William Blake, The Temptation and Fall of Eve, 1808 (illustration of Milton's Paradise Lost)
We're slipping backwards. The steady progress which Western societies had been making toward empiricism, rationalism and tolerance is going into reverse.
We are becoming more tribal, more intuitive, more impervious to evidence. And oddly, it's happening, not as a result of war or poverty, but during a sustained rise in living standards.
Consider, to pluck a recent example, the
New Yorker's decision to drop Steve Bannon from its "ideas festival." Bannon isn't my cup of tea ideologically - I'm a mainstream small-government conservative, whereas he pals about with Left-wing European populists who happen to be anti-immigrant (and are therefore inaccurately labeled "far-Right").
But, having invited him, it was extraordinary to disinvite him. Quite apart from the rudeness, the cowardice and the self-defeating publicity,
it showed how far the New Yorker - and, indeed, the liberal media generally - have moved from genuine liberalism, in the sense of openness to at least hearing different ideas.It is this aspect of the whole affair that is the most troubling and yet, sadly, the least remarkable.
The New Yorker was effectively saying,
"Your take on the world is so jarring that it may not be heard." That attitude is the opposite of liberalism. Liberalism, at least the English-speaking strain which is its best and truest variant, traces its pedigree back via John Stuart Mill and John Locke to John Milton, the Puritan poet whose dislike of authority was so pronounced that, in
Paradise Lost, he couldn't help portraying God as lordly, arid and cruel. In 1644, at the height of England's civil and religious conflicts, he published
Areopagitica, the first modern defense of freedom and free expression.
Comment: The answer probably lies in this line by the author:
"The sheer persistence of that idea across continents and centuries suggests that our notion of personal autonomy is the more difficult one to sustain."
The vast majority of people are 'not ready for' autonomy, if indeed they ever will be, or ever were meant to be, for that matter. They don't want it, though many merrily dabble in the illusion that they do, joining 'causes' and fighting for their 'tribe', spouting about freedom of speech and social justice, convinced of their rightness, when in truth they are vastly more ignorant than the person who knows himself to be so.
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