At the same time, the Inquisition was allowing the circulation of Lucretius, which says there’s no such thing as immortality of the soul, and prayer doesn’t work, and the gods didn’t create the cosmos…there’s this confusing apparent paradox of: “Inquisition, why are you spending so much effort and yet allowing these things that we think should be your number 1 target to circulate with your permission and even recommendation on the title page?”

And so I’m fascinated with trying to figure out what the Inquisition was doing when it wasn’t going after who we think it should’ve been. If you had a time machine, you’d go back and tell the Inquisition “You know, you’re fighting the wrong battles —if you want to really want to ferociously control the world, you should be going after Voltaire and not these bizarre Jansenist theologians no one in the future will have heard of.”

And so I became fascinated with the question of what the Inquisition’s actual goal was … and then that became a larger interest on a global scale, which is what my current project is: taking the patterns I’ve observed in European censorship and comparing them to China, the USSR, the Indian subcontinent both before and after British rule, to try to figure out what big global patterns there are in censorship that operate differently from what our expectations are.

how censorship worked historically. very interesting.

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