Free Speech is the 200th title to appear from Oxford’s Very Short Introduction series (www.oup.co.uk/vsi). These handy little volumes are hugely attractive, though the price (US$11.95) is inappropriately high for books that seek to introduce the young and other novices to their respective subjects. They summarize and comment on various aspects of their topics, with special reference to the latest developments in the field, and include recommended reading lists at the end (not infrequently including volumes penned by the author). They avoid talking down to readers and aim to present a neat, succinct overview in an eye-catching and quietly authoritative style.
The success of the series has led to imitators who combine a learned approach with unusually marketable subjects, notably Wiley-Blackwell’s Philosophy for Everyone series, which includes the titles Porn, Cannabis, Dating and College Sex. Not much philosophy there, you might think, but access www.philosophy4everyone.com to find out more.
That Oxford has managed to recruit some illustrious names proves that eminent authors are aware of the high quality of the series and so are willing to contribute to it. Jonathan Bate’s English Literature: A Very Short Introduction is among the latest titles, and Hermione Lee’s Biography: A Very Short Introduction has recently appeared. Among the earlier books, Terry Eagleton’s The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction can not only claim the catchiest title but is also a stunning and eye-opening read in itself. Eagleton, of course, is an exceptionally eminent contributor, and more of his outstanding book later on.
Nigel Warburton, the author of Free Speech, isn’t a leader in his field in the way the above-mentioned writers are, but is a popularizer of note in the field of philosophy. The position he adopts here is that free speech is everywhere desirable, though with some limits. It’s absolutely essential to democracy, he insists, and governments that limit freedom of speech in order to conceal their own corruption or cruelty get no sympathy whatever.
He begins by examining J.S. Mill’s classic On Liberty, published in 1859, emphasizing its stopping short of supporting freedom of expression when it advocates the causing of physical harm to anyone, but also its belief that opinions that lie unchallenged for long periods of time become in effect dead creeds; all of us need the challenge of opposition from time to time, in other words.
He then proceeds to look at some difficult issues such as pornography (permissible in Warburton’s view), child pornography (undesirable), and the key questions of whether or not religious sensibilities deserve special consideration (no, Warburton says) and whether art should be permitted a protected status (on balance he thinks that it should). This last consideration appears ridiculous to me, but when you see that the writer teaches courses for the Tate Modern art gallery in London you can perhaps understand his dilemma.
He also considers issues raised by the Danish cartoons featuring Mohammed, Robert Mapplethorpe’s erotic photographs, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, and the challenges to copyright law caused by the Internet. Here he is strongly opposed to the EU’s adoption of “70 years from the author’s death” as the duration for copyright protection, arguing explicitly in favor of the right to “collage” literary texts, and implicitly for much more.
Balanced and sane though this book is, it’s not one of the stellar contributions to the series. Eagleton’s fine volume, by contrast, very much is. In fact it’s one of the most startling books I’ve read for a long time.
Eagleton must be the only prominent Marxist thinker who’s also interested in theology. It’s some time since he began to display this reconversion to his youthful Catholicism, or at least something very close to it. He certainly doesn’t have much imaginative or intellectual sympathy with Protestantism — some of the most vivid writing in this book (and there’s plenty) involves an unflattering view of Protestants. The Protestant spirit “moves fearfully in a darkened world of random forces, haunted by a hidden God, uncertain of its own salvation.”
His The Meaning of Life surveys philosophical attempts to find an answer to the problem over the centuries, and comes to rest with the dual concepts of happiness and love, or rather the free flourishing of our faculties and the reciprocity that allows this to happen. He ends with the image of a jazz band — freedom of individual expression plus the happy cooperation with others who are also expressing themselves equally freely.
Eagleton understands very well that this is what classic Catholic theology, plus other traditions such as the Hindu one, have always seen as God’s nature and his wish for his creation. “God, too, is his own end, ground, origin, reason, and self-delight,” Eagleton writes, “and ... only by living this way can human beings be said to share in his life.”
These words, coming from a man who once castigated all English literature except Milton, Blake and Shelley for not preaching a form of social revolution, are astonishing indeed. But then Eagleton spends a lot of his time these days criticizing public atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins for setting up over-simplified versions of religious belief and then purporting to easily demolish them.
Eagleton has often been criticized for not really being interested in the literature he nominally teaches. Nevertheless, this little book contains the finest pages on Samuel Beckett I have read anywhere.
Even though I’d substitute an Indian raga for Eagleton’s jazz band, this is a most remarkable volume in a fascinating series. I will consider some of its other volumes in two weeks’ time.
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