Tuesday
I’ve just stumbled across a website announcing that it will be launching an “occasional feature” where it applies classic works to contemporary issues, obviously a project close to my heart. Entitled Persuasion Classics, its inaugural essay looks at how Milton would regard current debates about cancel culture.
I shared some of my thoughts about cancelation in yesterday’s blog. Since the Persuasion essay only mentions instance of liberal cancelations, let me briefly balance the scales before turning to it. In my experience, liberals are far more concerned about canceling people who don’t agree with them than are conservatives, who have no qualms about quashing their opponents. “Political correctness” was initially a liberal self-critique that the right gleefully took up to bash liberals, never themselves.
There has been nothing comparable on the American left to the McCarthy purges of the 1950s, where people were actually imprisoned and countless careers ended (especially in the entertainment industry). African Americans who spoke their mind were literally canceled in the Jim Crow south, and the number of transgenders who are murdered every year in America is appalling. On January 6 we saw more than a few Trump supporters demanding various forms of cancelation for their opponents.
In short, there is almost always an element of bad faith when conservatives complain about cancelation. At the same time Fox News was complaining about a publisher’s decision to cease publication of six Dr. Seuss books, 50 Republican senators and Joe Manchin were rejecting a qualified candidate for the Office of Management and Budget head for her “mean tweets.”
That being acknowledged, liberals are indeed capable of wielding shame to silence people, including themselves. Shame is a kind of violence, employed to enforce community norms—which is good if those norms are healthy, bad when used for unjustifiable oppression. This is one reason why I find David Bromwich’s Persuasion Classics article very useful.
Bromwich begins by talking about Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), one of the most important defenses of free speech ever penned. As Bromwich explains, Milton’s attack on the official licensing of books was partly self-serving but not entirely so:
His political motives can be explained simply enough—the process of licensing might have outlawed the republican propaganda he defended and wrote a good deal of himself. Yet his reasons were not merely political. The proposed censorship would have amounted to state intervention in matters of individual judgment. A free person, said Milton, should be at liberty to judge the virtue or vice of unlicensed books. Officious standards that claim to weed out writings deleterious to the public mind are a form of coercion that places state authority over personal conscience.
If free people employ this liberty, Milton believed, the truth will eventually triumph. Bromwich quotes Aeropagitica’s most famous passage:
Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?
Bromwich observes that this may be a misplaced faith in the truth eventually triumphing—”How long is the long run implied by ‘eventually’?”—but it’s a noble ideal. Whether utopian or not, however, we can agree that for truth to emerge, a struggle is inevitable: bad ideas must war with good. Milton turns to Garden of Eden imagery to make his point:
Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably….It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil….Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.
Bromwich summarizes:
Milton is saying here that innocence is not the same as virtue. Innocence, indeed, is no longer an attainable or even a desirable good, once humanity has been cast out from paradise.
We learn to know and cherish the good by testing ourselves against selfish or wrong desires, against the temptations of willfulness and vainglory, spite and cruelty—in short, against evil. Areopagitica puts the encounter with harmful words at the very heart of conscience; our progress as moral beings comes through trial “by what is contrary” to the good. “And this”—so Milton concludes his uncompromising civil-libertarian thought—“is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.”
I love how Bromwich uses the passage from Paradise Lost where Satan whispers evil thoughts into Eve’s sleeping ear. The guardian angels discover Satan
Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve
Assaying by his devilish art to reach
The organs of her fancy, and with them forge
Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams,
Or if, inspiring venom, he might taint
Th’ animal spirits that from pure blood arise
Like gentle breaths from Rivers pure, thence raise
At least distempered, discontented thoughts,
Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires
Blown up with high conceits engendering pride.
Disturbed, Eve informs Adam of the dream. Bromwich says that the Milton of Areopagitica appears to be speaking in Adam’s reply:
Evil into the mind of God or Man
May come and go, so unapproved, and leave
No spot or blame behind.
Noting that these dreams are comparable to “politically incorrect” views, Bromwich says they enter when “the doors of conscious censorship are left open.” As a result, they operate as “a trial of virtue”:
In themselves, they no more taint the dreamer than the vicious words of a book against which a reader’s judgment may be tested.
He then points out that we have our own version of Satan whispering into our sleeping ears:
Vagrant words (some of them possibly harmful), daydreams, half-formed hopes and fears are broadcast today with a swiftness and fecundity no poet in the age of books could have anticipated. Often, they seem to escape from their speaker with as little conscious thought as Eve put into her dream.
He then lambastes those “cultural institutions [that] have lately busied themselves finding new reasons for the suppression of words they consider harmful…” For Milton, he observes,
[L]iberty included the freedom to test oneself with such words. Evil acts alone were to be penalized. The essentially religious theory put forward by cultural censors today—namely, that dangerous thoughts or words taint the person they have once inhabited—takes us back to the inquisitorial attitude Milton aimed to abolish.
On the other hand, by working for good in the presence of evil, we can ultimately achieve what the archangel Michael calls “a paradise within thee, happier far”:
Milton’s poem leads us to see that the ultimate transgression of Eve and Adam was a necessary trial for their passage from innocence to the possibility of goodness. Eve—when she finally considers eating the apple, and then does eat, and regrets doing so—becomes the first human being to have a thought. And Adam, hearing her relate the trespass, becomes the first human being to find words for grown-up love. He says he will depart with her from Eden and die with her: “How can I live without thee?”
In this framing, Bromwich has turned ideological purists into tyrannical angels who allow neither intellectual exploration nor love. He concludes with a warning:
In the 17th century, these people would have been petty magistrates. Today, it is hard to know what to call them. They have been described as the hall monitors of a school in perpetual session. They have been ironically called the Elect. If we keep in mind Milton’s story of the Fall and “that doom which Adam fell into,” perhaps we can see them more clearly. They are angels. They exist to assure that nobody whose words betray an evil thought will escape the deserved punishment. They patrol the gate to stop offenders from re-entering the paradise of the sinless and blameless.
Bromwich’s essay falls into the important genre of liberal corrective and, as with all such correctives, I suspect liberals will take it more seriously than conservatives. I can’t imagine Trumpists, who punish harshly the slightest deviation from Trump orthodoxy, even giving Bromwich’s essay a hearing (except as another club to bash liberals with).
The limitation of liberal correctives is that they assume ideas get subjected to truth claims, with truth the ultimate victor. In such a vision, we should educate young minds–and our own minds–so that thoughtful conclusions are arrived at. If one side rejects the process altogether, however, you have the situation described by the Editorial Board’s John Stoehr with regard to democratic politics, which he delivers as a mantra:
“You can’t get anything done when fascists are sitting at the table of democratic politics.” A democratic community can tolerate a vast array of opinions. However, it cannot, and should not, tolerate opinions in which democratic politics is the problem. If it does, then nothing needing to get done gets done—and everyone suffers.
So yes, by all means, stop dunking so gleefully on politically incorrect tweets. Give people space to evolve and respect those who differ from you. But if those who differ endorse your annihilation, don’t fool yourself into thinking you can have a rational discussion.