God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (34 page)

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.”

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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 all 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?

In the waning years of the Roman Empire, a lawyer-turned-littérateur named Aurelius Clemens Prudentius composed the epic poem
Psychomachia,
about a contest between good and evil. It eventually became popular, and in the Middle Ages influenced a number of better-known works, such as the morality play
Everyman
and the allegorical poem
Piers Ploughman.
It was Prudentius who developed the list of the “seven heavenly virtues”—which did battle in his epic with the “seven deadly vices.” The first six of the heavenly virtues are charity, temperance, chastity, diligence, patience, and kindness. At the bottom of the list, appropriately enough, is humility. The “greatest of these,” Paul observed of the core Christian virtues, is charity. That is the standard view of all Christian denominations. It is a constant refrain of the Gospels and a central message of most religions. Stripped of divine sanction, it is a cherished secular value.

But if the first virtue, charity, summons us to our better natures, it is the seventh virtue, humility, that protects us from our baser ones. A few years ago, the political philosopher Michael Sandel published a small book called
The Case for Imperfection.
Its ostensible focus is on genetic engineering and other scientific methods for ensuring that the human beings who walk the planet are as good as they can be—as close to perfect as we can make them. But the larger purpose is to raise a question: Is perfection even desirable? Yes, of course, it is a worthy goal to diminish disease, incapacity, and other afflictions. But the quest for perfection goes well beyond such efforts, even as we disagree on what “perfection” actually means.

More to the point, Sandel asks, shouldn’t we pause to consider the contribution that imperfection makes to the betterment of the human condition? Our individual qualities and flaws are distributed unevenly. For now, they are also distributed randomly. We deserve neither full credit for what is good about ourselves nor full blame for what is bad. No one does. This aleatory quality—each of us in some sense represents a throw of nature’s dice—has important consequences. Rightly understood, it puts a premium on what we do have in common: to begin with, our moral equality as beings, regardless of specific attributes. Because all of us come up short in some dimension, it conduces to tolerance. “One of the blessings of seeing ourselves as creatures of nature, God, or fortune is that we are not wholly responsible for the way we are,” Sandel writes. “The more alive we are to the chanced nature of our lot, the more reason we have to share our fate with others.”

The Inquisition—any inquisition—is the product of a contrary way of seeing things. It takes root and thrives when moral inequality is perceived between one party and everyone else. Inquisitions invite members of one group—national, religious, corporate, political—to sit in judgment on members of another: to think of themselves, in a sense, as God’s jury. Fundamentally, the inquisitorial impulse arises from some vision of the ultimate good, some conviction about ultimate truth, some confidence in the quest for perfectibility, and some certainty about the path to the desired place—and about whom to blame for obstacles in the way.

These are powerful inducements. Isaiah Berlin warned against them:

To make mankind just and happy and creative and harmonious forever—what could be too high a price to pay for that? To make such an omelette, there is surely no limit to the number of eggs that should be broken—that was the faith of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Mao, for all I know, of Pol Pot. Since I know the only true path to the ultimate solution of the problems of society, I know which way to drive the human caravan; and since you are ignorant of what I know, you cannot be allowed to have liberty of choice even within the narrowest limits, if the goal is to be reached. You declare that a given policy will make you happier, or freer, or give you room to breathe; but I know that you are mistaken, I know what you need, what all men need; and if there is resistance based on ignorance or malevolence, then it must be broken and hundreds of thousands may have to perish to make millions happy for all time. What choice have we, who have the knowledge, but to be willing to sacrifice them all?

This way of thinking is not new. We would have encountered one version of it during the Medieval Inquisition, another during the French Revolution. Modernity itself is not the culprit, but it is an accomplice. It transforms an impulse into a process.

Some ills have cures of a conventional kind. We can change a law, tweak a regulation, implement a program. The inquisitorial impulse is impervious to such interventions. Legal restrictions can always be finessed (and the Inquisition itself, in any case, was always “legal”). The capacities of surveillance are heading in one direction only, regardless of what any law might say. No matter what happens to the nation-state, bureaucracies are permanent and ever more pervasive. They operate with more autonomy every day.

I think often of that conversation with Francisco Bethencourt, when he explained that what ultimately sent the Inquisition into decline (we were talking specifically about the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions) was something that had no physical existence at all: the slow advance of Enlightenment notions of tolerance, freedom of conscience, and freedom of expression. Enlightenment and Inquisition have faced off against each other in countless ways over centuries, but I came across a small, symbolic example one afternoon at the British Library. I had gone there to look at Bernard Gui’s
Liber Sententiarum
—his
Book of Sentences
—but affixed to the front of the manuscript was a sheaf of eighteenth-century correspondence bearing on how the manuscript had come into the library’s hands. The philosopher John Locke had played a central role; he came across the manuscript in the south of France, alerted the historian Philipp van Limborch to its existence, and eventually managed to find a buyer for it.
“When you see what it contains,” Locke wrote to Limborch, “I think you will agree with us that it ought to see the light. For it contains authentic records of things done in that rude age which have either been forgotten or purposefully misrepresented.”
Locke’s ideas about religious toleration turned on the very idea of uncertainty: human beings can’t know for sure which truths are “true,” and in any case, attempting to compel belief only leads to trouble.