“I have a feeling that we are missing something about this inferno of madness that is running its course through Europe and, of late, its American colonies”.

Bernard was having coffee with his wife, resting after a long shift consisting of, mostly, victims of all sorts of violence, and religious fanatics of all kinds that got killed in religious wars, persecutions and uprisings. It wasn’t something that was foreign to him, but the whole thing showed patterns he was unfamiliar with, and that bothered him.

“What do you mean?”, Clare sipped her coffee in blessed peace.

“Those fanatics, or ‘Protestants’ of hundreds of different varieties, are in some ways similar to the Cathari, but in other ways…”, he suddenly turned rigid. “The printing press”, he smiled and relaxed.

“?”

“The printing press. That’s the problem. That’s causing, or at least accelerating, all the problems”, he smiled and sipped from his cup.

“You’ll have to explain it to me, because I don’t follow you. I don’t see how the printing press would have caused this. I would expect it to promote literacy, because it would make books accessible to larger masses of people, and that can be only beneficial, as educated people are less likely to be ignorant savages. Let’s just compare Lady Hypatia and the mob who killed her. I would venture a guess that none of them had read a single book”, she pointed out.

“There is something that is much more dangerous than a mob that hasn’t read a single book”, he nodded.

“What is it?”

“A mob that has read only one single book”, he looked his wife in the eyes.

“People have a wrong idea about the printing press. They think it suddenly creates entire libraries of books and makes them accessible to everyone who can read, and that in turn incentivises people to learn how to read, and suddenly you have educated, enlightened masses. That’s not how the printing press works. A printing press works by arranging lead casts of letters into sentences and forming a page. This is a laborious process. Then comes the easy part: roll black ink over the prepared template, put a sheet of paper on that, and press. You have one printed page. What you do next, is roll another coat of ink, put another blank page on the template, and press. Repeat this easy process a hundred times, and you have a hundred copies of that page. But then you have to painstakingly do the typesetting for the next page, and so on. As a result, the printing press is the best at making a large number of copies of a single book. In fact, the printing press isn’t that much faster at producing a single book than manual calligraphy. What it excels at is producing that one book in a deluge of copies”, he explained.

“I still don’t understand the problem”, she sighed.

“It doesn’t produce a hundred books. It produces a hundred copies of a single book. Tell me, do you know what the first printed book was?”

“Gutenberg’s Bible. He printed Vulgata in 150 or so copies”, she answered easily.

“Exactly so. And the next efforts went very much in the same direction. They printed lots of Bibles in Latin. Then they translated Bible into commonly used languages, such as English and German, and printed that, because they understand that their target audience doesn’t know much, if any, Latin. And as a result, they produced large masses of people who have read only one book”, he concluded.

“I think I’m starting to understand what you’re getting at”, Clare nodded. “You get illiterate people who have read only the Bible. It starts with the Old Testament, which is difficult to understand without the historical context, but it is full of parts that promote fanaticism and rigidity, as it’s full of stringent rules, harsh punishments and a vindictive God. Those people take it all at face value, and since it’s the only book they have ever read, and it’s holy scripture, it becomes their whole world, and they quote it where it does and doesn’t make sense, not even understanding properly what they are quoting. And since this project of mass printing the Bible happens in the context of the Protestant, ‘sola scriptura’ sects, the viewpoint where the Bible is the only book one will ever need becomes pervasive. There is no commentary by the saints to explain the nuances of meaning”.

“You got it. And this viewpoint encourages self-righteous fanaticism – they think they are basing their beliefs on the only thing that matters, that its meaning is self-evident, and everybody with a different understanding of any minute point of theology is, I don’t know, a wolf in sheep’s clothing sent by Satan to seduce them from true faith”, he smiled. “So, what did we have in the 13^th century? We had a limited number of books. They were placed in libraries. The variety of books was pretty large, from Aristotle and Plato to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. You had books on medicine by Avicenna, books on mathematics by Averroes, books on history by Plutarch, Illiad and Odyssey, books on architecture by our friend Vitruvius, books on herbalism by Hildegarde, and so on”, he smiled. “You had one copy of almost everything, and multiple copies of the Bible. If you wanted to learn, you had that accessible at the University or in a monastery. If you could read, you likely read at least a dozen books, but more likely a hundred or more. If you couldn’t read, you heard something from the Bible on the Mass, where the priest selected the most instructive and inspiring passages. He was limiting access to the potentially incendiary parts, and those leading to dangerous conclusions without abundant knowledge of context. But what happens when this filter is removed?”

“People read everything, starting with the most fanatical slaughters of the Old Testament”, she nodded. “And there are more passages with infidels being slaughtered, and all sorts of groups commanded to be stoned, and rules and regulations of every kind that promote self-righteousness that had cost Israel so dearly, and only in the end there’s Christ saying it doesn’t matter, and the point is to love thy neighbour and God, and love each other as he loved them, and the point is to be ready to give your life for your friends, rather than kill many infidels for the jealous God”, she considered. “I see where you were getting at with people who had read only one book being more dangerous than those who had read none at all. And the printing press created a monoculture of books, because it is a technology that makes it easy to print one book in a thousand copies, but it is much worse at creating a varied library of a thousand different books. And what everybody thought most important was to mass produce the Bible”.

“It produced something much worse than an illiterate mob. It produced a semi-literate mob that read only the Bible, and this fed their self-righteous narcissism, that was very much like that of the Cathari. And there’s another thing the printing press is even better at. It absolutely excels at making short pamphlets. Tell me, what do you expect those to be?”, he smiled.

“Well, considering how the Bible would be the first thing everybody thinks of, the second thing would be some kind of ideological propaganda, by fanatics who think what they have to say needs to reach as many people as possible, and is secondary in importance only to the Bible”, she smiled and sipped her coffee. “Of course, some would want to print their poetry or other literature, especially commentary on the Bible or scientific views that are repressed as heretical, and especially if they are wealthy enough to be able to finance printing, but for the most part, I would expect fanatics to print incendiary material that tries to motivate mobs to revolutions and violence. And since people are used to seeing things in print only if they received imprimatur from the Church, they assume that everything they see in print is true”, she nodded. “I see now”.

“The printing press is the newest technological manifestation of the ‘fama volat’ principle – it can spread incendiary rumours quickly, leading to upheavals. If you want to make people depose the King, you spread rumours. How do you that, buy a printing press and start a newspaper. It would be expensive, and yet cheap enough for people who would actually see the use in doing so. I think we have only seen the beginnings of it”, he gestured in dismay.

“Are there any benefits to this technology at all?”, she wondered.

“Some. Eventually, whole libraries of books will be duplicated and reprinted. Every school library will be able to afford the number of books that used to be reserved for the large Universities. Eventually, education will become widespread. However, I’m not sure it means what people now think it will mean. They think everybody will be like Aristotle or Augustine. I don’t think so. I think it will create an inflated number of dunces educated far beyond their intelligence, with lots of superficial knowledge but little to no wisdom. I think it will mass-produce arrogance and conceit of knowledge in large masses, with the number of actually intelligent and wise philosophers staying pretty close to what it always was”, he guessed.

“I would assume that mass education would be of greater use for natural sciences, where access to information means more than the depth of understanding. For instance, if you want to grow trees in an orchard, you need accurate instructions, but little wisdom is required”, she smiled.

“You are right, of course, which is why I would expect the natural sciences to flourish, and spiritual sciences to stagnate or vanish outright”.

“And let’s not forget: if anyone can print a book in a thousand copies, and most of those books are of poor quality, one’s ability to find a book of good quality will be greatly diminished, as I would expect the number of good books to grow by a trickle, and the number of bad ones by a deluge”, she nodded. “If you don’t know exactly what you are looking for, you will have to go through thousands of worthless books in order to find a good one”.

“Which is why people will either stick to the known good ones, or read whatever they manage to stumble upon by random chance”, he assented. “But this is of little concern as of now. What worries me is the ease with which this technology spreads incendiary material that promotes fanatical violence. All it would take is the right book at the right time, and it could burn down half the world”.

“Qur’an comes to mind as confirmation of your thesis, my Lord”, she bowed and kissed him.

“That, and worse, my Lady”, he bowed back and smiled.

“What can even be worse? Have you read it?”, she gestured in dismay.

“I have, and I regret it greatly, for it resembles a mixture of garbled sentences hallucinated by a madman who thinks himself a prophet. But I fear very much that we won’t have to wait long in order to see for ourselves”.

“They had witch hunts recently. They burned hundreds of women at a stake only in England”, her look was grim.

“And with accusations so preposterous, I would not only have dismissed them summarily, but also conducted a thorough investigation of the accuser, since most of them look either insane, or evil with the spirit of Satan”, Bernard brooded darkly. “What frustrates me is that the enemies of the Church now spread the propaganda accusing the Church of this nonsense, whilst it never would have been possible in my time. They act as if all that superstitious nonsense is the product of the teachings of the Church, rather than the destruction of the Church by the plague and the resulting return to barbarism and the rise of the schismatic movements”.

“You are of course right. In our times, if someone accused a woman of being a witch, he would have been in serious trouble for slander, and rightly accused of crimes himself. Now, when one accuses a woman of being a witch, she is the one who is in trouble”, Clare frowned. “And what do they even mean by a witch? I’ve heard only nonsense that defies reason – witches flying on brooms and making people’s cattle die of sickness and so on. There is no chance whatsoever of any of it existing”.

“Of course there isn’t. No inquisitor in the world would have anything to do with such preposterous nonsense. In my time, when a woman was accused of witchcraft, the accusations were almost always true – there always was some village herbalist who dabbled in dark magic as well, and brewed potions out of toxic herbs and hallucinogenic compounds of other origins, where the only thing that made a difference between a hallucinogenic potion and a deadly poison was dosage, and often poisoning was the true intent. People actually died, and then of course the woman behind it was in trouble, but the actual accusation was murder, not something nebulous. We had cases where women performed abortions of pregnancy and infanticide. In every single case where actions were taken, witchcraft was merely a method of committing murder, and not a charge in itself. What they are doing these days is a mockery of religion as well as a mockery of justice. Were it so easy to prove witches flying on brooms, it wouldn’t be so difficult to prove the existence of God”, he concluded.

“It’s actually quite easy to prove the existence of God”, Clare smiled. “You only need to die and come to our office”.

“I’m afraid most people would prefer to have the evidence beforehand”, he smiled, lifted her by the hand and kissed her. “Coffee break over, my love. Let’s get back to work”.