I.
If you spend some time online, you’ll quickly discover that there are litmus tests everywhere. Something always comes along, like a powerfully potent image, video, or news event, which instantly lets us know something deeper about where someone stands or even what he fundamentally is. Every now and then, a new one arrives. Even the most seemingly humdrum everyday item could be one. Take the shopping cart, for instance. You see shopping carts all the time, yes? Every time you enter a supermarket, right? Well, did you know that the shopping cart is “the ultimate litmus test” to determine if you’re “capable of self-governing”? Observe:
Fascinating, no? Someone adapted this theory into a YouTube video, which currently has 2.6 million views. But far less impressive litmus tests proliferate online, and they’re virtually unavoidable on social media. It’s as though the internet is collectively holding auditions for litmus tests and determining via popularity which ones ought to be the most authoritative. And it feels as though soon enough, just about everything you could think of will be considered a litmus test for something by someone, somewhere, for some reason.
II.
The litmus test is a metaphor, and it has grown increasingly widespread over time to cover a variety of vaguely sociopolitical topics. It has been used since the mid-20th century as a political assessment, and when it first was metaphorized, the litmus test was the single issue to determine a candidate’s fitness for office. It worked like this: if you were a voter, you’d ask the candidate, “Ah, yes, but where do you stand on abortion?” “Where do you stand on the war?” “What is your opinion on implementing a tariff?” etc., and the candidate’s answer would make or break his candidacy for you, the voter. That was the idea.
Now, think about how apt of a metaphor the litmus test is in such a context. Litmus tests are used to determine whether a liquid is an acid or a base without revealing its precise pH level. When you do a litmus test, you use red and blue strips of paper. When you put a blue strip into a base, it stays blue, but if you put a red strip into a base, it will turn blue. Contrariwise, when you put a red strip into an acid, it stays red. But if you put a blue strip into an acid, it will turn red.
One can immediately see the application of the metaphor to politics: the voter is the strip, and the liquid is the candidate. The voter might typically be “red,” but what she learns about the candidate from that one question could potentially turn her “blue.” Or, she might regularly be “blue,” but there’s an issue she’s so concerned about that she might flip to “red.” And given that “red” and “blue” are regularly used to represent the two parties in America, the Republicans and Democrats, the litmus test seems a particularly potent metaphor.
But there are two interesting aspects to consider here. Aspect number one is that when the litmus test was first used as a political metaphor, there weren’t yet any dynamic maps of America that used blue and red colors to show which president won which state. The first one appeared in 1976. And moreover (this is the second interesting aspect), during this time, “red” and “blue” did not have a fixed meaning when applied to the parties. “Red” did not mean Republican, and “blue” did not mean Democrat; they were simply cipher colors that TV stations and newspapers would use interchangeably to show which president won a given state through the electoral college.
Few people consciously know this, and fewer still bother to think about its implications, but only in the year 2000 did “red” come to mean Republican while “blue” came to mean Democrat. It isn’t clear why the colors were chosen that way exactly. But regardless of the reason, as if miraculously, the voters became much more fixed in their voting patterns at the same time, and thus the concept of a “red state” or “blue state” became fully entrenched in the American national consciousness. Additionally, the possibility of a third party winning an election virtually disappeared altogether, and third party candidates went from being zany guys whom the media would work tirelessly to discredit despite having lots of grassroots support (e.g. Ross Perot and the Reform Party) to being mere “spoilers” whose only value is in destroying the chances of the party ideologically nearest to them of winning the election (e.g. Ralph Nader, who became the ultimate enemy and traitor to affluent Democrat-voting suburbanites everywhere despite being a better person than Al Gore by just about every measurable standard).
Yet nevertheless, the “litmus test” as a metaphor could still work in the mid-20th century despite there being no colors at first, and the colors not quite being fixed when they arrived. What the metaphor really meant was that a voter could have a single issue that determines how she’ll vote, and the importance of this issue overrode all other concerns The metaphor is still supposedly used this way when determining a candidate for the judiciary, but back then, it worked for everyone. Each issue was more likely to be considered discretely from the others for the voters as well as politicians. Today, the situation is quite different, the issues all blend together seamlessly, and thus almost no one is a “single issue” voter. One way we know this is in looking at two of the major protest movements that arose during the 00s decade: the “Tea Party” and “Occupy Wall Street.” In both cases, neither protest succeeded at sticking to a single issue. The “Tea Parties” were originally meant to be about national spending, but then they turned into an incoherent mess of Republican talking points. The “Occupy” protests fared a bit better in staying on-message for a while, but by the end of them, they too turned into an incoherent mess of progressive “social justice” talking points. The Vietnam War protests, by contrast, were pretty much about the Vietnam War.
III.
Given the shifts in American political culture, it should come as no surprise that the litmus test has also subsequently shifted in its usage. The litmus test now determines what kind of voter or political animal some average nobody might be, and so the mystery liquid isn’t the politician or the political issue itself, but rather the person. The strip of paper, then, becomes the issue (or image, or situation, or whatever). In other words, the focus has shifted from the politicians to the members of the general population. Along with this shift, the litmus test metaphor is applied to just about every conceivable subject, so long as it contains a vaguely sociopolitical subtext.
Litmus tests occur all the time, but some examples stick out more than others. In a Twitter post that went viral, a guy reposted a video of some white male oil rig workers operating heavy machinery and said, “This video is a pretty good litmus test for politics: do you regard these men with respect, or disgust?” The implication could only be determined from context clues, but it was that Republican voters are, in fact, more pro-working-class than Democrat voters, since Democrats have become the party of latte-sipping urbanites who can’t stand the sight of muscular macho mud-covered manly men. Democrats and various leftists immediately pounced on it, jeering at the tweet for not addressing anything substantive (like minimum wage, vacation leave, safety regulations, etc.) while they simultaneously boosted its engagement stats through their vitriol, assuring it of its viral success. In other words, it was a classic “bait” post. And even though the subject of the post was seemingly abstract, just about everyone immediately saw the political implication the poster was making.
Today’s litmus test typically preserves traces of its connection to democratic party politics, but it’s not always necessary. What truly gives the litmus test its power today is that it’s binary by nature, even for classifications that are anything but. Consider this example:
Of the two hot girls, your choice of who’s hotter will determine your social class. Of course, there are more than two social classes, so the user has to clarify what he’s talking about a couple posts down. But eventually, we see how the classes are neatly divided into two: there’s “high value,” and then there’s “lower strata.”
In its most extreme (and yet increasingly typical) usage, the litmus test determines whether someone, no matter how unimportant, is a “friend” or an “enemy.” These kinds of litmus tests occur frequently enough. Some news story breaks out, and people decide that someone’s stance on just that story alone will determine her existential worth. Again, these situations mostly break down along bipartisan political lines, and we can faintly sense the red and blue strips of paper being used to test the person, determining her value once and for all.
For the most part, these litmus tests never do anything or go anywhere, in large part because people lack the memory required to bear the results in mind. I believe that the popularity of the litmus test as a metaphor is a way of coping with two things: the first is the growing marginalization of the individual. That is, the inability of common people to generate meaningful, lasting political change in a world in which elected politicians have less power than ever, bureaucracies run most everything, and changes only occur due to action generated either from above or at the mob level (and these things are often the same). In the face of this new development, the litmus test reassures everyone that random people online really do matter as people, which means you matter, too!
The second condition with which people need to cope is the increasing complexity of just about everything in the modern world. At the moment, there are probably more “issues” to think about than there ever have been in all of political history, and consequently, almost no one is a “single issue” voter. In fact, people will often change their mind on an issue if the collective to whom they’ve sworn allegiance prompts them to do so. It grows increasingly difficult to maintain a sense of proportionality regarding which questions matter and which don’t.
The litmus test is a way you can reassure yourself that things are indeed quite simple; that a line can be drawn in the sand after all. But in truth, none of the images, videos, or news stories that people find online are really litmus tests. It’s just fun to think of them that way. At most, they’re Rorschach blot tests, and the results are about as conclusive and reliable as those a therapist reaches when he subjects his own patients to the blots. Which is to say, they have no value at all.
IV.
It may seem odd that the litmus test, a chemistry procedure, has taken on such strong sociopolitical dimensions, even to the point where its literal meaning is often forgotten. But it’s worth keeping in mind that the inventor of the litmus test, Arnald de Villa Nova (c. 1240-1311), could be quite political himself. Arnald was an alchemist, physician, student of astrology, political reformer, and prophet of the apocalypse. When he first started experimenting with lichens as a means of testing acids and bases, lichen moss was already well-known as an ingredient for dye (and had been used that way since the time of the Vikings). But Arnald ingeniously realized it could be used as a way to determine the makeup of unidentified liquids, and thus he invented the procedure with which to do so. As far as his scientific work went, Arnald’s met the highest standards of his time… but then again, one has to consider the standards of the time.
Typically, when historians of science discuss Arnald, they present him as a diligent, rational thinker, a faithful translator of Galen and Hippocrates, and a man of serious inquiry whose work helped paved the way for modern science. Consequently, this reputation of him has led historians to dismiss various “kooky” works attributed to him as forgeries, not because of any specific evidence but rather because the content doesn’t fit their understanding of who he was. But who he really was isn’t altogether clear — our perception of him has to remain blurry, as with most pre-modern figures. At the very least, we know that many of his discoveries were legitimate, and the litmus test was one of them.
Yet there was another side to Arnald that doesn’t typically get covered in the biographies of great scientists. And that’s the side of him that predicted an imminent apocalypse via Biblical exegesis, predicted the coming of the Antichrist, and correspondingly sought papal reform as a result of his exegetical findings. Some have even said that there are two entirely different Arnalds who emerge in academic scholarship: the prim and proper man of rational inquiry, and the mystical apocalypse prophet. If you’re an academic, you’ll either focus on one or the other, and there have been only a couple attempts to reconcile the two sides of this same person (and none have been terribly influential).1
Part of the reason for this is that Arnald had mostly finished his career in science by the time he started getting political. Here’s what happened, in brief. In the year 1290, Arnald was reading the Book of Daniel, and he stumbled upon a passage (12:11) that caused him to conclude that there would be 1,290 years between the end of the Jewish worship in Jerusalem and the worship of the Antichrist. Since the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed in 75 A.D., this meant that the end of the world would happen in the year 1365. Being an amateur in theological matters, he didn’t tell anyone about his views. Instead, he simply sat down and wrote a treatise, On the Advent of the Antichrist, and kept it in his possession for ten years. Finally, he worked up the confidence to show it to some Parisian theologians while he was visiting Paris on a diplomatic visit for the King of Aragon. This caused some serious controversy, and he wound up getting thrown into jail for heresy. He finally was released following the death of Pope Benedict XI, and then when Clement V was elected pope, he was quite relieved, since they were on good terms and Clement V would thus not go after him.
Arnald’s view was that during the 14th century, two opposing figures would emerge: one, an Angel Pope (pastor angelicus), and the other, the Antichrist. A similar prophecy could be found in the writings of Joachim of Fiore and one of his followers, Peter Olivi, and Arnald is thus assumed to be influenced by at least Joachim. But unlike the Joachites, Arnald allowed for some element of free will, seeing history as ultimately predetermined but still somewhat loose in the manner in which it would come to pass. Instead of saying that these popes would have fixed, predestined personalities, his writings stressed the voluntaristic nature of the situation. If a pope chose to be the Antichrist, he could be the Antichrist, but if the same pope decided to be the Angel Pope instead, perhaps he could become the Angel Pope! In the same way that a litmus test tells us if something is an acid or a base, thereby amounting to a strict binary, so did Arnald’s prophecy. Antichrist, or Angel Pope. Those are your choices, and Arnaldus wanted to guide whichever pope might read his work in the right direction.
Now, was there a “litmus test” to determine whether a pope would be the antichrist or the angel pope? For Arnald, there doesn’t seem to have been one. But for many, the debate on apostolic poverty was it. There was a large dispute between the Franciscan and Benedictine orders about whether or not poverty ought to be the ideal for which all righteous men must strive, with of course the Franciscans being on the side of poverty. This was a theological debate with roots going back to similar disputes between Augustine and Pelagius, but the debate took on a politically fraught dimension in the late thirteenth century when Celestine V was elected pope, a nearly illiterate man who had lived a simple life and had no real political experience. He was technically a Benedictine, but he had founded the order of the Celestines, who were simpatico with various Franciscans who also disliked the growing bureaucratization and cosmopolitanism of the church. Celestine V ultimately abdicated the papacy the same year he was elected, and his successor was Boniface VIII, who quickly jailed Celestine under the pretense that he might try to act as an antipope. Boniface quickly became associated with papal corruption, with various apocalyptic Franciscans and Celestines calling him the “Idol Pope,” and thus the debates about apostolic poverty became more intense than ever (Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, which takes place in the 14th century, features plenty of debate about the virtue of poverty for this reason). These fluctuations in popes were occurring in the background during the ten years between Arnald’s composition of On the Advent of the Antichrist and the time in which he finally decided to show it to some church authorities. It’s no wonder they were so concerned about it.
Arnald, to be clear, did believe in the virtue of apostolic poverty and had written about how his job as a physician conforms to the example of it, even though he had not been brought into a monastic order. But he didn’t seem to consider it the sine qua non of good papal reform. But it apparently turned into just that over a decade after he died, because in 1324, pope John XXII declared Franciscan poverty to be a heretical position, establishing the doctrine that Christ and his apostles did, in fact, own things and thus didn’t practice poverty. Upon that pronouncement, Michael of Cesena, William of Ockham, and various other Franciscans moved to the court of Lewis of Bavaria and engaged in a number of scathing attacks on John XXII, declaring him a false pope, a heretic, and even the antichrist. Consider it a good example of how a good litmus test can be determined after the fact.
I can’t help but be fascinated by the story, though, because in the modern world, we lived through a year that many prophesied to be apocalyptic, and nothing happened. The year 2000 was, for many, an eschatological disappointment. All throughout the 1990s, people carried on with a faint sense, particularly in America, that the apocalypse was nigh, and the culture expressed this anxiety in strange ways. Movies were strongly influenced by Gnostic ideas. Everyone wanted to take things to the “extreme” — in various youth sports, professional wrestling, heavy metal music, pornography, and comic books. There was a pop song about “partying like it’s 1999,” and for what it’s worth, people did a good job of doing just that. Yet politically, the major innovation was the invention of the Red and Blue state, and with it, a new paradigm of sterility, rigidity, and shrunken horizons. And in response to that new paradigm, endless litmus tests proliferate. On every little thing you can imagine. Litmus tests, as far as the eye can see. Maybe the apocalypse really did happen, and we’re living in the punchline to Arnald of Villanova’s joke.
Since I didn’t really know anything about this subject, I consulted a view sources to get a sense of the situation. They are: 1. Bernard McGinn’s “Angel Pope and Antichrist” (Church History 47.2, 1978), 2. Robert E. Lerner’s “Ecstatic Dissent” (Speculum 67.1, 1992), 3. Juanita A. Daly’s “Arnald of Villanova: Physician and Prophet” (1987), found here, and 4. Joseph Ziegler’s Medicine and Religion c. 1300: The Case of Arnau de Vilanova (Oxford, 1998).