Nobody expects the Inquisition

My reflexive free-association, whenever I think of Inquisition (grand or otherwise), is 

Too soon?

Monty Python could make fun of the Spanish Inquisition, according to Adam Gopnik, "because Enlightenment ideals of tolerance and decency make us feel safe from it."

But he said that a decade ago, midway through the civilized administration of our most literate president since TR (POTUS 44 just released his summer reading list). Do we still feel so safe? Nobody I know expected POTUS 45, though if we'd been paying attention to the interrogations and insinuations perpetrated under POTUS 43 we probably should have.

Gopnik's reassurance came in the context of a review of God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World by Cullen Murphy.

After reading Murphy’s accounts of so many bodies tortured and so many lives ended, one ought, I suppose, to feel guilty about laughing at the old Python sketch, but it’s hard not to feel a little giddy watching it. How did we become this free to laugh at fanaticism? That for a moment or two the humanists seem to have it—that we don’t really expect the Inquisition to barge into our living rooms—is a fragile triumph of a painful, difficult, ongoing education in Enlightenment values. Bloody miracle, really.

Miracle. Plus, Mystery and Authority (and fear, surprise, "an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope" etc. etc.), the chief weapons of the sort of intimidation and cruelty that we delude ourselves in thinking so remote as to be the mere stuff of parody. We live in a time when vicious, self-righteous dogmatists lack all humility and circumspection, while the humble and circumspect lack all conviction. 

If you believe that you know the truth of the cosmos or of history, then the crime of causing pain to one person does seem trivial compared with the risk of permitting the death or damnation of thousands. We had no choice is what the Grand Inquisitor announces in Dostoyevsky. We know the cruellest of fanatics by their exceptionally clear consciences. Gopnik, 1.8.12 

So to revisit yesterday's post, Hillary was right about history even if a bit off-base as a literary critic and diviner of Dostoevsky's intentions. Almost nobody nowadays expects the Inquisition. But we shouldn't be surprised. Our interrogators, if they come, won't be nearly so amusing as Michael Palin. They'll be the heirs of Sarah.