At the end of the second world war, George Orwell went to an event organised by PEN, a campaign dedicated to defending freedom of expression. He walked into a scene we encounter everywhere in 2022.
The meeting was meant to celebrate the tercentenary of John Milton’s Areopagitica, one of the earliest and still one of the best defences of freedom of thought in the English language.
Institutions are not censoring because they are true believers but because they are frightened
Journalists, novelists and poets depend on that right. They should know that, if they lose it, they lose their soul. Milton’s cry from the 1640s should be their cry: ‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for.’
For many jobbing writers, alas, talk of souls and racing for immortal garlands is, well, a little too high-flown to move them.
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