“Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.”

Louis D. Brandeis

Medieval Torture of the Mind

The term “medieval torture” instantly conjures images of the rack, the iron maiden, and that doctrinaire instructor from school days. Some people are so dedicated to their staunchly held orthodoxies that they believe all who fail to fall in line with their way of thinking deserve to be tortured into compliance.

In the sociopolitical realm, many quite orthodoxical beliefs emerge from distorted perceptions or fanciful theories about how to solve worldly problems. Think of the conflicts that surround race, sex, and political philosophies. Passions run high within these domains, particularly when evidence runs low. Then too, sometimes that passion is driven less by belief in the cause than for the presumably noble standing that alliance with the cause confers to the supporter.

Perceptions and motive notwithstanding, such orthodoxies frequently garner emphatic obedience from adoring acolytes who can’t stand to have their beliefs questioned. So, they defend their convictions by haranguing critics and portraying them as dangerous heretics who must be both silenced and shunned for the protection of all. Later this social vilification advances to demands for legal strictures against opposition, enforced by law and penalty. The witches must be burned.

Does any of this sound familiar? If so, you’ve witnessed Medieval torture of the mind. Your mind.

Things don’t advance much when the Medieval impulse prevails because it’s terrifically difficult to have a reasoned discussion while being drawn and quartered. Yet the discussion and criticism of opposing ideas is the very stuff of human progress. It’s how we come to understand each other, bridge gaps in perspective, and find surprising areas of agreement and places for compromise. It’s how we discover that while the other person may be wrong, that doesn’t make them evil. That realization helps us resist the Medieval urge to throw people into a dungeon (physical or metaphorical) when they express ideas that question our assumptions or hurt our feelings.

We thought we already had this in hand because we are the children of the Enlightenment, living in the Western world under its values of empiricism, skepticism, liberalism, and individualism. Yet that primitive Medieval impulse seems to be a deeply embedded human trait. Quite ironically, it even reared its vicious head at the very dawning of the Enlightenment within the fevered minds of the French Revolution Jacobins. They sank immediately into the Medieval impulse to destroy the structures, symbols, and people that opposed their “enlightened” views or that merely reminded them of pre-enlightenment thinking. No one and nothing was to be spared, even the very structure of the calendar by which time was marked. Thus, what had seemed to be an enlightened movement for structural change in 18th century France turned into a fanatical bloodbath at the hands of those who believed themselves to be so enlightened that their Medieval behavior was justified. We have seen this phenomenon over and over through the centuries. Our innate Medievalism is difficult to restrain.

Just so, modern-day Jacobins also operate a movement designed to shut down debate over politically charged philosophies and to stifle even the simple expression of viewpoints that conflict with their enlightened, high ground. The “cancel culture” developed so that people could be ceremoniously marched to the de-platforming guillotine if their ideas violated parochial notions of acceptable thought or use of language. The concept of “safe spaces” emerged as a kind of cloister that would protect the acolytes of popular causes from the “triggering” ideas of those with whom they disagree or consider offensive. Even on elite college campuses, enclaves that should be the bastions of the free exchange of ideas, such exchanges were often banished to the stocks of so called “free speech zones.”  And, in some places around the world, certain speech began to be punished with an actual trip to the contemporary dungeon of prison.

This notion that free speech is somehow dangerous signals our descent into a modern, Medieval dungeon of the mind, reducing the range of allowable thought to a mere blend of chimerical edicts and angry mob rule. Violence inevitably follows such a descent. It always has.

Yet, these Medieval thought dungeons are little more than dreamy sociopolitical thought bubbles that are airily presumed by their acolytes to hold the enlightened, progressive view. They are filled by the noxious gases of romanticized social theories, inflated by a combination of hypersensitivity, naivete, and doting compliance to anointed leaders, then pressurized to the bursting point by the force of group think.

Still, despite their taut fragility, these swirling thought bubbles prove to be rather effective as intellectual torture chambers. They exert excruciating pressure on the mind by deeming alternate views to be heretical and, thus, unconstrained discussion a punishable sin. Ironic that many of those who believe themselves to be most enlightened exhibit the most Medieval attitudes, enforcing their contentions with a ferocity that only closed minds can muster. In turn, the tortured often comply for fear that, otherwise, the torture will end only when their reputation is burned at the stake.

Again, does any of this sound familiar?

Know that there is only one escape from the Medieval thought dungeon: Never apologize for your views and continue to speak your mind despite the pressure bearing down. Know that it is the keen point wielded by clear and unafraid thinking that can puncture the taught surface of Medieval thought bubbles, but only if that clear and unafraid thinking is spoken. Every such voice has vital importance because the piercing words of each person emboldens quieter, tortured minds to assert their own clear and sharp-pointed thinking, each piercing ever more Medieval thought bubbles. And with each burst, our modern-day Jacobins are further exposed as the dungeon masters they are: a torturous remnant from the dark ages.

As more and more gassy dungeons burst, the air clears to enable breaths of actual enlightenment. But this time let us inhale not only the fine principles of empiricism, skepticism, liberalism, and individualism, but also the wisdom of ancient teachings and of practical experience. All are needed to differentiate between “enlightened” foolishness and enlightened wisdom.

It is only an unrelenting insistence that all perspectives be heard that can overcome the Medieval impulse to torture non-compliant minds... like yours.