Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition (Poly Sci Edition)

I have gotten requests for a version of my essay “Jupiter/Saturn Conjunction: Nobody Expects the Inquisition” with the astrobabble removed. I have also made some small changes to the three suggestions in response to feedback.

-AP

I recently had the opportunity to listen to a lecture by Christof Niederwieser, who discussed the similarities between the 13th century and today.

The 13th century was a wonderful time for knowledge in Europe. Many of the most illustrious colleges in Europe opened. The church stopped being the gatekeeper of knowledge, and education became accessible to people who were not clergy for the first time since the fall of Rome. Literacy rates soared. Cities boomed. Europe dropped roman numerals in favor of Arabic numerals making math much less cumbersome. All of these developments represent an amazing moment for intellectual freedom, but this time period also gave us the inquisition, making this simultaneously a time of sparkling wonder and terror for free-thinkers and intellectuals.

The Inquisition was a judicial branch of the Catholic Church tasked with trying and prosecuting heretics. It was concerned with thought crimes. People were not put on trial for things they did but for things they believed.

One of the more famous victims of the Inquisition was Galileo who was put on trial twice for the crime of believing in heliocentrism (that the earth orbits the sun). The first time, he was forced to recant and was released on the condition that he promised not to talk about heliocentrism anymore. The second time, he was threatened with torture during interrogation and was sentenced to house arrest. All of his works were banned, even works that he might write in the future. He lived under house arrest until he died nine years after his second trial.

I don’t think I need to make a prolonged argument for why the 13th century resembles our time. We have the rise of the internet, the urbanization of society, and the transportation-oriented gig economy. Gatekeepers are being put out of business, and calculators have become so ubiquitous there is serious debate about whether it’s worthwhile to teach children to do math by hand anymore.

Mirroring the Inquisition, we also have totalitarian movements, cancel culture, and internet flamewars.

Intellectual freedom matters.

The idea of living in a society that criminalizes heretical thought is distressing on many levels to me. I am a person with an emotional need to swim up stream and think for myself. A society that punishes divergent thought has the potential to be deadly for me.

Intellectual freedom is, also, the cornerstone of a free society. It’s not an accident that totalitarian regimes are infamous for banning books. Writing tends to make people better thinkers. Journaling is such a powerful practice because physically seeing your thoughts on paper (or screen) forces you to confront and evaluate them in the physical world.

Reading the thoughts of others challenges your assumptions. A well-formed argument (or an emotionally impactful one) can change people’s minds. It can even help them to be better people.

As the critical theorist Hannah Arendt pointed out in her analysis of the rise of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany, the inability to think allowed ordinary human beings to commit crimes against humanity at a gigantic scale. Without the ability to reflect on the reasons for their actions, they had no need to justify their actions to themselves. They functionally lacked the ability to tell right from wrong.

There is value in reading ideas that are uncomfortable, or even problematic. Developing critical thinking, or the ability to evaluate arguments, necessarily requires you to engage with ideas you don’t like. The brain is like a muscle. It needs to be exercised in order to be at its best. If you are surrounded exclusively by people you agree with, it is easy to become intellectually lazy. Problematic ideas are like resistance training for the mind. They give you the opportunity to think hard, to wrestle with nuanced arguments, and (most importantly) articulate exactly why you think the ideas in question are right or wrong.

This isn’t just important for people who want to think of themselves as intelligent. The ability to evaluate ideas and articulate why certain ideas are right and wrong is necessary if you are going to have a consistent moral system. Feelings are flighty and group-think is easily mistaken for intuition. Evaluating morality based on feelings alone is not enough.

Even if you are certain that you’re right and have weighed the arguments carefully, the choice to use violence or intimidation to force your will on people is problematic. The Inquisition used those techniques, too. It also canceled people.

Ultimately, intimidation isn’t even effective. Punching Nazis in the face isn’t enough. If it was, World War II would have settled the issue. The only way to kill an idea is to slay it with a better argument.

What are we going to do about this?

At this point, you may be panicking. When I realized the implications of potentially living through another Inquisition, I was not at my emotional best.

However, one of the reasons history is worth studying is because it gives us the ability to choose how we are going to respond consciously to the issues of our time.

Not many of us have the power to overthrow despots single-handedly, but we can still make choices about the types of behavior we will put up with in the communities we belong to.

These are some of the things I’m doing to make sure that I don’t support the next Inquisition:

Learn (and practice) critical thinking. Having a college degree (or even a graduate degree) does not guarantee that you learned critical thinking, even if you studied the liberal arts. I know many people with graduate degrees whose preferred way to solve arguments is with verbal intimidation and social violence. There are better ways to fight bad ideas. If you don’t know how, learn.

When you disagree with someone, fight fair. If you are not able to fight fair, and you are able to escape, walk away. It is better to be a noncombatant than to fight without honor. An honorable fight over ideas means engaging with ideas, not insulting people.

Cancel ideas, not people. The enemy that fights the fiercest is the enemy that is trapped and has no path to retreat. I have seen more people become extremists because they were humiliated by people who thought they were wrong than for any other reason. People can change their minds. They should always be given the opportunity to do so without losing their dignity or social standing. Even the Inquisition gave people that right (occasionally).