Last week, we read chunks of Paradise Lost in the homeschool, and I took the moment to give a but of study to one of Milton’s other works: Areopagitica, his argument for some freedom of speech.
John Milton (1608–1674), one of the greatest English poets, made an important contribution to the idea of free speech and free press in a pamphlet, Areopagitica (1644), which he wrote and published in response to a restrictive printing ordinance established by Parliament in 1643. The ordinance required authors to get prior approval from an official licenser before publication of printed materials. Milton published the tract anonymously, defying the ordinance’s prohibition…
…Although Areopagitica is commonly viewed as an eloquent plea for freedom of speech, in its context it should be understood as an argument for allowing printers to bring forth works that could be subjected, after publication, to evaluation, scrutiny, and censorship as might be judged appropriate. Milton by no means supported a general freedom for the press or tolerance of free speech. In Areopagitica, he encouraged the “extirpation” of Roman Catholicism and its writings, and he served himself as the censor for Mercurius Politicus, the Commonwealth’s primary newspaper of general circulation in the 1650s.
Nonetheless, what Milton has to say is interesting and extremely relevant. He argues four points (quotes from linked document):
- prepublication censorship originated with the Catholic Church and for that reason should be suspect…
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Moving on….
- readers may benefit from reading morally incorrect books along with good ones. He said, in essence, that the practice of moral virtue requires the knowing choice of good over evil.
- prepublication censorship is an ineffective means of achieving the goal of protecting public morality and religion
- Finally, he suggested that licensing would have the unintended effect of weakening people’s ability to recognize and affirm truths by using their reason. This argument draws on Milton’s belief that truths must be known by the use of reason rather than by acceptance of authority; unless a rich body of ideas, including some false ones, is available for rational debate, people’s faculty of reason will not flourish
I will try not to belabor this, but reading this obviously struck a nerve. We live in this very strange time – and not just the past two years, but predating that by some time – in which the right to express myself is celebrated as paramount but at the same time, expression is anything but free.
How Don’t tell me what to do or say lives with your views are problematic, so shut up is probably one of the most important conversations that isn’t happening right now.
The assumption of certain narratives as normative, deviations as heresy and honest discussion and exploration of data, evidence and experience as a threat is not what I call progress.
And especially over the past two years. Especially. When opinions and even statements of fact that got you deplatformed a year ago are now gingerly creeping back into mainstream-media approved conversation with no apology to you, when yesterday’s conspiracy theories are today’s op-eds in the Washington Post, and when no one will admit faults or mistakes or misunderstandings, and the new narrative slips in without a second thought or an apology to those who were discussing that now-new narrative months ago and were disparaged for it.
Knowledge, truth and understanding cannot advance in such a landscape. It just can’t. All you get is war and more war.
One of the greatest mistakes we can make when discussing this issue of freedom of expression, especially regarding Covid and Covid-related restrictions and policies, is to murmur ourselves into a state of abstraction, in which we forget or ignore the very human motivations that are at play in the maintenance of positions and views, motivations which can include from fear, greed, power and profit. And that goes for everyone from your local Reddit Rando to politicians, to pundits to scientific and medical figures to church people. The second greatest mistake is to unquestioningly accede when scolded to be “civil” or to cooperate in suppressing “misinformation.”
Both of those can be easily used as modes of control and repression.
There are a lot of ways to repress speech. One of the most common in the Catholic world, at least, is to dismiss the speaker by casting her outside the pale of authentic Christian charity and discipleship.
Which is, of course, not surprising. Milton wasn’t exactly off base on that score, you know.
What we see again and again is not a reasoned, in-depth discussion of how one view or another – of vaccines, of treatments and medical procedures, and of non-pharmaceutical interventions (masks, lockdowns, vaccine passports) – how these reflect (or not) Catholic teaching and thinking, with an openness to growing and learning. No, what has characterized the public Catholic conversation on all of this is simple and simplistic tribal condemnation, name-calling, targeting, personalizing and polarizing.
That’s what you think because you’re just…..
People should be able to talk about their worries and experiences about Covid, about the vaccines, about lockdowns and vaccine passports without one view or another living in fear of being cast out of polite society or even the neighborhood Nextdoor group. Data and evidence, experiences from all segments of society, fears and frustrations…to be able to put it all out there…what a world. A fantasy world? Maybe.
Shot:
Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.
Chaser – some Russell Brand for you. I mean, kind of crazy, but who isn’t?
Hello there, you 4. 9 million shimmering miracles…stronger, brighter, more capable of reasoning with one another, more capable as yet accepting the differences between us ….
Charlotte was Both 
In oir homeschool we`ve been studying George Orwell’s Animal Farm starting with his forword _The Freedom of the Press_ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-freedom-of-the-press/ in which he discusses the media’s self-censorship of unpopular opinions.
The opinons may have changed but the basic problem still exists.
What is going on right now in the world is that so-called experts abused their right to speech, or they were just wrong a lot, so people rightly quit listening to them. Then those people got big mad because they paid for degrees or something. So they said “ok, no one else can talk either, and that means you, ________!” Fill in the blank with Joe Rogan, Bari Weiss, Alex Berenson, Trump, etc. Really smart people who the elites got big mad at.
FWIW, I don’t have a problem with Milton’s first point because the church has classically had trouble staying in its own lane. Censorship never works and always leads to either giving up or physical violence.
Oh, I agree. And I think that people who try to rely on Catholic tradition and history to support freedom of expression have hard (impossible) row to hoe!
Yes! The dehumanizing that comes with categorizing people who express their opinions, or even want to ask questions to the narrative, with “misinformation” is absolutely out of control. It becomes real life cancellation. It becomes “if you don’t think and do exactly as I do on this one topic then I need to cast you out of my life and I will try to take away your livelihood”. We’ll live through this pandemic, but I don’t know how well humanity will fare if we treat people this way.