Ada Palmer: preference

Transcript context

…What do you take to have been the actual goals of the Spanish Inquisition? The Spanish Inquisition is a very separate thing from the other inquisitions that I work on in other regions. And I like to avoid using the word inquisition ever in the singular because it creates the illusion that there was an actual unified . . . Or it doesn’t create, it perpetrates the intentional illusion that there was a central, unified decision-making. The Catholic Church wanted to seem more unified than it was, but in periods when it took six months or more for a message to get to Rome from one of the Spanish colonies in the New World, for example, these are local authorities making local decisions in the name of Rome and Rome struggling to catch up. To the degree that Rome even printed a manual to guide inquisitors on how to respond if people came to them talking about books that have been banned in Spain that they’ve never heard of being banned elsewhere, and how to sort of fake it and pretend that “Yes, Rome totally knew that you banned this. Yes, it was a very good idea to ban it.” So, the Inquisition is a blunt instrument and usually a tool of local power. It isn’t a government. We often think of the Inquisition as the government, but it’s more a nongovernment body that reaches internationally. Think about UNICEF or Doctors Without Borders, and it has the infrastructure to go from place to place. Now, think about that operating locally and having agents that are good at crossing borders, but depend on the local government for collaboration and economic support. In the case of the Inquisition, it doesn’t own its own prisons. It doesn’t have its own police. It has to borrow them locally. So, what does the local authority want to persecute? That’s what the Inquisition will end up persecuting. In Ferdinand and Isabella’s Spain and that of their successors, they were incredibly anxious about the imagined treacherous fifth column of descendants of converted Jews and converted Muslims. So, they lavished money on their Inquisition to encourage their Inquisition to advance the mass persecution of what they perceived as a local threat to their crown. This had nothing to do with the practices of the Inquisition that were going on at the same time in Italy or in France, or in even Spanish-controlled territories or Portuguese-controlled territories. So, for example, in Goa on the west coast of India, in the 17th century, the orders given by the Inquisition were to destroy all texts in indigenous languages and try to wipe out indigenous languages and indigenous knowledge. At the same time, the Inquisition in what is now Mexico City was ferociously devoting itself to developing indigenous dictionaries and translating materials into indigenous languages because it decided that the best way to proselytize was through translation. These are the decisions being made by local authorities to try to seek power. Zooming out, however, the biggest pattern in all of them is that the most common form of censorship is self-censorship. n. These are the decisions being made by local authorities to try to seek power. Zooming out, however, the biggest pattern in all of them is that the most common form of censorship is self-censorship. But the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power. The Inquisition more broadly, especially the Roman Inquisition, spends a lot more of its time trying to scare people into not writing books than it does trying to destroy books that are actually there. If you think about the goal being to silence Galileo, the way to silence Galileo is not to make Galileo world-famous by having a giant splashy trial of Galileo. The way to make Galileo silent is to quietly poison Galileo, right? This is Renaissance Italy. We are very good at quietly poisoning people. This is a solved problem. If you want to silence a man, you silence him. You do not put him on a big show trial. But what they want to do is silence Descartes and dozens of others who saw what happened to Galileo, were scared and therefore never wrote the treatises that they otherwise would have. Censorship intends to cause and stimulate self-censorship. That’s a pattern we see broadly, whether in the Inquisition, whether in the Middle Ages before there was an inquisition, or whether today in China with the extremely intentionally unpredictable enforcement of when they arrest a blogger, for example, which they do with very little pattern, to make it harder to predict whether you are in danger, to make people more scared that they might be in danger — to, again, encourage self-censorship.…

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