You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (16 page)

John Milton and the Absurdity of Identity Politics

The English unleashed the contemporary idea of freedom of speech in the 1640s. Ever since, the English establishment has being trying to rein it in. John Milton’s
Areopagitica
– his title paid homage to the free-speaking assembly of ancient Athens – was the first critique of religious censorship to push ideas about freedom of conscience into the modern age. His words ring down the centuries, providing arguments and inspiration to all who must take on secular and religious tyranny.

Milton supposed that the Parliamentarians he supported in the war against Charles I were fighting to end the power of the state to tell men what they must believe and how they must worship. When the king ruled without Parliament from 1629 to 1640, his determination to impose religious orthodoxy, in the form of a Catholicised Anglicanism, on England helped convince Milton – and his fellow rebels – of the necessity of revolution against a monarch who appeared to be aiming for absolute power. Charles’s Court of Star Chamber had lopped off the ears and sliced the cheeks of Protestant dissidents, and branded their faces with ‘SL’ – seditious libeller – for contradicting the king’s theology, and questioning the authority of the king’s bishops. (Such was Star Chamber’s reputation for extracting confessions through torture that even now in England you hear people denounce kangaroo courts and arbitrary verdicts as ‘Star Chamber justice’.) A 1637 Star Chamber decree made it a crime to print ‘any seditious, scismaticall, or offensive Bookes or Pamphlets’. A publisher must obtain state approval, in the form of a licence, before he could sell a book. Charles, like his predecessors, insisted on pre-publication censorship – the most effective censorship there is – and mutilated those who refused to submit to the screening process.

When the costs of war with the Presbyterian Scots forced Charles I to recall Parliament in 1640 and England began its slide towards revolution, one of the first acts of the new House of Commons was to abolish the state licensing of book publishers, along with the Court of Star Chamber. For the first time in their history, the English enjoyed the freedom to publish and read what they wanted.

Milton revelled in the new liberty. He dived into the controversies about religion and politics, and briefly was more famous for his polemics than his poetry. As with so many revolutionaries since, he soon found it hard to tell the difference between the new boss and the old. The Presbyterian faction in the Westminster Parliament, strengthened by its alliance with the Scots, wanted to replace the uniformity Charles I had imposed through his bishops with a uniformity of its own. It reintroduced licensing in 1643. All printers had to register with the state and submit to pre-publication censorship. Parliament’s officer had the power to seize and destroy books and arrest offensive writers and publishers.

Milton watched the vanquishing of his hopes for religious liberty with increasing alarm. His bitter quip, ‘New presbyter is but old priest writ large,’ anticipated Orwell’s concluding scene in
Animal Farm
, in which the creatures looked ‘from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which’.

Milton had personal as well as intellectual reasons for opposing the return of censorship. Orthodox Protestants had demanded that a pamphlet on divorce he had written in 1643 should be burned for contradicting Christ’s teachings in the gospels and St Paul’s in his epistles. For recommending that men and women should be free to separate if their characters were incompatible, the poet became ‘Milton the divorcer’, a dangerous thinker who threatened the family and promoted lasciviousness.

Milton wrote
Areopagitica
in 1644, when the outcome of the war between Parliament and the king was still uncertain. It takes apart the reasoning of those who would censor authors’ works with the fury of a great writer directing all his intelligence against the mean-minded. As a mark of his intent, Milton refused to send his pamphlet to the licensers, but published it freely and at some risk to his safety. He argued as if his life depended on it, because what was at stake for Milton was the principle that was to inspire
Paradise Lost
. God had endowed man ‘with the gift of reason to be his own chooser’. Censors denied the God-given right to find religious truth in the world. They wanted to impose a ‘yoke of outward conformity’ and push England back into a ‘gross conforming stupidity’. It told Milton much about the contempt with which religious leaders held their flocks that they appeared to believe that ‘the whiffe of every new pamphlet should stagger them out of their catechism’. What were they frightened of? If a writer was leading the faithful astray, why could they not challenge his arguments? Christ preached in public ‘wherewith to justify himself [and] writing is more public than preaching; and more easy to refutation’.

The most stirring lines in the
Areopagitica
, which still have the power to bring a tear to English eyes, show Milton arguing for England to become a free-thinking country. ‘Lords and Commons of England,’ he said to Parliament, ‘consider what nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.’ The English should not allow clerics and politicians to infantilise them. Only by engaging in the battle of ideas, including the battle with false, foolish and blasphemous ideas, could they discover religious truth. When Milton said that he could not praise a ‘fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary’, he meant that religious truth could not be imposed from above by a king, priest, minister, rabbi, guru, ayatollah, ‘community leader’, judge or bureaucrat. The individual had to find it for himself in the heat of argument. The sentence all readers remember – ‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties’ – is an assertion that authority is no guarantee of truth, if authority is not tested.

Milton’s advantage over modern writers and academics is that he had experienced censorship. He knew the humiliation of having to take work to a censor, and had a justifiable contempt for the type of man who would choose bowdlerising as a career. He wondered who would want to tell others what they could and could not write, and found that his question answered itself. No writer with any talent or respect for liberty would consider accepting the job. Censoring was ‘tedious and unpleasing journey-work’. Only the ‘ignorant, imperious, and remiss, or basely pecuniary’ would wish to take money for blacking out the thoughts of others.

‘
Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour
,’ cried William Wordsworth in his sonnet to liberty of 1802.

Then as now, the temptation to see Milton as a modern man, whose words are weapons we can use to defend our freedoms, is overwhelming.

But the author of
Paradise Lost
, one of the greatest poems Christianity inspired, was not a forerunner of the Enlightenment, but a writer formed by the wars of religion. He could not bring himself to offer toleration to persecuted Catholics, and wrote a hack propaganda work for Oliver Cromwell before the general sailed off to massacre the Irish. Papists were so wicked to Milton’s mind that they must be silenced. His pamphlet on divorce, that infuriated the clerics of seventeenth-century London, did not anticipate Mary Wollstonecraft and the first feminists. As his biographer Anna Beer says, Milton had no interest in the horrendous abuse of women by men that the seventeenth century tolerated. In
Paradise Lost
, he created one of the most loathsome images in English literature when he imagined ‘Sin’, a female figure who guards Hell’s gates. Her own son has raped her, and she gives birth to fiendish dogs,

I think it is fair to say that John Milton was not wholly at ease with women’s sexuality. I am certain that he could no more contemplate the emancipation of women than could his contemporaries. Milton did not support divorce because he wanted to free battered wives from private hells, but because he thought marriage was a restriction on the dominant male’s right to live as he wished. He wanted to ‘make it easier for men to divorce their wives’ so that men could be ‘masters of themselves again’. Later, in the 1650s, he reneged on the principles of
Areopagitica
, and censored on behalf of Parliament. His work survives despite, not because of, the man.

To put that thought more kindly, Milton was a creature of his time, as we all are. His relevance lies not just in his arguments for freedom. The reaction against him illustrated how supporters of the status quo justify suppression. Monarchs believed that their subjects must share their religion. Charles I had no difficulty in justifying the censorship of Milton’s contemporaries, because he thought – rightly, as events were to show – that his power depended on his ability to suppress religious dissent. Seventeenth-century Presbyterians thought that they possessed the revealed truth, and had every right to use force to stop the ‘lies’ of blasphemers leading the faithful to perdition. Once again, their reasons for suppression strike us as dictatorial, but struck them as self-evident.

Today’s supporters of religious censorship claim that they are different. They say they are not advocating censorship because they believe we must bow down before Church and state, but because we must respect different cultures and say nothing that might offend them.

If those who said, from the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa onwards, that we must censor and self-censor in the name of ‘respect’ could be transported to the London of the 1640s, how would they make their case?

I said that Milton was a creature of his time, and they might reply that Milton was offending the culture of his time and inviting punishment. But how would they define culture? Milton’s views on divorce and freedom of speech undoubtedly conflicted with the views of the majority of his compatriots. But not even Milton’s opponents would have said he was an enemy of English culture. He was one of the most English Englishmen who ever lived, whose patriotism is obvious to all who read him. In any case, what could a charge of offending English culture have meant in the 1640s? Cultures are not unified or sealed in aspic; they change because men and women, propelled by circumstances and their own intelligence, fight to change them. Then as now, the English had many attitudes in common, but there was no such thing as a unified English culture, as the English of the 1640s proved by fighting a civil war to determine how the politics and culture of their country should change.

Our time travellers would fare no better if they substituted religious cultures for national cultures. It would take some nerve to accuse Milton of being a ‘Christianophobe’, and not only because of
Paradise Lost
. With Catholics fighting Protestants across Europe, a unified Christianity did not exist in the seventeenth century, any more than a unified Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism or Islam exists now. Could you say then that Milton was a heretical Protestant? His opponents claimed that he was, but the charge lacked force when Protestantism was itself divided into warring factions. The Presbyterians wanted to impose their views. A smaller group of independent Protestants, who believed in freedom of conscience, opposed them. Milton supported the independents, but the ranks of his comrades contained further divisions.

The faster you strip cultures down, the more you find contrariness and disputation, rather than a solid core, until eventually you reach the individual, a mammal shaped by evolution, material needs, cognitive biases and historical circumstances no doubt, but still a creature with a better right to state his opinions than kings and clerics have to silence them.

The faster you strip down the respectful arguments for religious censorship, the more you see the nation, tribe or community splintering, until you are left with one group of individuals with coercive power behind them demanding the right to censor another group of individuals because they disagree with them.

The one escape left from
reductio ad absurdum
for those who say we must censor to protect the majority within a religious group or any other community from the psychic harm that comes from hearing a strongly held view challenged, is for the ‘liberal’ proponents of censorship to admit that they support censorship on utilitarian grounds. They must believe that the harm to the tender feelings and brittle minds of believers caused by the publication of an argument, satire or exposé outweighs the benefit to the individual author of exercising his or her rights and of readers exercising theirs. They must take the possibility of violent reprisals as an honourable reason to ban a book rather than the best of reasons for defending it. To this way of thinking, even if the ayatollahs issuing death threats have not read the novel, and if the exposé of the subjugation of women is correct in all factual respects, liberals must join the religious in demanding suppression. They must hold that if the majority of a nation or community agrees on one issue – that divorce is immoral, in Milton’s case; that mockery of the Prophet is blasphemous, in Rushdie’s – it has the right to demand silence. (Even if the ‘community’ or nation is in other respects proving its lack of ‘social cohesion’ by fighting civil wars, as Protestants were in the 1640s.) They must mount the barricades against new thoughts that might torment and enrage the faithful, and say that no one can be the first to clamber over them, as Milton was the first Englishman to begin the argument for freedom of speech, or Mary Wollstonecraft was the first woman to argue for women’s rights, or Salman Rushdie was the first novelist to subject the myths of the creation of Islam to ironic enquiry, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali was the first politician from the poor world to warn Europeans of the dangers of tolerating religious abuse.