Many years ago, during my undergraduate years at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, someone pointed out to me the black dot which was on the spines of some of the older books in the stacks of our library. This black dot indicated that the book formerly had been held in closed stacks because it had been placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“Index of Prohibited Books”), the Church’s official list of books which were judged to be dangerous to faith or morals.
Arising out of the chaotic time of the Protestant Reformation and the invention of the printing press, the Church felt the need to enforce the moral claim that one should not read things which endanger faith and morals by attaching legal censures to the possession or reading of certain books.
Note carefully that this prohibition was not absolute; those with a legitimate purpose for reading these books (e.g., Machiavelli, Hobbes, or Hume) could receive permission to possess and read these books and this permission was relatively easy to obtain from ecclesiastical authority if one were engaged in academic scholarship.
Therefore, the college library didn’t lack the books in question; rather, the professor or student simply had to demonstrate a just reason. The black dot was there to ensure that the book was returned to the closed stacks after it was brought back. When the Index lost the force of ecclesiastical law in 1966, the books took their place for the first time in the open stacks.
This memory came to mind a few days ago at the Brownstone Conference and Gala as I discussed with Jeffrey Tucker his recent article about how nearly impossible it is to gain access to our own government’s Vaccine Safety Datalink. I immediately observed that it would have been child’s play to gain access to even the most perniciously heretical book on the Index compared to what was required to gain access to the VSD.
“I’m a professor of philosophy looking to critique this thinker’s errors” was enough to take the book home with you, albeit after the delay involved in waiting for one’s letter to be answered.
Instead, what Jeffrey describes is a massively expensive and time-consuming system where you have to explain the conclusions you plan on reaching ahead of time, pass through a gauntlet of reviews, sign off on restrictive promises to not leak the data, only to possibly be granted access to a workstation where they show you only what they want to show you after they take away all of your electronics. Jeffrey grimly observes:
Hence, as you can see, the science is settled even before the evidence is examined. In reality, no outside researcher has made it through this process for more than twenty years. Many have tried, hundreds of attempts, but they have never amounted to anything.
This restrictive process doesn’t resemble the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, but rather resembles the restrictions that exist for access to the doctrines of a religion like Scientology. Despite the fact that many of these materials have been made available because of legal filings and internet leaks (amusingly summarized in the South Park episode “Trapped in the Closet”), the Church of Scientology considers these lessons to be protected by trade secret and copyright laws and will often aggressively attempt to pursue these claims.
