The Inquisition ignited the modern police state

One of the best habits I got into a very long time ago was to read Lingua Franca.  The magazine began about the time I was growing up as a graduate student.  It was something like an inside-baseball version of intellectual discussions.  From Lingua Franca, which didn't last long, I transitioned to a life of a daily dose of aldaily.com.

Today, aldaily.com serves me this essay about how all our awful waterboarding and torture and censorship and everything else have their origins in the Inquisition.  But then,

[Why] did the Inquisition come into being when it did? Intolerance, hatred and suspicion of one group by another had always existed. Throughout history, these realities had led to persecution and violence. But the ability to sustain a persecution – to give it staying power by giving it an institutional life – did not appear until the Middle Ages. Until then, the tools to stoke and manage those embers of hatred did not exist. Once the tools do exist, inquisitions become a fact of life. They are not confined to religion; they are political as well. The targets can be large or small. An inquisition impulse can quietly take root in the very systems of government and civil society that order our lives.

Yeah, why, and how?

The tools are these: there needs to be a system of law, and the means to administer it with a certain amount of uniformity. Techniques must be developed for conducting interrogations and extracting information. Procedures must exist for record-keeping, and for retrieving information after records have been compiled and stored. An administrative mechanism – a bureaucracy – is required, along with a cadre of trained people to staff it. There must be an ability to send messages across significant distances, and also an ability to restrict the communications of others – in a word, censorship.
The Inquisition was built on all of these capabilities. The new universities brought order to canon law, defining heresy with precision and therefore defining who was “inside” and who was “outside”. The Church bureaucracy became professional; papal chanceries turned out perhaps 300 letters in 1200 and 50,000 a century later. Inquisitors learned how to organise their documents and make them searchable; a person’s testimony to one tribunal could be known to another tribunal decades later. Interrogation manuals, like the famous Practica written by Bernard Gui, were drawn up to instruct inquisitors on how to question the accused – the tricks to use, the psychology to employ. The resemblance to the modern manuals for military personnel and intelligence operatives is hard to miss. As a supplement to interrogation, torture became systematic – subject to rules, perhaps, but rules that proved elastic, as they always do.

What an institutional support, eh that took intolerance to awful depths! 

Every once in a while, I ask students in my classes about the Spanish Inquisition.  Simple questions like if they know what it was about.  The approximate time when it happened.  And then I share with them the Mel Brooks version of the history of the world in which he presents the Inquisition :)

Do the "humanities" serve any purpose at all?

Yes they do.
But, if taught and learnt with a certain approach. Certainly not the way we torture students with the humanities now. If I were an undergrad, I would hate taking anything in the humanities! Why? Because, the focus has shifted from helping students comprehend the world and understanding their own individuality and individual place in this world, to some horribly rotten dumbed down version of doctoral topics so that professors can then pretend to be ultra-smart in the eyes of students. No wonder then students are left wondering why there is a focus on some strange abstraction and theory when all they want is to "get the gen.ed. out of the way." So, that is what we have at the end of the undergrad experience: that the humanities are to most students something to endure if they want to get a college degree.

That is not how it ought to be. I found so much of valuable insights into what it means to be human from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Dickens, Narayan, Saroyan, Maugham, ..... I am so glad I read them and reflected on them on my own time and not in a choking classroom environment. The Grand Inquisitor by itself was a profound experience. I am willing to bet that most humanities departments rarely guide students towards the Grand Inquisitor.

The trigger for these thoughts came while reading this essay in Wilson Quarterly. In it, I liked this part the best (I don't agreee with everything in that essay):
[Many] of those who speak for the humanities, especially within the organized scholarly disciplines (history, English, and the like), have not quite acknowledged the nature of the problem. The humanities reached unprecedented heights of prestige and funding in the post–World War II era. But their advocates can only dream of such status today. Now the humanities have become the Ottoman Empire of the academy, a sprawling, incoherent, and steadily declining congeries of disparate communities, each formed around one or another credal principle of ideology and identity, and each with its own complement of local sultans, khedives, and potentates. And the empire steadily erodes, as colleges and universities eliminate such core humanities departments as classics (or, at the University of Southern California, German), and enrollment figures for humanities courses continue to fall or stagnate.