Jane O'Grady reviews: Towards the Light: A Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights that Made the Modern West by A. C. Grayling.
Reading this timely book gave me the sort of exhilaration I felt when first reading E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Classes. Towards the Light, a philosophical history of the struggles for liberty in Europe since 1500, is just as rousing and impassioned - a paean to heretics, Chartists, suffragettes, Milton, Mill, de Tocqueville, all those who brought about the extraordinary situation that what were once privileges for aristocrats have become standard rights for all citizens. It is also an exhortation that we should, if necessary, fight to save these hard-won rights.
How sad, though, that the sort of polemic which, in the sixties, in Thompson, was so canonically Marxist will now be dubbed reactionary. Naturally Grayling condemns the US and UK governments for retrenchments on freedom in the name of the war against terror - so far, so agreeable to the left.
But he also warns that concessions to hidebound superstition, in the name of political correctness and muddled moral relativism, threaten to reverse freedoms of speech, conscience and behaviour, and turn the clock back for women, homosexuals and dissenters.
What is to count as freedom and happiness, says Grayling, should be decided by ‘experience and rational reflection' (as opposed to authority, civil or religious). He agrees with Diderot that humans are bound by three codes -- of nature, society and religion - and should transgress all of them. Absurdly, what should be uncontentious 300 years after the Enlightenment, not only needs repeating, but might actually seem brazenly Eurocentric. It unfashionably assumes that pluralism, individualism and liberalism are basic and universal values, rather than just one (the Western) set of many culturally various pieties, myths and traditions, all equally valid. Grayling also confesses to a Whiggish view of history - seeing it as an onward march of progress -- which flouts the pessimisms of both left and right. And (another leftwing sin) he virtually confines himself to liberty in its ‘negative' sense - freedom from constraints on thought and behaviour - which is only relevant to those above destitution level.
Yet I challenge anyone not to see progress in Grayling's account. Taking an admittedly ‘selective route' (as a philosopher, his is not the historian's concern with detailed or new historical data, but more broadbrush and theoretical) he sets out to inform and remind us of events, characters, and above all ideas, salient in the development of liberty. Starting with the forced conversions of the Inquisition, he holds up milestones of theory and revolt on the long road by which truth came to be seen as not ‘the locked-up possession of a church' but as something to be pursued by all humankind. Till, in the late 17th century, Locke could condemn bloodshed over minute sectarian differences of Christian doctrine as ‘diametrically opposite to the profession of Christianity', contending that a good Christian can believe sincerely without forcing others to believe the same. And Milton could beautifully argue that, if someone bases his beliefs on authority rather than reason, ‘the very truth he holds becomes his heresy'. Not that Grayling (any more than Milton) thinks truth subjective, or that any old beliefs will do since all are equal. It is because the truth is so important that it has to be sought unimpeded by dogma or authority.
Grayling insists on ‘the indivisibility of the good' -- one type of liberty struggle happily dovetailing into another. Challenging clerical hegemony leads to Galileo's revolutionary demand that Scripture be interpreted according to the discoveries of science rather than the other way round. From Kant's ‘dare to know' it is a natural step to dare to demand civil liberty. Following chapters on freedom of thought comes ‘the Fight against Absolutism' -- how civil liberty evolved from challenging the Divine Right of Kings, via the Glorious, French and American Revolutions and the October Trials, to the hard-fought Reform Bill of 1832. There are the usual, unanimously-sung heroes (even Pitt, reports Grayling, admitted, ‘"Tom Paine is quite right, but what am I to do?"'), as well as less-known ones like Benezet, who features in the chapter on abolishing the slave-trade and emancipating women and workers. Finally, after discussing post-War human rights enactments, the book ends on a passionate plea that we ‘fight and fight again' to retain our dearly-won freedoms.
Confident in ‘the indivisibility of liberty struggles', Grayling touches only lightly on liberty's incompatibilities and contradictions - how it can slide into licence, Terror or authoritarianism, how it does not necessarily prevent the ‘tyranny of the majority' from suppressing heterodox minorities. Nor does he examine how placing so much weight on individual belief inevitably topples liberalism, over time, into the sloughs of relativism and self-important subjectivity, making heresy our truth. ‘Have courage to use your own understanding' was Kant's motto for the Enlightenment, but what is to determine this understanding? How, and by what guarantee, are we to gauge if our dared-at ‘knowledge' is knowledge? Liberalism tolerates intolerance, scuppers the universal objectivity that it aims for, nurtures both ancient and new-fangled idiocies. Grayling does not tackle this heart-breaking paradox, but lucidly and courageously grapples with its ominous results.
Towards the Light, Bloomsbury, 336pp.
This review first appeared in the Daily Telegraph
