. If you are convinced that Joe Biden is a pedophile, as one Wellfleet voter told us in our survey of local Republicans, then you’re going to credit the stories on right-wing talk radio and dismiss those in the Washington Post.
This form of self-deception has no party affiliation. It is evident in the way we tell some of our most cherished local stories.
Four hundred years ago this week, an exhausted band of English émigrés arrived in Provincetown Harbor on the Mayflower. As Josephine de La Bruyère writes on the front page, this is one of the best-known tales in American history, but we’re still trying to get it right.
For one thing, everyone calls these people “the Pilgrims” with a capital “P,” even though they never called themselves that, and others didn’t either until about 200 years later. The word pilgrim, meaning traveler, usually has a religious cast, and some of the Mayflower passengers were in fact religious radicals. Calling themselves “Separatists,” they revolted against the Church of England. Others were ordinary farmers and indentured servants — the Separatists called them “the Strangers” — and almost a third of them were children. And what about the crew?
But “the Pilgrims” sounds so much better than “the Separatists” or “the Strangers.”
The people of Provincetown, proud of the fact that the Mayflower anchored here first, have been trying for literally hundreds of years to get the folks in Plymouth to acknowledge it. Check the Plimoth Plantation web page titled “Who were the Pilgrims?”: there’s still no mention of Provincetown there.
“Mayflower arrived in New England on November 11, 1620 after a voyage of 66 days,” it says. “Because it was so late in the year and travel around Cape Cod was proving difficult, the passengers decided not to sail further and to remain in New England. It was here, in Cape Cod Bay, that most of the adult men on the ship signed the document that we know as the Mayflower Compact.”
“Here,” of course, was Provincetown Harbor. The Plimoth website version goes on to tell the familiar story of the “First Thanksgiving” with the friendly Wampanoags.
As Wampanoag historian Paula Peters says, it’s time we looked at the whole Mayflower story, including the parts that make us uncomfortable. It might even change what we believe.
