Book Review

Inquisition: The Reign of Fear

by Toby Green

     If you don’t have a low opinion of humanity before reading this book, you will when you finish. Inquisition: The Reign of Fear by Toby Green is a history of The Spanish Inquisition and an analysis of why it happened. Some of the themes he covers are the use of fear for social engineering, the use of religion for the ideological unification of a society, and the Inquisition as a precursor to the totalitarian governments of the 20^th century, namely Nazi Germany. He also gives a sufficient analysis of how scapegoating is used for the purpose of social cohesion.

The Spanish Inquisition began roughly in the 15^th century. Papal Inquisitions had already taken place in the persecution of heretical groups like the Cathars and the Albigenses, as well as with the military order known as the Knights Templar. Green skips over most of the Papal Inquisitions and jumps straight into what happened in Spain and Portugal, which was part of the Spanish kingdom until the later war of separation. In their bid to unify the Iberian peninsula, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella established a bureaucracy to uproot elements of “cultural impurity” in their lands.

The first target of this Spanish Inquisition was the conversos, Jews who had converted to Catholicism for the sake of assimilating to Spanish culture. These conversos, who were usually wealthy, were accused of practicing Judaism in secret after being baptized. Many of these conversos fled to Portugal to escape the autos da fe, public spectacles in which these alleged heretics were burned alive in public to scare Spanish citizens into obedience. As the Portuguese set sail for distant lands, many of these conversos went abroad as colonialists to escape further persecution when the Inquisition took over in Lisbon. Later victims of this terrorist bureaucracy were Muslims, homosexuals, Lutherans, and people accused of practicing witchcraft.

Green does a good job of writing about the historical events and political context of the Spanish Inquisition. He also does an adequate job of analyzing the social and psychological forces that were related to it. He points out that the torture of the accused and the public autos da fe were effective tools of controlling the beliefs and behavior of the monarchy’s subjects; the threat of torture was enough to keep people submissive and obedient while the display of religious processions that ended with burning heretics alive gave visual proof of what could happen to anyone who stepped out of line. He also demonstrates the psychological impact of rigid ideological purity. When the Inquisition felt they held the ultimate truth, a truth that is so lofty that reaching it is impossible, they felt justified in doing whatever they saw fit to cleanse society of its impurities. The result was censorship, limitations on human rights, persecution of marginalized people, sadism, and mass murder. Being placed above the law, the Inquisition also became corrupt, adhering to a set of double standards by embezzling property from those they persecuted, and also indulging in quid pro quo sexual favors and bribery in exchange for freedom from punishment. Reading this can make you think that the writings of the Marquis de Sade were so scandalous in his time because he was merely articulating the atrocities the European aristocracy had been committing against the lower classes for thousands of years.

Some of the weaker parts of this book involve Green’s psychoanalysis of people subject to the oppression of the Spanish Inquisition. He uses Freudian concepts of hysteria, sexual suppression, paranoia, and neurosis to explain some of the bizarre behaviors indulged in by the religiously-minded in Spain. His analyses actually make sense, but he brushes over them with so little detail that they come off as a little sketchy and based on hasty conclusions. Despite being Freudian concepts, they still make sense in this narrative, but Green is no psychologist and this part of the book is an amateurish attempt at what he sets out to prove.

The biggest flaw in this history is the way the author almost leaves the Catholic church out of the story. It is true that the bishops gave control of prosecution for heretics over to the secular arm of the Spanish government, but little else is said about the church’s role in all this. Almost nothing is said about the Papal Inquisition that preceded the Spanish Inquisition and, by Green’s account, the church remained silent for the almost 400 years that the Spanish Inquisition existed. It is hard to imagine that an institutionalized form of torture and persecution would be ignored by the religious authorities it was meant to defend. The author appears to downplay the role of the church, emphasizing the political nature of the persecution, for the sake of avoiding indulgence in religious intolerance. The Catholic church obviously had opinions on the Inquisition and they were enablers at the very least, so leaving them out of the story is not fair to students of history who need to learn the whole story. What happened needs to be said and if Catholics and their apologists are offended, they should make the effort to reflect on why that might be so rather than attacking historians whose job it is to tell the truth.

What Toby Green is successful in demonstrating is that the Spanish Inquisition was used as a tool of political domination by the Spanish monarchy. In Hannah Arendt’s masterwork The Origins of Totalitarianism, the defining characteristics of authoritarian government are laid out in the final section. Many of them overlap with, and are rooted in, the Spanish Inquisition. These include, infallible leadership, anti-intellectualism, scapegoating, conspiracy theories, censorship, control of information, purging of unwanted social elements, fear mongering, intolerance of dissenting opinions, and encouraging citizens to spy on each other. The connections are so easy to see that it is a surprise that Hannah Arendt had so little to say about the Inquisition, especially since anti-Semitism was such a rampant part of it, and it is also a surprise to see that Toby Green had nothing to say about Hannah Arendt, despite his opinion that the Spanish Inquisition was a form of proto-fascism that reached full fruition in 20^th century Europe.

Sometimes it is all too easy to look at history and see parallels with our contemporary political climate. The human mind evolved to see patterns and sometimes those patterns are not real while at other times they are. Looking at America’s Republican party today, it is not hard to see elements of latent fascism in their mentality. We can see the presence of conspiracy theories, anti-intellectualism, and the scapegoating of immigrants, Muslims, scientists, and secular humanists. Most alarming is the conservative Christian idea that a national religion is necessary to unify the state. Arendt also said that the identification of one political party as the only legitimate representative of the nation is a symptom of fascism. In America that political party would be the Republicans and in the medieval Kingdom of Spain and Portugal that state would be the monarchy supported by the Catholic church. If that isn’t enough, remember that torture was used against Muslims in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those wars were wildly popular with the right-wing sector of America. That’s not to say the Democrats don’t have their authoritarian impulses because they certain do, but if another bureaucratic inquisition were to be established, it would be more likely to come from the right. Toby Green’s Inquisition: The Reign of Fear is not a book about contemporary politics, but considering it was written fairly recently, it can be looked at as a warning that we might be on the wrong path of making the same stupid mistakes the human race has continuously made. Just be careful of what you support.

 

Edward Abbey: A Voice In the Wilderness

biographical video

 

Book Review

The Gods Themselves

by Isaac Asimov

     I have a feeling that Isaac Asimov wrote his 1972 novel The Gods Themselves in response to some of the criticism that had accumulated around his writing. His earlier works were largely scientific problem solving stories that were action driven and the human element took a back seat to the situation. He enters newer territory in this novel and tries to bring out the depth in his characters, shifting away from the themes of his other writings. Asimov always claimed that his stories were about what technology does to humans and how they interact with it, but critics were right to point out that character development was lacking in most of his works. In his attempt at auto-correction, Asimov wrote a fairly good novel with interesting, if imperfect, results.

The novel, which is actually three short stories strung together the way science-fiction novels were after 1950 or so, begins with serendipity, the principle that the most profound scientific discoveries are made by chance. When a mediocre engineer named Hallam discovers that a bottle of tungsten sitting on his desk had turned into plutonium, a parallel universe reveals itself. The scientists in his company learn how to harness this exchange to make an Electron Pump that creates a limitless energy for the planet, replacing the need for fossil fuels. In explanation, we get a crash course in particle physics and nuclear fission, all of which is scientifically accurate according to what was known at the time of writing. The catch is that another scientist, named Lamont, does some calculations and learns that this exchange with the parallel universe will cause the sun to burn at an accelerating rate, eventually exploding, killing everyone on Earth. The explanation Lamont gives is, I believe, the concept of thermodynamic entropy. But this isn’t the entropy of an ice cube or a burning match; this is entropy on a cosmic scale. You wouldn’t want us all to turn into a quasar, now, would you?

This is where the human element comes in. Lamont goes on a campaign to convince everyone else that the electron pump will result in disaster. He approaches Hallam, whose head has grown oversized with his fame, but the scientist is too arrogant and vain to admit that something might be wrong. Lamont also approaches a politician and the head of another company, but they are too concerned with their careers to risk bringing this issue to the public’s attention. In terms of character development, this is as good as Isaac Asimov has ever been. Ultimately, though, this story mostly involves a bunch of men discussing and arguing about science. What Asimov gets right here is the statement he makes. He demonstrates how important science is for knowledge and technology, but also shows how it is limited in its scope by human nature. Lamont is like the man in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave who learns the truth and gets ridiculed for it when he returns to tell others that everything they think they know is wrong. Human society is too myopic, self absorbed, and selfish to be able to see that he is right and that the electron pump is a recipe for Armageddon.

For the next section of the book, we are taken into the parallel universe where the tungsten is being used to generate energy which these para-humans, as the other humans call them, use as a source of food. They receive nourishment from their sun, but it is shrinking and not providing them with what they need for long term survival. The writing is deliberately disorienting. Asimov uses a lot of vocabulary that he does not define, leaving us to our own intuitional skills to figure out what is going on. There are Hard Ones, Soft Ones, Rationals, Emotionals, and some other varieties of para-humans. You have to keep reading until it becomes clear who is who and what is what. You can’t just expect to show up in a parallel universe and expect to understand everything that is going on. Getting off an airplane in Istanbul, Mexico City, or Jakata can be confusing enough as it is and those places aren’t even in a parallel universe.

This section revolves around three characters. Odeen is a Rational and his significant other, Tritt, is an Emotional. These two males have an incomplete sexual relationship because, for the para-humans, a third partner is necessary for reproduction. This is where Dua enters the story. She is an outsider in her society because of her transgression of boundaries. At first, she draws comparisons to lesbians in the America of the 1970s, but as the story goes on, we learn she is a different kind of outsider. She is an Emotional who has Rational tendencies so she gets rejected by everybody. The exception to this is Tritt and Odeen who need her for sex.

Yes, that’s right. These para-humans reproduce in threesomes. Before you go getting all excited, just get those internet porn images out of your head because these para-human horndogs don’t do it quite the same way we do. They are shape-shifting creatures who spread their molecules out and mix their bodies together until they achieve some kind of orgasm in their menage-a-trois. I don’t know if this is one of Asimov’s sexual fantasies or not, but the result is more interesting than erotic from the vantage point of our side of the parallel universe. Asimov had previously been criticized for writing sexless characters, so maybe this was his attempt at eroticism. Or maybe this is an idea from the mind of a middle-aged man trying to sound like he’s on some far out sex trip to the younger generation at the peak of the Sexual Revolution. He was turning into a lecher at this point in his life anyhow. In any case, millennials who are naive enough to think that they invented gender fluidity don’t know as much about previous generations as they think. Asimov certainly conceived of gender fluidity before them and he wasn’t the first one either.

This whole section of the book is more about sci-fi world-building than anything. The author creates a parallel universe that looks like a distortion of our own. He is quite successful at this, but the plot of the novel recedes here for the sake of creating this alternate reality. The two parallel universes do meet, though. The para-humans are scientifically advanced enough to know that their use of the tungsten for their own energy pump will cause the other universe to explode. They really don’t care because, like the humans, the para-humans’ only concern is with themselves. This is where Dua comes in as an alternate form of Lamont. In her hermaphroditic nature, being both a Rational and an Emotional, she possesses both superior intuition and superior morals. So her goal is to save both parallel universes by sending warnings to the humans on the other side.

In the third section, the plot recedes eve further into the background. As a reader, you might expect some sort of connection to be made between the two parallel universes for the sake of solving the problem of the Electron Pump. Instead, whe are taken to the moon where a colony of humans has been built, making a separate society from that of Earth. A scientist from the first section, named Denison, immigrates to the moon and hooks up with a woman named Selene. He tells her of his ambition to solve the problem of the Electron Pump in order to save the universe from destruction. But that theme becomes less important as two other themes dominate the story. One of those is another exercise in world-building. The lifestyle of those living on the moon gets a full description. The other theme is the growing relationship between Denison and Selene. The complication here is that Selene’s exual partner is a surly, rogue scientist named Dr. Barron Neville who has a plan to turn the moon into a giant traveling spaceship. The world-building part is a little annoying. There are passages about climbing up hills and then running down them in the low gravity field of the moon, acrobatics done for the sake of physical fitness, and lots of naked people because citizens of the moon are simply averse to wearing clothes for some reason that never gets explained. I think there are three things going on here. One is that this novel was written soon after the moon landing of Apollo 11 and Asimov wanted to riff on this historic event. Another is that he didn’t want to make the entire story to be nothing but a lot of people talking about science, so he had Denison and Selene have conversations while engaging in other activities. Third, all the naked people sound like another attempt of the author to prove that he is cool to the younger generation who were probably his intended audience. Asimov here tries to be hip and ends uo looking more like a dirty old man.

Ultimately, despite the detailed descriptions of nuclear science and astrophysics, Denison is faced with another human dilemma. Since he can’t convince the people of Earth to abandon the Electron Pump, he has to find a way to introduce some new technology that will contain and deflect the inherent threat of that energy producing system. The problem here is not with the unique idea he presents about the human dilemma; the problem is that it comes off as too little too late. The Electron Pump is the thread that holds the whole novel together, but that thread becomes more and more obscure under layers of other themes as the novel progresses. It’s like a play where the main character makes an uproarious entrance, then fades away in the second and third acts only to try making another uproarious entrance again at the end and then wondering why the audience is so underwhelmed. You could almost say that the Electron Pump is a McGuffin, but considering how much detail Asimov put into describing it and how it creates a dilemma that needs to be solved, I think there is too much literary investment in it to make it function in that way.

The Gods Themselves could be considered a failure in terms of what Isaac Asimov set out to accomplish. But it is a noble, ambitious, and interesting book that is full of worthwhile ideas that pose significant questions. It left me with the impression that the aging author wanted to take his art to a higher level by making his characters more three-dimensional, thereby exploring the more humanistic territories of the scientific endeavor. He was also responding to the culture of his time. With this novel, I think Asimov tried to make a giant leap forward but ended up taking a few steps sideways instead. The result is far from perfect but that shouldn’t deter anyone from reading this unusual work of fiction, even if the plot does peter out in the end. This isn’t Asimov at his best but it is Asimov striving to be the best so the results are worthwhile after all.