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January 21, 2012

SOPA and freedom of the press

For a long time now, I have been publishing short classics in humanities—modernizing the language, making easily available the nuggets of “wisdom” for the college market. I chose pieces that seemed to me to matter, to continue to have value in how one ought to look at the world. I thought of it as enduring value, part of a well-rounded education.

I’m a bit of a news junkie too, trying to keep myself aware of the rest of the world. SOPA hit me with a different angle on what I have been doing. One of “my” titles is Areopagitica, which, if you haven’t read it (and I hadn’t all the way through college), is really talking about the issue that SOPA brings up.

His circumstance, how he came to write this defense of the freedom of the press, is that, as a leading European Latin poet (in the Seventeenth Century, Latin was still a literary and diplomatic language), young John Milton traveled to Italy, the seat of the Renaissance. He had corresponded with other Latin poets, and they introduced him to Galileo Galilei, the famous scientist and astronomer, who had announced that Copernicus was right, the Earth did move around the Sun. The Pope didn’t see it that way; in fact, he was so worried that Galileo’s ideas might disrupt the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church that Galileo was forced to recant publicly, and he was held in house arrest—which is where Milton found him.

Old Galileo warned Milton, “Don’t let this happen to you, to Britain!” He said that the rest of Europe was watching with great hopes of what was already happening in Britain. The English had just ousted their king and the Long Parliament was holding debates on how best to remake the governance of their kingdom.

Milton hardly needed reminding; as a precocious Latin scholar, he had already absorbed almost all the known writings from the original Greek and Latin. He knew that he was uniquely qualified to spell it out, and he did, in the Areopagitica—describing the societies that allowed freedom of speech and flourished, versus the societies that “regulated” speech, which stifled ideas and growth.

SOPA—which do you think would happen with SOPA? Milton did not have to contend with advertising or super-PACs or Citizens United, yet he knew that the mind is not free if the channels are not open. Who would be entrusted to decide? he argued. What writer would write freely?

So I see that I am not just rescuing fine writing from the ongoing rush of history. Milton speaks for us.

If you’d like to buy the book, it’s now POD at www.createspace.com/3666194. And if you’re really serious about it, the Supplement Edition is at www.createspace.com/3674947.

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