This post is a signal boost for Ada Palmer’s very interesting John Nuveen Lecture on censorship at the University of Chicago Divinity School. A lot of you reading this blog may know her better from her songs and the group Sassafrass, but she’s amazingly knowledgeable about a lot of things.

A few thoughts of my own:

Her objection to censorship as just governmental action is valid if you restrict it to actions where the government is the sole party, but cases where the government impels private action or permits actions that would otherwise be crimes are also forms of government censorship. The talk is largely about the Inquisition, or as she prefers, the Inquisitions that operated independently in different nations. They were private agencies, but in the Medieval and Early Modern periods there were lots of ties between church and state. The Spanish Inquisition could torture people because the Spanish government gave it the authority to. Otherwise they’d have been just a criminal gang.

One of Ada’s major themes is that censors almost always think they’re doing good. In their view, they’re protecting people from “harmful” material. Insofar as she’s talking about suppression on “moral” grounds, that’s true, but there have been many governments that have controlled information for the purpose of holding on to power. Russia, China, and North Korea are current examples.

I haven’t watched the Q&A, and she might have addressed these points there. It’s a great talk anyway. Listen to it.