The Return of Obscurantism

There are words that history wears down through rhetorical overuse. Obscurantism is one of them. For decades it was used to caricature the entire Middle Ages, as if a thousand years of European history had been nothing more than a long intellectual night. The term became popular in Enlightenment Europe. In the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers used obscurantism to describe the old temptation of power to limit the spread of knowledge. Voltaire mocked it in his famous pamphlet De l’horrible danger de la lecture, in which he imagined an edict banning reading because reading—he said with irony—“dispels the ignorance that protects well-governed states.” He was referring not only to religion nor only to the Church. He was pointing to something deeper: the alliance between political power and the control of thought.

For centuries, that logic manifested itself in very visible ways: censorship of books, persecution of inconvenient thinkers, control over knowledge considered dangerous. The Enlightenment believed it had left that stage behind by affirming a revolutionary principle: no authority should decide which ideas may be discussed and which may not. The West built its progress on that premise. But the temptations of power never disappear. They merely change form.

Controlling Digital Speech

Today there are no inquisitors or ecclesiastical tribunals. Yet in many Western countries—and Spain is no exception—a disturbingly similar logic is beginning to reappear: the idea that power must supervise public debate in order to protect society from mistaken ideas. The new battlefield is no longer books. It is the networks. In the name of fighting disinformation, hatred, or extremism, political projects to regulate digital speech are proliferating. The argument always sounds reasonable. The problem lies elsewhere: when political power begins to decide what is true and what is not, the line between regulation and censorship becomes dangerously thin.

Spain has been walking on this slippery ground for several years. From the government it is frequently repeated that it is necessary to “combat hoaxes.” The expression seems harmless. But in politics words matter. Because an uncomfortable question immediately arises: who decides what a hoax is? In a mature democracy the answer should be simple: public debate, free media, the confrontation of arguments. Yet the contemporary temptation is different. Increasingly, progressive governments believe that this task should fall to political power itself or to institutions close to it. In other words, exactly what for centuries defined obscurantism: the official administration of truth.

But control of speech is not the only symptom. Historical obscurantism was also characterized by moral dogmatism. Certain ideas ceased to be debated because questioning them was considered offensive or dangerous to the established order. In contemporary Spain, some political questions seem to have acquired that status. Certain narratives—about history, about identity, or about the very functioning of the system—are no longer discussed with arguments but with moral disqualifications. The dissenter is not mistaken: he is ideologically contaminated. It is the old mechanism of heresy, updated for the twenty-first century.

A Higher Historical Truth

Another feature of obscurantism was the delegitimization of the dissenter. When a system loses confidence in the strength of its arguments, it begins to resort to labels. The adversary ceases to be an interlocutor and becomes an anomaly that must be neutralized. Spanish politics has developed a particular talent for this practice. Whoever questions certain policies is not simply a critic: he is reactionary, a denialist, an extremist, or something similar. The objective is not to answer him. It is to expel him from the debate. That reflex reveals a deep insecurity. Societies confident in themselves do not fear uncomfortable ideas. They debate them. Insecure societies try to silence them.

Finally, obscurantism was always accompanied by an almost religious conception of power. Rulers did not present themselves as provisional managers, but as interpreters of a higher historical truth. Whoever opposed them did not merely disagree politically: he opposed the direction of history itself. In present-day Spain, that tone is beginning to sound familiar. Official discourse does not limit itself to defending concrete policies. It often adopts a pedagogical, almost moralizing tone in which the government appears as the guardian of the correct values before a society that needs to be guided.

How Freedoms Disappear

When political power begins to see itself as the intellectual tutor of society, history advises caution. That was always the starting point of obscurantism. Of course, the twenty-first century is not the Middle Ages. Spain continues to be a democracy with institutions, a plural press, and a critical citizenry. Precisely for that reason it is worth recognizing certain warning signs in time. Freedoms rarely disappear suddenly. They usually erode gradually, wrapped in good intentions and apparently reasonable arguments. Obscurantism never returns proclaiming itself as such. It always comes back with a noble discourse: to protect society, to organize debate, to prevent collective errors. But history teaches something uncomfortable: every time power decides to monitor thought in order to protect citizens, the result is usually the same. Less debate. Less freedom. And, ultimately, less truth. Because the true progress of a society does not consist in eliminating mistaken ideas. It consists in allowing them to be debated.