God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

by Cullen Murphy

  Advances in surveillance are rarely walked back. They become institutionalized, and then normalized, creating a new status quo and a platform for whatever the next steps might be. Jack Balkin, of Yale University Law School, has pointed out that powers granted by acts of Congress in the period after 9/11—the Authorization of the Use of Military Force of 2001, the Patriot Act of 2001, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the Protect America Act of 2007, the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—have, taken together, “created a basic framework for the National Surveillance State,” which in turn could lead to “emergency government as a normal condition of politics.” National-security cases aside, the number of state and federal requests for wiretap authorization keeps growing; it reached a record high of 3,194 in 2010, up by a third over the previous year. Of that number, a single request for authorization was denied by a judge.

  Monitoring is not merely an act of policy. It is abetted by everyone, because it is built into the way we run our lives. A member of Germany’s Green Party recently made public a graphic display of his personal movements over a six-month period. It was based on longitude and latitude data that had been automatically tracked by his cell phone on 35,000 distinct occasions. On the basis of the proximity of a user’s cell phone to the cell phones of other people, together with the user’s location and the duration of his conversations, and without listening in, service providers can analyze patterns of personal interaction—identifying your circle of friends, discerning when conversations touch on political topics, even predicting if you’re about to jump to a different phone company. “Computer vision” systems are now employed in prisons, at shopping malls, in intensive care units; they can recognize faces, monitor expressions, assess behavior. They are used by Hollywood to test audience reactions. They are used by hospitals to remind employees to wash their hands. They can distinguish among emotions. A new Google app called Goggles allows users to photograph an object or scene and then search the Internet for matches. Google drew the line, for now, at facial recognition, but the capability exists.

  ACCESS DENIED

  Censorship today occurs in many new ways, but the old ways are still very much alive. The expurgation of a work of history by Philipp Camerarius in the sixteenth century has an analogue in the revision of school textbooks by the Texas State Board of Education in the twenty-first. Under the new Texas guidelines, approved in 2010, textbooks must emphasize that the Founding Fathers were people of religious faith; must deemphasize the doctrine of separation of church and state; must assert that the Civil War was fought mainly over states’ rights, not slavery; must give ample consideration to the views of Confederate President Jefferson Davis; must downplay criticism of Senator Joseph McCarthy; and must include positive references to the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association. A proposal to rename the slave trade “the Atlantic triangular trade” did not pass, nor did a proposal that textbooks must use Barack Obama’s middle name, Hussein.

  In the short term, do changes like these threaten the freedom of any university historian in Cambridge or Berkeley (or Austin)? Of course not. In our lifetime, no scholar will feel constrained to alter so much as a comma. No professor will be purged. But in the long term? The changes in Texas affect 5 million students a year in the state’s grammar schools and high schools. Additional changes will be implemented every decade, when the textbooks come up for review. Meanwhile, the Texas requirements will ripple outward: the Texas market is so large that publishers often turn local demands into national standards. Fifty years will pass, a century. The intellectual elite may remain free to say what it wishes. But what will have happened to popular opinion in the meantime? And what will that future elite have grown up knowing?

  Examples of censorship like those above—campaigns against this book or that; campaigns to include one set of ideas and exclude another—are by now almost antiquated. They are sideshows. Corporations and the government may soon have the capacity to achieve similar ends in a more systematic way. In 2010, the investment-banking firm Goldman Sachs decreed that profanity was no longer to be used in e-mails sent by its employees, and backed up its policy by installing software to detect any breaches. In 2009, Amazon discovered that it did not have the rights to editions of Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm that readers had downloaded onto their Kindles. With the push of a button, Amazon was able to delete those books remotely from all Kindles worldwide. No one questioned that Amazon needed to act—it was in breach of copyright. But many were surprised that it could make books simply disappear from people’s hands. The fact that the episode involved these particular novels was an irony lost on no one.

  Much has been made of the role of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media in fostering democratic upheavals in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere—as if the last barriers to the free flow of communication and information are inevitably destined to disappear. Cyber analysts are not so sure. Yes, it’s usually possible to get around so-called first-generation filtering—whereby governments attempt to erect firewalls at key Internet choke points in order to screen out whatever they deem undesirable. But “second-generation filtering”—whereby governments (or other entities) themselves attack sources of information in various ways—is another story. A popular revolution overthrew the government of Hosni Mubarak, in Egypt, but the most important lesson from the episode may be that before it did so, the Egyptian authorities managed to shut down the entire Internet in the country with relative ease. In Iran, whose Islamic government has also been a target of protests fueled by online social networks, the authorities used access to Twitter and Facebook to collect names and trace relationships.

  The Internet has long had its utopian theorists. Its dystopian pessimists deserve attention. In his book The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov asks, “What if the liberating potential of the Internet also contains seeds of depoliticization and thus dedemocratization?” Elsewhere he writes, “A Twitter revolution is only possible in a regime where the state apparatus is completely ignorant of the Internet and has no virtual presence of its own. However, most authoritarian states are now moving in the opposite direction, eagerly exploiting cyberspace for their own strategic purposes.” In China, the government “harmonizes” Web sites that traffic in content it considers inappropriate—that is, it shuts them down. In the United States, well-meaning measures to ensure the transparency of government operations have been bent to a different use. When a University of Wisconsin historian began commenting in a blog on statewide political matters, his opponents cited his status as a state employee and demanded, under the state’s open-records law, that he release all the private e-mails he had ever written from his university e-mail account containing words such as “Republican,” “union,” “collective bargaining,” “recall,” and “rally.” Leverage can be exercised in other ways. Opinion varies widely on the merits of WikiLeaks, which in 2010 made public hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents. The organization has not been charged with any crime, but soon after the first disclosures, and at the urging of a powerful senator, Amazon dropped WikiLeaks material from its servers. Separately, several major financial companies, including Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal, announced that they would no longer process contributions to WikiLeaks. The flow of information—and money—is subject to choke points, and it’s not always clear who controls the valves.

  The organization Freedom House publishes an annual survey of freedom of expression worldwide. According to its 2010 survey, the world has seen eight consecutive years of setbacks. Severe controls of some sort on the press and on the Internet are more the rule than the exception; only one person in six lives in a country without them. As a study published in the independent British publication Index on Censorship recently pointed out, “No longer is it easy to hide from slow-moving and inept bureaucracies in the vast pools of information flows.” Wealthy Catholic families in Reformation England once kept “priest holes” in their manor ho
uses to hide itinerant Jesuits. Priest holes on the Internet are not very secure.

  US AGAINST THEM

  Americans pride themselves on being a nation with no established religion, where the state does not interfere in religious activities. And yet the level of hostility toward “the other”—or, in milder form, the level of nervousness and suspicion—is on the rise. It is not just a matter of religion, of course. Bill Bishop, in his book The Big Sort, describes how more and more Americans are choosing to live, work, and play almost exclusively with people “like themselves.” This is a natural tendency, but it diminishes exposure to any contrary outlook while elevating the primacy of one’s own. The Internet makes the pursuit of this sort of epistemic closure increasingly easy. Users of a search engine called SeekFind will be directed only to sites consistent with evangelical Christianity. Users of a site called I’mHalal will be directed only to sites consistent with Islam.

  Religion remains a central front. In Texas in 2004, a plank in the Republican Party platform made an explicit reference to “the myth of the separation of church and state” and declared that “the United States of America is a Christian nation.” An evangelical tone suffuses the modern American military, particularly the Army officer corps. In public life, the “Christian nation” theme is hard to miss. When President Obama made a state visit to Turkey in 2009, he told his audiences there: “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation; we consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.” Angry rejoinders were instantaneous. Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, called the president’s remarks “fundamentally misleading about the nature of America.” Fox News host Sean Hannity described the comments as “a disgrace.” A year later, Sarah Palin professed bewilderment at “hearing any leader declare that America isn’t a Christian nation.” At rallies, Palin calls on an army of “prayer warriors” to smite her foes, and she encourages the identification of herself with the biblical figure Esther. In 2011, the governor-elect of Alabama, Robert Bentley, stated that he considered himself a “brother” to others only if “you’re a Christian, and if you’re saved, and if the Holy Spirit lives within you.” Prominent ministers have laid the blame for 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina on homosexuality and secularism, and identified the cause of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti as a long-ago “pact with the devil.”

  The proposed building of an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan, within several blocks of Ground Zero—the site of the World Trade Center, destroyed by Islamist terrorists—brought out similar feelings. The cultural center, which was to include a mosque, had been advanced by a moderate imam named Feisal Abdul Rauf, who embraces a vision of an Islam that lives peacefully within the American tradition. Rauf had been sent on overseas missions by the Bush administration to explain American ideas of religious pluralism. The cultural center was to be named Cordoba House, the reference being to Córdoba in Spain, the symbolic embodiment of convivencia. The facility conformed to local ordinances and had received a unanimous green light from New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. Though concentrated in a handful of communities nationwide, Muslims make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. population. But the idea of an Islamic facility near “hallowed ground” inflamed passions. Political leaders and other prominent figures raised their voices against it. So did the venerable Anti-Defamation League. The ADL’s historical mission is to “put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against, and ridicule of, any sect or body of citizens”—but in this instance, the organization explained, the anguish of the grieving families “entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.” Bryan Fischer, an official with the American Family Association, went further, arguing that there should be “no more mosques, period” in the United States, because “each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government.”

  Opposition to Islamic facilities broke out in California, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. A church in Gainesville, Florida—the Dove World Outreach Center—announced plans to gather copies of the Koran and hold a public bonfire. The church’s pastor said it was his intention to “send a message to Islam and the pushers of sharia law: that is not what we want.” He burned a Koran and sent his message; riots in Afghanistan, which broke out in response, left ten people dead and eighty-three wounded.

  President Barack Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, among others, spoke out forcefully in support of First Amendment rights. They noted that many of the earliest European settlers had been motivated by a quest for the religious freedom they could not find at home. Part of the very genius of the American idea was that removing religion from the constitutional structure allowed religious beliefs of all kinds to flourish without provoking endless violence. Such voices did not seem to be getting the best of the argument. Obama himself was painted as, in effect, a converso, and possibly a backsliding one at that. The evangelist Franklin Graham remarked that Obama had been born from “the seed of Islam.” In late summer of 2010, a CNN/Opinion Research Center poll found that 70 percent of Americans were opposed to the Cordoba House project.

  The matter did not stop with Cordoba House. In November 2010, in Oklahoma, an amendment to the state constitution that would ban any consideration of sharia law in rulings by state-court judges won approval from 70 percent of all voters. The ballot initiative was quickly struck down by a federal judge, but legislators in a number of other states, including Arizona, Florida, South Carolina, and Utah, introduced bills to similarly restrict any use of sharia law. Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy and a supporter of such legislation, said, “I think you’re seeing people coalesce around legislation of the kind that was passed in Oklahoma.”

  THE ONE TRUE PATH

  Finally, there is the matter of moral certainty—the indispensable ingredient. Moral certainty ignites every inquisition and then feeds it with oxygen. One might argue that there’s less moral certainty in the world today than there was fifty (or five hundred) years ago. The power of the Church is vastly diminished. The power of the great secular “isms”—communism, fascism—has dissipated. Moral certainty lacks the institutional base it once had. But as a personal matter—as what individuals actually believe—it is as pervasive as ever, even if certainties are in collision. Moral certainty underlies the idea of a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West. Surveys consistently find that a large proportion of Americans—about a third—believe the Bible to be unerringly true in all particulars—the “actual word of God” and something to be “taken literally.” After authorizing the invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush was asked if he had consulted his father, a former president, for advice as he weighed his decision. Bush answered that he had not—but that he had consulted “a higher power.” For some, the higher power is not God per se but the forces of history, or democracy, or reason, or technology, or science, or a subset of science such as evolutionary psychology or genetics—and these people are no less certain in their convictions. Sometimes it’s even hard to tell the various parties apart: one mutates into another in surprising ways. How different are the certainties of the ancients from those of the moderns? Writing in The New Yorker some years ago, Louis Menand posited the breakdown of traditional monotheism into “genetic polytheism,” in which personal behavior is attributable to an individualized genetic pantheon. Where once there was a god of anger, now there is a gene of aggression. Where once there was a god of wine, now there is a gene of alcoholism. In ancient Greece, Phobos was the god of fear. Today he is gene SLC6A4, whose specific Olympian dwelling place is chromosome 17q12.

  There’s another way of looking at the certainty issue—by flipping it on its head. The presumption is now widespread, though rarely articulated in these terms, that a lack of certainty is unacceptable. It is the presumption that if we only knew enough, and paid enough attention, and applied sufficient resources, then ills of a
ll kinds would disappear. Anti-terrorism measures are built on this assumption, and so new forms of search and surveillance are added continually to older ones. U.S. foreign policy has long been premised on the assumption that a threat to America anywhere is a threat to us everywhere. Though its proponents failed to consider that taking action entails as much uncertainty as taking no action, the policy of preemption, articulated by the Bush administration, was built on the proposition that uncertainty cannot be countenanced. The catalyzing moment was caught by the writer Ron Suskind, reporting on Vice President Dick Cheney:

  Cheney listened intently, hard-eyed, clamped down tight. When the briefing finished, he said nothing for a moment. And then he was ready with his “different way.”

  “If there’s a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response,” Cheney said. He paused to assess his declaration. “It’s not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence,” he added. “It’s about our response.”

  So, now, spoken, it stood: a standard of action that would frame events and responses for years to come. The Cheney Doctrine. Even if there’s just a one percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty.

  The Seventh Virtue

  As I left the Inquisition archives on my last visit, Msgr. Cifres walked with me out the door and into the courtyard. We stood for a few moments near the fountain at its center. This is not one of Rome’s exuberant, splashing fountains; it’s subdued, perhaps slightly abashed. I looked around the courtyard to get my bearings. “Where was Giordano Bruno held?” I asked Cifres. He gestured with a wave of his arm to the eastern side of the palazzo. “All the prison cells were over there,” he said, “but during the renovations in the 1920s, that wing was demolished and then rebuilt.” The dungeons, it was felt, could be dispensed with. It is just a bureaucracy now. I asked Cifres about the Friends of the Inquisition Archives initiative—had that program gotten anywhere? No, he said, for some reason it had never found much traction. What can you do?