The final form of Descartes’ published synthesis was self-censorship-self-censorship very deliberately cultivated by an outside power. Descartes and thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial-an event whose burden in money and manpower for the Inquisition was minute compared to how hard it would have been for them to get at all those scientists. The purpose of the Galileo trial was to scare Descartes into retracting his then-about-to-be-published synthesis, which-on hearing about the trial-he took back from the publisher and revised to be much more orthodox. If you want to silence Galileo in 1600 you don’t need a trial, you just hire an assassin and you kill him, this is Renaissance Italy, the Church does this all the time. If we believe that the purpose of the Inquisition trying Galileo was to silence Galileo, it absolutely failed, it made him much, much more famous, and they knew it would. Will the show trial or book burning scare people into destroying every copy? No, a few will keep it, even treasure it more because of its precious scarcity, but the number who do is no larger than the number whose copies would’ve been missed by the ever-imperfect process of the search, and the cost in manpower is 1/1000 th of the cost of the search, freeing up resources for other action.Ī great question to get at this is : Did the trial of Galileo succeed or fail?
Think about how many man-hours it takes to search thousands of homes one-by-one to confiscate and destroy a particular book, versus how cheap and easy it is to have a showy book burning or arrest of an author which scares thousands of families into destroying the book if they have it. This makes sense when we realize that (A) preventing someone from writing/saying/releasing something in the first place is the only way to 100% wipe out its presence, and (B) encouraging self-censorship is, dollar for dollar and man-hour for man-hour, much cheaper and more impactful than anything else a censorious regime can do. In other words, when we look at history’s major censorious regimes, all of them-I want to stress that all of them-invested enormous resources in programs designed to encourage self-censorship, more resources than they invested in using state action to actively destroy or censor information. The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power. There are many problems with trying to draw such a line, but the most important is this: Many analyses of censorship start by drawing this line and analyzing state action and private action separately. The first and most important principle is that we cannot and should not draw a line between state censorship and private or civilian censorship.
The conclusions here are helpful for understanding this situation, but equally applicable to thinking about when school libraries bow to book ban pressures, how controversies impact book publishing in the USA and around the world, and historical cases: from the Inquisition, to censorious union-busting in 1950s New Zealand, to the US Comics Code Authority, to universities censoring student newspapers, etc. But since I am a scholar in the middle of writing a book about patterns in the history of how censorship operates, I want to put at the service of those thinking about the situation this zoomed-out portrait of a few important features of how censorship tends to work, drawn from my examination of examples from dozens of countries and over many centuries. This is not a direct analysis of the current 2023 Chengdu Hugo Awards controversy. This is inevitably among our first questions when news breaks that any expressive work (a book, film, news story, blog post etc.) has been censored or suppressed by the company or group trusted with it (a publisher, a film studio, a newspaper, an awards organization etc.) “Was it a government action, or did they do it themselves because of pressure?”