Truth By Statute?
John Milton reminded Parliament that the Truth wasn’t what they and their fact-checkers in Stationers’ Hall made it.
1643
John Milton reminded Parliament that the Truth wasn’t what they and their fact-checkers in Stationers’ Hall made it.
1643
In 1643, shortly after the Civil War with Charles I (r. 1625-1649) began, Parliament ordered a crackdown on what we would call fake news and disinformation, censoring and licensing political comment and telling the public only what Parliament thought it was good for us to know. John Milton, himself a Parliamentarian, felt obliged to publish an anguished protest at such cowardly behaviour.
WHAT a collusion is this, when, as we are exhorted by the wise man to use diligence, to seek for wisdom as for hidden treasures,* early and late, that another order shall enjoin us to know nothing but by statute!*
When a man hath been labouring the hardest labour in the deep mines of knowledge, hath furnished out his findings in all their equipage, drawn forth his reasons, as it were a battle ranged, scattered and defeated all objections in his way, calls out his adversary into the plain, offers him the advantage of wind and sun, if he please, only that he may try the matter by dint of argument; for his opponents then to skulk, to lay ambushments, to keep a narrow bridge of licensing where the challenger should pass, though it be valour enough in soldiership is but weakness and cowardice in the wars of Truth.
For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty? She needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings, to make her victorious; those are the shifts and the defences that error uses against her power; give her but room and do not bind her when she sleeps, for then she speaks not true.
* Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) was a protest against the Licensing Order of 1643. The Order engaged a private firm, The Stationers’ Company, to do the work for them (much as happens with fact-checkers and social media companies today) in return for a monopoly on all printing in England. The Company undertook to check all printed matter for unsatisfactory content in pre-publication, to record all authors, printers, publishers and titles in the Register at Stationers’ Hall, and to notify Parliament of offensive publications so that books may be seized and offenders prosecuted. Milton’s decision to print and circulate his criticisms in a pamphlet was an act of open defiance. For further comments by Milton, see The Firstborn Liberty. The Order was not renewed after 1694, as the press grew in influence and the advantages of free speech became more widely recognised. For an anecdote about William III’s attitude to free speech, see Something Rotten in the State of Denmark.
* See Proverbs 2:2-4: “If thou seekest her [knowledge] as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures; then shalt thou understand the fear of the LORD, and find the knowledge of God.”
* See 1 Esdras 4:38: “As for the truth, it endureth, and is always strong; it liveth and conquereth for evermore.”
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.