Following the disastrous performance of the Liberal Democrats in the recent British election, concern has been expressed that ‘core liberal values’ have to be kept alive in British politics. At the same time, the Labour Party has already begun a process of critical self-examination that would almost certainly move it to what they consider more centrist ground.
The post The end of liberalism? appeared first on OUPblog.
Wordle is a fun web tool that allows people to make artistic text collages or “word clouds” from any text.
Here’s more from the site: “Wordle is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”
This GalleyCat contributor took eBookNewser’s “Free eBook of the Day” (Rudyard Kipling‘s The Jungle Book) and created a word cloud–the image is embedded above. Other literary projects on Wordle include the U.S. Constitution, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and Stephenie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn.
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Richard Reeves, author the acclaimed biography John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, will lecture at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Va. on Wednesday, September 16, 7pm. Now available in paperback, Reeves's beautifully written book is the definitive life of one of the heroic giants of Victorian England. A young activist and highly-educated Cambridge Union debater, Mill would become in time the highest-ranked English thinker of the nineteenth century, the author of the landmark essay "On Liberty" and one of the most passionate reformers and advocates of his revolutionary, opinionated age. As a journalist he fired off a weekly article on Irish land reform as the people of that nation starved, as an MP he introduced the first vote on women's suffrage, fought to preserve free-speech and opposed slavery, and, in his private life, pursued for two decades a love affair with another man's wife. Exploring Mill's life and work in tandem, Reeves's book is a riveting and authoritative biography of a man raised to promote happiness, whose life was spent in the pursuit of truth and liberty for all.
Nigel Warburton is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University, as well as the author of a number of bestselling books on the subject. His latest book, Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction, examines important questions facing modern society about the value and limits of free speech. In the blog below he talks about Geert Wilders, a right-wing Dutch MP who was recently denied entry into Britain.
There is a constant flow of stories about free speech in the news, so constant that it is almost invisible. Then, every few years, a particularly poignant event occurs and for a few weeks all the media are focused on the topic. Before I began writing Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction the furore about the Danish cartoons had enflamed discussion. Previously it had been the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and then the libel case that David Irving brought against Deborah Lipstadt in relation to Holocaust denial.
For the last few weeks Geert Wilders’ 16 minute film Fitna and the UK Home Office’s decision not to let him enter the country on the grounds that it ‘would threaten community security and therefore public security’ have been the trigger for self-reflection on where we want to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable speech – a major theme of my book. It is gratifying to see that this is a live issue today, not a merely academic topic.
Wilders’ film juxtaposes disturbing scenes of the results of terrorism - including from 9/11, the Madrid bombings, an execution of a hostage - with verses from the Koran which allegedly justify and encourage violence. There are clips of extremists urging violence against a range of groups and a small child who has been indoctrinated with hatred. The second half of the film suggests that in the Netherlands the increasing number of Muslims present a threat to democracy and security, represented by the most famous of the Danish cartoons, Muhamed with a turban in the form of a ticking bomb. The film seems to imply that just about any Muslim is a potential threat to democracy and security. It is in many ways crude. But for most people discussing the film, its message has ceased to be the most relevant aspect. This has become a debate about to what degree we should tolerate speech that many people find offensive and the circumstances under which a Government should prevent someone from speaking in the UK.
Wilders, a right wing Dutch MP, had been invited to show and discuss his film in the House of Lords, and the film-showing went on in his absence. But anyone can access Fitna on YouTube. It hasn’t been censored. But preventing the film’s creator from discussing the film and its message with British politicians sent a strange message about how we view free speech in this country. As I write, Wilders is considering suing the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith for blatant discrimination and has the backing of the Dutch foreign minister Maxime Verhagen, who declared: ‘Everybody, but especially a Parliamentarian from an European Union member country, has the right to freedom of speech’.
In defence of the decision to deny Wilders entry at least one MP cited John Stuart Mill on the necessary limits to free speech, namely at the point where speech is tantamount to incitement to violence. Mill is subtler than this suggests. He used a famous example contrasting someone declaring ‘Corndealers are starvers of the poor’ on the steps of a corndealer’s house (justifiably censored) with the same view expressed in the editorial of a newspaper (a view that we should tolerate). In other words, context, which in turn affects likely outcomes should be an aspect of any decision to curtail speech.
My view about the British Government’s action is that it has inadvertently and against its wishes illustrated another aspect of Mill’s thesis in On Liberty, namely that speech we find offensive can energise us and stop us falling asleep at the post since it encourages us to reflect on why we disagree with its message. That is a reason to tolerate it and refute it with counter-speech. Without this sort of challenge there is the risk that our beliefs will just be dead dogma. Fortunately the Internet provides an easy way to view Fitna and be stimulated in just this way. The Government’s ban sent many of us scurrying to our trackpads to find out what the fuss was about and as a result are probably a great deal clearer about where we stand on this issue than before.
Nigel Warburton also did a podcast on this subject for The Guardian. Another podcast based on the first chapter of Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction can be found here.
In today's issue of the New York Post, Adam Kirsch reviews John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, by Richard Reeves:
"If history, as Edward Gibbon said, is 'little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind,' it makes sense that the greatest criminals tend to receive the most attention from historians. Napoleon, a tyrant who was responsible for millions of deaths, is the most biographized figure in modern history, and it seems that new biographies of Stalin and Hitler crowd the bookstores every year. It is pleasant to be reminded, then, that good men can also make history from time to time — that humanity is not too fascinated by its destroyers to pay tribute to its benefactors.
"'John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand' (Overlook, 616 pages, $40), an accessible and admiring new biography by Richard Reeves, is such a tribute. Mr. Reeves — a British journalist, not the American biographer of presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan — works hard in this book to humanize Mill, to rescue him from his deadening fame as 'a bone-dry, formal, humourless Victorian.'"
Kirsch concludes his extensive review by boiling down Mill's complex political views into this insightful gem:
"Mill's specific political views do not map neatly onto today's categories of left and right... What united all these opinions, as Mr. Reeves skillfully shows, was a constant dedication to liberty as he understood it: 'the consciousness of working out [our] own destiny under [our] own moral responsibility.'"
