Calamity Kate Caught With Her Tits Hanging Out!

A Free Press:  Are there limits to the Enlightenment?

IS IT a cruel irony that those who live by celebrity die by celebrity?  In an age in which Simon Cowell and the 'X-Factor' has replaced Hughie Green and the more homely 'Opportunity Knocks', are we now in an era in which Bread and Circuses rage, and one in which we snigger and sneer at inept contestants lured onto TV, we might well ask if the spirit of the Enlightenment has now overstepped the mark?  Each day the weight of evidence seems to grow:  with Kate Middleton caught on camera with her tits hanging out, Prince Harry photographed philandering with good-time girls while playing strip-poker in a Los Angeles hotel room, and now riots around the world following a feeble You-Tube film desecrating the good name of the prophet Mohammed.  Have we in the West, now indulged in too much freedom of choice in our consumer society?

As a poet said in the middle of the last Century:  'Property, property, let us expand soul and body without end!'

This is a serious problem for western intellectuals, not least those of us around the Northern Voices publication and NV Blog where we too are under criticism from a small local sect or at the anarchist paper Freedom in London, where they have been under attack from David Hoffman, the Copyright Kid, a freelance journalist who seems intent on suing almost everything that moves, and has been labeled 'writ-happy'.  The philosopher, Mary Midgley, has written (see her 'Evolution as a Religion' in 1985):  'Internalized in each of us is a voice which speaks with accents of Voltaire and Rousseau, of Mill, Hulme, Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft:  a voice which says, "Was it for this that we defied the priests, the fathers, and the Kings?  Can anything be more important than individual liberty?".' 

The thing is that since the Renaissance, it may even have begun with the Greeks, it has broadly been the aim of western civilisation to free up individuals from the chains of their social backgrounds so as to help people to escape and stand on their own feet, free from family, the state, the Church etc.  Even western Christianity, with its focus on the separate, irreplaceable value of each human soul, helped to play a role in this flowering of the enlightenment.  In a way, this spirit of the Enlightenment has been the engine of all that is good and wonderful in western society today, and it is in the blending of liberalism and socialism that is present in the writings of such anarchist thinkers as Rudolf Rocker and more recently Noam Chomsky, the linguist, who openly describes himself as a 'Child of the Enlightenment'.

For my part, I confess that lately I have been regularly taking Mary Midgley to bed with me, and she persuasively writes:  'The careful separating out of each soul from its social background has of course been responsible for an immense amount that is distinctive and valuable in the achievements of our civilization.'  It has never been carried so far by any other culture,  and Mary adds that it is 'No wonder that to many people it never looked, until lately, as if we could have too much of that good thing, individualism.'

As I write this I have before me a copy of last Saturday's International Herald Tribune, with a headline story entitled 'A Parisian avenue far from romantic', in which the writer recalls that the French Culture Minister and novelist, Andre Malraux, in the 1960s told a journalist 'that the Champs-Élysées - then considered the most beautiful avenue in the world - had "an American basement".'  Today, we learn from the writer, Steven Erlanger, that America is no longer confined to the basement, 'but American business and its brands are prominently above ground on a Champs-Élysées that has become increasingly commercialized and globalized.'

What Mary Midgley said in 1985, was that while there were still tyrants, 'what [in 1985] chiefly confronts us ... is not an Easter Island row of ossified traditional patriarchs, but a chaotic mob of dollar-snatching cormorants, doing damage of an order undreamed of in previous ages.'  Indeed, there are many 'dollar-snatching cormorants' today, as the Duchess of Cambridge (Kate Middleton) was quick to point out this week, after the snaps of her were published, but there are also many genuine tyrants and enemies of freedom, not just on the right but also on the left.

I want to agree with Mary Midgley in everything she says about 'dollar snatching cormorants' and because she challenges the pretensions of some modern scientists like Richard Dawkins, but here Ms. Midgley is writing in 1985, at a time of the softening in the Cold War when Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachyov had just arrived in the Kremlin and before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and more importantly before the rise of Islam as an international political force, before the Salman Rushdie case and the burning of his book 'Satanic Verses' by Pakistanis in Bradford, before 9/ 11 and before 7/ 7 and other dramatic features of the post-post-modern era.  As I write this, I am listening to Andrew Marr interviewing Salman Rushdie on Radio 4's 'Start the Week', and Mr. Rushdie says that when we 'self-censor' to please a publisher or even a public 'a little part of us dies' inside.

Like Chomsky, we in the West are all 'Children of the Enlightenment', and this is a project that began even earlier than the Renaissance with the Ancient Greeks.  And yet, some of us are bastard children of the Enlightenment:  witness Adolf Hitler, of whom George Orwell wrote, that in the 1930s Germany represented a version of modern science in the service of ideas rooted in the Stone Age.   What protects us against this outcome, I would argue, is the presence of something that can be represented as a free media with all its faults and blemishes:  the likes of Julian Assange, and Wikileaks and even an old tin-pot anarchist publication like Freedom Press in Whitechapel.  If this means we have to put up with the Irish Star, Berlusconi  in Italy and 'Closer' in France so be it.  I don't want to appear pompous, but so long as I am an editor at Northern Voices, I will be anxious to oppose self-censorship and to stick to the Enlightenment project..